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.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.

Washington D.C. is the Most Unequal City in America

He's right that the leftist Democrats actually hate the middle class. All dictatorships that aren't totalitarian are in the process of destroying what's left of their middle class just as Venezuela is now. "Inequality" is a cognitive corruption designed to replace the valid meaning of equality under the law with equality of outcomes. This in turn is designed to wipe out in the minds of the public the difference between the earned and the unearned just as it's been wiped out in theirs.

Washington D.C. is the Most Unequal City in America

Who Runs March for Our Lives?

As the saying goes, if you want to know the truth, follow the money.

Who Runs March for Our Lives?

What's not surprising (in politics) is...

The day after the Winter Olympics convened in South Korea the news media was all abuzz about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un's sister Kim Yo Jong, who was in attendance. Videos showed Ms Kim Yo Jong seating just behind US vice-president Mike Pence.

The media complained that Pence made no attempt to reach out to or communicate with her. I for one was glad to see he didn't. I'm tired of watching our past leaders getting chummy with the world's bloodiest dictators.

But the biggest surprise to me was the reaction of the conservative media to the MSM's fawning over Ms Kim Yo Jong. Hannity and others at Fox expressed "shocking" and "stunning" as descriptors of the MSM's adoration. But it made perfect sense to me.

You see, Ms Kim Yo Jong is the propaganda minister for her brother's totalitarian dictatorship. Our MSM are propaganda ministers for the Democrat Party who wants to establish its own socialist dictatorship here. The MSM sees her as an ideological and political soulmate, as one of them.

They drool over her because she has what they all want: to have the ear of the emperor who will then force their view of reality on an entire nation. That they look at her longingly is not surprising at all.

More thoughts on 2018 SOTU

One of the things that surprised me about the Democrat's reaction to President Trumps SOTU speech was the complete lack of approval or respect for the fact that black unemployment was at an all time low. You would think they would applaud such news. They didn't.

 I saw two members of the Congressional Black Caucus mildly and briefly applaud while sitting. This tells me that most of the Caucus really does not care about the welfare of blacks as such. But only about loyalty to the Democrat Party line.

Another thing I saw was one Democrat Senator briefly stand to applaud one of Mr Trump's achievements only to quickly sit back down when he noticed Sen Schumer was looking at him stoically. This is seriously troubling.

Now I believe there are honest people in the Democrat Party who would be willing to recognize and support truth when they see it. But they are intimidated by the partisan hardliners in the Party leadership.

This reminds me of the behavior of totalitarian regimes like communist China and Soviet Russia as well as Nazi Germany. Whenever a party officer said anything to another citizen it was received as gospel. You did not question or depart in any way from the Party line.

 It is this lust for totalitarian control I saw on display by the Democrats during the SOTU. No Democrat was allowed to grant any respect or acknowledgement to anything Mr Trump said regardless of how much citizens benefited.

It was as if they were saying in unison "We don't care how much Donald Trump seems to be  benefiting Americans. He isn't. We know what is good for them and Trump is preventing us from bestowing that goodness on them. He has no business letting them keep more of their money. We need that money in order to care and provide for them."

I had the thought that the Democrats actually wanted the cameras focused on them in order to show their hatred for those who voted for Trump, as if to say "This is what we think of you voting for him."

It's obvious to me that the Democratic Party has allowed itself to be corrupted by the lust for power, the power of control. They thought they were about to get their socialist utopia with Hillary as their president.

The groundwork for that utopia has already been laid. President Obama had no problem forcing citizens to purchase his idea of health insurance and fining them for disobedience, which is exactly what dictators do. The Party leadership hailed it. Not one republican voted for it.

When you consider the disrespect for life in Hillary's "What difference at this point does it make?" and AG Loretta Lynch's meeting with Bill Clinton on the tarmac while Hillary was under investigation, and Comey's in-your-face dishonesty changing Hillary's crime from gross negligence to extreme carelessness, and the DNC's funding of the fake Dossier and on and on, there is no doubt that Americans will have hell to pay the next time Democrats regain all three branches of government.

The Party's contempt for the Constitution and the American people is on display for all to see. My biggest fear is that President Trump's inability to think and talk in terms of fundamental principles will give the Democrats and the MSM another chance at total control. America is not suffering from bad deals, but from bad philosophic premises.

The Kidnappings Americans Won't Do

 "According to the Center for Immigration Studies, 42.4 percent of federal kidnapping convictions are of non-citizens. Non-citizens also account for 31.5 percent of federal drug convictions. Even though they’re only 8.4% of the population. Obviously there aren’t enough Americans to commit these crimes. "



The Kidnappings Americans Won't Do

President Trump's first SOTU

I watched President Trump's SOTU Tuesday. Here are my initial impressions.

I thought Trump did a good job of appealing to his base and to most who voted for him in 2016.  There were lots of things to like. For example:

Cutting regulations on business.

Cutting taxes on everyone.

Restoring our military strength.

And I really liked his claim that weakness invites aggression. That is so true.

There were others but not to create a long list I'll defer for now.

I don't like his idea of tariffs as something good. They are not of course because they raise the price of goods to American consumers.

But Trump pretty much stayed loyal to his agenda of Making America Great Again (MAGA). He did make several invitations to the Democrats to join him in bipartisan efforts to MAGA but looking at the reaction of those Democrats to Trump's list of accomplishments it was obvious the Democrats wanted nothing to do with anything bipartisan.

The Dems sat through all of the ovations Trump received. One media pundit said the Dems all looked like their dog just died. Well it did die actually, on Nov 8th 2016 and they still haven't got over it.

But I'm becoming convinced that the Democrats have no intention of getting over it. They don't see anything to get over. They feel cheated and like little children who are frustrated that reality is not conforming to their world view, they want to pick up their ball and go home. No teamwork for them.

I also saw the Democrat response  by Joe Kennedy 111. I felt like I was watching an audition for a future presidential run. It was the standard Marxist talking points of class warfare, of victims and oppressors, of haves and have nots with Donald Trump as the symbol of the haves and oppressors.

But that's just it. Trump is just a symbol of their hatred, not the essence. That essence is the voters who voted for him. They are the real object of Democrat hatred.

I can't tell what the Dems will adopt as their strategy going forward. It looks right now like they will rely on the midterm elections and continue to try and get him out of office any way possible. They won't give up on their socialist utopia. More analyses to follow in next post.

A Year of Russian Collusion

Good post on the real colluders.

A Year of Russian Collusion

The real racists

Ever since President Trump was alleged to have said something like "Why are we letting in people from s***holes like Haiti and other African nations instead of nations like Norway?" the MSM has been going nuts with charges of racism. ( I say alleged because Trump denies saying it and two other senators in attendance said they heard no such thing.) But let's suppose he did.

I'm willing to bet that none of these MSM types can give a definition of racism. So here is one I'm using: To attach political, social or moral values to a person's race is racism. It is to say that his ideas and values are determined not by his own choices and ideas, but by a long line of ancestors over which he had no control. But Trump never mentioned anyone's race or skin color. The media and Democrats couldn't wait to scream it. To them, race is important. That is racism.

