Black racism and socialism
Thomas Sowell
Although much of the media have their antennae out to pick up anything that might be construed as racism against blacks, they resolutely ignore even the most blatant racism by blacks against others.
That includes a pattern of violent attacks on whites in public places in Chicago, Denver, New York, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Kansas City, as well as blacks in schools beating up Asian classmates -- for years -- in New York and Philadelphia.
These attacks have been accompanied by explicitly racist statements by the attackers, so it is not a question of having to figure out what the motivation is. There has also been rioting and looting by these young hoodlums.
Yet blacks have no monopoly on these ugly and malicious episodes. Remarkably similar things are being done by lower-class whites in England. Anybody reading "Life at the Bottom" by Theodore Dalrymple will recognize the same barbaric and self-destructive patterns among people with the same attitudes, even though their skin color is different.
Anyone reading today's headline stories about young hoodlums turning the streets of London into scenes of shattered and burning chaos, complete with violence, will discover the down side of the brotherhood of man.
While the history and the races are different, what is the same in both countries are the social policies and social attitudes long promoted by the intelligentsia and welfare state politicians.
A recent study in England found 352,000 households in which nobody had ever worked. Moreover, two-thirds of the adults in those households said that they didn't want to work. As in America, such people feel both "entitled" and aggrieved.
In both countries, those who have achieved less have been taught by the educational system, by the media and by politicians on the left that they have a grievance against those who have achieved more. As in the United States, they feel a fierce sense of resentment against strangers who have done nothing to them, and lash out violently against those strangers.
During the riots, looting and violence in England, a young woman was quoted as saying that this showed "the rich" and the police that "we can do whatever we want." Among the things done during these riots was forcing apparently prosperous looking people to strip naked in the streets.
The need to bring people down in humiliation that marked the mass violence against the Armenians in Turkey nearly a century ago, and that later marked the Nazi persecutions of the Jews in Germany, is still alive and well in people who resent those who have achieved more than they have.
A milder but revealing episode in England some time back involved burglars who were not content to simply steal things but also vented their hostility by scrawling on the wall: "RICH BASTARDS."
In the United States, young black thugs attacked whites with baseball bats and took their belongings in Denver, while voicing their hatred of whites. But it is all a very similar attitude to what has been found in other countries and other times.
Today's politically correct intelligentsia will tell you that the reason for this alienation and lashing out is that there are great disparities and inequities that need to be addressed.
But such barbarism was not nearly as widespread two generations ago, in the middle of the 20th century. Were there no disparities or inequities then? Actually there were more.
What is different today is that there has been -- for decades -- a steady drumbeat of media and political hype about differences in income, education and other outcomes, blaming these differences on oppression against those with fewer achievements or lesser prosperity.
Moreover, there has been a growing tolerance of lawlessness and a growing intolerance toward the idea that people who are lagging need to take steps to raise themselves up, instead of trying to pull others down.
All this exalts those who talk such lofty talk. But others pay the price -- and ultimately that includes even those who take the road toward barbarism.
SOURCE
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Ominous Parallels
Walter E. Williams
People are beginning to compare Barack Obama's administration to the failed administration of Jimmy Carter, but a better comparison is to the Roosevelt administration of the 1930s and '40s. Let's look at it with the help of a publication from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and the Foundation for Economic Education titled "Great Myths of the Great Depression," by Dr. Lawrence Reed.
During the first year of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, he called for increasing federal spending to $10 billion while revenues were only $3 billion. Between 1933 and 1936, government expenditures rose by more than 83 percent. Federal debt skyrocketed by 73 percent. Roosevelt signed off on legislation that raised the top income tax rate to 79 percent and then later to 90 percent. Hillsdale College economics historian and professor Burt Folsom, author of "New Deal or Raw Deal?", notes that in 1941, Roosevelt even proposed a 99.5 percent marginal tax rate on all incomes more than $100,000. When a top adviser questioned the idea, Roosevelt replied, "Why not?"
Roosevelt had other ideas for the economy, including the National Recovery Act. Dr. Reed says: "The economic impact of the NRA was immediate and powerful. In the five months leading up to the act's passage, signs of recovery were evident: factory employment and payrolls had increased by 23 and 35 percent, respectively. Then came the NRA, shortening hours of work, raising wages arbitrarily and imposing other new costs on enterprise. In the six months after the law took effect, industrial production dropped 25 percent."
Blacks were especially hard hit by the NRA. Black spokesmen and the black press often referred to the NRA as the "Negro Run Around," Negroes Rarely Allowed," "Negroes Ruined Again," "Negroes Robbed Again," "No Roosevelt Again" and the "Negro Removal Act." Fortunately, the courts ruled the NRA unconstitutional. As a result, unemployment fell to 14 percent in 1936 and lower by 1937.
Roosevelt had more plans for the economy, namely the National Labor Relations Act, better known as the "Wagner Act." This was a payoff to labor unions, and with these new powers, labor unions went on a militant organizing frenzy that included threats, boycotts, strikes, seizures of plants, widespread violence and other acts that pushed productivity down sharply and unemployment up dramatically. In 1938, Roosevelt's New Deal produced the nation's first depression within a depression. The stock market crashed again, losing nearly 50 percent of its value between August 1937 and March 1938, and unemployment climbed back to 20 percent. Columnist Walter Lippmann wrote in March 1938 that "with almost no important exception every measure (Roosevelt) has been interested in for the past five months has been to reduce or discourage the production of wealth."
Roosevelt's agenda was not without its international admirers. The chief Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, repeatedly praised "Roosevelt's adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies" and "the development toward an authoritarian state" based on the "demand that collective good be put before individual self-interest." Roosevelt himself called Benito Mussolini "admirable" and professed that he was "deeply impressed by what he (had) accomplished."
FDR's very own treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, saw the folly of the New Deal, writing: "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. ... We have never made good on our promises. ... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... and an enormous debt to boot!" The bottom line is that Roosevelt's New Deal policies turned what would have been a three- or four-year sharp downturn into a 16-year affair.
The 1930s depression was caused by and aggravated by acts of government, and so was the current financial mess that we're in. Do we want to repeat history by listening to those who created the calamity? That's like calling on an arsonist to help put out a fire.
SOURCE
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Fear and Loathing of Bachmann
In the last election cycle, we heard a lot of complaining about the sexist treatment accorded to Hillary Clinton as she campaigned for president. One magazine wrote, "It's her resilience and capacity to survive and thrive against all comers that partly fuels the haters' fury." They even wrote "The anti-Hillary industry has never managed to bring down Hillary herself -- in fact, the more they have attacked, the higher she has risen."
That would be Newsweek magazine, in the June 18, 2007 issue. Four years later, Newsweek mocked Republican candidate Michele Bachmann on its cover, making her look pale and confused and, well, nutty -- with the headline "The Queen of Rage." Physician, heal thyself. Now the term "hater's fury" aptly describes the very same "news" magazine that so pompously lectures us about civility every one time one of their favorites is in political crosshairs.
It's impossible to imagine the "objective" news rags picturing Hillary with crazy eyes and a headline like "Queen of Rage." Newsweek titled their 2007 article "The New War on Hillary." There is a war on Michele developing, and the left-wing press is waging it. They won't stop until they achieve their goal of grinding her presidential hopes -- if not her entire political career -- into a fine powder. They despise this woman.
On MSNBC, Joe Scarborough was typical: "Michele Bachmann is a joke...Her candidacy is a joke." Joe has favored the sleep walking Jon Huntsman because "He can speak in complete sentences. One sentence actually relates to the previous sentence." Huntsman only got beat in the straw poll by Bachmann by, ahem...4,823 to 69, or a ratio of about 70 to 1. So who is the joke?
On NBC, former CNBC host Donny Deutsch defended Newsweek's right to mock Bachmann as a cartoon without care for accuracy and honesty: "Why can't they make a statement? Obviously that was a real picture, and they didn't air touch her. It's not a flattering article. By the way, why can't you write an unflattering, biased article?"
Deutsch wasn't kidding about the nastiness of the article. Newsweek's Lois Romano threw acid at Bachmann about her dangerous "shtick" of "intransigence." Here's a typical, sneering sentence: "For now, Bachmann revels in the Iowa crowds, which don't fuss about the missing fine print behind her ideas, the perceived contradictions among them, or their radicalism."
Newsweek claims to loathe contradictions -- as they write long, nasty editorials and then claim like complete hypocrites that they're publishing a "news" product.
There are at least three reasons for the media's everlasting enmity. The first is Bachmann's staunch and vocal conservatism on TV. She has become the most identifiable member of Congress aligned with the Tea Party, which to the liberal media is a cancer on our politics that like a tumor must be removed. Bachmann's opposition to President Obama and his radical agenda was red-hot before the Tea Party "rage" was born.
The second is Bachmann's deeply-held religious faith. She's an evangelical conservative who doesn't hesitate from a fight on cultural issues like abortion and "gay marriage." Our secular press corps seriously despises people who dare to assert that America is great in part because America has been and is inspired by Judeo-Christian values. Their ideal of a "devout Christian" is Barack Obama, who devoutly spends most Sundays golfing.
Third is Bachmann's gender -- but that's closely associated with the first two. If you're a liberal woman, the media will celebrate your presidential run as shattering a glass ceiling. But as we just learned with Sarah Palin, a conservative woman on a national ticket is going to get nothing but a carpet-bombing from the powers that be in "compassionate" journalism. (The same narrative applies to conservative blacks. Just ask Clarence Thomas.)
There are many Republicans infatuated with the idea of countering Obama in 2012 with female or minority conservatives, be it on the presidential and/or vice presidential ticket. But it's quite obvious that the media -- especially liberal females and minorities in the media -- loathe the very thought, regardless of the person. They don't want to give up their "making history" template for two seconds.
Five months ago, new Newsweek boss Tina Brown's first cover championed Hillary Clinton and "How she's shattering glass ceilings everywhere." Brown doesn't really want conservative women to shatter that metaphorical ceiling first. After a run of victories by conservative female candidates in the 2010 GOP primaries, Brown went on ABC and with a straight face called the wins "a blow to feminism."
And she calls Michele Bachmann the Queen of Rage.
SOURCE
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The Authoritarian Temptation
In the weeks during and since the debt-ceiling debate, the media, pushed by the Democratic Party, has peddled the propaganda that our government is broken -- because the Republicans in the House of Representatives negotiated a better deal than the liberals wanted.
While it was President Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner who, during the debate, said they couldn't assure payments of Social Security or interest on the federal debt payments (while Republican leaders guaranteed there would be no lapse in such payments) it was the GOP that the media accused of irresponsible threats.
It is par for the course for the losing side in a congressional fight to bewail the end of democracy in America. But it is rare for the major media to push and the broader public to bite on, such a line.
Yet the surprisingly gullible Wall Street and European opinion leaders bought in to that propaganda. Indeed, Standard and Poor's downgraded U.S. Treasuries expressly on the preposterous proposition that the American governmental process was broken and unreliable. After all, a deficit bill passed without tax increases in it -- the process must be broken. From their point of view, any system that doesn't raise taxes is broken. (For explanations of why our governance is not broken, see Washington Post opinion writer Charles Krauthammer's column last week, "The System Works" and my article " Is Our Government Really Broken?" from February 24, 2010.)
The immediate price of this "broken government" propaganda is several trillion dollars in lost equity value last week on the stock exchanges of the world. But, the enduring danger -- if not intent -- of such propaganda is its potential to undermine public confidence in representative government.
Make no mistake: If our form of government is "broken," democracy's challengers would "fix" it by castration. In our case, these critics would castrate the "representative" bit. We have seen this argument before in our history. Put forward by authoritarians and their supporters, it disdains the messy and disorderly process whereby free people thrash out the nation's decisions.
The current recrudescence of this authoritarian temptation did not start with the debt-ceiling fight. Its been building for a couple of years. It comes -- as it always does -- at a moment when the nation faces serious economic or security dangers. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in September of 2009 gave early voice to the current authoritarian temptation: "One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century."
More here
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List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Extreme Christian fanatics?
With the 2012 GOP presidential contenders already pretty clear -- some combination of Bachman, Romney and Perry -- the Donks have got their campaign of lies underway. All three contenders are "extreme Christian fanatics". Even the Mormon Romney presumably qualifies.
Below is an excerpt from one such attack. Notable in it is that NOT ONE WORD from Bachman, Romney or Perry is quoted. Views are attrbuted to them entirely out of thin air. They are accused of beliefs that they have never avowed. The only authority quoted for attributing nutty views to the GOP contenders is previous accusations by other Leftists.
But that's OK. Its a secret conspiracy, you see, just like the Jewish conspiracy to control the world or GWB's conspiracy to blow up the twin towers. Leftists mock Christians for their beliefs but Leftists will believe anything if it suits them. And they mainline on conspiracy theories.
So the fact that a rather nutty but tiny Christian sect exists is enough evidence to prove that any chosen Christian must believe in its tenets -- even if most people in the Christian world have never even heard of the sect concerned. Lies are the lifeblood of Leftism.
With Tim Pawlenty out of the presidential race, it is now fairly clear that the GOP candidate will either be Mitt Romney or someone who makes George W. Bush look like Tom Paine. Of the three most plausible candidates for the Republican nomination, two are deeply associated with a theocratic strain of Christian fundamentalism known as Dominionism. If you want to understand Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, understanding Dominionism isn’t optional.
Put simply, Dominionism means that Christians have a God-given right to rule all earthly institutions. Originating among some of America’s most radical theocrats, it’s long had an influence on religious-right education and political organizing. But because it seems so outré, getting ordinary people to take it seriously can be difficult. Most writers, myself included, who explore it have been called paranoid. In a contemptuous 2006 First Things review of several books, including Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy, and my own Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, conservative columnist Ross Douthat wrote, “the fear of theocracy has become a defining panic of the Bush era.”
Now, however, we have the most theocratic Republican field in American history, and suddenly, the concept of Dominionism is reaching mainstream audiences. Writing about Bachmann in The New Yorker this month, Ryan Lizza spent several paragraphs explaining how the premise fit into the Minnesota congresswoman’s intellectual and theological development. And a recent Texas Observer cover story on Rick Perry examined his relationship with the New Apostolic Reformation, a Dominionist variant of Pentecostalism that coalesced about a decade ago. “[W]hat makes the New Apostolic Reformation movement so potent is its growing fascination with infiltrating politics and government,” wrote Forrest Wilder. Its members “believe Christians—certain Christians—are destined to not just take ‘dominion’ over government, but stealthily climb to the commanding heights of what they term the ‘Seven Mountains’ of society, including the media and the arts and entertainment world.”
In many ways, Dominionism is more a political phenomenon than a theological one. It cuts across Christian denominations, from stern, austere sects to the signs-and-wonders culture of modern megachurches. Think of it like political Islamism, which shapes the activism of a number of antagonistic fundamentalist movements, from Sunni Wahabis in the Arab world to Shiite fundamentalists in Iran.
Dominionism derives from a small fringe sect called Christian Reconstructionism, founded by a Calvinist theologian named R. J. Rushdoony in the 1960s. Christian Reconstructionism openly advocates replacing American law with the strictures of the Old Testament, replete with the death penalty for homosexuality, abortion, and even apostasy. The appeal of Christian Reconstructionism is, obviously, limited, and mainstream Christian right figures like Ralph Reed have denounced it.
