Is President Trump our Messiah?

That heading will no doubt get a few laughs.  It may even attract some Leftist derision.  With his short temper and impatience with detail he is a most unlikely Messiah -- but the Pharisees thought that about the carpenter from Galilee too. I don't really believe in Messiahs but I am beginning to think that he is as near to our Messiah as we are likely to get.  His repudiation of the Paris climate accord is a YUGE break with the status quo.  Warmism will be on death watch from now on.  The greatest craze of the postwar era will have run its course. Someone of influence has finally declared that the emperor has no clothes.

And he brings us salvation from oppression of many other sorts too:  Tax reform, healthcare reform, immigration reform and much more is on his agenda.  None of those things are new ideas but it took Trump to get them rolling.  Jesus too based his teaching on what was already there in the Old Testament: "I came not to abolish ..." (Matthew 5:17).  The breadth of Trump's breaks with the past is truly astonishing.  He slays the sacred cows of convention daily.

And the sacred cows he slays are mostly Leftist.  He even shows how Leftist thinking has seeped into conservative thought.  I myself plead guilty to having accepted the conventional doctrine that unalloyed free trade is an ultimate goal.  There is no doubt that unalloyed free trade delivers all goods and services at lowest cost but is that the only desideratum?  Do we care whether our Chinese electric kettle costs us $7 or $9? Are there goals more important than that? Trump has made clear that there are.  Stability of employment matters too; social stability matters too.  Preserving jobs may be well worth it if the price is  to accept a $9 kettle instead of a $7 kettle.

My brother is so far Right he is almost out of sight and he has always said you have to look after your own people as first priority.  Thanks to Prez. Trump we now agree on that.

And when my son got home from work after the climate announcement we toasted Mr. Trump in good Australian "Champagne"

So Trump has even educated conservatives on what is important.  He is a great educator and conservatives not on his wavelength should accept what they can learn from him rather than digging their heels in like the Pharisees

covfefe! -- JR

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What Kathy Griffin Means for Us

The most heinous aspect of the Kathy Griffin faked beheading of Donald Trump is that it shows us exactly how degraded the sensibilities of the liberal establishment have become- and how subverted they are by the Islamic Jihad.

I do not remember, prior to Daniel Pearl’s cold-blooded murder in 2002, even being aware of beheading in the modern world. I think that, to my mind it was, back then, as distant and ancient as impaling and crucifixion. After February 1, 2002 cutting the head off of a living human being with a knife became a particular and real horror. In an attempt to understand what happened to him, I found the video on line.The utter barbarity, the bloody reality, the ghastly psychopathic cruelty of the act was overpowering. This rough disconnection of the head from the body, accompanied by the flood of life’s blood is at once a terrifying, spectacular mutilation and a desecration of the most elemental spiritual wholeness of humanity. The mouth is open, the eyes go dull and if we fail to be horrified, we die inside ourselves.

I recognized it right away as a close cousin of the gas chambers, firing squads, death trucks and starvation of the holocaust. What sane American in the early twentieth century could have seen those coming? The numbers of victims were not the same but they were both cases of how the human mind can calculate its way- rage and reason its way- to doing deeds of previously unthinkable evil. Anyway, didn’t Stalin say that “the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic”?

Now, more than 15 years later, beheadings are common, almost daily occurrences. The brutal savages post videos and pictures of them on the internet as terror tactics. How many people in the west have watched one of them- or even made themselves look at one of the pictures?  I wonder if Kathy Griffin ever watched one of those videos. They are real and they are happening all the time.

As unthinkable and despicable as joking about “Lynching president Obama” was for the past eight years, there had been no epidemic of racial lynchings for many decades to give them a similar dimension of possibility. Even the catcalls against Jews who support Israel that “the gas chambers are waiting” and “kill the Jews” taunts that are heard in anti-Israel demonstrations around the world are not as immediate and visceral as beheading is today. Only to people who are not paying attention to the wholesale murder of innocent Christians and Jews in the Islamic Jihad is a beheading anodyne enough to be a subject of a humorous satire. This is the worst horror of Kathy Griffin and her failed jape, It is yet another how so many of us are unwilling to look squarely at the most immediate threat to all of us.

She doesn’t get it. Nor do the rest of the clucking liberal press who are all in some degree sympathetic in their condemnations. They think it was “inappropriate”. Beheading is not funny,  it is not merely inappropriate, it is emblematic of how the barbaric Jihad is beginning to incrementally succeed in separating our minds from our hearts and our souls.

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Booming US jobs market lifts equities

American employers created more than a quarter of a million jobs last month in a “rip-roaring” labour market as manufacturing conditions improved for the sixth month running, according to reports yesterday which sent stock markets to new highs.