If you look at those--I will call them crap hole--countries compared to Norway you'll see major differences in economic status and political ideology and even industrial and technological advancement. Many of these African countries are in fact economic, political and social hell holes. Some still practice slavery. So in what context did Trump intend his descriptor? He didn't say.

And the news media didn't care to ask. Like Pavlov's dog their conditioned reflex was to shout "racist" regardless of any evidence.  Are we to ignore all the other contexts such as political, social and economic and focus only on racism? Evidently, yes. And here is why.

It's the only context the Democrats and media have any use for.  They can use it to attack Trump as a racist in hopes that it will evoke a feeling of condemnation in the populace which will then result in Trump being kicked out of office or at least Democrat victories in 2018 midterms.

But many of the ignorant unwashed masses aren't as ignorant and unwashed as before. They are beginning to see through the racist charges. They see that Trump won the Ellis Island award for outstanding philanthropy for immigrants and minorities on the same day as Rosa Parks and Mohamed Ali.

They see that Trump employed many minority workers in his empire. It was reported recently that Trump donated some money to Haiti following the earthquake. They are noticing that Trump was never called a racist while in the public view for over 30 years until he decided to run for office and beat a Democrat. That automatically made him a racist in the MSM's bird's eye-and brain-world view.

To me, disgusting is the spectacle  of a whole class of educated people in the MSM and academia who have been indoctrinated with the notion that if we don't call a crap hole a crap hole then it won't be a crap hole. Isn't that wonderful? Now we don't have to be concerned with questions like how did it become a crap hole. Nor do we need to ask where are all those houses the Clinton Foundation was supposed to have built and where did that money go?

What we are seeing in the media is the latest generation of cognitive children stamping their feet and screaming at the sky in a tantrum over a reality their professors told them is not supposed to exist.

They really don't hate Trump the man as such. They hate what he represents; the voters who have rejected their entire world view. This they see as intolerable. To destroy Trump would be to punch all those voters in the face. It's what they want, vehemently.

Judging by the high level of emotional hatred spewing from the mouths of the media and politicians daily, I fear for when the next Democrat takes office. He or she, will be tough even brutal towards all the voters who denied them their socialist utopia. Attempts to further restrict free speech will be made. They will no longer tolerate any dissent from that totalitarian world view.

It's sickening to hear Democrats and the media yell 'racist' when theirs is the party of slavery, the Klan and Jim Crow. They are the real racists.

Just doing his anti-tax cut job

My local Detroit suburban county newspaper the Macomb Daily carried an article by Bill Press writing for the Tribune Content Agency in the Daily's Dec 26th edition. According to the article Mr Press has his own radio show and is a CNN contributor.

His Marxist ideology is revealed in the title of his post: "A tax bill only millionaires could love." This is another version of the poor are poor because the rich are rich mantra. It was Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto that formulated the dogma of hatred of the rich to a modern, global movement.

But government promotion of hatred of the rich has been around in one form or another for centuries. In their book "Forty centuries of wage and price controls: how not to fight inflation"  authors Robert Schuettinger and Eamon Butler report on ancient Greece:

   "But Lysias was not the first and he was hardly the last politician to court popularity by promising the people lower prices in times of scarcity if only they put an occasional merchant to the sword. The Athenian government, in fact, went so far as to execute its own inspectors when their price-enforcing zeal flagged. Despite the high mortality rates for merchants and bureaucrats alike, the price of grain continued to rise when supplies were short and continued to fall when supply was plentiful." (page 16, book available online).

In fact the authors go back to 2000 BC showing how businessmen were routinely scapegoated for economic failures like wage and price controls. Nothing much has changed since.

In that misguided tradition Mr Press says about the GOP tax cuts:

"The GOP plan's based on two assumptions, both of which are demonstrably wrong.

First, that the more money you give the wealthiest Americans, the more money "trickles down" to the middle class.

Second myth: that cutting corporate taxes will result in new investment, more jobs and higher wages, which again, is pure hogwash."

Let's look at the first claim and please consider the implied meaning of the phrase "money you give the wealthiest Americans." This means that taking less in forced taxation from those who earned it is in fact, not taking less but rather is a gift from the government.

The premise here is that the money earned by the wealthy (and everyone else) actually belongs to the government. It's no different than a thug who robs you of $100 every week and decides to take only $80 dollars from now on. He declares that he is not taking less of your money but instead is making you a gift of his money.

The last part of that sentence "the more money "trickles down" to the middle class" is in my book  a smear word designed to downplay any and all benefits to the middle class that may come from more freedom or less taxes or less regulations i.e. from a freer market. We are supposed to believe that only the government can provide non-trickle down benefits.

The concept "trickle down" is meant to imply a benefit that is next to worthless or irrelevant or trivial. But I can assure you that those thousands of workers that just got $1000 Christmas bonuses do not see them as negligible. Nor is it likely a family of four who are now getting a $1000 deduction for each child will regard a $2000 deduction for each child as trivial.

As to Press's second point that lower taxes don't increase investment or create new jobs. Well that is real hogwash. Those increases happened when Kennedy cut taxes, again when Reagan did it and it will happen again with Trump's cuts. To believe Mr Press you'd have to believe that the rich hide their money under mattresses making that money unavailable to the market.

 If they just put their money in the bank, the bank then lends it out to promising prospects such as existing businesses wanting to expand or new startups with sound business plans. Even when the rich just invest in mutual funds, those funds buy stocks in companies that use that investment to expand or diversify or pay dividends to investors. Many middle class people invest in those funds. The notion that these activities don't benefit workers in any way is absurd on the face of it.

It's no secret that the MSM is in the back pocket of the Democrat Party and have been since FDR. It's the media's job to poo-poo everything republican, conservative, and individualist. Mr Press is just doing his anti-tax cut job.

Is there anything wrong with the bill? Yes. It's not accompanied by any serious spending cuts. That needs to be fixed.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/h_l_mencken_101109

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/h_l_mencken_101109

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/h_l_mencken_101109

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/h_l_mencken_101109

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/h_l_mencken_101109

There's injustice on both sides of NFL kneeling.

In my view Colin Kaepernick chose the wrong venue at which to display his political views. He was wrong to appropriate the property of the NFL owners' stadiums and the medias' cameras to display his protests. Mr Kaepernick is a famous football star. He would have been welcomed on an abundance of TV and radio talk shows and print media to express his views. No need to use the property of others without their consent.

On the other hand, some NFL owners went to local governments to get taxpayer money to help pay for their stadiums. This makes those stadiums a quasi or pseudo public entity at which, of course, free speech is protected. What's happening here is the NFL owners who use tax dollars are trying to have their private property cake and eat it too. Irrational.