More HERE
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Damn that bad luck
"We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again," Obama told a crowd in Decorah, Iowa. "But over the last six months we've had a run of bad luck." Obama listed three events overseas -- the Arab Spring uprisings, the tsunami in Japan, and the European debt crises -- which set the economy back.
"All those things have been headwinds for our economy," Obama said. "Now, those are things that we can't completely control. The question is, how do we manage these challenging times and do the right things when it comes to those things that we can control?"
"The problem," Obama continued, "is that we've got the kind of partisan brinksmanship that is willing to put party ahead of country, that is more interested in seeing their political opponents lose than seeing the country win. Nowhere was that more evident than in this recent debt ceiling debacle."
Actually Mr. President, you're the problem. You and your hypocrisy. You and your policies. You and your cohorts in Congress. You and the fools who continue to believe what you say. You and your blindness to your own partisan brinkmanship, your own incompetence, your hatred for capitalism, your embrace of socialist thought.
It is you Mr. President who wants to see this country lose, you and your war against fossil fuels, your embrace of union thuggery, your notions toward bigger government, your obsession with penalizing the productive, your ideology that enslaves the poor.
Mr. President, for once quit pointing your bony finger of blame outward, for once have the integrity to face the man in the mirror not in adoration but in humility, for once see that you Mr. President are the problem.
It's not bad luck Mr. President. It's you. You.
SOURCE
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Peddling lies is all Obama is good at
Seeing as President Obama cannot govern, he's had to go back to campaigning -- an activity with which he's quite comfortable but decreasingly successful, as evidenced by his falling poll numbers and his endless, repetitive speeches.
I don't just throw out this governance charge lightly. The Los Angeles Times reports that Obama is no longer receiving daily Oval Office economic briefings. More troubling, he doesn't even appear to have much of an economic team left to advise him. "The economic team lacks a top-caliber economist" and "is noticeably short on big-name players -- potentially hurting his ability to find solutions and sell them to Wall Street, Congress and the American public."
The Times quotes Edward Mills, a financial policy analyst with FBR Capital Markets, as saying, "When you ask about the economic team, it's kind of like, 'What economic team?' They are very thin at a very critical time."
Not to worry. At a time when Obama doesn't even have in place a chairman for his Council of Economic Advisers, he's talking about creating yet another federal department on "Jobs." That's the ticket; he doesn't have real people in real positions, so he just creates new positions. You can't fool all the people all the time, but you hope that you can fool just enough of them to ensure re-election.
Then again, perhaps we should be counting our blessings, because no one Obama would pick, despite that person's Ivy League credentials, would have the faintest clue how jobs are created or the slightest inclination to let the private sector work its magic.
Obama is obviously in way over his head. Don't get me wrong. He knows what he wants and is definitely in charge of big-picture items. He's the one driving the national car into a ditch. But he is not a detail guy. He doesn't want to be bothered with how things get done. "Just plug the damn hole."
Increasingly, people have caught on to the toxic combination of his extreme leftist ideology, his fundamental incompetence, his defiant refusal to accept accountability, and his mean-spirited partisan scapegoating. Gallup shows his approval rating at 39 percent, an all-time low.
So what's he supposed to do now? It's not as if he can just make the country vote for him against its will (Department of Justice voting supervision notwithstanding) as he crammed Obamacare down our throats.
But he can go back to the stump -- hoping to rekindle the messiah myth or the "hope and change" chimera. Voila!, The Associated Press reports that with his "dismal approval polls," Obama is planning on hitting the road and launching a political counteroffensive this week.
A counteroffensive? That word is obviously designed to depict a long-suffering, bipartisan Obama who has kept his nose to the grindstone on behalf of all Americans, only to be subjected to a unilateral Republican assault.
Excuse me? From the beginning, Obama has been on the offensive against everyone who dares oppose any part of his poisonous agenda. To suggest he's countering anything does damage to the language.
And what message does Obama have in store for us in his counteroffensive? Well, we don't have to guess, because he laid it out for us in his weekly radio address Saturday. I'll let you be the judge of whether he has any new ideas to tackle the economy and debt.
He said that putting people back to work "has got to be our top priority" -- as if he hasn't been saying that for a couple of years. He proposed putting construction workers "back to work rebuilding America," implying that he can just snap his federal fingers, spend borrowed money and inaugurate make-work jobs and things will all be well. He didn't specify how new stimulus schemes would be more successful than his previous $800 billion monstrosity.
He said he wants to cut red tape so entrepreneurs can get their ideas to market more quickly. So now our regent of regulation has become a champion of deregulation? Why not? He is, after all, a "fierce advocate of the free market."
Lest you think Obama is frozen in the same old rhetoric and impervious to new ideas, he seasoned his soliloquy with this brand-new assertion: "We didn't get into this mess overnight, and it's going to take time to get out of it."
And he leveled the novel charge that Congress only opposes him because of its partisanship. If it would only follow his example and "put country before party and the interests of our children before our own," we could solve these problems he "inherited."
In closing, Obama exhorted Americans to let their congressmen know how they feel. Finally, a course of action on which we can agree.
Yes, please do pick up your phones, send emails, tweet, text and shout from the rooftops. Good idea, Mr. President. Now you're talkin'.
SOURCE
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Social Degeneration
Thomas Sowell
Someone at long last has had the courage to tell the plain, honest truth about race. After mobs of young blacks rampaged through Philadelphia committing violence -- as similar mobs have rampaged through Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee and other places -- Philadelphia's black mayor, Michael A. Nutter, ordered a police crackdown and lashed out at the whole lifestyle of those who did such things.
"Pull up your pants and buy a belt 'cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt," he said. "If you walk into somebody's office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won't hire you? They don't hire you 'cause you look like you're crazy," the mayor said. He added: "You have damaged your own race."
While this might seem like it is just plain common sense, what Mayor Nutter said undermines a whole vision of the world that has brought fame, fortune and power to race hustlers in politics, the media and academia. Any racial disparities in hiring can only be due to racism and discrimination, according to the prevailing vision, which reaches from street corner demagogues to the august chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Just to identify the rioters and looters as black is a radical departure, when mayors, police chiefs and the media in other cities report on these outbreaks of violence without mentioning the race of those who are doing these things. The Chicago Tribune even made excuses for failing to mention race when reporting on violent attacks by blacks on whites in Chicago.
Such excuses might make sense if the same politicians and media talking heads were not constantly mentioning race when denouncing the fact that a disproportionate number of young black men are being sent to prison.
The prevailing social dogma is that disparities in outcomes between races can only be due to disparities in how these races are treated. In other words, there cannot possibly be any differences in behavior.
But if black and white Americans had exactly the same behavior patterns, they would be the only two groups on this planet that are the same.
The Chinese minority in Malaysia has long been more successful and more prosperous than the Malay majority, just as the Indians in Fiji have long been more successful and more prosperous than the indigenous Fijians. At various places and times throughout history, the same could be said of the Armenians in Turkey, the Lebanese in Sierra Leone, the Parsees in India, the Japanese in Brazil, and numerous others.
There are similar disparities within particular racial or ethnic groups. Even this late in history, I have had northern Italians explain to me why they are not like southern Italians. In Australia, Jewish leaders in both Sydney and Melbourne went to great lengths to tell me why and how the Jews are different in these two cities.
In the United States, despite the higher poverty level among blacks than among whites, the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits since 1994. The disparities within the black community are huge, both in behavior and in outcomes.
Nevertheless, the dogma persists that differences between groups can only be due to the way others treat them or to differences in the way others perceive them in "stereotypes."
All around the country, people in politics and the media have been tip-toeing around the fact that violent attacks by blacks on whites in public places are racially motivated, even when the attackers themselves use anti-white invective and mock the victims they leave lying on the streets bleeding.
This is not something to ignore or excuse. It is something to be stopped. Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia seems to be the first to openly recognize this.
This needs to be done for the sake of both black and white Americans -- and even for the sake of the hoodlums. They have set out on a path that leads only downward for themselves.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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With the 2012 GOP presidential contenders already pretty clear -- some combination of Bachman, Romney and Perry -- the Donks have got their campaign of lies underway. All three contenders are "extreme Christian fanatics". Even the Mormon Romney presumably qualifies.
Below is an excerpt from one such attack. Notable in it is that NOT ONE WORD from Bachman, Romney or Perry is quoted. Views are attrbuted to them entirely out of thin air. They are accused of beliefs that they have never avowed. The only authority quoted for attributing nutty views to the GOP contenders is previous accusations by other Leftists.
But that's OK. Its a secret conspiracy, you see, just like the Jewish conspiracy to control the world or GWB's conspiracy to blow up the twin towers. Leftists mock Christians for their beliefs but Leftists will believe anything if it suits them. And they mainline on conspiracy theories.
So the fact that a rather nutty but tiny Christian sect exists is enough evidence to prove that any chosen Christian must believe in its tenets -- even if most people in the Christian world have never even heard of the sect concerned. Lies are the lifeblood of Leftism.
With Tim Pawlenty out of the presidential race, it is now fairly clear that the GOP candidate will either be Mitt Romney or someone who makes George W. Bush look like Tom Paine. Of the three most plausible candidates for the Republican nomination, two are deeply associated with a theocratic strain of Christian fundamentalism known as Dominionism. If you want to understand Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, understanding Dominionism isn’t optional.
Put simply, Dominionism means that Christians have a God-given right to rule all earthly institutions. Originating among some of America’s most radical theocrats, it’s long had an influence on religious-right education and political organizing. But because it seems so outré, getting ordinary people to take it seriously can be difficult. Most writers, myself included, who explore it have been called paranoid. In a contemptuous 2006 First Things review of several books, including Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy, and my own Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, conservative columnist Ross Douthat wrote, “the fear of theocracy has become a defining panic of the Bush era.”
Now, however, we have the most theocratic Republican field in American history, and suddenly, the concept of Dominionism is reaching mainstream audiences. Writing about Bachmann in The New Yorker this month, Ryan Lizza spent several paragraphs explaining how the premise fit into the Minnesota congresswoman’s intellectual and theological development. And a recent Texas Observer cover story on Rick Perry examined his relationship with the New Apostolic Reformation, a Dominionist variant of Pentecostalism that coalesced about a decade ago. “[W]hat makes the New Apostolic Reformation movement so potent is its growing fascination with infiltrating politics and government,” wrote Forrest Wilder. Its members “believe Christians—certain Christians—are destined to not just take ‘dominion’ over government, but stealthily climb to the commanding heights of what they term the ‘Seven Mountains’ of society, including the media and the arts and entertainment world.”
In many ways, Dominionism is more a political phenomenon than a theological one. It cuts across Christian denominations, from stern, austere sects to the signs-and-wonders culture of modern megachurches. Think of it like political Islamism, which shapes the activism of a number of antagonistic fundamentalist movements, from Sunni Wahabis in the Arab world to Shiite fundamentalists in Iran.
Dominionism derives from a small fringe sect called Christian Reconstructionism, founded by a Calvinist theologian named R. J. Rushdoony in the 1960s. Christian Reconstructionism openly advocates replacing American law with the strictures of the Old Testament, replete with the death penalty for homosexuality, abortion, and even apostasy. The appeal of Christian Reconstructionism is, obviously, limited, and mainstream Christian right figures like Ralph Reed have denounced it.
More HERE
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Damn that bad luck
"We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again," Obama told a crowd in Decorah, Iowa. "But over the last six months we've had a run of bad luck." Obama listed three events overseas -- the Arab Spring uprisings, the tsunami in Japan, and the European debt crises -- which set the economy back.
"All those things have been headwinds for our economy," Obama said. "Now, those are things that we can't completely control. The question is, how do we manage these challenging times and do the right things when it comes to those things that we can control?"
"The problem," Obama continued, "is that we've got the kind of partisan brinksmanship that is willing to put party ahead of country, that is more interested in seeing their political opponents lose than seeing the country win. Nowhere was that more evident than in this recent debt ceiling debacle."
Actually Mr. President, you're the problem. You and your hypocrisy. You and your policies. You and your cohorts in Congress. You and the fools who continue to believe what you say. You and your blindness to your own partisan brinkmanship, your own incompetence, your hatred for capitalism, your embrace of socialist thought.
It is you Mr. President who wants to see this country lose, you and your war against fossil fuels, your embrace of union thuggery, your notions toward bigger government, your obsession with penalizing the productive, your ideology that enslaves the poor.
Mr. President, for once quit pointing your bony finger of blame outward, for once have the integrity to face the man in the mirror not in adoration but in humility, for once see that you Mr. President are the problem.
It's not bad luck Mr. President. It's you. You.
SOURCE
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Peddling lies is all Obama is good at
Seeing as President Obama cannot govern, he's had to go back to campaigning -- an activity with which he's quite comfortable but decreasingly successful, as evidenced by his falling poll numbers and his endless, repetitive speeches.
I don't just throw out this governance charge lightly. The Los Angeles Times reports that Obama is no longer receiving daily Oval Office economic briefings. More troubling, he doesn't even appear to have much of an economic team left to advise him. "The economic team lacks a top-caliber economist" and "is noticeably short on big-name players -- potentially hurting his ability to find solutions and sell them to Wall Street, Congress and the American public."
The Times quotes Edward Mills, a financial policy analyst with FBR Capital Markets, as saying, "When you ask about the economic team, it's kind of like, 'What economic team?' They are very thin at a very critical time."
Not to worry. At a time when Obama doesn't even have in place a chairman for his Council of Economic Advisers, he's talking about creating yet another federal department on "Jobs." That's the ticket; he doesn't have real people in real positions, so he just creates new positions. You can't fool all the people all the time, but you hope that you can fool just enough of them to ensure re-election.
Then again, perhaps we should be counting our blessings, because no one Obama would pick, despite that person's Ivy League credentials, would have the faintest clue how jobs are created or the slightest inclination to let the private sector work its magic.
Obama is obviously in way over his head. Don't get me wrong. He knows what he wants and is definitely in charge of big-picture items. He's the one driving the national car into a ditch. But he is not a detail guy. He doesn't want to be bothered with how things get done. "Just plug the damn hole."
Increasingly, people have caught on to the toxic combination of his extreme leftist ideology, his fundamental incompetence, his defiant refusal to accept accountability, and his mean-spirited partisan scapegoating. Gallup shows his approval rating at 39 percent, an all-time low.
So what's he supposed to do now? It's not as if he can just make the country vote for him against its will (Department of Justice voting supervision notwithstanding) as he crammed Obamacare down our throats.
But he can go back to the stump -- hoping to rekindle the messiah myth or the "hope and change" chimera. Voila!, The Associated Press reports that with his "dismal approval polls," Obama is planning on hitting the road and launching a political counteroffensive this week.
A counteroffensive? That word is obviously designed to depict a long-suffering, bipartisan Obama who has kept his nose to the grindstone on behalf of all Americans, only to be subjected to a unilateral Republican assault.
Excuse me? From the beginning, Obama has been on the offensive against everyone who dares oppose any part of his poisonous agenda. To suggest he's countering anything does damage to the language.
