Will American Fascism ever be defeated?

Here's a statement that few Americans will recognize as true:

"America started out as a Communist society but declined into a Fascist society. And like all Fascist societies it spilt a lot of blood getting power into the hands of its elite"

A bizarre statement?  It's certainly unorthodox but very solidly based in history.  We all know that the Founding Fathers were devout religious communists with all land owned in common until a third of them died of starvation.  Only then did they reinstate private property.  Communists don't relinquish control easily.

But what's this decline into Fascism?  That is clearly set out in America's most famous document. Most Americans have clearly not read the Declaration of Independence.  They know the few grand statements at the beginning of it but that is all.  So before I say anything more, I ask readers to read it. It is here.

What's all that stuff in the middle of it about laws?  Just some old stuff that is no longer relevant?  To the contrary, that is the nitty gritty of the document.  What it says is that the colonial legislators were busily making laws to tell their citizens what they must and must not do.  And that pesky libertarian King kept over-ruling them!  The King stood in the way of the colonial elite having power over the people.

And regulating everything is what Fascists do.  Fascists believe in strong central power -- for the "good" of the people, of course.  Mussolini prophesied that Fascism would rule the 20th century -- and he was right.  All countries are now Fascist.  They now all have governments that try to regulate all sorts of minutiae in peoples' lives. They in fact try to regulate more than the 20th century Fascist regimes ever did -- diet, for instance.

And the marginalization and prosecution of dissent is very Fascist.  And that is well underway -- with Christians in particular losing their jobs and being fined for articulating and standing by their Biblical beliefs.

And Fascist bloodshed?  We have seen that the War of Independence was really a war for the power of the colonial legislators and Abraham Lincoln himself, in his famous letter to Horace Greeley,  admitted that he waged his war not for the slaves but only for "the union" -- i.e. control of the whole territory of the USA by the central government.

And Fascist wars?  How about Bill Clinton waging war on the Christian Serbs in defence of Muslim Kosovars? And what good did the Iraq intervention do? And don't get me started about FDR and Pearl Harbor.  The Afghanistan involvement was a response to attack from there so that war was advisable.  But it was still a vast loss of fine American lives for no gain.  Just dropping a big one on Kandahar was all that was needed. An indiscriminate attack in response to an indiscriminate attack would simply be to answer the adversary in a language that it would understand.

Libertarians are vocal opponents of government power but are too few to limit it. I am of course one of those

One can only hope that conservative legislators come to realize the company they are in when they support or fail to oppose  regulation of various kinds  -- and ask themselves what right they have to tell others what to do. They have no right.  All they have is might.  And Leftists, of course, deny that there is anything such as right and wrong at all.  They are nihilists whose only motive is destruction.  And laws can be very destructive.

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High IQ people better looking

This is actually an old finding but it again shows how pervasive the influence of IQ is.

Our strongest personality traits can be deduced simply from our facial features, scientists believe.  Research shows those with higher IQs are usually good-looking, while those with wider faces are usually perceived as being more powerful and successful.

There is even evidence that sexual deviancy can be picked up from facial features, with paedophiles more likely to have minor facial flaws.

The new evidence means the judgments we make when we meet strangers - which is usually concluded in less than a tenth of a second - are often accurate.

Mark Fetscherin, professor of international business at Rollins College, Florida, has recently found a link between company profits and the shape of its chief executive's face.

In his new book, CEO Branding, Mr Fetscherin describes how the executive tended to have wider faces than the average male.

A wider face means that the person is viewed as dominant and successful, Mr Fetscherin said. He also found a positive link between that shape face and the profits of the company.

He told The Sunday Times: 'Facial width-to-height ratio correlates with real world measures of aggressive and ambitious behavior and is associated with a psychological sense of power.'

Elsewhere, scientists also believe people can decipher negative attributes from a person's face. At Cornell University, scientists showed subjects mugshots of those who were guilty and innocent and found the majority could tell them apart.

Researchers have also found that those with a high IQ tend to be better looking. An example is Kate Beckinsale, who won poetry awards as a teenager, then studied Russian literature and English at Oxford.

Actress Natalie Portman also graduated with a psychology degree from Havard in 2003.

Leslie Zebrowitz, professor of social relations at Brandeis University, near Boston, said the trend was due to the high quality of DNA, with few mutations, that those people have inherited.  [Zeb gets it -- JR]

SOURCE

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Why the establishment fears Trump

By Robert Romano

establishment puzzled by trumpCritics of a Donald Trump presidential candidacy have made two separate, contradictory claims regarding his electability in the 2016 general election.

First, that if he is nominated by the Republican Party, he would repel too many Independents, and lose handily in a general election. Second, that if he is not nominated, and instead runs as an Independent, he would siphon off too many Independents, costing the Republican candidate the election.