But this kind of mess, where each side has a seemingly legitimate complaint, will always happen when government is allowed to meddle in the marketplace for some alleged public good. There is no way to justly adjudicate an unjust system. If however, a team's stadium is completely privately owned, the owners would have the right to terminate a player for breach of contract. But such clear thinking is not the case today. That's why all government subsidies to private entities should stop.

As to whether Kaepernick's main problem with police racism is real or imagined ( I think it is some of each), that will have to wait for another post.

I will say this though, he took it upon himself to kneel in front of an entire nation to make his views known and to do it alone. I have to give him credit for courage.

So very true.

 Teacher Discovers that Young Students Really Can Be Taught to Think for Themselves

By now it’s old news that many Americans can no longer think for themselves. True, they have strong opinions, but often those opinions are influenced by prominent leaders and can turn around as quickly as the winds of political favor.

Unfortunately, such a state is likely driven by the education system. Although schools purport to be fans of “critical thinking,” many schools no longer teach the philosophy or logic classes which were once a prominent part of high school education. 

But one college professor is seeking to change this. Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Leonard Cassuto tells the story of Marcello Fiocco, a professor at the University of California at Irvine. Fiocco is taking his graduate students and heading to elementary schools to introduce young children to philosophy:

“Fiocco’s project is called TH!NK. It’s a simple design: A philosopher visits the same group of grade-school students weekly for four weeks, for an hour or so each time. The philosopher reads a short piece aloud — usually a story — and then leads a philosophical discussion with the children based on the story. A typical question, Fiocco told me, might be, ‘Can we have shape without color?’ Or, following from an excerpt from The Little Prince, the discussion leader might ask, ‘Could you own the moon?’

The children respond eagerly to these challenges. ‘They all seem so excited to provide answers or get to the bottom of debates, and it is a joy to see,’ Kourosh Alizadeh, a graduate student in philosophy, wrote in an email. ‘We keep pushing them,’ said Fiocco. ‘We keep asking them, “Why?”’ Fiocco recalled one fifth grader exclaim, ‘I’m thinking so much my brain hurts!’”

According to those who have watched the program grow, these early flights in philosophy help students “to make better and more rational decisions about how to live their lives.” In other words, such classes are teaching students not what to think but how.

In 1947, academic Dorothy Sayers sounded a warning about modern education, noting that schools were doing the complete opposite. Her famous essay, The Lost Tools of Learning, describes it in the following way:

“Is not the great defect of our education today--a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned--that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils ‘subjects,’ we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning.”

She goes on to say:

“[M]odern education concentrates on ‘teaching subjects,’ leaving the method of thinking, arguing, and expressing one's conclusions to be picked up by the scholar as he goes along; mediaeval education concentrated on first forging and learning to handle the tools of learning, using whatever subject came handy as a piece of material on which to doodle until the use of the tool became second nature.”

If we want to turn our students into independent, responsible adults, then is it time we moved away from simply cramming their heads with material to pass the test, and instead taught them how to think in a creative, logical fashion?

This post Teacher Discovers that Young Students Really Can Be Taught to Think for Themselves was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Annie Holmquist.

Edward Cline: Elite’s Globalist Manifesto of Rules

 What's happening in Europe is about to come to the USA. Here are the plans.

Edward Cline: Elite’s Globalist Manifesto of Rules: Here is the unofficial, malign preamble to the globalist takeover of the world. It could just as well suffice as a warning of Islamic con...

The Luxury Hotel from Leftist Hell

This is a good post on the anti-life nature of the new left that has complete control of the Democrat Party.

The Luxury Hotel from Leftist Hell

Democracy vs constitutional republic and gun control

The Sunday 11/12/17 Detroit Free Press editorial by staff writer Nancy Kaffer "Dueling views on gun control" is an example of trying to solve a problem in the context of a democracy instead of a constitutional republic. A democracy always becomes tyranny of the majority where it can vote away the rights of minorities. In a constitutional republic the rights of minorities are protected by constitutional law and may not be voted away.

Ms Kaffer champions the democracy context when she cites several polls that claim most citizens don't want more guns in schools, bars and churches but that Michigan's legislature is promoting laws to expand gun carry in those places. She is saying that the majority should rule the minority. That's democracy.

A constitutional republic requires the government to protect everyone's right to self defense. Whether we should have that right can never be put up to a vote. The proper context is how do we go about properly exercising our right of self defense while protecting the rights of other citizens? This can be put up to a vote but only within the context of protecting rights. For example:

Waving a gun around in public is an objective threat. Our laws call it 'brandishing.' The government can forbid this not because it has any power to restrict rights, but because it is protecting the rights of other citizens. Carrying a gun on your person or even open carrying is not brandishing and should not be outlawed. On the other hand, property rights provides citizens the right to forbid guns on their own property.

How best to exercise our rights to keep and bear arms should always be debated in the context of how to protect rights instead of restricting them. The reason this context must be maintained is based on the logical fact that the right to violate or threaten to violate other's rights with a gun is a right that does not exist. Therefore government cannot restrict something that doesn't exist. So what does exist? The rights of other citizens. Protecting them is the right context.

 I think banning guns in schools, bars and churches makes those people sitting ducks for any murderous psychopath. But that has to be left up to the decisions of the property owners and patrons. Unfortunately, if government owns the schools then it can turn all those students into defenseless victims, a power it should not have. The purpose of government is to protect rights, not ignore them.

Lastly, Most politicians want to get reelected and will be cognizant  of voters' wants. If those polls are right about "most people" not wanting more guns, why didn't they tell their politicians about what they wanted? Politicians watch polls like a hawk. So I view those polls with a lot of suspicion.

Allahu Akbar is Why Muslims Kill

Allahu Akbar is Why Muslims Kill

More racist Trump bashing.

Tuesday's 10/24 Macomb Daily carries an oped by Leonard Pitts, a writer for the Miami Herald. (Click on 'opinion'). It's an anti-Trump screed titled "Donald Trump, poster boy for white privilege." Here we go with the white privilege meme so popular in progressive circles today.

First Mr Pitts sets up the target he wants to attack, the lack or patriotism allleged of former president Barack Obama.

"It was that some people said he didn't have any. The claim was based on the flimsiest of evidence: his failure to wear an American flag pin on his lapel and a picture, widely circulated online, that purported to show him with hands clasped instead of over his heart, refusing to cite the Pledge of Allegiance."

Then here comes the excuse making:

"Of course, most men don't wear flag pins. And the picture was taken during the singing of the national anthem, not the Pledge of Allegiance."

Well, let me say that most men are not president of the USA and sworn to uphold it's Constitution. The leader of any nation is always supposed to advance some positive aspects of the nation he represents. A pin or badge or banner or garment or salute or some such is usually in order. Evidently, not for Obama. As for the picture? Come on! So Obama's target of disrespect was the Anthem and not the Pledge? Talk about flimsy!

Pitts then quotes several prominent people who questioned Obama's patriotism and then followed it up with:

"Donald Trump has faced no sustained questions about his patriotism, though the evidence of his lack thereof is far more substantial than an empty lapel and a photograph. Indeed, in just the last few days, we've learned that he failed for almost two weeks to contact the families of four America soldiers killed in Niger. He did, however, manage to squeeze in multiple Twitter feuds and lots of golf in that time."