And what message does Obama have in store for us in his counteroffensive? Well, we don't have to guess, because he laid it out for us in his weekly radio address Saturday. I'll let you be the judge of whether he has any new ideas to tackle the economy and debt.
He said that putting people back to work "has got to be our top priority" -- as if he hasn't been saying that for a couple of years. He proposed putting construction workers "back to work rebuilding America," implying that he can just snap his federal fingers, spend borrowed money and inaugurate make-work jobs and things will all be well. He didn't specify how new stimulus schemes would be more successful than his previous $800 billion monstrosity.
He said he wants to cut red tape so entrepreneurs can get their ideas to market more quickly. So now our regent of regulation has become a champion of deregulation? Why not? He is, after all, a "fierce advocate of the free market."
Lest you think Obama is frozen in the same old rhetoric and impervious to new ideas, he seasoned his soliloquy with this brand-new assertion: "We didn't get into this mess overnight, and it's going to take time to get out of it."
And he leveled the novel charge that Congress only opposes him because of its partisanship. If it would only follow his example and "put country before party and the interests of our children before our own," we could solve these problems he "inherited."
In closing, Obama exhorted Americans to let their congressmen know how they feel. Finally, a course of action on which we can agree.
Yes, please do pick up your phones, send emails, tweet, text and shout from the rooftops. Good idea, Mr. President. Now you're talkin'.
SOURCE
**************************
Social Degeneration
Thomas Sowell
Someone at long last has had the courage to tell the plain, honest truth about race. After mobs of young blacks rampaged through Philadelphia committing violence -- as similar mobs have rampaged through Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee and other places -- Philadelphia's black mayor, Michael A. Nutter, ordered a police crackdown and lashed out at the whole lifestyle of those who did such things.
"Pull up your pants and buy a belt 'cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt," he said. "If you walk into somebody's office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won't hire you? They don't hire you 'cause you look like you're crazy," the mayor said. He added: "You have damaged your own race."
While this might seem like it is just plain common sense, what Mayor Nutter said undermines a whole vision of the world that has brought fame, fortune and power to race hustlers in politics, the media and academia. Any racial disparities in hiring can only be due to racism and discrimination, according to the prevailing vision, which reaches from street corner demagogues to the august chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Just to identify the rioters and looters as black is a radical departure, when mayors, police chiefs and the media in other cities report on these outbreaks of violence without mentioning the race of those who are doing these things. The Chicago Tribune even made excuses for failing to mention race when reporting on violent attacks by blacks on whites in Chicago.
Such excuses might make sense if the same politicians and media talking heads were not constantly mentioning race when denouncing the fact that a disproportionate number of young black men are being sent to prison.
The prevailing social dogma is that disparities in outcomes between races can only be due to disparities in how these races are treated. In other words, there cannot possibly be any differences in behavior.
But if black and white Americans had exactly the same behavior patterns, they would be the only two groups on this planet that are the same.
The Chinese minority in Malaysia has long been more successful and more prosperous than the Malay majority, just as the Indians in Fiji have long been more successful and more prosperous than the indigenous Fijians. At various places and times throughout history, the same could be said of the Armenians in Turkey, the Lebanese in Sierra Leone, the Parsees in India, the Japanese in Brazil, and numerous others.
There are similar disparities within particular racial or ethnic groups. Even this late in history, I have had northern Italians explain to me why they are not like southern Italians. In Australia, Jewish leaders in both Sydney and Melbourne went to great lengths to tell me why and how the Jews are different in these two cities.
In the United States, despite the higher poverty level among blacks than among whites, the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits since 1994. The disparities within the black community are huge, both in behavior and in outcomes.
Nevertheless, the dogma persists that differences between groups can only be due to the way others treat them or to differences in the way others perceive them in "stereotypes."
All around the country, people in politics and the media have been tip-toeing around the fact that violent attacks by blacks on whites in public places are racially motivated, even when the attackers themselves use anti-white invective and mock the victims they leave lying on the streets bleeding.
This is not something to ignore or excuse. It is something to be stopped. Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia seems to be the first to openly recognize this.
This needs to be done for the sake of both black and white Americans -- and even for the sake of the hoodlums. They have set out on a path that leads only downward for themselves.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Monday, August 15, 2011
How Four Influential Socialist Anti-Semites Shaped the Left
by Daniel Greenfield
1. Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)
“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in the face of which no other god may exist… The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world.”
Marx’s influence on the socialist movement and its various streams cannot be underestimated, and neither can the extent to which his view of Jews as the embodiment of capitalism became embedded on the left.
In a handful of sentences, Marx depicted Jews as the anti-thesis of Socialism, a theme that he was to repeatedly revisit, and more poisonously in such essays as “The Russian Loan”, where he implicitly suggested that war would continue for as long as the Jews existed.
“Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew… In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets.”
Coded forms of this thinking can still be found among leftists who blame wars on Wall Street and assemble Jewish neo-con war conspiracies. The linkage of capital, war and the Jews made Anti-Semitism a permanent part of Socialist thought. Since the Holocaust its expressions have become more coded, but the essence remains.
While Marx did not invent Socialist Anti-Semitism, he helped grant intellectual legitimacy to left-wing populists who merged worker’s rights rhetoric with bigotry. But Marx’s formulation implicitly set the elimination of the Jews as a necessary step to the end of war and capitalism.
2. H.G. Wells (1866 – 1946)
“And yet between 1940 and 2059, in little more than a century, this antiquated obdurate culture disappeared. It and its Zionist state, its kosher food, the Law and all the rest of its paraphernalia, were completely merged in the human community.”
While H.G. Wells is best remembered today for a handful of futuristic novels, some of his more significant work of the time envisioned the creation of a utopian, yet totalitarian socialist state. And arguably the European left has followed his plan a little too closely.
Wells follows Marx’s linkage between Jews, capital and war. The elimination of the Jews as a separate people is necessary for Wells’ modern world state to come into being. So while in “The Shape of Things To Come”, he disposes of Christianity in a single paragraph, and Islam in another (Wells supposed that Islam would disappear as Arabic fell into disuse), but several paragraphs are devoted to the elimination of the Jews.
The hostility toward Israel is manifestly there. The Jews are described as abandoning the Socialist cause of creating the world state, preoccupied instead with “the dream of a fantastic independent state all of their own”. “Only a psycho-analyst could begin to tell for what they wanted this Zionist state,” Wells sneers.
Wells’ solution to Marx’s Jewish Question was to wipe out the Jews as a distinct people, without engaging in physical extermination. But religion, state and even a distinct ethnic identity had to go.
Even as the Nazi Holocaust had begun, H.G. Wells wrote in The New World Order (1940);
“The hostile reaction to the cult of the Chosen People is spreading about the entire world to-day… there has never been such a world-wide—I will not use the word anti-Semitism because of the Arab—I will say anti-Judaism… it is becoming world-wide and simultaneous… Until they are prepared to assimilate and abandon the Chosen People idea altogether, their troubles are bound to intensify.”
It was a more elegant phrasing of a Julius Streicher quote from that same year, “The time is near when a machine will go into motion which is going to prepare a grave for the world’s criminal – Judah – from which there will be no resurrection.”
Wells had prefigured the left’s fixation on Israel as the cause and justification for the hatred of the Jews. It is very much extant today.
3. Henry Hyndman (1842–1921)
“The condition of the people… favours the spread of Socialist doctrines, whilst the attack upon the Jews is a convenient cover for a more direct attack at an early date upon the great landlords and Christian capitalists.”
Hyndman founded England’s first Socialist political party, the Social Democratic Federation. He also went on to found the National Socialist Party, which eventually became part of the Labor Party.
Hyndman and the SDF’s newspaper “Justice” carried on a relentless campaign of attacks against Jews. What is unique about Hyndman is that he employed those attacks only as a cover for a larger anti-war movement.
The high point of Hyndman and the SDF’s Anti-Semitism came during the Boer War. To oppose the war was to be accused of disloyalty. Instead Hyndman recreated the war as a Jewish conspiracy, and campaigned against “Imperialist Judaism in South Africa”, the “Jew War in the Transvaal” fought on behalf of an “Anglo-Hebraic Empire” in Africa.
Socialists had often legitimized Anti-Capitalism by associating it with Anti-Semitism, but Hyndman legitimized an Anti-War position by treating it as not a campaign against England, but against the Jews.
Hyndman did not appear to be any more bigoted than most of his contemporaries, but he was far more cynical. When Hyndman wanted to attack the press, he called it the “Jew-Jingo Press”. When he wanted to attack the government, it was the “Jew clique”. By employing bigotry, Hyndman transformed himself from a traitor to a patriot battling the ‘alien’ subversion of England.
This is the same tack taken by much of the Anti-war movement today, which dodges accusations of disloyalty by claiming to fight against a Likud or Zionist takeover of foreign policy. And today the Hyndman tradition is still strong in the UK with the likes of George Galloway, shouting, “Show us the shekels, Richard.”
4. Pierre Leroux (1797 - 1871
“When we speak of Jews, we mean the Jewish spirit, the spirit of profit, of lucre, of gain, the spirit of commerce.”
Leroux is credited with coining the term, ‘Socialism’. He also expressed the idea of commerce as an original Jewish sin in the clearest of terms. To Leroux, banking was the original sin of the Jews. And therefore commerce was the Jewish spirit.
Fourier, the co-creator of French Socialism, would take this premise to its more explicit conclusion, writing; “Every government having regard to good morals ought to repress the Jews”.
Unlike Wells or Marx, Fourier and Leroux were not so much aspiring to a new order, as they were to a scientific application of an old order. A return to a pre-commercial civilization based on cooperation, rather than competition. This would be impossible if commerce were a natural human form of resource organization and distribution. So it was necessary to theorize that commerce was something alien. A creation of the Jews.
The appealing idea that commerce is a Jewish entity, or that war is a Jewish entity, or in Hitler’s formulation, conscience is a Jewish entity, means that any part of humanity can be cut out so long as you define it as Jewish.
The error of Leroux, Fourier and so many other Socialists was that they built their entire philosophy on a lie about human nature, and then did their best to plaster over that lie with bigotry. The economics of their program were unworkable, the sociology of it even more so. And so the Jews became the scapegoats of Socialism.
To Wells, Jewish identity was an obstacle to the New World Order, but he was in denial about the fact that every cultural identity was an obstacle. So Wells too repeated the basic Socialist error of taking an unworkable premise, and assuming that it would be workable if only it weren’t for the Jews.
Today, the existence of Israel is treated as an obstacle to world peace. Once again the left is possessed by the idea that if the Jewish question is finally resolved, a modern rational world state can come into being. The flip side of this childish and bigoted belief is genocide. For if the Jews are all that stands in the way of Socialism and World Peace– then the Jews must go.
SOURCE
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We Can't All Get Along
Bruce Bialosky
In an attempt to quell the 1992 riots that broke out in Los Angeles after the acquittal of the police officers who beat him senseless, Rodney King uttered these famous words: “Can’t we all get along?” Today, Mr. King could go to Washington D.C. and ask the same question, but the answer, as it was 20 years ago, is breathtakingly simple: No. There was an unmistakable illustration of this in a recent Wall Street Journal column by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Ironically, Mr. Sanders is respected by many Republicans because he clearly, unabashedly admits what he is – a Socialist. He doesn’t try to hide behind wishy-washy terms like “progressive” or “liberal.” Like Popeye, he clearly says “I am what I am.” But really, how different is he from Mr. Obama, Ms. Pelosi, and the rest of their brood in Congress?
Mr. Sanders made his case for how to address the debt ceiling; but more importantly, he put forward his opinion on what is causing our enormous deficit:
1. He claimed that the “Rich,” along with large corporations, have been evading taxes in the United States.
2. He alleged that Republicans have been “fanatically determined to protect the interests of the wealthy and multinational corporations so that they do not contribute a single penny toward deficit reduction.”
3. He further stated that “if the Republicans have their way, the entire burden of deficit reduction will be placed on the elderly, the sick, children, and working families.”
Would someone explain how this rhetoric differs from the likes of Pelosi, Schumer, or Obama?
Sanders went on to state that the American people want the wealthy and large corporations to pay their “fair share” of taxes. Unfortunately, Mr. Sanders clearly doesn’t understand that corporations do not actually pay taxes, but merely pass them on to customers in the form of higher prices. He’s also clearly ignorant of the fact that the lower-earning 50% of the population pay less than 2% of all taxes, and that the upper 5% of earners already pay about 59%. So, exactly how much does he really want them to pay?
This is the impenetrable wall between Socialists like Sanders and we Capitalists. We believe that people who work hard and earn money are not obligated to support the remainder of the population, and that coercing them to do so is not only bad public policy, it is ineffective. We believe, unlike the President, that if someone has extra earnings – whether they need them or not – it is their choice how to dispose of (or invest) them, and that these assets should not be confiscated by the government, which habitually employs the money far less productively, or (worse) hands it over to favored constituencies.
Sanders believes that America is filled with large multitudes of pitifully stupid, “little” people, all of whom need the protection of government elites to make better decisions for them. Capitalists believe that these decisions are best made by individuals and their families who are actually quite capable in their own regard.
Regrettably for the last 80 years, Capitalists have been losing the argument in America. In the relatively peaceful period from 1960 to 2010, the percentage of GDP consumed by government has grown from 27% to 37%. Mr. Sanders and his comrades have the budget on a trajectory toward 50%, and the sad part is that too often, Capitalists have been complicit in the quest to bring Socialism to America.
In November 2010, the American people finally said “Enough!!” They haven’t totally come to their senses because there is still widespread resistance to long-needed reforms of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. But at least they now have a true picture of Mr. Sanders’ ideal government, having seen how Obama, Pelosi, Reid and their acolytes strive to “fundamentally change the nature of America.”
We openly admit that we want smaller government. We also admit that not only is Capitalism the best economic system, it is the primary reason for the vast wealth of Americans. We believe that expansive government, complete with its invasive rules, mindless dictates, and shameless bureaucrats, is principally a vehicle for those who aspire to a truly Socialist society. And we also believe that they want more and more people getting those monthly checks (currently 80 million as stated by Treasury Secretary Geithner).
Like many European leaders, such as Prime Minister Zapatero of Spain, Mr. Sanders openly states that he’s a Socialist. Others like Lawrence O’Donnell, MSNBC show host, has stated clearly he is a socialist. Yet there’s not an inch of difference between their policies and almost every elected Democrat in this country. You can count on two hands the Democratic members of Congress whose opinions are materially different.
So there you have it: they are Socialists and we are Capitalists. We admit it and they almost totally deny it. They believe that if we’re in charge, there will be Armageddon. We know that they’ve been in charge and they’ve brought us to the brink of Armageddon. That is why there is so little bipartisanship in Washington D.C.
There’s a war going on for the future of America. God forbid the Capitalists don’t win.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
Who says liberals want government out of the bedroom?: "Nothing is off limits anymore. Nothing. Not as far as politicians are concerned. Democratic State Senator Kevin De Leon wants California to mandate fitted sheets in the state’s hotels, and forbid flat sheets."
