Study concludes Conservatives are more likely to live meaningful lives

No surprise.  Leftists spend all their time whining about how unfair the world is

According to a recent University of California study, conservatives tend to find more purpose and meaning in their lives.

Published in the Social Psychological and Personality Science journal last month and led by lead researcher David Newman, a doctoral candidate at USC Dornsife’s Mind and Society Center, the study was in itself an examination of five other studies.

Newman’s team specifically examined the feelings of purpose and meaning that 50,000 participants across 16 countries had reported over a 40-year span.

What his team found was that being conservative more often than not correlated with being driven by a purpose in life and experiencing a sense of meaning. Newman warned though that the results of his study should not be misused to issue automatic judgments of others.

“It doesn’t mean that every conservative finds a lot of meaning in their life and that every liberal is depressed,” he said.

He also noted that other factors play a role as well: “These factors range from various personal characteristics such as how religious someone is to situational influences such as one’s current mood.”

True, but the results do suggest that conservatives are more likely to find meaning in their lives. Why, though, might this be? Listen to the following segment of Fox News’ “The Greg Gutfeld Show” to hear some possible reasons:

George Murdoch, also known as the wrestler Tyrus, said something interesting toward the end of the clip.

“If you watch or skim through … any liberal TV show or news program, it’s Armageddon. It’s horrible. It’s like misery’s in your house and there’s a little guy breaking your ankles. They’re all sad,” he said.

“They’re just miserable, and we’re like, ‘We won, we’re making money, I’m pop-locking it home.’ It’s a good time if you’re working hard and paying your bills and stuff. And if you’re not, you’re miserable. I’m not saying all Democrats don’t work, but I’m just saying there’s a certain group of them who prefer things done for them, and they’re pretty upset right now.”

He had a valid point, but not in regard to the left’s reaction to President Donald Trump’s election. Trump just stepped into office a year ago, and since the study covers a 40-year span, he’s ultimately irrelevant to the study’s results.

But what Tyrus said later about Democrats preferring “things done for them” hit the nail on the head. Conservatives find joy and meaning in working hard, fulfilling their obligations, taking care of their families and, in some cases, adhering to a religious faith. And while not every liberal is a welfare-consuming secularists, many leftists do readily subscribe to attitudes of victimhood and entitlement.

Recall that it’s the left that tries to drum up support among women, minorities and the youth by encouraging them to adopt a victim mentality and offering them freebies like free tuition, free healthcare, free housing, free meals.

The problem is that it’s by earning the fruits of one’s labor that people find meaning. When people instead get everything handed to them, there’s no sense of accomplishment, no pride from a job well done. There’s just an empty pit devoid of purpose and meaning.

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Some Trump ideas worth stealing

A tribute to Trump's cleverness from Boston liberal Alex Beam

What is Trump doing that the next president will want to emulate? If you answer, “Nothing!” you are wrong. There is plenty to learn, even from this train wreck of a presidency.

* The tweets. These work, undeniably. No future president will be expected to tweet day and night about his favorite sycophantic TV show, or routinely misspell words of over three syllables. But these mini-press releases pack a lot of power, and Trump has successfully weaponized them.

I followed the Obama White House Twitter feed and it was mainly anodyne junk, e.g., “Watch @POTUS and @FLOTUS welcome Singapore PM @leehsienlong and Mrs. Lee for tonight’s State Dinner.” I can see the next president hiring some with-it 28-year-old to keep the Twitter feed spicy, unboring, and engaged.

* The rolling pardons. Yes, this is cheap sensationalism, but it’s cheap sensationalism that works. The tawdry spectacle of rich crumbums lining up at the White House door to suborn the outgoing president (See Bill Clinton’s pardoning of Marc Rich via Eric Holder) in the final days of an administration is disgusting.

Trump has changed the rules. There is a lot of room for creativity here, and Trump’s posthumous pardon of boxer Jack Johnson opened an interesting door. We know history is rich with miscarriages of justice directed against Native Americans for defending their lands and against African-Americans for all manners of imagined crimes.

You could combine long-overdue restorative justice with a headline-grabbing pardon for (convicted felon) Martha Stewart. Now we’re raising a big tent!

* In-office campaign rallies. Trump isn’t the first president to hold campaign-style events early in his tenure — Obama and George W. Bush held similar pep rallies — but “he’s just more upfront about it,” as The Washington Post observed last year. Unlike his predecessors, Trump filed papers to create his reelection campaign committee on the day of his inauguration.

Why pretend? Trump is better at campaigning than governing, and his canned events outside of Washington get plenty of coverage. That lesson won’t be lost on his successors.

What else? Trump has annoyed the Obama fan base by undoing some of his predecessor’s most ambitious executive orders, e.g. Trump’s radical rollback, by almost 2 million acres, of two national monuments created by his Democratic predecessors.

The lesson? Live by extra-legislative fiat, die by extra-legislative fiat. To paraphrase Matthew 19:6, what one president hath put together, another president can easily rend asunder.