The reason Trump 'faced no sustained questions about his patriotism' is because the evidence for that patriotism is overwhelming. As for not calling the families for almost two weeks, I can't see how that has anything to do with lack of patriotism. Waiting a short while for the families to do initial grieving seems very respectful and, I must add, presidential of Mr Trump.

But most disappointing for me is Mr Pitts willingness to play the race card for the political purpose of bashing Trump by claiming 'double standards imposed by race':

"The black guy fails to wear a lapel pin and endures months of questions about whether he belongs. The white guy canoodles with Russia, insults the intelligence community, undermines the judiciary and makes a Gold Star widow cry, dismissing her husband's sacrifice as, apparently, just one of those things."

That, my readers, is a completely racist paragraph. President Obama did not refuse to wear a lapel pin or endure months of questions about his patriotism because he was black. He did it because of his ideas, his obvious contempt for America and its founding principles, his stated desire to 'fundamentally transform the United States of America" and prancing around the world apologizing to tyrants, dictators and assorted butchers of human life for America's existence.

I don't have to defend Trump here but I will say some in the intelligence community needed insulting for doing nothing about Hillary's 'canoodling' with the Russians and our uranium supply. Whatever Trump did he didn't do it because he was white. He did it because of his ideas, his stated desire to make America great again.

Mr Pitts is not alone. Because they have not defined precisely what racism is and are thus unable to mount an attack on it, lots of black and white intellectuals are left to fight white racism against blacks with black racism against whites, an exercise in futility.

In closing I will say that the only way to defeat racism is to stop focusing on all our differences like skin color and nationalities through policies like multiculturalism, egalitarianism, diversity etc. and start focusing on the things we do have in common like equal individual rights, and how to adjudicate them.

Europe's Next World War Begins in France

 Here is an excellent article on the suicidal nature of clinging to a moral principle while ignoring the purpose of a moral principle, to show men how to live a life proper to a reasoning animal.

Europe's Next World War Begins in France

The missing cause of poor academic results

The Thursday Oct 20 Detroit News has a series of editorials on why Michigan students in particular and U.S. students in general are falling behind other nations in educational achievement.

I have been reading such editorials on public education's failures for many decades. Such attempts at solving the problem range from 1.lack of money (this is a perennial), 2. no supplies, 3. lack of access to this or that or some other thing. Even circular arguments like 'poor academic results are due to lack of access to a quality education' have been used!!!  I can't count the times I've seen articles claiming we need better standards, new standards, a stronger or newer commitment to better results and so on.

But if one wants to really make progress in finding a cure for the never ending poor academic results, one needs to examine the one concept almost never mentioned, curriculum. The questions that need to be asked are what is the reading curriculum, the math curriculum and the history and science curricula?

But first in my view we must ask what is a curriculum? According to this blog:

"In the most general sense, curriculum is a course of study. But as Great Schools Partnership notes, in practice it typically refers to objectives, lessons and assessments:

“...curriculum typically refers to the knowledge and skills students are expected to learn, which includes the learning standards or learning objectives they are expected to meet; the units and lessons that teachers teach; the assignments and projects given to students; the books, materials, videos, presentations, and readings used in a course; and the tests, assessments, and other methods used to evaluate student learning. An individual teacher’s curriculum, for example, would be the specific learning standards, lessons, assignments, and materials used to organize and teach a particular course.”"

I agree with this description. So a curriculum is a method of teaching a given subject, a lesson plan so to speak which would include all relevant materials. For example, Spanish and English just to name two, are phonetic languages thus the most efficient way to teach them would be phonetically. Sounding out vowels and consonants into syllables followed with rules of grammar and so on. That would be a reading method or curriculum.

Chinese however, employs a pictorial method usually called sight recognition where the phonetic method could not work. There are of course other attributes of these two methods of learning. But I think that if an elementary school system is turning out students that can't read at the end of grade three then it should compel us to examine with a fine toothed comb the reading curriculum, the lesson plans and even teacher's aides used in class. The same approach should be taken to all other subjects.

Nowhere in the above linked-to editorials is there a demand to examine the curricula of our elementary and secondary schools. We need to make that demand now. Since most of our schools are run by the government I will further recommend looking for political candidates that will demand a microscopic look at curriculum, lesson plans and the like. Next year is an election year so now is a good time to let candidates know your vote depends on their stand on this issue.

About gun control

Since the Las Vegas shooting the Democrat Party, media and academia have been barn-storming for more government restrictions on guns. Yet we already have laws against fully automatic rifles, against killing other humans and the hotel I'm told, was a gun free zone. None of these laws prevented the shooter from murdering 59 people.

Criminals by definition don't obey laws. The notion expressed by Senator Charles Schumer and the power lusting Democrats that more laws will magically result in criminals obeying them which will then make us safer is beyond the pall of sloppy thinking or any other seemingly innocent rush to judgement. There is nothing innocent about it.

The leftists (progressives) that now dominate the Democrat Party care only about power, the power of force over the masses. You can't reason with them. If you try to talk to them in terms of principles like for example you point out that the method of killing-guns-is not the problem but rather the act of killing is the crime, you may as well talk to a wall. They are not open to reason.

A truck was used in Paris to kill 85 people. Should we call for a ban on "assault trucks"? The notion that a weapon can have a designation of 'assault' is to impart free will to inanimate matter, it is to believe  that guns run around jumping into the hands of people compelling them to pull the trigger. To designate assault as the only purpose is to deny its ability to be used in self defense, a major but required evasion for progressives.

But, you might ask, Democrats don't really believe that do they? Yes they do. Democrats have a long history defending robbers, murderers, rapists, (Hillary defended successfully the raper of a 12 year old girl) various psychopaths and other maniacs claiming "It's not your fault. Society made you this way."

And so it is with Mr Paddock. The availability of guns made him do it. He is only partially responsible I presume, for not understanding the evil intent of the guns. You see, he is the victim of an irrational society flooding him with these evil guns. But I say to put any blame on the guns at all is to remove some blame from the shooter and there is nothing morally good about that though it is standard MO for progressives.

Many Democrats are claiming that guns are out of control. But the question to be asked is "Whose control?" Every gun owner I know is in control of his guns. Mr Paddock was in control of his guns. They weren't out of control. Obviously the only control acceptable to Democrats is governmental control and that--a disarmed citizenry, is the real goal of the Democrats.

The claim that Democrats are only concerned about public safety is a real stretch. All statistics show that where guns are plentiful, murders by guns are way down and where guns are heavily restricted murder rates skyrocket. Yet you can't even communicate these facts to them. Whatever their motives, a concern for public safety is not one of them.

More articles on gun control can be found here.