Post office proves government unions are a bad idea: "If you think government unions are not a threat to good government, just take a look at the U.S. Postal Service, which is what eventually could happen to every governmental unit that has union workers who are allowed to collectively bargain. The Postal Service is hemorrhaging money. It is spending $1 million a week paying employees not to work"
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc. He also has a lot to say about the latest British riots.
I have just put up a small Bible study of Jude verse 25 on my Scripture blog
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
by Daniel Greenfield
1. Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)
“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in the face of which no other god may exist… The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world.”
Marx’s influence on the socialist movement and its various streams cannot be underestimated, and neither can the extent to which his view of Jews as the embodiment of capitalism became embedded on the left.
In a handful of sentences, Marx depicted Jews as the anti-thesis of Socialism, a theme that he was to repeatedly revisit, and more poisonously in such essays as “The Russian Loan”, where he implicitly suggested that war would continue for as long as the Jews existed.
“Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew… In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets.”
Coded forms of this thinking can still be found among leftists who blame wars on Wall Street and assemble Jewish neo-con war conspiracies. The linkage of capital, war and the Jews made Anti-Semitism a permanent part of Socialist thought. Since the Holocaust its expressions have become more coded, but the essence remains.
While Marx did not invent Socialist Anti-Semitism, he helped grant intellectual legitimacy to left-wing populists who merged worker’s rights rhetoric with bigotry. But Marx’s formulation implicitly set the elimination of the Jews as a necessary step to the end of war and capitalism.
2. H.G. Wells (1866 – 1946)
“And yet between 1940 and 2059, in little more than a century, this antiquated obdurate culture disappeared. It and its Zionist state, its kosher food, the Law and all the rest of its paraphernalia, were completely merged in the human community.”
While H.G. Wells is best remembered today for a handful of futuristic novels, some of his more significant work of the time envisioned the creation of a utopian, yet totalitarian socialist state. And arguably the European left has followed his plan a little too closely.
Wells follows Marx’s linkage between Jews, capital and war. The elimination of the Jews as a separate people is necessary for Wells’ modern world state to come into being. So while in “The Shape of Things To Come”, he disposes of Christianity in a single paragraph, and Islam in another (Wells supposed that Islam would disappear as Arabic fell into disuse), but several paragraphs are devoted to the elimination of the Jews.
The hostility toward Israel is manifestly there. The Jews are described as abandoning the Socialist cause of creating the world state, preoccupied instead with “the dream of a fantastic independent state all of their own”. “Only a psycho-analyst could begin to tell for what they wanted this Zionist state,” Wells sneers.
Wells’ solution to Marx’s Jewish Question was to wipe out the Jews as a distinct people, without engaging in physical extermination. But religion, state and even a distinct ethnic identity had to go.
Even as the Nazi Holocaust had begun, H.G. Wells wrote in The New World Order (1940);
“The hostile reaction to the cult of the Chosen People is spreading about the entire world to-day… there has never been such a world-wide—I will not use the word anti-Semitism because of the Arab—I will say anti-Judaism… it is becoming world-wide and simultaneous… Until they are prepared to assimilate and abandon the Chosen People idea altogether, their troubles are bound to intensify.”
It was a more elegant phrasing of a Julius Streicher quote from that same year, “The time is near when a machine will go into motion which is going to prepare a grave for the world’s criminal – Judah – from which there will be no resurrection.”
Wells had prefigured the left’s fixation on Israel as the cause and justification for the hatred of the Jews. It is very much extant today.
3. Henry Hyndman (1842–1921)
“The condition of the people… favours the spread of Socialist doctrines, whilst the attack upon the Jews is a convenient cover for a more direct attack at an early date upon the great landlords and Christian capitalists.”
Hyndman founded England’s first Socialist political party, the Social Democratic Federation. He also went on to found the National Socialist Party, which eventually became part of the Labor Party.
Hyndman and the SDF’s newspaper “Justice” carried on a relentless campaign of attacks against Jews. What is unique about Hyndman is that he employed those attacks only as a cover for a larger anti-war movement.
The high point of Hyndman and the SDF’s Anti-Semitism came during the Boer War. To oppose the war was to be accused of disloyalty. Instead Hyndman recreated the war as a Jewish conspiracy, and campaigned against “Imperialist Judaism in South Africa”, the “Jew War in the Transvaal” fought on behalf of an “Anglo-Hebraic Empire” in Africa.
Socialists had often legitimized Anti-Capitalism by associating it with Anti-Semitism, but Hyndman legitimized an Anti-War position by treating it as not a campaign against England, but against the Jews.
Hyndman did not appear to be any more bigoted than most of his contemporaries, but he was far more cynical. When Hyndman wanted to attack the press, he called it the “Jew-Jingo Press”. When he wanted to attack the government, it was the “Jew clique”. By employing bigotry, Hyndman transformed himself from a traitor to a patriot battling the ‘alien’ subversion of England.
This is the same tack taken by much of the Anti-war movement today, which dodges accusations of disloyalty by claiming to fight against a Likud or Zionist takeover of foreign policy. And today the Hyndman tradition is still strong in the UK with the likes of George Galloway, shouting, “Show us the shekels, Richard.”
4. Pierre Leroux (1797 - 1871
“When we speak of Jews, we mean the Jewish spirit, the spirit of profit, of lucre, of gain, the spirit of commerce.”
Leroux is credited with coining the term, ‘Socialism’. He also expressed the idea of commerce as an original Jewish sin in the clearest of terms. To Leroux, banking was the original sin of the Jews. And therefore commerce was the Jewish spirit.
Fourier, the co-creator of French Socialism, would take this premise to its more explicit conclusion, writing; “Every government having regard to good morals ought to repress the Jews”.
Unlike Wells or Marx, Fourier and Leroux were not so much aspiring to a new order, as they were to a scientific application of an old order. A return to a pre-commercial civilization based on cooperation, rather than competition. This would be impossible if commerce were a natural human form of resource organization and distribution. So it was necessary to theorize that commerce was something alien. A creation of the Jews.
The appealing idea that commerce is a Jewish entity, or that war is a Jewish entity, or in Hitler’s formulation, conscience is a Jewish entity, means that any part of humanity can be cut out so long as you define it as Jewish.
The error of Leroux, Fourier and so many other Socialists was that they built their entire philosophy on a lie about human nature, and then did their best to plaster over that lie with bigotry. The economics of their program were unworkable, the sociology of it even more so. And so the Jews became the scapegoats of Socialism.
To Wells, Jewish identity was an obstacle to the New World Order, but he was in denial about the fact that every cultural identity was an obstacle. So Wells too repeated the basic Socialist error of taking an unworkable premise, and assuming that it would be workable if only it weren’t for the Jews.
Today, the existence of Israel is treated as an obstacle to world peace. Once again the left is possessed by the idea that if the Jewish question is finally resolved, a modern rational world state can come into being. The flip side of this childish and bigoted belief is genocide. For if the Jews are all that stands in the way of Socialism and World Peace– then the Jews must go.
SOURCE
***************************
We Can't All Get Along
Bruce Bialosky
In an attempt to quell the 1992 riots that broke out in Los Angeles after the acquittal of the police officers who beat him senseless, Rodney King uttered these famous words: “Can’t we all get along?” Today, Mr. King could go to Washington D.C. and ask the same question, but the answer, as it was 20 years ago, is breathtakingly simple: No. There was an unmistakable illustration of this in a recent Wall Street Journal column by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Ironically, Mr. Sanders is respected by many Republicans because he clearly, unabashedly admits what he is – a Socialist. He doesn’t try to hide behind wishy-washy terms like “progressive” or “liberal.” Like Popeye, he clearly says “I am what I am.” But really, how different is he from Mr. Obama, Ms. Pelosi, and the rest of their brood in Congress?
Mr. Sanders made his case for how to address the debt ceiling; but more importantly, he put forward his opinion on what is causing our enormous deficit:
1. He claimed that the “Rich,” along with large corporations, have been evading taxes in the United States.
2. He alleged that Republicans have been “fanatically determined to protect the interests of the wealthy and multinational corporations so that they do not contribute a single penny toward deficit reduction.”
3. He further stated that “if the Republicans have their way, the entire burden of deficit reduction will be placed on the elderly, the sick, children, and working families.”
Would someone explain how this rhetoric differs from the likes of Pelosi, Schumer, or Obama?
Sanders went on to state that the American people want the wealthy and large corporations to pay their “fair share” of taxes. Unfortunately, Mr. Sanders clearly doesn’t understand that corporations do not actually pay taxes, but merely pass them on to customers in the form of higher prices. He’s also clearly ignorant of the fact that the lower-earning 50% of the population pay less than 2% of all taxes, and that the upper 5% of earners already pay about 59%. So, exactly how much does he really want them to pay?
This is the impenetrable wall between Socialists like Sanders and we Capitalists. We believe that people who work hard and earn money are not obligated to support the remainder of the population, and that coercing them to do so is not only bad public policy, it is ineffective. We believe, unlike the President, that if someone has extra earnings – whether they need them or not – it is their choice how to dispose of (or invest) them, and that these assets should not be confiscated by the government, which habitually employs the money far less productively, or (worse) hands it over to favored constituencies.
Sanders believes that America is filled with large multitudes of pitifully stupid, “little” people, all of whom need the protection of government elites to make better decisions for them. Capitalists believe that these decisions are best made by individuals and their families who are actually quite capable in their own regard.
Regrettably for the last 80 years, Capitalists have been losing the argument in America. In the relatively peaceful period from 1960 to 2010, the percentage of GDP consumed by government has grown from 27% to 37%. Mr. Sanders and his comrades have the budget on a trajectory toward 50%, and the sad part is that too often, Capitalists have been complicit in the quest to bring Socialism to America.
In November 2010, the American people finally said “Enough!!” They haven’t totally come to their senses because there is still widespread resistance to long-needed reforms of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. But at least they now have a true picture of Mr. Sanders’ ideal government, having seen how Obama, Pelosi, Reid and their acolytes strive to “fundamentally change the nature of America.”
We openly admit that we want smaller government. We also admit that not only is Capitalism the best economic system, it is the primary reason for the vast wealth of Americans. We believe that expansive government, complete with its invasive rules, mindless dictates, and shameless bureaucrats, is principally a vehicle for those who aspire to a truly Socialist society. And we also believe that they want more and more people getting those monthly checks (currently 80 million as stated by Treasury Secretary Geithner).
Like many European leaders, such as Prime Minister Zapatero of Spain, Mr. Sanders openly states that he’s a Socialist. Others like Lawrence O’Donnell, MSNBC show host, has stated clearly he is a socialist. Yet there’s not an inch of difference between their policies and almost every elected Democrat in this country. You can count on two hands the Democratic members of Congress whose opinions are materially different.
So there you have it: they are Socialists and we are Capitalists. We admit it and they almost totally deny it. They believe that if we’re in charge, there will be Armageddon. We know that they’ve been in charge and they’ve brought us to the brink of Armageddon. That is why there is so little bipartisanship in Washington D.C.
There’s a war going on for the future of America. God forbid the Capitalists don’t win.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
Who says liberals want government out of the bedroom?: "Nothing is off limits anymore. Nothing. Not as far as politicians are concerned. Democratic State Senator Kevin De Leon wants California to mandate fitted sheets in the state’s hotels, and forbid flat sheets."
Post office proves government unions are a bad idea: "If you think government unions are not a threat to good government, just take a look at the U.S. Postal Service, which is what eventually could happen to every governmental unit that has union workers who are allowed to collectively bargain. The Postal Service is hemorrhaging money. It is spending $1 million a week paying employees not to work"
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc. He also has a lot to say about the latest British riots.
I have just put up a small Bible study of Jude verse 25 on my Scripture blog
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Sunday, August 14, 2011
Leading Democrat deliberately stirs up racial strife
Nancy Pelosi Tells Predominantly Black Audience that the GOP Complicated the Debt Debate Because Obama Is Black. As if there weren't enough racial tension in America already, she is prepared to lie in order to create more of it. She is clearly an enemy of America and all Americans.
"Why is this President being treated so disrespectfully?" GWB wasn't treated disrespectfully, of course. "Obama=Nazi" signs are all over the place, aren't they?
SOURCE
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Tea Partiers sound an urgent alarm
THE FIRE HALL next to my in-laws' house in northern New York State has a siren that can be heard for miles. "Loud" doesn't begin to describe the sound it makes: a shrill, relentless, piercing wail that is impossible to ignore -- and that can be extremely upsetting for anyone who isn't used to it. There's good reason for that. None of the rural towns in the area has a professional fire department, so when a fire breaks out, the siren is needed to summon volunteers. The urgent blast of that siren (which sounds like this one) used to terrify my younger son, who would hide under a bed when it sounded, and angrily tell us afterward how much he hated it.
In the recent clamor over the federal debt ceiling and the Standard & Poor's downgrade of US Treasury bonds, the Tea Party has been that fire hall siren. Fiscal conservatives, mostly but by no means only Republican, have been sounding an alarm that can come across as strident and uncompromising. And a lot of liberals have been angrily telling us how much they hate it.
But hating the Tea Party for being so insistent and single-minded in its focus on cutting spending is like hating a fire hall siren for calling attention to a potentially devastating blaze. And blaming the S&P downgrade on Tea Party-backed House Republicans makes about as much sense as blaming a raging fire on the 911 dispatcher.
Worse than pointing fingers at the Tea Partiers, however, is when a government official demands that they be frozen out.
Speaking on MSNBC the day S&P lowered its credit rating on US debt from AAA to AA+, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry called on the media to blackball the Tea Party and its message.
"What we had was a group of people who are completely unaware, or didn't care about the consequences of their actions," Kerry claimed. It is typical of him to attribute opposition to Democrats' policies to ignorance or bad faith; shortly before the 2010 tsunami that handed the House GOP its greatest triumph in 60 years, Kerry seethed that voters were yielding to "know-nothingism" and rejecting "truth and science and facts." Now he wants the views he rejected then to be silenced, and the press to do the silencing.
"The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it," Kerry said. "It doesn't deserve the same credit as a legitimate idea about what you do. And the problem is everything is put into this tit-for-tat equal battle and America is losing any sense of what's real."
Kerry -- who is one of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's appointees to the debt deal's "super committee" -- has been in the Senate since 1985. He is an entrenched member of the bipartisan Beltway establishment that has overseen the explosion of federal spending and debt that the Tea Party was born to resist. It is perfectly understandable that he would push back against the conservative insurgents' agenda, which he characterizes as "cutting, cutting, cutting."
But he ought to have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that the Tea Partiers are not "absurd" to focus on budget cuts and entitlement reform -- not when federal outlays have more than doubled (from $1.8 trillion to $3.8 trillion) in a decade. Not when entitlement payments are eating up two-thirds of the US government budget. Not when Washington has to borrow 40 cents for every dollar it spends. And not when (as a result) the US debt burden has ballooned from 40.3 percent of GDP in 2008 to an alarming 72 percent this year -- and growing.
In explaining its downgrade, S&P did not call for the higher taxes that Kerry and many Democrats seek. Instead it said that the debt deal "fell well short" of the deficit reductions needed, that it provided only "modest savings" in discretionary spending, and that Congress was unwilling to curb Medicare and other entitlements, which is the "key to long-term fiscal sustainability." That sounds an awful lot like what the Tea Party has been saying -- except that the tea partiers were raising the alarm well before S&P got involved.
