A lesson Socialists need to learn!!

A man named Tom Nicholson posted on his Facebook account the sports car that he had just bought and how another man commented that the money used to buy this car could've fed thousands of less fortunate people. Tom’s response to this man made him famous on the internet.

"A guy looked at my Corvette the other day and said, 'I wonder how many people could have been fed for the money that sports car cost.'”

I replied, "I am not sure;

"it fed a lot of families in Bowling Green, Kentucky who built it,
"it fed the people who make the tires,
"it fed the people who made the components that went into it,
"it fed the people in the copper mine who mined the copper for the wires,
"it fed people in Decatur IL at Caterpillar who make the trucks that haul the copper ore.
"It fed the trucking people who hauled it from the plant to the dealer and fed the people working at the dealership and their families.

“BUT,… I have to admit, I guess I really don’t know how many people it fed.”

That is the difference between capitalism and the welfare mentality.

When you buy something, you put money in people’s pockets and give them dignity for their skills.

When you give someone something for nothing, you rob them of their dignity and self-worth.

Capitalism is freely giving your money in exchange for something of value.

Socialism is taking your money against your will and shoving something down your throat that you never asked for.

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Britain’s divide isn’t North v South or red v blue. It’s between the ugly intolerant Left and the rest of us

Just like America

There is a troubling new divide running through our country, but it is not the one that people like to imagine. It is best shown by the Election result in affluent Putney, West London, where, in a rare victory, the Labour party gained a seat from the Conservatives.

Putney, like Kensington and Chelsea, is filled with rows of over-priced £1 million homes where residents would have faced huge tax hikes if Labour got into power. Yet the constituency still decided to vote for the socialist experiment that Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell were promising – and in so doing, upended a whole set of presumptions.

On the other hand, a seat like Bolsover, in Derbyshire, did something unheard of. Dennis Skinner had been the sitting Labour MP for nearly half a century, and made it a byword for the hardcore Labour heartlands.

In Bolsover you can buy a nice semi-detached house for about £100,000 – one tenth of Putney’s prices. But it was Putney that went Left and Bolsover Right.

Not that Left and Right are the correct way to describe the extraordinary upheaval of this last week.

The real chasm which has arisen is between a Conservative party that committed itself to fulfilling the will of the people, and two Left-wing parties which had devoted the past three-and-a-half years to subverting it.

It is a divide between people who have real-world concerns and those focused on niche and barely significant ones. It is a divide between those who worry about the way they are governed, how the nation will fare and how high immigration should be and those who hector them as backwards or bigoted for even noticing such things.

How, you might ask, have we reached such a state? There is a clue in the Labour Party’s dysfunctional reaction to its catastrophic defeat on Thursday.

Even after the Conservatives won in a near-landslide, the Leftist automatons that run the party are choosing to learn nothing.

They are not using this time for self-reflection or to work out how they approach this new division. Instead, they’re stuck on repeat – at increasing volume.

A perfect example of this was the self-proclaimed economist and full-time Corbyn-cheerleader Grace Blakeley, who treated viewers of ITV’s Good Morning Britain on Friday to the Corbyn-is-God mantra. Hours after her dear leader had led his party to an historic defeat she was on air, blindly insisting that Labour’s ‘democratically developed’ policies were ‘incredibly popular’.

Fellow studio guests, including former Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, begged to differ. But Grace had an alternative universe to inhabit.

‘People in this country are in favour of fairly radical Left-wing policies,’ she shouted. During the ensuing studio meltdown, Grace was, in fact, Grace-less, continuing to shout ‘Yes they are’ repeatedly over Piers Morgan and everyone else.

It demonstrated just one thing. There is a reason that people like Grace can’t accept that they have lost – they haven’t met people who don’t agree with them.

Or rather, when they do, it’s usually on social media where it is all too easy to ‘unfriend’ or ‘block’ them. When it comes to the British electorate as a whole, ignoring them completely becomes a far more difficult task.

But this is what has happened. In recent years a portion of the British Left, like Grace, very carefully built itself an echo chamber and then moved into it.

That chamber has allowed them to consistently disregard the views of the majority of the British public, most significantly the results of the referendum of 2016.

This small, London-centred clique has, in the process, pulled away from the rest of the country.

It is for that reason that the divides we used to say existed in British politics (North vs South, red vs blue) have been completely overtaken. Now, the divide is between the radical Left and everyone else.

It didn’t have to be this way. After Ed Miliband’s failure at the 2015 General Election, the Labour party did not have to decide that the main lesson was that they hadn’t been ‘radical’ enough. But it in electing Corbyn as leader that’s exactly what they did.

It was the same after the 2016 referendum. Labour and the Liberal Democrats might, in the past, have accepted such a result, but for the first time in our history the cultists driving these parties decided otherwise. They chose not just to ignore it, but to insult the public by deriding them as thick or uninformed, and to try to get around them.

With devices like the ‘People’s Vote’ charade – as the campaign for a second referendum called itself – they thought we were too dim to notice what they were doing.