Intellectual self defense on climate change

In my previous post "Slanted News" I mentioned that we need to be aware of the techniques used to move us into a certain desired mindset. I mentioned the use of adjectives, verbs and adverbs that are designed to imply something nasty with the goal of smearing someone or some position. Like for example "The dirty, rotten Republicans met with the noble and virtuous Democrats today." Well you get the idea.

My next example is provided by Washington Post writer Eugene Robinson whose article titled "Climate-change denial is a cruel insult to storm victims" which appeared in the editorial page of the Macomb Daily of 9/10/17. Admittedly this is an opinion piece and opinions often have little relation to facts. But it is an example of several slanting techniques.

Take this sentence:

"No rational U.S. administration would look at the devastation from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma and seek to deny climate change. At present, however, there is no rational U.S. administration."

This is a form of the argument from intimidation. Its most popular form is on the order of "Only an idiot (or moron or irrational fool) could believe that X is true." It is meant to appeal to a person's feelings in the hope it will result in something like "Well I certainly don't want to be an idiot or irrational fool, so I won't support the idea that X is true."

Here, the phrase "No rational administration ...would deny climate change" is designed to evoke something like "I will not support this administration because it is irrational" ignoring the fact that the administration's irrationality has not been proven yet just asserted.

But Mr Robinson goes on to provide what he thinks is evidence of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change (CACC) i.e. man made climate change. He asks among other things:

"Why did Harvey dump unprecedented, almost biblical, amounts of rainfall on Houston and its environs? Why did Irma spend longer as a Category 5 storm than any other storm on record?"

These and other questions were answered by real scientists I saw on TV. Harvey stalled over the Houston area because of two high-pressure centers, one just northeast and one just northwest  of Harvey preventing it from moving so it just kept dumping on the City. Irma stayed a Category 5 for a long time because of its huge size. Neither these nor other events have any relation to man made causes. There is just no evidence for it.

But the real deception foisted on his readers is his use of the term denier. It is an anti-concept. Anti-concepts are designed to destroy a valid concept by replacing its original meaning with a new meaning.

In this case the warmers want to obliterate the concept 'critic' in the public mind. A 'critic' is one who criticizes a proposition, like global warming, because he has either evidence contrary to the proposition or he knows the evidence supporting the proposition is flawed. Either way a critic has reasons for his criticism.

And that fact is what the warming mongers and their acolytes in the media are out to destroy. A denier is one who has no reasons. He just denies for the hell of it. So if they can replace 'critic' with 'denier' then the existence of contrary evidence is hidden from the public. Gone. Oh happy day for the saviors of the planet! (And the destroyers of modern civilization.)

Next time you read an article pushing man made climate change just substitute the word critic for denier and the meaning should become clearer. Take the above headline "Climate-change denier criticism is a cruel insult to storm victims." How can criticism be an insult to victims? It can't. That's why 'critic' has to go. If there are no critics, there is no contrary evidence.

Mr Robinson goes on with the standard global warming talking points [my comments in brackets] like humans have increased "...the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 40% [not a problem because our atmosphere is actually CO2 deficient] or that carbon dioxide traps heat [nope, it just slows down the escape of heat to space but cannot trap it] or that global land and ocean temperatures have shot up [another nope, temps have increased as the always do in an inter-glacial but have not 'shot" up] or that Arctic ice is melting [such melting always happens in cycles due to the two main oceans' conveyor belts] or that sea levels are rising [ see this and this from CO2 Science showing no increase in accelerating rising]. Actually, the evidence against man made climate change is overwhelming.

To further provide you with sources of intellectual self defense on climate change and CO2, I want to highly recommend the web site of CO2 Science, a weekly roundup of studies showing the benefits of increased CO2 in the atmosphere for all living things. I eagerly recommend the following additional sources:

SEPP the Science Environmental Policy Project
Watts up with that?
Climate Depot 
And if you want to get into the heavy science see
Climate Audit 

Please visit these sites and check out their blogrolls. They contain links to many other sites reporting on the real science of climate change.

But you won't find this knowledge on the MSM. They routinely deal in anti-concepts and arguments from intimidation. You know, knowledge is like food. We can't sit at the kitchen table and wait for someone to plop it down in front of us. We have to actively go get it. Same with the truth. We cannot expect the MSM to plop the truth into our heads while sitting on the couch. We must go get that too. I've listed some top quality sites with scientific truths for your cognitive self defense. Hope that helps.

Is the media unfit to be objective and fair?

The Sunday 8/27/17 Detroit Free Press oped page carried a rant by former Free Press editor Paul Anger who asked "Can we all agree now that Trump is unfit to lead?"

Well, no, I don't agree.

There are a number of things Mr Anger said with which I disagree--like his notion that Trump is un-American. Though I reject that viewpoint, I will support his right to have it and express it publicly.

I want to focus on a more serious injustice, his claim that Trump legitimized the Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va. I want Mr Anger to understand that the Nazi rally was legitimized by our Constitution which guarantees everyone the right of free speech regardless of how obnoxious or even evil their ideas may be like those of the Nazis.

This a good test of one's loyalty to a principle like that of free speech. Most people don't have a problem agreeing with each other. It's when we disagree that problems arise. But even if someone's ideas are wholly evil, a loyalty to free speech requires we defend their right to voice them. Defending someone's right to speak evil ideas is not the same as defending those ideas.

Mr Anger properly gives a list of the evils of slavery and Jim Crow laws for which the KKK and neo Nazis were demonstrating. His complaints about Trump are that he spoke "...so erratically about what happened in Virginia" and that Trump's response was 'belated and tepid' and "There were "many sides" to blame?" and there were "fine people" on both sides. This last was indeed wrong. There were no fine people on either side as far as I could see. He deserves criticism for it. But 'belated' and 'tepid' and 'erratic'? We should execute him immediately?

But Trump's claim that there were "many sides" to blame for the violence is spot on. You could see that on the media's videos where Antifa (anti fascist fascists) were wearing helmets and body armor vests. One does not wear these these things if one intends a peaceful protest. No, they intended to be violent.

Mr. Anger states: "And as someone who spent almost five decades in journalism, I am beyond fed up with Trump's attempts to demonize the media. Members of the media are not perfect. We're human. We're your neighbors, friends, family member. But the media's first responsibility is to be objective yet relentless in reporting and fair yet fearless in commentary."

Objective? Fair? Let's take a closer look at this.

 There was a rally designed by neo Nazis and some KKK members to protest the taking down of a statue of Robert E Lee, a civil war general for the Confederacy which wanted to keep slavery and Jim Crow. The Nazis applied for a permit to peacefully protest. I say peacefully because when you sign such a permit you agree to the terms and conditions therein one of which is always that your rally remain peaceful. Did Mr Anger mention that? Nope.

Nor did he mention that the so-called counter protesters consisting of Antifa and Black Lives Matter did not get a permit. Obviously neither group planned on being peaceful especially since one group wore body armor. Clearly both groups think they are above the law. Did Mr Anger mention that? No.