Kerry is under no obligation to like the Tea Party's style. He does have an obligation to contend responsibly with its arguments. A fiscal fire is burning, and reasonable people can differ on how best to quell it. But this much ought to be clear to anyone: Silencing the siren will accomplish nothing.
SOURCE
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The false god of tolerance
On June 26th, the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.was the latest church to be used for the promotion of syncretism—the attempted union of different religions. The idea was that “Christian” ministers, Jewish Rabbis, and Muslim Imams would co-lead a service in “Christian” churches around America using a multi-faith liturgy.
Sadly, 70 other churches across America signed on to do the same thing. The event was organized by a group called “Faith Shared.” It comes as no shock that the service was designed to promote “religious tolerance.” This is indeed a major step forward in promoting what I believe to be America’s new god of tolerance.
The major problem with this false god of tolerance is that it is not marked by the true love that genuine Christians believe in and are called upon to exercise. Love of others, regardless of their background, religion, or complexion, should be expressed in offering hospitality, and even service, but not at the expense of the truth. Loving people and selling out on the truth of one’s faith are two different things altogether.
These liberal “apostate” denominations are not only naïve and ignorant of the truth of the Christian faith, they are acting on emotional impulse in a way that ultimately endangers our nation. They are seeking to engender personal acceptance from others, rather than imploring others to accept Christ as the Savior.
You may be wondering how a service that promotes “unity” could be dangerous to our nation. What many Americans do not understand is that Islam is not just a religion. It is a political and social system that is inseparable from the state. Islamic Sharia [law] is to be administered by Muslim caliphates or successors of the prophet, not a secular government. Indeed the founder of Islam was not only their prophet, but also their commander-in-chief, ruler and unifier, something they have been longing for again since the fourth one died and created a division between the Shiites and the Sunnis.
Also, what most of these naïve souls don’t understand is that Taqiah is a religious/political principal in Islam that allows Muslims to go along with this charade of mixing and mingling religions, something that is normally anathema to them. Taqiah says that when you do not have the upper hand, go along with the infidels’ schemes until you get the upper hand, and then subjugate them.
Has anyone noticed that none of these events are ever held in a Mosque? It is an anathema to have a Christian minister speak in a Mosque, but they are happy to occupy the pulpits of hapless Christians in American Christian churches. Indeed, it is considered a triumph of Islam over the infidels when they occupy Christian pulpits without opening their Mosques to Christian preachers.
Be that as it may, Bible-believing Christians should love everyone, including Muslims. That love can be expressed in a variety of ways: acts of kindness, hospitality, and friendship. Above all, there can be no greater act of love by true Christians than to share our most prized treasure with our Muslim friends. Only Jesus Christ can meet their most desperate need by making a personal relationship with God possible. He came to earth from Heaven, took on the form of a servant, died on a cross, and rose again on the third day.
For true, genuine, and Bible-believing Christians, this is the greatest act of kindness that they can express to all people, including Muslims.
During this month of Ramadan, as Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset, all Christians need to pray that Muslims come to know the only One who is the way, the truth, and the giver of eternal life.
SOURCE
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The Sun Never Sets on the British Welfare System
Ann Coulter
Those of you following the barbaric rioting in Britain will not have failed to notice that a sizable proportion of the thugs are white, something not often seen in this country. Not only that, but in a triumph of feminism, a lot of them are girls. Even the "disabled" (according to the British benefits system) seem to have miraculously overcome their infirmities to dash out and steal a few TVs.
Congratulations, Britain! You've barbarized your citizenry, without regard to race, gender or physical handicap!
With a welfare system far more advanced than the United States, the British have achieved the remarkable result of turning entire communities of ancestral British people into tattooed, drunken brutes.
I guess we now have the proof of what conservatives have been saying since forever: Looting is a result of liberal welfare policies. And Britain is in the end stages of the welfare state.
In 2008, a 9-year-old British girl, Shannon Matthews, disappeared on her way home from a school trip. The media leapt on the case -- only to discover that Shannon was one of seven children her mother, Karen, had produced with five different men. The first of these serial sperm-donors explained: "Karen just goes from one bloke to the next, uses them to have a kid, grabs all the child benefits and moves on."
Poor little Shannon eventually turned up at the home of one of her many step-uncles -- whose ex-wife, by the way, was the mother of six children with three different fathers. (Is Father's Day celebrated in England? If so, how?)
The Daily Mail (London) traced the family's proud Anglo ancestry of stable families back hundreds of years. The Nazi war machine couldn't break the British, but the modern welfare state has.
A year earlier, in 2007, another product of the new order, Fiona MacKeown, took seven of her eight children (by five different fathers) and her then-boyfriend, on a drug-fueled, six-month vacation to the Indian territory of Goa. The trip was paid for -- like everything else in her life -- with government benefits. (When was the last time you had a free, six-month vacation? I'm drawing a blank, too.)
While in Goa, Fiona took her entourage on a side-trip, leaving her 15-year-old daughter, Scarlett Keeling, in the capable hands of a 25-year-old local whom Scarlett had begun sleeping with, perhaps hoping to get a head-start on her own government benefits. A few weeks later, Scarlett turned up dead, full of drugs, raped and murdered.
Scarlett's estranged stepfather later drank himself to death, while her brother Silas announced on his social networking page: "My name is Si, n I spend most my life either out wit mates get drunk or at partys, playing rugby or going to da beach (pretty s**t really)."
It's a wonder that someone like Silas, who has never worked, and belongs to a family in which no one has ever worked, can afford a cellphone for social networking. No, actually, it's not.
Britain has a far more redistributive welfare system than France, which is why France's crime problem is mostly a matter of Muslim immigrants, not French nationals. Meanwhile, England's welfare state is fast returning the native population to its violent 18th-century highwaymen roots.
Needless to say, Britain leads Europe in the proportion of single mothers and, as a consequence, also leads or co-leads the European Union in violent crime, alcohol and drug abuse, obesity and sexually transmitted diseases.
But liberal elites here and in Britain will blame anything but the welfare state they adore. They drone on about the strict British class system or the lack of jobs or the nation's history of racism. None of that explains the sad lives of young Shannon Matthews and Scarlett Keeling, with their long English ancestry and perfect Anglo features.
Democrats would be delighted if violent mobs like those in Britain arose here -- perhaps in Wisconsin! That would allow them to introduce yet more government programs staffed by unionized public employees, as happened after the 1992 L.A. riots and the 1960s race riots, following the recommendations of the Kerner Commission.
MSNBC might even do the unthinkable and offer Al Sharpton his own TV show. (Excuse me -- someone's trying to get my attention ... WHAT?)
Inciting violent mobs is the essence of the left's agenda: Promote class warfare, illegitimate children and an utterly debased citizenry.
Like the British riot girls interviewed by the BBC, the Democrats tell us "all of this happened because of the rich people."
We're beginning to see the final result of that idea in Britain. The welfare state creates a society of beasts. Meanwhile, nonjudgmental elites don't dare condemn the animals their programs have created.
Rioters in England are burning century-old family businesses to the ground, stealing from injured children lying on the sidewalks and forcing Britons to strip to their underwear on the street.
I keep reading that it's because they don't have jobs -- which they're obviously anxious to hold. Or someone called them a "k*****." Or their social services have been reduced. Or their Blackberries made them do it. Or they disapprove of a referee's call in a Manchester United game.
A few well-placed rifle rounds, and the rioting would end in an instant. A more sustained attack on the rampaging mob might save England from itself, finally removing shaved-head, drunken parasites from the benefits rolls that Britain can't find the will to abolish on moral or utilitarian grounds. We can be sure there's no danger of killing off the next Winston Churchill or Edmund Burke in these crowds.
But like Louis XVI, British authorities are paralyzed by their indifference to their own civilization. A half-century of berating themselves for the crime of being British has left them morally defenseless. They see nothing about England worth saving, certainly not worth fighting for -- which is fortunate since most of their cops don't have guns.
This is how civilizations die. It can happen overnight, as it did in Revolutionary France. If Britain of 1939 were composed of the current British population, the entirety of Europe would today be doing the "Heil Hitler" salute and singing the "Horst Wessel Song."
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Nancy Pelosi Tells Predominantly Black Audience that the GOP Complicated the Debt Debate Because Obama Is Black. As if there weren't enough racial tension in America already, she is prepared to lie in order to create more of it. She is clearly an enemy of America and all Americans.
"Why is this President being treated so disrespectfully?" GWB wasn't treated disrespectfully, of course. "Obama=Nazi" signs are all over the place, aren't they?
SOURCE
************************
Tea Partiers sound an urgent alarm
THE FIRE HALL next to my in-laws' house in northern New York State has a siren that can be heard for miles. "Loud" doesn't begin to describe the sound it makes: a shrill, relentless, piercing wail that is impossible to ignore -- and that can be extremely upsetting for anyone who isn't used to it. There's good reason for that. None of the rural towns in the area has a professional fire department, so when a fire breaks out, the siren is needed to summon volunteers. The urgent blast of that siren (which sounds like this one) used to terrify my younger son, who would hide under a bed when it sounded, and angrily tell us afterward how much he hated it.
In the recent clamor over the federal debt ceiling and the Standard & Poor's downgrade of US Treasury bonds, the Tea Party has been that fire hall siren. Fiscal conservatives, mostly but by no means only Republican, have been sounding an alarm that can come across as strident and uncompromising. And a lot of liberals have been angrily telling us how much they hate it.
But hating the Tea Party for being so insistent and single-minded in its focus on cutting spending is like hating a fire hall siren for calling attention to a potentially devastating blaze. And blaming the S&P downgrade on Tea Party-backed House Republicans makes about as much sense as blaming a raging fire on the 911 dispatcher.
Worse than pointing fingers at the Tea Partiers, however, is when a government official demands that they be frozen out.
Speaking on MSNBC the day S&P lowered its credit rating on US debt from AAA to AA+, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry called on the media to blackball the Tea Party and its message.
"What we had was a group of people who are completely unaware, or didn't care about the consequences of their actions," Kerry claimed. It is typical of him to attribute opposition to Democrats' policies to ignorance or bad faith; shortly before the 2010 tsunami that handed the House GOP its greatest triumph in 60 years, Kerry seethed that voters were yielding to "know-nothingism" and rejecting "truth and science and facts." Now he wants the views he rejected then to be silenced, and the press to do the silencing.
"The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it," Kerry said. "It doesn't deserve the same credit as a legitimate idea about what you do. And the problem is everything is put into this tit-for-tat equal battle and America is losing any sense of what's real."
Kerry -- who is one of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's appointees to the debt deal's "super committee" -- has been in the Senate since 1985. He is an entrenched member of the bipartisan Beltway establishment that has overseen the explosion of federal spending and debt that the Tea Party was born to resist. It is perfectly understandable that he would push back against the conservative insurgents' agenda, which he characterizes as "cutting, cutting, cutting."
But he ought to have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that the Tea Partiers are not "absurd" to focus on budget cuts and entitlement reform -- not when federal outlays have more than doubled (from $1.8 trillion to $3.8 trillion) in a decade. Not when entitlement payments are eating up two-thirds of the US government budget. Not when Washington has to borrow 40 cents for every dollar it spends. And not when (as a result) the US debt burden has ballooned from 40.3 percent of GDP in 2008 to an alarming 72 percent this year -- and growing.
In explaining its downgrade, S&P did not call for the higher taxes that Kerry and many Democrats seek. Instead it said that the debt deal "fell well short" of the deficit reductions needed, that it provided only "modest savings" in discretionary spending, and that Congress was unwilling to curb Medicare and other entitlements, which is the "key to long-term fiscal sustainability." That sounds an awful lot like what the Tea Party has been saying -- except that the tea partiers were raising the alarm well before S&P got involved.
Kerry is under no obligation to like the Tea Party's style. He does have an obligation to contend responsibly with its arguments. A fiscal fire is burning, and reasonable people can differ on how best to quell it. But this much ought to be clear to anyone: Silencing the siren will accomplish nothing.
SOURCE
*****************************
The false god of tolerance
On June 26th, the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.was the latest church to be used for the promotion of syncretism—the attempted union of different religions. The idea was that “Christian” ministers, Jewish Rabbis, and Muslim Imams would co-lead a service in “Christian” churches around America using a multi-faith liturgy.
Sadly, 70 other churches across America signed on to do the same thing. The event was organized by a group called “Faith Shared.” It comes as no shock that the service was designed to promote “religious tolerance.” This is indeed a major step forward in promoting what I believe to be America’s new god of tolerance.
The major problem with this false god of tolerance is that it is not marked by the true love that genuine Christians believe in and are called upon to exercise. Love of others, regardless of their background, religion, or complexion, should be expressed in offering hospitality, and even service, but not at the expense of the truth. Loving people and selling out on the truth of one’s faith are two different things altogether.
These liberal “apostate” denominations are not only naïve and ignorant of the truth of the Christian faith, they are acting on emotional impulse in a way that ultimately endangers our nation. They are seeking to engender personal acceptance from others, rather than imploring others to accept Christ as the Savior.
You may be wondering how a service that promotes “unity” could be dangerous to our nation. What many Americans do not understand is that Islam is not just a religion. It is a political and social system that is inseparable from the state. Islamic Sharia [law] is to be administered by Muslim caliphates or successors of the prophet, not a secular government. Indeed the founder of Islam was not only their prophet, but also their commander-in-chief, ruler and unifier, something they have been longing for again since the fourth one died and created a division between the Shiites and the Sunnis.
Also, what most of these naïve souls don’t understand is that Taqiah is a religious/political principal in Islam that allows Muslims to go along with this charade of mixing and mingling religions, something that is normally anathema to them. Taqiah says that when you do not have the upper hand, go along with the infidels’ schemes until you get the upper hand, and then subjugate them.
Has anyone noticed that none of these events are ever held in a Mosque? It is an anathema to have a Christian minister speak in a Mosque, but they are happy to occupy the pulpits of hapless Christians in American Christian churches. Indeed, it is considered a triumph of Islam over the infidels when they occupy Christian pulpits without opening their Mosques to Christian preachers.
Be that as it may, Bible-believing Christians should love everyone, including Muslims. That love can be expressed in a variety of ways: acts of kindness, hospitality, and friendship. Above all, there can be no greater act of love by true Christians than to share our most prized treasure with our Muslim friends. Only Jesus Christ can meet their most desperate need by making a personal relationship with God possible. He came to earth from Heaven, took on the form of a servant, died on a cross, and rose again on the third day.
For true, genuine, and Bible-believing Christians, this is the greatest act of kindness that they can express to all people, including Muslims.
During this month of Ramadan, as Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset, all Christians need to pray that Muslims come to know the only One who is the way, the truth, and the giver of eternal life.
SOURCE
**************************
The Sun Never Sets on the British Welfare System
Ann Coulter
Those of you following the barbaric rioting in Britain will not have failed to notice that a sizable proportion of the thugs are white, something not often seen in this country. Not only that, but in a triumph of feminism, a lot of them are girls. Even the "disabled" (according to the British benefits system) seem to have miraculously overcome their infirmities to dash out and steal a few TVs.