How can both be true? Either, Trump has broad appeal to Independents, which could fuel a third party run, or he does not.

Let us assume the latter conventional wisdom, that if Trump were to run as an Independent, it would splinter the vote, dramatically increasing the odds that the Democrat nominee would win. For this to be true, he would have to attract enough Independents to his campaign to steal votes from one or both of the major parties.

Ross Perot did that in 1992, garnering 19.7 million votes in the general election. Let’s leave aside the question of whether this actually cost George H. W. Bush the election, a debatable topic. Roughly half of Perot supporters were voters who otherwise might not have voted in the election. How do we know that?

Voter turnout exploded in 1992 by nearly 13 million to 104.4 million, a 12.27 percent increase from 1988. All that while the growth of the voting age population was slowing down — it had only increased 6.7 million that cycle.

In addition to Perot’s 19.7 million votes, Democrats increased their 1988 vote total by 3.1 million to 44.9 million, while Republicans lost 9.7 million supporters down to 39.1 million.

Meaning, Perot’s presence in the race may have brought as many as 5 to 10 million voters to the polls who would have stayed home if he were not in the race. He expanded the voter universe.

Besides the dramatic growth of the national debt, Ross Perot’s big issue in 1992 was being against the pending North American Free Trade Agreement. Trump’s big issue besides illegal immigration is trade, as he led the opposition to granting trade authority to President Barack Obama to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Both are economic populists.

Only two other times in modern electoral history has there been such a marked increase in voter turnout exceeding the growth rate of the voting age population at a time when the population growth rate was slowing. In 1984 and 2008, when Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, respectively, increased their party’s voting bases and, thus, overall voter turnout substantially.

In 2000 and 2004, the growth of voter turnout also exceeded the growth rate of the voting age population, but that occurred at times when the voting age population was surging. That said, the George W. Bush campaigns were highly successful at increasing the number of Republicans. In fact, Republican voter identification peaked in 2004 at 39 percent, according to Gallup.

The trouble for Republicans is that it has sunk ever since, down to 23 percent in July. Independents, on the other hand, have risen markedly to near an all-time high at 46 percent of voters.

What emerges is a Republican Party that is — or should be — desperate to increase its numbers with unaffiliated voters after getting drubbed in 2008 and 2012. In fact, Republicans still have not been able to surpass George W. Bush’s 62 million vote total in 2004.

The question with Trump — and every other GOP candidate — is if that person will build the voter base of the party, without which Republicans cannot hope to win in 2016. A key question may be whether they bring the Ross Perot voters home.

A hint could come in a recent Rasmussen poll, which found a full 36 percent of Republicans, 33 percent of Independents and 19 percent of Democrats say they would support Trump — even if he ran third party. His threat to run as an Independent notwithstanding, that is not a bad place to start.

Perhaps what the party’s establishment fears the most, then, is that either as a Republican or an Independent, Trump could actually win. And they can’t control him.

SOURCE

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How US Sugar Policies Just Helped America Lose 600 Jobs

The manufacturer of Oreo cookies recently announced plans to move production of Oreos from Chicago to Mexico, resulting in a loss of 600 U.S. jobs.

This should be a wake-up call to defenders of the U.S. sugar program and other job-destroying trade barriers.

The leading ingredient in Oreos is sugar, and U.S. trade barriers currently require Americans to pay twice the average world prices for sugar.

Sugar-using industries now have a big incentive to relocate from the United States to countries where access to their primary ingredient is not restricted.

If the government wants people making Oreo cookies and similar products to keep their jobs, a logical starting point would be to eliminate the U.S. sugar program, including barriers to imported sugar.

This obvious connection between the lost jobs and sugar quotas was missed by many observers. According to one online commenter: “This is why tariff[s] on products coming to U.S must be raised.”

That’s backwards. When protectionist policies like the U.S. sugar program lead to offshoring, the response shouldn’t be to pass new laws to discourage such offshoring or to raise tariffs even higher. The response should be to eliminate government policies that encourage offshoring in the first place.

The loss of Oreo cookie jobs should reinforce a lesson on the job-destroying aspect of protectionist trade policies.

According to a 2006 report from the government’s International Trade Administration: “Chicago, one of the largest U.S. cities for confectionery manufacturing, has lost nearly one-third of its SCP manufacturing jobs over the last 13 years. These losses are attributed, in part, to high U.S. sugar prices.”

That lesson appears to be lost on unions that are supposed to represent the workers losing their jobs in Chicago.

For example, The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Union consistently has opposed free trade agreements with sugar-producing countries like Australia, Brazil, and Mexico —the kind of trade deals that just might protect their members’ jobs.

So that’s how the cookie crumbles.

SOURCE

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