Private employers hired significantly more workers in May than economists expected, a closely watched forecast suggested, raising hopes of a strong showing in today’s official jobs report. A separate reading of manufacturing conditions showed that new orders, exports and backlogs built up rapidly.

The three main US share indices closed at record highs. The Dow Jones rose 135.53 points to 21,144.18 while the broader S&P 500 was 0.6 per cent up at 2,430.06. The tech-heavy Nasdaq finished 0.7 per cent higher.

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Loony Liberal Insults General Mattis With This Idiotic Statement




Prof. Juan Cole goofs again below. The Leftist "expert" on the Middle East (a  professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History in the History Department at the University of Michigan), Juan Cole, gets shown up for the know-nothing he is here. And there is another scathing takedown of him here.  For more on that see Mark Kleiman.  We also read  here that Cole thinks  Iraq is on the Mediterranean!  And if  you read here you will see that the wacky Prof. Cole does not even know that a large part of what is the USA today was taken from Mexico!

At least one national media contributor thinks professional singer Ariana Grande, not Secretary of Defense (DOD) Jim Mattis, is the leader America needs to win the war on terror.

The Nation contributor and University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole published an article Wednesday centered on Grande and how the Department of Defense could learn a thing or two from the 23-year-old Nickelodeon alum.

The headline reads: “Arianna Grande Understands Counterterrorism Better Than Jim Mattis.”

Even for skeptics of the Trump administration, this assertion is a bit of a stretch. Cole accuses Mattis of underestimating our enemy and feels it is pointless to wipe out terrorists because it would only turn their families against the U.S.

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Astounding Number of States Support Trump Against Illegal Immigration

Two thirds of the nation’s states have taken action to join in President Trump’s bid to crackdown on illegal immigration and “sanctuary cities,” a sweeping national move that would bolster the administration’s effort even if it loses in the Supreme Court.

The Migration Policy Institute reports that 33 states have moved to choke off illegal immigration, led by Texas which OK’d a law to block cities from giving “sanctuary” to illegals.

“While Texas was the first state to pass a sweeping law focused on illegal immigration since the presidential election, at least 32 other states have introduced immigration enforcement bills,” said the Institute.

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Local government abuse of poor families

A column in the Washington Post reveals that local governments try to make families pay if their kids wind up in the legal system, even if they’re ultimately declared not guilty of any offense.

In dozens of one-on-one meetings every week, a lawyer retained by the city of Philadelphia summons parents whose children have just been jailed, pulls out his calculator and hands them more bad news: a bill for their kids’ incarceration. Even if a child is later proved innocent, the parents still must pay a nightly rate for the detention. Bills run up to $1,000 a month… The lawyer, Steven Kaplan…is paid up to $316,000 a year in salary and bonuses, more than any city employee, including the mayor.
I haven’t given any thought to whether families should cough up money if kids are found guilty and then incarcerated.

But I find it to be outrageous that bills are sent to families when the kids are found to be not guilty.

And let’s be honest. Such a policy is not about criminal justice. It’s about figuring out new ways of pillaging people to finance bureaucracy.

To add insult to injury, most of the families are poor, so it’s very difficult to collect revenue. Indeed, very little money is collected after paying the lawyer.

Because these parents are so often from poor communities, even the most aggressive efforts to bill them seldom bring in meaningful revenue. Philadelphia netted $551,261 from parents of delinquent children in fiscal 2016.
And when you look at the consequences for poor families, it’s hard to think this is a good policy. Especially if the kid isn’t convicted of any crime!

When parents fail to pay on time, the state can send collection agencies after them, tack on interest, garnish 50 percent of their wages, seize their bank accounts, intercept their tax refunds, suspend their driver’s licenses or charge them with contempt of court.
Here’s an example from the west coast.

When Mariana Cuevas’s son was released from a California jail, after being locked up in a juvenile hall for more than 300 days for a homicide he did not commit, the boy’s public defender, Jeffrey Landau, thought his work was done. The case had been dismissed; his client was free. But at a celebratory dinner afterward, Cuevas, a Bay Area home cleaner, pulled out a plastic bag full of bills and showed Landau that the state had tried to collect nearly $10,000 for her child’s imprisonment. …In fiscal 2014-2015, Alameda County, which contains Oakland, spent $250,938 collecting $419,830 from parents. An internal county report called that “little financial gain.”
This is astounding. Trying to pillage a poor family for $10,000 when the kid didn’t commit the crime. If you care about decency and justice, this may even be worse than civil asset forfeiture.

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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