Congratulations, Britain! You've barbarized your citizenry, without regard to race, gender or physical handicap!
With a welfare system far more advanced than the United States, the British have achieved the remarkable result of turning entire communities of ancestral British people into tattooed, drunken brutes.
I guess we now have the proof of what conservatives have been saying since forever: Looting is a result of liberal welfare policies. And Britain is in the end stages of the welfare state.
In 2008, a 9-year-old British girl, Shannon Matthews, disappeared on her way home from a school trip. The media leapt on the case -- only to discover that Shannon was one of seven children her mother, Karen, had produced with five different men. The first of these serial sperm-donors explained: "Karen just goes from one bloke to the next, uses them to have a kid, grabs all the child benefits and moves on."
Poor little Shannon eventually turned up at the home of one of her many step-uncles -- whose ex-wife, by the way, was the mother of six children with three different fathers. (Is Father's Day celebrated in England? If so, how?)
The Daily Mail (London) traced the family's proud Anglo ancestry of stable families back hundreds of years. The Nazi war machine couldn't break the British, but the modern welfare state has.
A year earlier, in 2007, another product of the new order, Fiona MacKeown, took seven of her eight children (by five different fathers) and her then-boyfriend, on a drug-fueled, six-month vacation to the Indian territory of Goa. The trip was paid for -- like everything else in her life -- with government benefits. (When was the last time you had a free, six-month vacation? I'm drawing a blank, too.)
While in Goa, Fiona took her entourage on a side-trip, leaving her 15-year-old daughter, Scarlett Keeling, in the capable hands of a 25-year-old local whom Scarlett had begun sleeping with, perhaps hoping to get a head-start on her own government benefits. A few weeks later, Scarlett turned up dead, full of drugs, raped and murdered.
Scarlett's estranged stepfather later drank himself to death, while her brother Silas announced on his social networking page: "My name is Si, n I spend most my life either out wit mates get drunk or at partys, playing rugby or going to da beach (pretty s**t really)."
It's a wonder that someone like Silas, who has never worked, and belongs to a family in which no one has ever worked, can afford a cellphone for social networking. No, actually, it's not.
Britain has a far more redistributive welfare system than France, which is why France's crime problem is mostly a matter of Muslim immigrants, not French nationals. Meanwhile, England's welfare state is fast returning the native population to its violent 18th-century highwaymen roots.
Needless to say, Britain leads Europe in the proportion of single mothers and, as a consequence, also leads or co-leads the European Union in violent crime, alcohol and drug abuse, obesity and sexually transmitted diseases.
But liberal elites here and in Britain will blame anything but the welfare state they adore. They drone on about the strict British class system or the lack of jobs or the nation's history of racism. None of that explains the sad lives of young Shannon Matthews and Scarlett Keeling, with their long English ancestry and perfect Anglo features.
Democrats would be delighted if violent mobs like those in Britain arose here -- perhaps in Wisconsin! That would allow them to introduce yet more government programs staffed by unionized public employees, as happened after the 1992 L.A. riots and the 1960s race riots, following the recommendations of the Kerner Commission.
MSNBC might even do the unthinkable and offer Al Sharpton his own TV show. (Excuse me -- someone's trying to get my attention ... WHAT?)
Inciting violent mobs is the essence of the left's agenda: Promote class warfare, illegitimate children and an utterly debased citizenry.
Like the British riot girls interviewed by the BBC, the Democrats tell us "all of this happened because of the rich people."
We're beginning to see the final result of that idea in Britain. The welfare state creates a society of beasts. Meanwhile, nonjudgmental elites don't dare condemn the animals their programs have created.
Rioters in England are burning century-old family businesses to the ground, stealing from injured children lying on the sidewalks and forcing Britons to strip to their underwear on the street.
I keep reading that it's because they don't have jobs -- which they're obviously anxious to hold. Or someone called them a "k*****." Or their social services have been reduced. Or their Blackberries made them do it. Or they disapprove of a referee's call in a Manchester United game.
A few well-placed rifle rounds, and the rioting would end in an instant. A more sustained attack on the rampaging mob might save England from itself, finally removing shaved-head, drunken parasites from the benefits rolls that Britain can't find the will to abolish on moral or utilitarian grounds. We can be sure there's no danger of killing off the next Winston Churchill or Edmund Burke in these crowds.
But like Louis XVI, British authorities are paralyzed by their indifference to their own civilization. A half-century of berating themselves for the crime of being British has left them morally defenseless. They see nothing about England worth saving, certainly not worth fighting for -- which is fortunate since most of their cops don't have guns.
This is how civilizations die. It can happen overnight, as it did in Revolutionary France. If Britain of 1939 were composed of the current British population, the entirety of Europe would today be doing the "Heil Hitler" salute and singing the "Horst Wessel Song."
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Saturday, August 13, 2011
Survivalists are now terrorists, according to Obama's FBI
Since GOP Congressmen are also allegedly terrorists, it's only logical to expand the list, I guess. Excerpt:
Let me give a more realistic set of terrorism indicators: Possession of a Koran; Getting your butt up in the air 5 times a day; saying "inshallah", "Allah Akhbar" or "Peace be upon him"; wearing long white coats; being seen inside a mosque.
**********************
Why Profit Is Our Best Friend in healthcare too
Many liberals think of profit as evil. They see it as the product of “corporate greed,” something that needs to be harshly taxed. Yet the desire to earn a profit is what impels innovators to solve some of our most important social problems.
I don’t think that getting rich is the main motivation of entrepreneurs — the possibility of changing the world may be an even stronger desire. However, you can almost guarantee there will be no entrepreneurship if you do two things: (a) eliminate all possibility of getting rich, and (b) make it impossible to change anything without the approval of an intractable bureaucracy.
That in a nutshell is my explanation for why our two most visibly dysfunctional social systems — health care and public education — remain so dysfunctional.
I meet entrepreneurs in health care almost every day. Their novel ideas are invariably focused on helping some entity — a hospital, insurer, employer, etc. — solve a problem. They are rarely focused on how to solve an overall social problem, however. Because our health care system is so dysfunctional, in solving the problem for a client, they may be making our social problems worse than they would have been.
Solving social problems in health care with innovative policy proposals is what I do. It is a lonely field. But it would be a lot less lonely if we allowed people to get rich doing it.
To take one example, it is often asserted that one-third of all health care spending is wasteful. Suppose Bill Gates was able to write a computer program that would find the waste and eliminate it. Society as a whole would save more than $800 billion. So how much should we be willing to pay Bill Gates? A tenth of the overall benefit he creates ($80 billion)? One-half the benefit ($400 billion)?
Perhaps you’re thinking that we shouldn’t pay Bill Gates anything. Maybe you think he should give us the program for free, as an altruistic gesture. Or, maybe you think the most he should get back is a 1% or 2% return — something close to the return paid by government bonds. If this is your viewpoint, welcome to the world of health policy. You will find all kinds of people who think just like you do.
In general, there is no limit to how much people can make in health care by successfully exploiting reimbursement formulas. But the federal government is in the process of limiting what insurance companies can earn, effectively reducing them to the role of public utilities.
Two recent items in the news help illustrate why this approach is so wrong. In one, The New York Times reports:
In the other story, The New York Times reports that Blue Shield of California will voluntarily limit its profit to no more than 2% of revenues — no doubt anticipating that government regulators were going to force that result anyway.
Think about those two examples. Almost everybody in health care agrees that many of our biggest problems stem from the way we pay for care. And who is paying? Insurance companies.
The $800 billion is almost all funded by third-party payers. So another way of stating the social problem is: we need to find newer and better types of third-party payment.
Let’s suppose that an insurance company contracts with Bill Gates for the hypothetical software described above. By using it, the insurer will cut its spending by one-third and add that amount to the bottom line. This would be good for numerous reasons: the elimination of wasteful spending would improve the quality of care for patients, reduce the chance of medical errors, free up resources for use by other patients and encourage every other insurer to find ways of achieving the same outcome.
But under ObamaCare, the software will never be invented, never be purchased and never be used. Why? Because under the new health law it will be impossible for an insurer to cash in on that innovation.
Under the new law, large health insurance companies have to pay out as much as 85% of their premium income in the form of benefits. The remaining 15% has to cover all sales and administrative costs plus brokers fees and if anything is left that’s what the insurer gets to keep.
The insurer with Bill Gates’ hypothetical software would have to rebate its profit to enrollees in the form of lower premiums. Thus, no insurer will be able to profit from major cost-reducing discoveries. Nor will any insurer even try. Instead, insurance companies will function like utilities, taking no real risks and making no radical changes in their current business model.
ObamaCare has ensured that our health care problems will not be solved by stifling innovation in the one sector of the market that most needs vigorous entrepreneurial activity.
SOURCE
*************************
Obamacare Gets Thumbs Down by court
The hallmark legislation of the Obama administration, Obamacare, took another body blow when the 11th Circuit Court ruled Friday that the individual mandate requiring adult persons in the U.S. to purchase health insurance is unconstitutional. Where have we heard that argument before?
While the court didn’t go so far as to declare the entire act void, it effectively scrapped the legislation by denying it the source of its funding. The administration is expected to appeal the ruling, but a final decision will likely come in the U.S. Supreme Court.
A coalition of 26 states, kind of an ad-hoc death panel for Obamacare, is suing the federal government to stop implementation of Obamacare, arguing that key provisions of the act are illegal.
A key argument by the states was that the power to require Americans to purchase a product gives the government unlimited powers to regulate all aspects of someone’s life and is thus unconstitutional.
The 11th Circuit Court seems to agree by a 2-1 margin: “The government’s position amounts to an argument that the mere fact of an individual’s existence substantially affects interstate commerce, and therefore Congress may regulate them at every point of their life.” In short, it’s the same old argument liberals always make that the mere ability to pass legislation is more than enough reason to do it, 'cuz "Hey, let's see what's in it.".
Forbes quotes the crux of the argument from the 11th Circuit’s Death Panel thusly: “The federal government’s assertion of power, under the Commerce Clause, to issue an economic mandate for Americans to purchase insurance from a private company for the entire duration of their lives is unprecedented, lacks cognizable limits, and imperils our federalist structure.”
While politically the passage of Obamacare was the biggest legislative accomplishment of the Obama administration, more and more Americans are growing uneasy about the wisdom of the legislation as they “find out what’s in it.”
In June, a CNN poll showed that more Americans opposed Obamacare than supported it by a landslide margin of 17 percent. A Rasmussen poll in August showed a margin against by 14 points. And it looks like opposition is coming from both Democrats and Republicans.
The Washington Post quotes Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute as saying “One of the striking things about today’s ruling is that, for the first time in one of these cases, a Democrat-appointed judge, Frank Hull, has ruled against the government,” although Shapiro warns that the fight is far from over.
“Supporters of limited constitutional government need to temper their celebrations — just as they wisely tempered their sorrows after the last ruling — because we must all now realize that this will not end until the Supreme Court rules,” Shapiro concluded.
Progressives ballyhooed the legislation as healthcare reform that would help lower costs and increase coverage. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that while it may increase coverage, costs will skyrocket. As Townhall’s political editor Guy Benson noted in June, 1 of 3 employers will probably cancel employee coverage by 2014 because of Obamacare.
A survey by Mercer finds that 55 percent of employers think that their costs will go up as a result of Obamacare, while premiums already continue to rise.
“Rising health care costs are putting a huge financial burden on employers across the country,” says Robert Zirchelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, which represents insurers who provide health benefits to some 200 million Americans according to the San Antonio Business Journal. “Rather than help control the rising cost of medical care, the new health care reform law instead imposes billions of dollars in new taxes and benefit mandates and will significantly increase the cost of coverage for employers and their employees.”
It’s just another example of the Obama administration passing laws that don’t even attempt to solve actual problems faced by the American people, but rather try to take advantage of problems faced by the American people by passing legislation that increases the reach of the federal government regardless of the consequences to personal liberty.
SOURCE
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Huge new costs are another reason scrap Obamacare
A few hundred billion dollars here, a few hundred billion dollars there — sooner or later we’re talking about the real cost of Barack Obama’s new socialized medicine monstrosity.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once said that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Apparently, passing the legislation was also a prerequisite to determining its actual price tag — which as it turns out is much higher than anyone fathomed.
The latest cost overrun associated with ObamaCare? A $500 billion “error” associated with insuring the spouses and children of new entitlement recipients. That’s $500 billion in additional deficit spending — although it didn’t stem from an “error” so much as it was the result of a deliberate miscalculation.
As it attempted to calculate ObamaCare’s true fiscal impact, the Congressional Budget Office was explicitly instructed to ignore the cost of covering family members under new eligibility requirements for low-income private sector employees.
“The Congressional Budget Office has never done a cost-estimate of this (because) they were expressly told to do their modeling on single coverage,” researcher Richard Burkhauser told the Daily Caller this month.
Documents obtained from the Democratic-controlled Joint Committee on Taxation confirm Burkhauser’s account — and demonstrate the lengths to which Obama supporters went in an effort to hide these costs from the taxpayers.
Obviously this isn’t the first “oversight” associated with this unconstitutional abomination. In March of 2011, Obama’s heath care czarina Kathleen Sebelius was forced to acknowledge under oath that the government double-counted $529 billion in “savings” associated with the implementation of the legislation.
Numerous other errors and omissions have been uncovered within ObamaCare’s fuzzy math — including a $52 billion raid of Social Security and a $72 billion repayment obligation for a new “long-term care trust fund.”
According to Congressional Budget Office estimates released on the eve of its passage in March 2010, ObamaCare was originally projected to add $109 billion to the federal deficit over 10 years.
We can now add more than $1 trillion to that total (and counting), shredding once and for all Obama’s ridiculous claim that his signature legislation is “one of the biggest deficit-reduction plans in history.”
It’s also critical to remember that all of this deficit spending comes after the imposition of new tax hikes totaling hundreds of billions of dollars — a double whammy for taxpayers.
In addition to its infamous (and unconstitutional) individual mandate, ObamaCare also includes a new employer mandate tax, a new tax on “Cadillac” health insurance plans, the creation of a new 3.8% surtax on investment income for households that earn more than $250,000, increases in Medicaid payroll taxes, a new tax on medical device manufacturers, a new tanning tax, a tax hike on drug companies and at least a dozen other new “revenue enhancements.”
Many of these tax hikes have already been implemented — siphoning money away from our economy at the worst possible time. They’re also being collected even after a federal judge struck down ObamaCare in its entirety.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Since GOP Congressmen are also allegedly terrorists, it's only logical to expand the list, I guess. Excerpt:
An FBI Denver Joint Terrorism Task Force handout being distributed to Colorado military surplus store owners lists the purchase of popular preparedness items and firearms accessories as “suspicious” and “potential indicators of terrorist activities,” instructing store owners to keep records on and report people who:
“Make bulk purchase of items to include: Weatherproofed ammunition or match containers; Meals Ready to Eat; Night Vision Devices; night flashlights; gas masks; High capacity magazines; Bi-pods or tri-pods for rifles”
The FBI handout, entitled “Communities Against Terrorism: Potential Indicators of Terrorist Activities Related to Military Surplus Stores” also instructs surplus store owners to:
“Require valid ID from all new customers; Keep records of purchases' Talk to customers, ask questions, and listen to and observe their responses; Watch for people and actions that are out of place; Make note of suspicious statements, people, and /or vehicles; If something seems wrong, notify law enforcement authorities.”