Most of the time when there are protests and counter protests the local police keep both sides separate precisely to avoid violence. That did not happen in Charlottesville. Why not? There was a police presence yet they did nothing to maintain the peace. Did Mr Anger report this? No again.

 It certainly looked like the powers that be-the mayor and/or governor-wanted the violence to happen. Why that? I say in order to tie it to the Trump administration. Of course this is speculation but not without some warrant.

For example, the neoNazis hold a rally every year and the only media coverage they get if any, is local. The national media routinely ignores them and properly so. Routinely ignores that is , until Trump was elected. I fully expect more media to look the other way as BLM and Antifa hold more violent rallies somewhere and to search the land for more evil and try to tie it to Trump.

Can the media actually be 'objective' and 'fair'? Sure, when it comes to things like "local PTA holds bake sale" or "Dog bites man." But when it comes to politics? Forget it. A nonobjective and unfair media has been around for a long time. Back in 1971 Edith Efron published her book "The News Twisters" on the 1968 election between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. One of the things she shows is how the 3 major networks (ABC, NBC and CBS) gave much more air time to Humphrey than Nixon.

Here is a quote from page 50 on the media's general opinion.

"The opinion-selectivity of all three networks resulted in:

   !)A portrayal of Mr Humphrey as a quasi-saint.

   2) A portrayal of Mr Nixon as corruption incarnate"

As for Trump being un-American, well I find it a stretch to believe a man who was awarded the Ellis Island Award by the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations for immigration and ethnic philanthropy, with co-Award winners Mohammed Ali and Rosa Parks, could somehow support Nazis and KKK types. I don't buy it.

 I've always believed that one should look at the essence of opposing sides. To me the Democrat Party has been for a totally controlled society since FDR at least. Trump in his bumbling, stumbling way claims to be for America and more economic freedom. I'll take the latter any day.

Mr Anger says he's always been an independent voter until two years ago when he decided to become a Democrat. For a man who says he condemns the KKK, slavery and Jim Crow, it's sad to see him join the party that promoted all three.

Sultan Knish: Understanding the McMaster NSC Purge

Sultan Knish: Understanding the McMaster NSC Purge

What was the Obamacare folly designed to accomplish?

Sunday 8/6 Detroit Free Press's Brian Dickerson is at his fact altering editorializing again. He claims that:

"Donald Trump has been predicting Obamacare's collapse since he began his presidential campaign more than two years ago — and certainly, no one has done more than he has to make that prophecy come true."

Donald Trump was elected precisely to get rid of Obamacare. Most American voters knew it was a disaster. Trump in fact said many times that the newly elected GOP must save America from the utter catastrophe of Obamacare, that the GOP could let it implode because the Democrats will own those results but moral concerns dictate the GOP not let that happen.

Mr Dickerson talks approvingly of various subsidies the ACA (Affordable Care Act) provides for some people who are hit with higher costs. But he ignores the fact that those subsidies are paid for by higher taxes on the very people the ACA claims it wants to help.

Donald Trump has done nothing to make that above mentioned prophecy of collapse happen. It was written into the ACA. It was designed to fail so that the next Democrat president, Hillary, would declare that freedom has failed so it is now time for government to take totalitarian control of health care.

The details of the ACA were not important. That is why many Democrats-like Nancy Pelosi-and some Republicans, saw no need to read it. What was important was the ultimate goal, government control of every individual's health.

The ACA is not about helping anyone. Insurance is about money. If you control a man's money you control him. That is what the ACA is designed to accomplish, with Mr Dickerson's eager approval.


 

London's Acid Test of Diversity

This is so true. Multiculturalism and diversity are destroyers of modern civilization. Both are cognitive package deals whose goal is to destroy diversity of thought. 

London's Acid Test of Diversity

America is Not a Nation Ruled by Judges

Good points.America is Not a Nation Ruled by Judges

Military History Book Reviews: Review: Pride, Prejudice and Politics: Roosevelt v...

Grant has an excellent post.
Military History Book Reviews: Review: Pride, Prejudice and Politics: Roosevelt v...: In the last few decades several excellent books have been published documenting the New Deal's failure. Amity Shlaes The Forgotten Man ...

Drain GOP swamp first

Wow! I get emails from Real Clear Politics every day. Today RCP editor Carl Cannon's round up of news items included this headline. "Senate approves news Russia sanctions, limits on Trump" by staffer James Arkin. The first paragraph reads:

"The Senate on Wednesday approved new sanctions against Russia for its interference in the 2016 election. Perhaps more significantly, the measure also includes a provision preventing President Trump from lifting or adjusting the sanctions without congressional approval."

This seems really far fetched to me. First of all, What interference? It is treating Russian interference in the election as established fact even though over 7 months of investigation has produced zero evidence to support it.

Secondly, the Senate is controlled by Republicans and since the vote was 97 to 2 this means Trump's own party is defying him, joining the Democrats' attempts to undermine him.

Thirdly, Obama placed sanctions on Russia by way of an executive order which can be reversed with a new EO by a subsequent president. Even if the original EO calls for the approval of congress, it is my understanding that EOs apply to the executive branch and not Congress. That would violate the separation of powers. Am I wrong on this?

It seems to me the Democrats are looking for WW3. They seem to forget that today's Russia is not the Soviet Union with desires of world domination. Putin is no friend of capitalism but he is concerned about Russia.

I find it amazing that Congress had no problem with Obama making nice with "Death to America" Iran and giving them $170 billion to achieve that death but go hysterical over Trump's hope to try a peaceful agreement with Russia.

I don't think Trump will have much success draining the swamp unless he drains the GOP swamp first.

4th Circuit Court deals blow to individual rights

     The Friday 5/26 Detroit News print edition ( I could not find a link in the online edition) carried a front page news item "Court deals new blow to travel ban" by David G. Savage, Tribune Washington Bureau. Evidently, The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 10 to 3 that "...it appears to discriminate based on religion and that the administration's argument that the order was needed to protect national security was a "pretext" offered in "bad faith."

     Please understand what this means: we should never have bombed Japan in WW2 because doing so was discriminating against their religion, Shinto. Their religion treated the emperor as a god or godlike. His every command was to be accepted on blind faith and obeyed. America's self defense then was just a "pretext" determined by our own "bad faith." Evidently, that 'bad faith' caused Pearl Harbor. Thankfully, none of these justices were around in WW2.

     This is what happens when justices drop context when considering legal decisions. They dropped several contexts big time in this one.

     First, is the question, what is the purpose of our laws? Generally speaking, their purpose is to provide justice. But that leads to the next question: according to what standard?  That standard is provided in our Declaration of Independence. It is man's unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness guaranteed to all men equally. This should be the standard by which all laws are to be written.

     It's a simple formula actually: If an activity violates or threatens to violate a citizen's right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, Congress shall address it. If an activity does not violate or threaten to violate a citizen's right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, Congress shall make no law. This in turn means the Constitution and all its amendments must be held to this standard.