Trump has plenty of tricks up his sleeve, and some of them are worth copying.

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Americans have constitutional right to carry guns in public for self-defense, appeals court rules

Americans must have a constitutional right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday, delivering a major legal victory to gun-rights supporters.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Hawaii’s law severely restricting carrying of firearms to homes and businesses “eviscerates a core Second Amendment right.”

In an opinion that covers the breadth of thought from Geoffrey Chaucer to the country’s founders, Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain, who wrote the majority opinion in the 2-1 ruling, said that while the government can limit concealed carry, it cannot ban weapons outside the home altogether — so public open-carry must be allowed.

Judge O’Scannlain said there’s little doubt the framers of the Second Amendment were comfortable with Americans openly carrying weapons for self defense, and until the Constitution is changed, that remains the standard.

“For better or for worse, the Second Amendment does protect a right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense,” the judge wrote.

The case could be appealed to the full 9th Circuit, frequently cited as the most liberal appeals court in the country,

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Show your support for ICE

Some have defined a fanatic as “One who can’t change his opinion and won’t change the subject.” (It is often attributed to Winston Churchill, though the truth appears to be more complicated.) By that definition, I am a fanatic when it comes to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency—aka: “ICE.”

As most readers likely know, across the Left there is a greater and greater clamouring to abolish ICE entirely. Just last month Socialist darling Bernie Sanders would not go on the record as saying ICE should go the way of the Works Progress Administration, but with an eye on the 2020 Presidential race, he has since caved. [Bernie Abolishes His Opposition to "Abolish Ice", by Ethan Epstein, The Weekly Standard, July 17, 2018.] Remember that in 2015 (as in three years ago) he called Open-Borders “a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States… It would make everybody in America poorer—you're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that…” .

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris, California’s freshman senator and another strong contender for 2020, has been flip-flopping and equivocating like crazy. In March she said:

Should ICE exist? Well, certainly. When we’re talking about people who’ve committed serious and violent crimes–you know... I’m a prosecutor. I believe there need to be serious, severe and swift consequences when people commit serious and violent crimes…and certainly if they are undocumented, they should be deported if they commit those serious and violent offenses. So, yes, ICE has a purpose. ICE has a role. ICE should exist. But let’s not abuse the power.

[Dem Senator Kamala Harris Slammed for Defending the Existence of ICE (VIDEO), by Colin Kalmbacher, Law and Crime, March 10, 2018.]

But that did not go over well with the new Socialist wing of the Democratic Party, and boy did they let her know. Come June, she was more prepared to say the right thing:

I think there’s no question that we’ve got to critically re-examine ICE, and its role, and the way that it is being administered, and the work it is doing. And we need to probably think about starting from scratch.

[Kamala Harris Says Congress Needs To Change ICE, Perhaps ‘Start From Scratch’, by Paul Blumenthal, The Huffington Post, June 25, 2018.]

Nevertheless, much of the Left is now unimpressed with this, because Harris did not use the word “abolish.” They are still hammering at the Senator for not going far enough [Kamala Harris Wants You To Know She's Definitely Not Calling For Abolishing ICE, by Molly Hensley-Clancy and Lissandra Villa, BuzzFeed News, July 3, 2018.]

It will be interesting to see how this all-but-official-presidential candidate “evolves” on the issue between now and when the Democratic nomination process really gets going.

Like me, the anti-ICE radicals of the Left are fanatics—they will not change their minds, and they are not going to change the subject. That is a good thing. I hope they continue to talk about this as frequently as possible, as their position is completely insane.

As even Sen. Harris pointed out in her first response, ICE targets the worst of the worst, and does great work. Patriots, politicians and pundits alike, need to be highlighting this as regularly as ICE announces each great action they take.

Let’s take a look at some of the monsters ICE has recently played a role in apprehending, arresting, convicting, and/or deporting:

A Brazilian national arrested for rape and assault and battery. He had been previously deported. (Details here.)

Charles Cooper, a Liberian former bodyguard to President Charles Taylor, the notorious and murderous despot who once campaigned for public office under the slogan, "He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him." (Details here.)

“A Mexican national with multiple criminal convictions for inflicting corporal injury on his spouse, three convictions for driving under the influence, three convictions for driving without a license, giving false information to a peace officer, and carrying a loaded firearm in a public place.” Along with 39 other criminal aliens in New York. (Details here.)