The handout also instructs surplus store owners to consider as “suspicious” anyone who “demands identity ‘privacy’” or anyone who expresses “extreme religious statements” and those who “make suspicious comments regarding anti-US, [or] radical theology.”
The “Communities Against Terrorism” flyer closes by stating:
Preventing terrorism is a community effort. By learning what to look for, you can make a positive contribution in the fight against terrorism. The partnership between the community and law enforcement is essential to the success of anti -terrorism efforts.
More HERE
Let me give a more realistic set of terrorism indicators: Possession of a Koran; Getting your butt up in the air 5 times a day; saying "inshallah", "Allah Akhbar" or "Peace be upon him"; wearing long white coats; being seen inside a mosque.
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Why Profit Is Our Best Friend in healthcare too
Many liberals think of profit as evil. They see it as the product of “corporate greed,” something that needs to be harshly taxed. Yet the desire to earn a profit is what impels innovators to solve some of our most important social problems.
I don’t think that getting rich is the main motivation of entrepreneurs — the possibility of changing the world may be an even stronger desire. However, you can almost guarantee there will be no entrepreneurship if you do two things: (a) eliminate all possibility of getting rich, and (b) make it impossible to change anything without the approval of an intractable bureaucracy.
That in a nutshell is my explanation for why our two most visibly dysfunctional social systems — health care and public education — remain so dysfunctional.
I meet entrepreneurs in health care almost every day. Their novel ideas are invariably focused on helping some entity — a hospital, insurer, employer, etc. — solve a problem. They are rarely focused on how to solve an overall social problem, however. Because our health care system is so dysfunctional, in solving the problem for a client, they may be making our social problems worse than they would have been.
Solving social problems in health care with innovative policy proposals is what I do. It is a lonely field. But it would be a lot less lonely if we allowed people to get rich doing it.
To take one example, it is often asserted that one-third of all health care spending is wasteful. Suppose Bill Gates was able to write a computer program that would find the waste and eliminate it. Society as a whole would save more than $800 billion. So how much should we be willing to pay Bill Gates? A tenth of the overall benefit he creates ($80 billion)? One-half the benefit ($400 billion)?
Perhaps you’re thinking that we shouldn’t pay Bill Gates anything. Maybe you think he should give us the program for free, as an altruistic gesture. Or, maybe you think the most he should get back is a 1% or 2% return — something close to the return paid by government bonds. If this is your viewpoint, welcome to the world of health policy. You will find all kinds of people who think just like you do.
In general, there is no limit to how much people can make in health care by successfully exploiting reimbursement formulas. But the federal government is in the process of limiting what insurance companies can earn, effectively reducing them to the role of public utilities.
Two recent items in the news help illustrate why this approach is so wrong. In one, The New York Times reports:
The brothers, Philip and Joel [Levy], earned close to $1 million a year each as the two top executives running a Medicaid-financed nonprofit organization serving the developmentally disabled.
They each had luxury cars paid for with public money. And when their children went to college, they could pass on the tuition bills to their nonprofit group.
Philip H. Levy went as far as charging the organization $50,400 for his daughter’s living expenses one year when she attended graduate school at New York University.
That money paid not for a dorm room, but rather it helped her buy a co-op apartment in Greenwich Village.
In the other story, The New York Times reports that Blue Shield of California will voluntarily limit its profit to no more than 2% of revenues — no doubt anticipating that government regulators were going to force that result anyway.
Think about those two examples. Almost everybody in health care agrees that many of our biggest problems stem from the way we pay for care. And who is paying? Insurance companies.
The $800 billion is almost all funded by third-party payers. So another way of stating the social problem is: we need to find newer and better types of third-party payment.
Let’s suppose that an insurance company contracts with Bill Gates for the hypothetical software described above. By using it, the insurer will cut its spending by one-third and add that amount to the bottom line. This would be good for numerous reasons: the elimination of wasteful spending would improve the quality of care for patients, reduce the chance of medical errors, free up resources for use by other patients and encourage every other insurer to find ways of achieving the same outcome.
But under ObamaCare, the software will never be invented, never be purchased and never be used. Why? Because under the new health law it will be impossible for an insurer to cash in on that innovation.
Under the new law, large health insurance companies have to pay out as much as 85% of their premium income in the form of benefits. The remaining 15% has to cover all sales and administrative costs plus brokers fees and if anything is left that’s what the insurer gets to keep.
The insurer with Bill Gates’ hypothetical software would have to rebate its profit to enrollees in the form of lower premiums. Thus, no insurer will be able to profit from major cost-reducing discoveries. Nor will any insurer even try. Instead, insurance companies will function like utilities, taking no real risks and making no radical changes in their current business model.
ObamaCare has ensured that our health care problems will not be solved by stifling innovation in the one sector of the market that most needs vigorous entrepreneurial activity.
SOURCE
*************************
Obamacare Gets Thumbs Down by court
The hallmark legislation of the Obama administration, Obamacare, took another body blow when the 11th Circuit Court ruled Friday that the individual mandate requiring adult persons in the U.S. to purchase health insurance is unconstitutional. Where have we heard that argument before?
While the court didn’t go so far as to declare the entire act void, it effectively scrapped the legislation by denying it the source of its funding. The administration is expected to appeal the ruling, but a final decision will likely come in the U.S. Supreme Court.
A coalition of 26 states, kind of an ad-hoc death panel for Obamacare, is suing the federal government to stop implementation of Obamacare, arguing that key provisions of the act are illegal.
A key argument by the states was that the power to require Americans to purchase a product gives the government unlimited powers to regulate all aspects of someone’s life and is thus unconstitutional.
The 11th Circuit Court seems to agree by a 2-1 margin: “The government’s position amounts to an argument that the mere fact of an individual’s existence substantially affects interstate commerce, and therefore Congress may regulate them at every point of their life.” In short, it’s the same old argument liberals always make that the mere ability to pass legislation is more than enough reason to do it, 'cuz "Hey, let's see what's in it.".
Forbes quotes the crux of the argument from the 11th Circuit’s Death Panel thusly: “The federal government’s assertion of power, under the Commerce Clause, to issue an economic mandate for Americans to purchase insurance from a private company for the entire duration of their lives is unprecedented, lacks cognizable limits, and imperils our federalist structure.”
While politically the passage of Obamacare was the biggest legislative accomplishment of the Obama administration, more and more Americans are growing uneasy about the wisdom of the legislation as they “find out what’s in it.”
In June, a CNN poll showed that more Americans opposed Obamacare than supported it by a landslide margin of 17 percent. A Rasmussen poll in August showed a margin against by 14 points. And it looks like opposition is coming from both Democrats and Republicans.
The Washington Post quotes Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute as saying “One of the striking things about today’s ruling is that, for the first time in one of these cases, a Democrat-appointed judge, Frank Hull, has ruled against the government,” although Shapiro warns that the fight is far from over.
“Supporters of limited constitutional government need to temper their celebrations — just as they wisely tempered their sorrows after the last ruling — because we must all now realize that this will not end until the Supreme Court rules,” Shapiro concluded.
Progressives ballyhooed the legislation as healthcare reform that would help lower costs and increase coverage. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that while it may increase coverage, costs will skyrocket. As Townhall’s political editor Guy Benson noted in June, 1 of 3 employers will probably cancel employee coverage by 2014 because of Obamacare.
A survey by Mercer finds that 55 percent of employers think that their costs will go up as a result of Obamacare, while premiums already continue to rise.
“Rising health care costs are putting a huge financial burden on employers across the country,” says Robert Zirchelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, which represents insurers who provide health benefits to some 200 million Americans according to the San Antonio Business Journal. “Rather than help control the rising cost of medical care, the new health care reform law instead imposes billions of dollars in new taxes and benefit mandates and will significantly increase the cost of coverage for employers and their employees.”
It’s just another example of the Obama administration passing laws that don’t even attempt to solve actual problems faced by the American people, but rather try to take advantage of problems faced by the American people by passing legislation that increases the reach of the federal government regardless of the consequences to personal liberty.
SOURCE
*****************************
Huge new costs are another reason scrap Obamacare
A few hundred billion dollars here, a few hundred billion dollars there — sooner or later we’re talking about the real cost of Barack Obama’s new socialized medicine monstrosity.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once said that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Apparently, passing the legislation was also a prerequisite to determining its actual price tag — which as it turns out is much higher than anyone fathomed.
The latest cost overrun associated with ObamaCare? A $500 billion “error” associated with insuring the spouses and children of new entitlement recipients. That’s $500 billion in additional deficit spending — although it didn’t stem from an “error” so much as it was the result of a deliberate miscalculation.
As it attempted to calculate ObamaCare’s true fiscal impact, the Congressional Budget Office was explicitly instructed to ignore the cost of covering family members under new eligibility requirements for low-income private sector employees.
“The Congressional Budget Office has never done a cost-estimate of this (because) they were expressly told to do their modeling on single coverage,” researcher Richard Burkhauser told the Daily Caller this month.
Documents obtained from the Democratic-controlled Joint Committee on Taxation confirm Burkhauser’s account — and demonstrate the lengths to which Obama supporters went in an effort to hide these costs from the taxpayers.
Obviously this isn’t the first “oversight” associated with this unconstitutional abomination. In March of 2011, Obama’s heath care czarina Kathleen Sebelius was forced to acknowledge under oath that the government double-counted $529 billion in “savings” associated with the implementation of the legislation.
Numerous other errors and omissions have been uncovered within ObamaCare’s fuzzy math — including a $52 billion raid of Social Security and a $72 billion repayment obligation for a new “long-term care trust fund.”
According to Congressional Budget Office estimates released on the eve of its passage in March 2010, ObamaCare was originally projected to add $109 billion to the federal deficit over 10 years.
We can now add more than $1 trillion to that total (and counting), shredding once and for all Obama’s ridiculous claim that his signature legislation is “one of the biggest deficit-reduction plans in history.”
It’s also critical to remember that all of this deficit spending comes after the imposition of new tax hikes totaling hundreds of billions of dollars — a double whammy for taxpayers.
In addition to its infamous (and unconstitutional) individual mandate, ObamaCare also includes a new employer mandate tax, a new tax on “Cadillac” health insurance plans, the creation of a new 3.8% surtax on investment income for households that earn more than $250,000, increases in Medicaid payroll taxes, a new tax on medical device manufacturers, a new tanning tax, a tax hike on drug companies and at least a dozen other new “revenue enhancements.”
Many of these tax hikes have already been implemented — siphoning money away from our economy at the worst possible time. They’re also being collected even after a federal judge struck down ObamaCare in its entirety.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Friday, August 12, 2011
New Picture Gallery
I don't put up a lot of pictures on my blogs -- except for Greenie Watch. It has lots of graphs. But I think that some of the pictures I do put up are worth a second look. So when I get time I gather such pictures together in a "gallery". I have just put up the gallery for the first half of this year. You can access it here
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Weird Healthcare Regulation of the Day: No Coverage for Men With Breast Cancer
“Disease does not discriminate, but apparently Medicaid coverage does. A 26-year-old South Carolina tile-layer has found himself with breast cancer and out of luck for one reason: He is a man.
While breast cancer affects an estimated 2,000 men annually, Medicaid does not cover treatment of the disease in men,” reports the Daily Caller. “The South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services said that the discriminatory policy lies with the federal government. ‘We are again urging CMS [Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services] to reconsider,’ the South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement. ‘It’s a very clear example of how overly rigid federal regulations don’t serve the interests of the people we’re supposed to be helping.’”
The man with cancer, Raymond Johnson, is hardly an anomaly. There have been high-profile cases of men with breast cancer, like former Senator Ed Brooke (R-Mass.), the first popularly-elected black U.S. Senator. But the federal geniuses who are taking over our healthcare system don’t seem to read the paper.
The government justifies its actions by citing a regulation that bars covering men. But the regulation itself is unconstitutional. The government cannot engage in sex discrimination or sex-based classifications unless it has an “exceeding persuasive justification” that goes beyond mere administrative convenience or gender-based generalizations; it must show that any gender classification substantially advances important state interests; and the burden of showing the need for such discrimination is on the government, which must satisfy a “demanding” showing.
See the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Virginia (1995), which struck down VMI’s men-only policy, and cases like Craig v. Boren (1976), and Michigan Road Builders v. Milliken (1987), which applied similar principles to strike down gender classifications that harmed men.
SOURCE
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What is "debt forgiveness"
While it is easy to come up with a standard definition, standard definitions seldom apply when a term enters the realm of politics and policy.
A recent article in the Washington Post cited economists who argue that slow economic growth is in our foreseeable future because we have run up so much mortgage debt. It will take years to de-leverage it. But economist Carmen Reinhart argued that there was a policy that could help:
Reinhart focuses on the housing market, where much of the debt is concentrated. “I ultimately think we have to wind up with some form of debt forgiveness,” she says.
Debt forgiveness sure sounds good, doesn’t it? Let’s remember, though, that it was melodious but deceptive rhetoric like “affordable housing” and “community reinvestment” that got us into this mess in the first place. Thus, it’s a good idea to look at what debt forgiveness will really mean.
First, who will be forgiven and who will do the forgiving? Presumably it will be banks that have to forgive those who have taken on a larger mortgage than they could afford. Yet if banks have to take a loss on those mortgages, they may try to make it up with higher interest rates on other mortgages, higher interest rates on credit cards, or more fees on checking accounts. That means that many people who have acted responsibly with their money will also be doing the forgiving.
Next, what if banks decide that they don’t want to forgive debt? Well, it’s generally not in the nature of politicians and other policymakers to let the private sector back out of a “good idea.” Likelier, it will be the type of “forgiving” that Chrysler’s secured bondholders got to do. In that case, “forgiveness” isn’t the right term since it implies an action that is voluntary.
The current mess was caused by people making bad choices because at the end of the day they could expect the government to rescue them. “Debt forgiveness” might only encourage more such behavior.
Nevertheless, it is nice-sounding rhetoric, so expect politicians to use it to gin up votes. Just be sure that when you hear them use that phrase, you know what they really mean is “using government to force banks and responsible borrowers to bail out irresponsible borrowers.”
SOURCE
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An old controversy
I am no peacenik but I have always been disturbed and skeptical over the A-bombing of Japan by a Democrat President. Japan was already crushed by that time
According to most high-school history texts, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible but necessary tragedies. They "ended the war," and while they resulted in the deaths of as many as 250,000, they saved many thousands more. Of course a close examination of the facts reveals that none of this is true: Even the estimate for a full-scale invasion of Japan put the American death toll at only 46,000 (all combatant deaths, not civilians). Moreover, the Japanese government had been trying to surrender – balking only at the unconditionality the US side demanded, as they did not want to see their emperor dethroned and executed. Following the Japanese surrender however, the US government happily allowed the emperor to continue serving as a figurehead.