      So when the founders wrote the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,...." The context here has to mean that any religion that requires its followers to violate the rights of other humans cannot receive judicial sanction as a rights compatible religion and must be exempted from the first amendment. The reason is plain: a rights protecting society and a rights violating religion are incompatible.

     To hold that a rights violating religion should have the same legal status as rights compatible religions is to ignore the purpose of law: to protect individual human life in a social context. It is astonishing that these 4th Circuit Justices cannot see this. (The truth is that they are blinded by their previous acceptance of an out of context notion of the concept 'discrimination', a topic for another day)

     I understand that not all Muslims seek to kill infidels. But the fact remains that all the major religions have repudiated their more violent and brutal pasts, except one, Islam. Plus, their bible, the Koran, orders them to lie to all infidels to gain their confidence then kill them. So how can we infidels trust them? By what standard? For those Muslims already here however, it has to be the principle of assuming innocence until proven guilty.

     But in my view, those seeking to come here anew to establish Sharia law must be turned away. It is an admission of wanting to overthrow the government. The attempt to establish Sharia Law here in the US should be grounds for deportation or imprisonment for the same reason as an attempt to overthrow the government.

      The second major context dropping is accepting a principle, moral or political, out of the context of rights protection. For example, if you accept the principle 'honesty is the best policy' without ever putting it in context, it can hurt you. A thug breaks into your house and demands your wallet. Then asks 'do you have any more'? You say 'yes, $300 in the second dresser drawer under the socks.' He takes it and leaves. Your honesty just cost you an extra $300. Loyalty to the virtue of honesty here leads to the destruction of life values, not their survival.  In this context honesty was the worst policy.

     And so it is with immigration. Allowing massive amounts of unvetted, uncontrolled immigration the pretext that immigration is always a moral virtue regardless of any hostile intentions by those immigrants is risking suicide. I contend there are contexts in which immigration needs to be supervised or controlled like in war or at least vetted for diseases if coming from a stricken nation.

     This leads to the third evasion of context: treating immigration as though it were exclusively a domestic policy issue. It is also a foreign policy issue which I wrote about here.

     In that essay I imagined what I had hoped then President Obama would have said in his speech on immigration but didn't. One paragraph:

"We need to find out why our neighbors to the south are not creating the conditions in their nations that exist here in the US so their citizens don't have to come here to be free and prosperous. Again, this is something that needs to be discussed not only by our congressional houses but by the State Department as well. Foreign Policy is this Department's domain. It needs to be developing policies with perhaps incentives or even disincentives to be applied to and/or negotiated with our southern neighbors. This isn't happening right now. It will going forward."

Although that paragraph was about immigration from our southern neighbors it applies to all immigrants. Yes immigrants have a right to their pursuit of happiness which includes the right to try and come here. Yes we are a nation of immigrants and need to stay that way. I'm all in favor of open borders but not from nations that have sworn "Death to America." Even though we did not declare war on them, the Muslims in Iran declared war on the U.S. long ago.

It was President Obama who first identified the 7 nations as terrorist hot spots that Trump wants vetted. But do you think if Obama had followed up with a ban from those nations the Democrat Party and news media would have gone hysterical like they are now? There would be not only silence but eager approval.

These 10 justices are engaging in blatant obstructionism and should be rebuked by the Supreme court. From the New's article:

"All 10 judges in the majority were Democratic appointees. The three Republican appointees dissented."

That's all the evidence we need to know that these justices (and the Democrat Party and the news media) have no interest in law, justice or individual rights.

The Climate Confederacy

 Their hatred of mankind knows no bounds. Committing treason is OK with them.

The Climate Confederacy

The UK's Libyan Jihadist Problem

The UK's Libyan Jihadist Problem

Double Standards for me but not thee

It could be a candidate for the eighth wonder of the world. I'm referring to the bulldogged resistance of the Democratic Party and its acolytes in the media. After losing the white house to Republicans, they have a born again concern for things like the Constitution, principles, rule of law and separation of powers among others. Although Democrats paid lip service to these values when in power, they were largely ignored by the party leaders and their media champions.

Case in point: the Sunday 5/14 Detroit Free Press' Brian Dickerson posted an oped on how Trump's judicial appointees could protect us from an imperious president if we examine them closely. The need to examine them critically is true enough. But his first paragraph says:

"The men who wrote the U.S. Constitution never met Donald Trump. But he was precisely the sort of president they had in mind when they invested the other two branches of government with the authority to corral a commander-in-chief with pretensions of autocratic power."

One has to ask where was Mr Dickerson's concern for the separation of powers while Obama routinely sidestepped congress to get what he wanted? For example, when the president signs into law legislation passed by congress, only congress can alter it. But Obama altered or postponed several parts of the ACA until after the then next election. That is supposed to be unconstitutional. Evidently loyalty to the separation of powers is only expected of Republicans not Democrats. He continues:

"The good news for champions of a robust judiciary is that Trump is not terribly interested in the judicial process, and that he has largely delegated the business of identifying and vetting candidates for judicial office to people who are."

I agree. That is exactly what Trump with no judicial experience, should do, rely on those who do have such experience. Dickerson then adds:

"The bad news is that some of those people are less interested in promoting the rule of law than with greasing the judicial skids for the same special interests that already wield outsize influence in the other two branches of government."

Who are 'those people'? Who are the special interests that wield 'outsize influence'? No answer. They are simply evil bad guys lurking about, which we are to take on faith.

 But 'greasing the judicial skids' has been on the Democratic Party's dream list going all the way back to FDR and his attempts to pack the SCOTUS with progressives. Evidently, greasing the skids is OK for Democrats but not Republicans. Later Mr Dickerson claims:

"Trump took office with the opportunity to fill an unusually large number of seats on the federal bench. Now, after hustling to fill the vacancy created by Justice Antonin Scalia's death (and prolonged by the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's unprincipled refusal to schedule confirmation hearings for President Barack Obama's nominee to replace Scalia) the White House is turning its attention to 129 lower court openings."

I think those 129 seats are what the Democrats and media really fear. But why was Senate Leader Mitch McConnell's refusal to schedule a  hearing on Obama's nominee 'unprincipled'? From the NYTimes:

"WASHINGTON — As a senator more than two decades ago, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. argued that President George Bush should delay filling a Supreme Court vacancy, should one arise, until the presidential election was over, and that it was “essential” that the Senate refuse to confirm a nominee to the court until then."

The above statement is in the form of a principle. Just not one Mr Dickerson or the MSM feels loyalty to this year. Perhaps loyalty to that principle will be born again in the next Democrat administration. Mr Dickerson concludes with:

"Last week's transparent attempt to take the wind out of the FBI's investigation into the administration's ties to Russia is only the latest signal that Trump's grandiose conception of presidential prerogative is on a collision course with the constitutional reality."

No it isn't. It's on a collision course with the wishes, whims and feelings of the Democrat Party and their baggage handlers in the media. Nor is any wind taken out of the Russia investigations. Mr Comey did very little if any investigating himself. He had a vast number of investigators working on many cases. His job is that of an administrator coordinating teams and helping where needed and turning over results to the Attorney General.