They tried to reduce our politics to simple binaries, a choice between ‘hope’ or ‘fear’, racism or tolerance, destroying the NHS or saving it.

They also started running with issues so marginal that they lost the general public completely. Take another one of Thursday’s sore losers: Jo Swinson. The now ex-Liberal Democrat leader decided, just days before the Election, to talk to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about something which affects around 0.01 per cent of the British electorate: the Lib Dem’s promise to introduce an ‘X’ gender option on passports for transgender people.

In Swinson’s echo chamber, it is important to get these things right. One false step and you’re Twitter toast. So on Swinson wittered, trying to claim that biological sex is a social construct, and that people who believe everyone is born either male or female are in fact ‘demonising’ trans people. It is hard to imagine a more niche issue.

How beautiful it was, then, only a couple of days later to watch Swinson at her constituency count, looking absolutely amazed that the people of East Dunbartonshire had not re-elected her as their MP. In typical fashion she blamed people who were opposed to ‘warmth’, ‘generosity’ and ‘hope’. But she lost by 149 votes. The irony is if she had been able to find a bit more generosity and warmth towards the people of East Dunbartonshire, perhaps she would still be in Parliament.

As it happens, I share the views of the majority of the country. I have seen the Leftist robots up close for years. I have sat in halls and studios with them and been insulted by them just as the rest of the general public have.

They have called me a ‘Little Englander’ because I happen to think that our country isn’t a good fit with the EU. They have called me a ‘racist’ and ‘scum’ because I’m concerned about too-high levels of immigration. They have called me a ‘bigot’ and a ‘transphobe’ because I refuse to pretend that biological sex does not exist.

And amazingly, at the end of all that, I felt no more desire to vote for them than I had beforehand. I suspect the general public have the same view.

Needless to say the message still hasn’t sunk in.

Immediately after Thursday’s exit polls emerged, the former journalist Paul Mason declared that the Conservative victory signalled ‘a victory of the old over the young, racists over people of colour, selfishness over the planet’.

During demonstrations in Westminster on Friday night, other sore losers congregated to attack the police and insult our democracy.

‘I wish [Boris Johnson] a horrible death,’ one young, well-spoken female protester told the cameras. ‘I plan to work in the NHS. I plan to be a doctor. I plan to actually care about people,’ she continued, implausibly. ‘Go f*** yourself Boris Johnson. Honestly. What a c***.’

So yes, there is a divide in Britain right now. But it’s not like any of the old ones. It’s between the ugly, intolerant, metropolitan Left and the rest of us. And as Thursday so beautifully showed, there are more of us than them.

SOURCE 

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Donald Trump's 'best week ever', where his Space Force was approved and a new budget with $1.3 BILLION for the border wall was set

In a week overshadowed by news from the impeachment hearings, Donald Trump has had 'one of his best weeks yet,' according to an aide, after securing $1.3billion for the border wall and approval for Space Force in the House. 

It was a week of damning public testimony against the president, which ended with the House Judicial Committee advancing two articles of impeachment Friday. 

But while the news was dominated by the impeachment hearings, Trump has quietly had some of the biggest successes of his presidency. 

This week saw congressional negotiators finally reach agreement on a $1.37trillion spending package covering 12 spending bills, based on the bipartisan budget Trump proposed over the summer. It is expected to pass in the House next week before voting on the Trump impeachment.

The funding includes a $1.3billion package for his controversial border wall with Mexico.

But, two federal courts have stepped in, issuing nationwide orders blocking the Trump administration's use of $3.6billion in military construction funds to build the wall. ABC News reported that repurposing the funds would be 'unlawful.'

Trump also had a major milestone in his presidency as his much-heralded U.S. Space Force, a brand-new branch of the military, was passed by the House.

It would, in effect, be a military headquarters for space operations.

'Spacecom will defend America’s vital interests in space, the next warfighting domain, and I think that’s pretty obvious to everybody. It’s all about space,' Trump said in August.

He called the Space Command's establishment a 'landmark moment.' 

'Perhaps, for now, what he accomplished this week will be overshadowed by the impeachment, but by next summer, the impeachment may be seen as mean-spirited and partisan, and the string of victories will add to his incredible list of victories going into reelection season,' Trump biographer Doug Wead told the Washington Examiner.

'It is one of his best weeks yet,' an unnamed White House aide said.

'During impeachment, any other president would retreat into the bunker and be consumed with defense. Endlessly gaming various scenarios. Instead, Trump, the businessman, is looking for a way to use it to his advantage,' Wead told the Washington Examiner.

Trump also signed a Pro-Israel anti-Semitism executive order and a trade agreement between the U.S. and Mexico. He got approval of his 50th federal appeals judge and there was confirmation of a new Food and Drug Administration head.

Perhaps, though, most important to Americans, Wall Street hit another record Thursday.

The S&P gained 27 points to close at 3,168, while the Nasdaq added 63 points to 8,717.

SOURCE 

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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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here 

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