35 “darknet” vendors. Some of items seized included, “333 bottles of liquid synthetic opioids, over 100,000 tramadol pills, 100 grams of fentanyl, more than 24 kilograms of Xanax, more than 100 firearms, including handguns, assault rifles, and a grenade launcher; five vehicles that were purchased with illicit proceeds and/or used to facilitate criminal activity; more than $3.6 million in U.S. currency and gold bars; 15 pill presses, which are used to create illegal synthetic opioids…” and “$400,000 in U.S. currency, 140 kilograms of suspected marijuana and an additional 10 kilograms of suspected marijuana vape cartridges, 12 kilograms of suspected Xanax pills, over half a kilogram of suspected ecstasy, four pill presses, mixers, and pill press parts, over a dozen kilograms of various powders, packaging materials, and paraphernalia... three loaded shotguns, including a tactical double-barreled shotgun loaded with 14 shells, and over 50 shotgun shells, as well as significant quantities of narcotics, packaging materials, and paraphernalia including a money-counting machine.” (Details here.)

Around 50 drug dealers in Chicago. This one sweep netted, “more than three kilograms of heroin, more than a kilogram of cocaine, and more than 230 grams of fentanyl.” (Details here.)

24 MS-13 members in Maryland. The two dozen men are alleged to have, “murdered five individuals in Frederick, Anne Arundel, and Montgomery Counties, dismembering three of the victims. In addition, the defendants allegedly conspired to murder eight individuals, maiming and assaulting one of the individuals with a machete, shooting one individual in the head, and kidnapping and threatening another individual with a firearm to extract payment for extortion.” (Details here.)

Isaias Estrada-Morales, a Puerto Rican child pornographer. (Details here.)

Dorviro Rocha-Ribeiro, a Brazilian wanted by Interpol for murder who had already been deported from America once before. (Details here.)

Eight MS-13 members in Texas. All have been indicted for, “racketeering conspiracy; attempted murder in aid of racketeering; assault with a dangerous weapon in aid of racketeering; conspiracy to commit murder in aid of racketeering; and using, carrying and possessing a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence.” (Details here.)

Enrique Rodriguez, member of the charmingly-named street gang Barrio Azteca (“Aztec Neighborhood”), who was smuggling drugs into America for Mexico’s Juarez Cartel. He was not a smuggler of benign marijuana either, in total he brought in “about 1,000 pounds of heroin and 1,000 pounds of cocaine.” (Details here.)

Jesus Briseno and Elias Serrano, two American citizens who were caught smuggling illegal aliens into the country. Between the two of them, their prior convictions include: aggravated stalking, kidnapping, possessing a deadly weapon and possessing marijuana with intent to distribute; escape from custody, possessing marijuana, assault/causing injury to family member, and driving while intoxicated. (Details here.)

37 criminal aliens in New Jersey. Most of them had prior criminal records for drunk driving and various kinds of assault. (Details here.)

Ramon Raudel Campos Murillo, an MS-13 member and sex trafficker. (Details here.)

Majd Al Helwani, a Syrian national who lied, “about being a U.S. citizen so he could buy a shotgun from a local sporting goods store.” (Details here.)

132 criminal aliens in the Washington, DC area. Some of the more repulsive of the 132 included:

An El Salvadoran national identified as a high-ranking MS-13 member.

A Bolivian national who has four prior convictions for rape and intercourse with a victim under thirteen.

A Peruvian national previously convicted for battery and failure to register as a sex offender.

A Mongolian national previously convicted for driving under the influence and forgery.

An El Salvadoran national who is currently facing criminal charges for felony strangulation.

A Honduran national and illegal re-entrant with an outstanding warrant for two counts of felony rape, two counts of felony sodomy, and two counts of felony sexual abuse.

A Philippine national previously convicted of felony possession of a firearm with a controlled substance.

A Guatemalan national previously convicted for consensual sexual intercourse with a child.

An El Salvadoran national who is the subject of a U.S. Marshals federal arrest warrant for felony assault with a deadly weapon.

A Jamaican national previously convicted of forgery.(Details here.)

                                               

So, why would figures who bill themselves as champions of poor, ordinary, and working Americans want to abolish an agency that puts away criminals who are most likely to prey on our most vulnerable citizens? It is a question worth pondering.

In the meantime, you can show your support for ICE, and help VDARE.com do the same, by making a donation today, and getting yourself an “ICE is Nice” or “Abolish Open Borders” sticker.

Via email

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Another Trump win over critics

The United States hit its highest economic growth rate in roughly four years on Friday — something many economists predicted would never happen.

Gross domestic product (GDP) grew to a 4.1-percent rate in the second quarter of 2018, compared to just 2.8 percent in the second quarter of 2017.

Meanwhile, CNN ran a headline in October of 2016 claiming, “Donald Trump promises 4-percent growth, but economists say no way,” and the Los Angeles Times ran a column with an even more dire prediction — that Trump was “dreaming” to think he could hit a 3-percent growth rate.

“An aging population and stagnant productivity could put Donald Trump’s goal of 3.5-percent economic growth out of reach,” the Wall Street Journal similarly wrote in December of 2016.

Businessman and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban predicted that the markets would tank if Trump were elected president in 2016.

And, of course, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that the economy would fare quite poorly under her 2016 opponent.

“Just like he shouldn’t have his finger on the button, he shouldn’t have his hands on our economy,” Clinton said during the election.

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