I wonder where the concern about presidential prerogative was when Bill Clinton, under investigation by the FBI for the Whitewater scandal, decided to fire the FBI director? Was that director getting close to discovering something pernicious? Obviously, firing FBI directors is only permissible when Democrats do it but a no-no when Republicans do so.

I think what we are seeing today is a clash between a false reality adopted by an intellectual class of concrete bound mentalities no longer able or willing to think in terms of principles, and a public that can still do so but lacks the integration needed to form a coherent philosophy which is needed for a consistent movement. So a frustrated public is striking back at the establishments the only way it can, by supporting an administration that wants to punch the establishment in the nose.

This can be futile because the intellectuals are well organized and united by their common anti-conceptual method of thinking. Novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand pointed this out nicely:

"This kind of psycho-epistemology works so long as no part of it is challenged. But all hell breaks loose when it is--because what is threatened then is not a particular idea, but that mind's whole structure. The hell ranges from fear to resentment to stubborn evasion to hostility to panic to malice to hatred." (from the essay "The Missing Link" in her book "Philosophy: who needs it"pg40          

This hatred is what we are seeing today. While Mr Dickerson's oped is one of the more milder ones, it is representative of how media pundits often employ a double standard against Trump as opposed to any Democrat.

 If America can get principled intellectual leadership, principled political leaders will follow. But it can't be done backwards, by focusing on politics first. Perhaps Trump can buy enough time for such a principled leader to emerge. Hopefully.

They only care about maintaining control

      The tooth and nail tenacity with which the Democrat, Republican and media establishments are resisting President Donald Trump's attempts to drain these swamps reminds me of a commercial I saw a few years ago on local TV. It showed an elderly gentleman standing in an auto repair shop in front of a larger man in mechanic's coveralls. The elderly man looks at the camera and proudly announces: "I always take my car to Joe's. He's fixed my transmission 26 times."

     I think we can all agree that TV commercials are prone to wild exaggerations and this is certainly one of the wilder ones.

     I now ask you to imagine with me that this commercial was not an exaggeration after all, but rather true: this gentleman-we'll call him Phil-actually did take his car to Joe's to have his transmission fixed 26 times. Fact.

     Now, given this fact, would you say that Phil's highest goal was to get his car fixed right? Or that his highest goal was to keep Joe in charge of fixing his car? It's rather obvious that after 26 times, Phil's main goal is to keep Joe in charge of fixing his car, and that the goal of getting it fixed right is further down on his priority list, and probably not even on it. I'm sure we can all be telling ourselves yes, that makes sense but I for one would never be guilty of that. Right?

     Well, I'm here to say wrong. We are guilty of it. All of us.

     First, year after year we see our roads and bridges crumbling. Pot holes that require more money to patch this year than two years ago. Endless lines of orange barrels turning our roads into obstacle courses. Yet our political and intellectual leaders in academia and the media keep advising us of the practicality of  putting our transportation needs in the hands of Joe's public transportation.

     Second, not year after year but decade after decade we see our kids coming out of school, especially in the inner cities, unable to read, can't write coherently about what they read, can't give change for a dollar without a calculator and can't get into college without taking two, three or more remedial classes.

     Even outside of the big cities, many graduates cannot think in principles. They can't identify the premise on which a particular idea is based. Our primary and secondary schools are failures. Yet our professional leaders insist it is practical and moral to continue placing our children's minds under the auspices of Joe's public education.

     Third, now we are told that it is practical and moral to put our lives and that of our loved ones under the control of Joe's public health care. In fact we are constantly told to let the government provide almost everything our lives require. So the question is, why are we allowing ourselves to be put into these boxes? Why can't we start thinking outside the box of Joe's government control?

     This is my main point. It is we who have to teach ourselves how to think outside the box of Joe's government control. It is you and I that have to research things like private roads in America, toll roads in America and how else can they be funded. We must look at private for profit and non-profit educational systems, private health care and so on. How can we identify a candidate's ability to think outside the box if we don't know what that looks like ourselves? Happily, some of this research has already been done.

     For example:

     There are lots of private roads in America and they are maintained nicely. We need to study these and call for the government to begin a process of auctioning off some of its roads.*

     The same with education. The public school problems have been around for a long time. A March 25 2002 Detroit News article headline reads "Voters to politicians: improve the schools"

Another Detroit News article on Dec 11th 2003 headline "District parents: Dump new math"

A Detroit Free Press article of Oct 16th 2004 says "Detroit students fall farther behind state." Those articles are 13 to 15 yrs old. So what have the media been saying recently?

     A Mar 17 2016 Detroit News article by Ingrid Jacques headlined "Mich. residents believe public schools failing." She cites a poll showing "...less than 30% of residents believe Michigan's school-age children get or have access to, the best education possible."**

     Another editorial this time in the Detroit Free Press by staff writer Nancy Kaffer is titled "To fix Michigan schools, we must fund them."***  It's an endless plea for more money which has never helped in the past. So we see nothing has changed in at least 15 years.

     The same with health care. First Lady Hillary Clinton tried to get Hillary Care passed during President  Bill's first term. It didn't fly then but with constant pressure from academia and the media to put our health in the hands of Joe's government, they tried again with President Obama and succeeded, for now anyway.

     So it is up to us to make it happen, to educate ourselves and seek out candidates of like mind. The politicians aren't going to do it themselves. They are the Joes who are determined to stay in power and maintain control over us. Do you really think our present Senators and Congressmen are going to start thinking outside the box of government control anytime soon? They have spent their entire careers creating these boxes and nudging us into them. It's time we climbed out.

     I would like at this point, to indicate what I think are two first steps to climbing out of these boxes: shutting down Joe's federal Dept of Education and electing freedom candidates to local school boards.

     The Dept of  Education doesn't teach a single thing to a single student. Instead it controls the purse strings of indoctrination. It actually threatens our kids by declaring for example that the states had better teach subject X or it will have to withhold federal dollars. It is child abuse.

     By turning education over to the states it will begin the process of decentralization which should continue within the states down to the local level where it belongs. The states will do things differently from each other. Best practices will tend have best results and those results will be out there for all to see, debate and copy.

     In closing I want to emphasize this point: when Joe controls education he will be sure to teach all his students the value of....Joe, that Joe cares about them and that Joe's control--and Joe's money--will be the solution to all of their future problems. Sadly, there have been several generations of American adults who have gone through Progressive Education and have been thusly indoctrinated. That's why it's absolutely critical that if we want to get education fixed right, we must first break the stranglehold that Joe has on the minds of our young, and do it soon. We need to stop being Phils and make sure our kids don't become new Phils.




   *http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimpowell/2012/07/29/no-president-obama-it-was-private-business-that-made-our-

**http://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/columnists/ingrid-jacques/2016/03/16/michigan-public-schools-fail/

***http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/nancy-kaffer/2016/12/29/school-reform-michigan-funding/9570479