Even the United States Strategic Bombing Survey declared that,"… certainly prior to 31 December, 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November, 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated." Indeed, the devastation the US forces had wreaked upon Japan through conventional warfare (the infamous firebombing campaigns left as many as half a million dead) had already helped seal Japan’s defeat. The most generous interpretation possible of the motives for dropping the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that they served as a demonstration to the Soviet Union of US military might.
More HERE
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Barbarism Comes from the Left
Barbarism comes from the Left. Socialism always leads to death and destruction – every time it is forced upon a society.
Socialist created barbarism is again rearing its evil head on the streets of Great Britain. The rioters are attacking and destroying symbols of Capitalism -- the products of personal hard work, including small businesses and family homes.
Socialism teaches that what others have earned is rightfully owed to those who do not care to exert the necessary effort to earn it by their own hard labors. The looters are stealing from private business and destroying what they cannot carry. Fire is a favorite destructive tool of those who are attacking and destroying that which is not theirs.
Arson, as recently as 1970, was confirmed to still be a capital offense in Great Britain. Arsonists were eligible for hanging. It seems British law no longer has a stomach for defending private property and innocent people. The discussions have descended to the level of whether or not to even use plastic bullets and water cannons.
Whatever happened to live ammunition? Shooting looters and arsonists on sight is how civilized societies once kept the wanton barbarism of the undisciplined in check.
A depraved and degenerate society gives the benefit of the doubt to criminals and punishes those who would dare to defend themselves. The British people have long since been disarmed by their nanny state government and would probably be jailed if they were to harm a rioting hooligan in self-defense.
The Left creates dependency which leads to anger and despair. The Left establishes an entitlement mentality in society, which leads to the resentment and hatred of those who dare to work hard and to achieve. The nanny government uses legalized theft to take the money and personal property of those who have the gumption to work and to use it to provide goods and services to able-bodied people who are too lazy to provide for themselves.
We see similar eruptions of barbarism in the United States. J. Christian Adams wrote:
"Consider the Wisconsin State Fair last week. The 911 tapes reveal a nightmare. “We’re outside the Wisconsin State Fair and there’s a white guy being beaten up by about 100 black people,” the panicked caller cries. “They’re jumping on our cars. . . . My mom just got attacked by a black mob.” Multiple eyewitnesses describe white fairgoers being pulled from cars and beaten by the Mob, all black. The evidence establishes a strong presumption that race was a motivating factor in the attacks. This is America?"
The Left stokes the fires of greed, hatred, and resentment by forcibly removing societal religious foundations. Without the fixed moral compass of the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, people descend into barbarism.
SOURCE
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In Lieu of Well-Reasoned Arguments, the Left Relies on Intimidation
Because the radical demands of groups like the American Civil Liberties Union run counter to common sense and the tenets of Western Civilization, they and their leftist allies and colleagues use fear, intimidation, and disinformation to accomplish their ends which generally mean a loss of liberty for everyone else. We see this in the way they rely on shame tactics, the court system, and behavior controls, like speech codes and “anti-bullying” regulations, to implement and protect their agenda.
Just think of how many times you’ve heard someone mention they wanted to say something about the blatant lawlessness and immorality in our culture, but they hesitated because they didn’t want to rock the boat—they didn’t want to disturb the status quo. All too often, this is because the totalitarians on the left have successfully levered sufficient shame to intimidate decent people into silence.
In other words, groups like NARAL and their media allies use shame to bring a strong man low enough to allow a weaker man to control him: shame takes the fight out of the dog.
For example, the left’s use of the court system is ubiquitous, and perhaps best exemplified through Roe v. Wade (1973), the case which made most state laws against abortion unenforceable.
Even now, the leftist American Atheists is suing to have a cross – a cross not made by human effort –removed from the National 9/11 Memorial in New York, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State are suing to shut down a proposed school voucher system in D.C.: a system aimed at delivering some of the students from the cycle of poverty and ignorance by allowing them to attend private schools where both the curriculum and environment are better. Because the vouchers could be used to attend private, Christian schools, Americans United for Separation for Church and State complains, “Vouchers…compel taxpayers to subsidize religion.” (As if they don’t know that the other option is to have government compel taxpayers to subsidize the anti-Christian/Jewish curriculum now rampant in government schools.)
The great irony here is that many of the aforementioned groups are among those who claim to do everything in the name of the people, yet it is they who frequently use the court system to bypass the people – and even sue to prevent elections – because they know their ideas lack popular support when put to the test.
And for those who dare brush aside the shame tactics or fight fire with fire in the courtroom, the left has enacted speech and anti-bullying codes that serve as more stringent forms of behavior control. Promoted by those like GLSEN and the ACLU, the speech codes are prevalent on high school and university campuses where even certain student-sponsored statements and phrases are disallowed unless uttered in a designated “free speech” area. And on the same campuses, diversity campaigns, and the “anti-bullying” campaigns that usually accompany them, result in the implementation of policies that actually create a caste system for those whose sensitivities are not protected from insult and discrimination, and that usually means a Christian ministry that wants to spread the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
One last point: these methods of intimidation are bolstered by the left’s use of cripplingly costly lawsuits, which go above and beyond their “normal” use of the court system to rid our landscape of crosses, references to Scripture, “In God We Trust” inscriptions, etc.
Frivolous lawsuit after lawsuit is filed against things like Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s call to voluntary prayer or any public mention of one’s faith by a political figure with the hope not simply of ending a day of prayer but of scaring small municipalities into scrubbing their speech free of any religious reference—or else. (For example, groups like the Freedom From Religion Foundation maintain an Internet link which exists solely for the purpose of reporting any “violators.”)
Reality is thus twisted and turned upon its head in a world where the left ignores the metaphysical while waging war on logic and tradition. In the end, they have to intimidate people into playing along or being silent because they lack arguments sufficient to convince us that their way is better.
SOURCE
*********************
ELSEWHERE
The war on lemonade: "America is a country founded on entrepreneurship and free enterprise. That’s why one of its most enduring childhood traditions is the lemonade stand. It teaches children initiative, about the value of money and how to earn it. Recently, however, children have been learning entirely different lessons -- that bureaucrats are in charge and you cross them at your peril. Bureaucrats have the power to pick winners and losers -- a power many are happy to exploit."
The Democratic Party and the language of bankruptcy: "What does a political regime do when its philosophy doesn’t work and is leading to ruin? It can’t scrap the philosophy, which is its raison d'etre and the basis of its power. Were it to chuck the philosophy, its core constituencies would abandon it. So instead it blames those who have most cogently pointed out the defects of the philosophy. It calls them liars and haters."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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I don't put up a lot of pictures on my blogs -- except for Greenie Watch. It has lots of graphs. But I think that some of the pictures I do put up are worth a second look. So when I get time I gather such pictures together in a "gallery". I have just put up the gallery for the first half of this year. You can access it here
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Weird Healthcare Regulation of the Day: No Coverage for Men With Breast Cancer
“Disease does not discriminate, but apparently Medicaid coverage does. A 26-year-old South Carolina tile-layer has found himself with breast cancer and out of luck for one reason: He is a man.
While breast cancer affects an estimated 2,000 men annually, Medicaid does not cover treatment of the disease in men,” reports the Daily Caller. “The South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services said that the discriminatory policy lies with the federal government. ‘We are again urging CMS [Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services] to reconsider,’ the South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement. ‘It’s a very clear example of how overly rigid federal regulations don’t serve the interests of the people we’re supposed to be helping.’”
The man with cancer, Raymond Johnson, is hardly an anomaly. There have been high-profile cases of men with breast cancer, like former Senator Ed Brooke (R-Mass.), the first popularly-elected black U.S. Senator. But the federal geniuses who are taking over our healthcare system don’t seem to read the paper.
The government justifies its actions by citing a regulation that bars covering men. But the regulation itself is unconstitutional. The government cannot engage in sex discrimination or sex-based classifications unless it has an “exceeding persuasive justification” that goes beyond mere administrative convenience or gender-based generalizations; it must show that any gender classification substantially advances important state interests; and the burden of showing the need for such discrimination is on the government, which must satisfy a “demanding” showing.
See the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Virginia (1995), which struck down VMI’s men-only policy, and cases like Craig v. Boren (1976), and Michigan Road Builders v. Milliken (1987), which applied similar principles to strike down gender classifications that harmed men.
SOURCE
***********************
What is "debt forgiveness"
While it is easy to come up with a standard definition, standard definitions seldom apply when a term enters the realm of politics and policy.
A recent article in the Washington Post cited economists who argue that slow economic growth is in our foreseeable future because we have run up so much mortgage debt. It will take years to de-leverage it. But economist Carmen Reinhart argued that there was a policy that could help:
Reinhart focuses on the housing market, where much of the debt is concentrated. “I ultimately think we have to wind up with some form of debt forgiveness,” she says.
Debt forgiveness sure sounds good, doesn’t it? Let’s remember, though, that it was melodious but deceptive rhetoric like “affordable housing” and “community reinvestment” that got us into this mess in the first place. Thus, it’s a good idea to look at what debt forgiveness will really mean.
First, who will be forgiven and who will do the forgiving? Presumably it will be banks that have to forgive those who have taken on a larger mortgage than they could afford. Yet if banks have to take a loss on those mortgages, they may try to make it up with higher interest rates on other mortgages, higher interest rates on credit cards, or more fees on checking accounts. That means that many people who have acted responsibly with their money will also be doing the forgiving.
Next, what if banks decide that they don’t want to forgive debt? Well, it’s generally not in the nature of politicians and other policymakers to let the private sector back out of a “good idea.” Likelier, it will be the type of “forgiving” that Chrysler’s secured bondholders got to do. In that case, “forgiveness” isn’t the right term since it implies an action that is voluntary.
The current mess was caused by people making bad choices because at the end of the day they could expect the government to rescue them. “Debt forgiveness” might only encourage more such behavior.
Nevertheless, it is nice-sounding rhetoric, so expect politicians to use it to gin up votes. Just be sure that when you hear them use that phrase, you know what they really mean is “using government to force banks and responsible borrowers to bail out irresponsible borrowers.”
SOURCE
*************************
An old controversy
I am no peacenik but I have always been disturbed and skeptical over the A-bombing of Japan by a Democrat President. Japan was already crushed by that time
According to most high-school history texts, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible but necessary tragedies. They "ended the war," and while they resulted in the deaths of as many as 250,000, they saved many thousands more. Of course a close examination of the facts reveals that none of this is true: Even the estimate for a full-scale invasion of Japan put the American death toll at only 46,000 (all combatant deaths, not civilians). Moreover, the Japanese government had been trying to surrender – balking only at the unconditionality the US side demanded, as they did not want to see their emperor dethroned and executed. Following the Japanese surrender however, the US government happily allowed the emperor to continue serving as a figurehead.
Even the United States Strategic Bombing Survey declared that,"… certainly prior to 31 December, 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November, 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated." Indeed, the devastation the US forces had wreaked upon Japan through conventional warfare (the infamous firebombing campaigns left as many as half a million dead) had already helped seal Japan’s defeat. The most generous interpretation possible of the motives for dropping the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that they served as a demonstration to the Soviet Union of US military might.
More HERE
*************************
Barbarism Comes from the Left
Barbarism comes from the Left. Socialism always leads to death and destruction – every time it is forced upon a society.
Socialist created barbarism is again rearing its evil head on the streets of Great Britain. The rioters are attacking and destroying symbols of Capitalism -- the products of personal hard work, including small businesses and family homes.
Socialism teaches that what others have earned is rightfully owed to those who do not care to exert the necessary effort to earn it by their own hard labors. The looters are stealing from private business and destroying what they cannot carry. Fire is a favorite destructive tool of those who are attacking and destroying that which is not theirs.
Arson, as recently as 1970, was confirmed to still be a capital offense in Great Britain. Arsonists were eligible for hanging. It seems British law no longer has a stomach for defending private property and innocent people. The discussions have descended to the level of whether or not to even use plastic bullets and water cannons.
Whatever happened to live ammunition? Shooting looters and arsonists on sight is how civilized societies once kept the wanton barbarism of the undisciplined in check.
A depraved and degenerate society gives the benefit of the doubt to criminals and punishes those who would dare to defend themselves. The British people have long since been disarmed by their nanny state government and would probably be jailed if they were to harm a rioting hooligan in self-defense.
The Left creates dependency which leads to anger and despair. The Left establishes an entitlement mentality in society, which leads to the resentment and hatred of those who dare to work hard and to achieve. The nanny government uses legalized theft to take the money and personal property of those who have the gumption to work and to use it to provide goods and services to able-bodied people who are too lazy to provide for themselves.
We see similar eruptions of barbarism in the United States. J. Christian Adams wrote:
"Consider the Wisconsin State Fair last week. The 911 tapes reveal a nightmare. “We’re outside the Wisconsin State Fair and there’s a white guy being beaten up by about 100 black people,” the panicked caller cries. “They’re jumping on our cars. . . . My mom just got attacked by a black mob.” Multiple eyewitnesses describe white fairgoers being pulled from cars and beaten by the Mob, all black. The evidence establishes a strong presumption that race was a motivating factor in the attacks. This is America?"
The Left stokes the fires of greed, hatred, and resentment by forcibly removing societal religious foundations. Without the fixed moral compass of the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, people descend into barbarism.
SOURCE
***************************
In Lieu of Well-Reasoned Arguments, the Left Relies on Intimidation
Because the radical demands of groups like the American Civil Liberties Union run counter to common sense and the tenets of Western Civilization, they and their leftist allies and colleagues use fear, intimidation, and disinformation to accomplish their ends which generally mean a loss of liberty for everyone else. We see this in the way they rely on shame tactics, the court system, and behavior controls, like speech codes and “anti-bullying” regulations, to implement and protect their agenda.
Just think of how many times you’ve heard someone mention they wanted to say something about the blatant lawlessness and immorality in our culture, but they hesitated because they didn’t want to rock the boat—they didn’t want to disturb the status quo. All too often, this is because the totalitarians on the left have successfully levered sufficient shame to intimidate decent people into silence.
In other words, groups like NARAL and their media allies use shame to bring a strong man low enough to allow a weaker man to control him: shame takes the fight out of the dog.
For example, the left’s use of the court system is ubiquitous, and perhaps best exemplified through Roe v. Wade (1973), the case which made most state laws against abortion unenforceable.
Even now, the leftist American Atheists is suing to have a cross – a cross not made by human effort –removed from the National 9/11 Memorial in New York, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State are suing to shut down a proposed school voucher system in D.C.: a system aimed at delivering some of the students from the cycle of poverty and ignorance by allowing them to attend private schools where both the curriculum and environment are better. Because the vouchers could be used to attend private, Christian schools, Americans United for Separation for Church and State complains, “Vouchers…compel taxpayers to subsidize religion.” (As if they don’t know that the other option is to have government compel taxpayers to subsidize the anti-Christian/Jewish curriculum now rampant in government schools.)
The great irony here is that many of the aforementioned groups are among those who claim to do everything in the name of the people, yet it is they who frequently use the court system to bypass the people – and even sue to prevent elections – because they know their ideas lack popular support when put to the test.
And for those who dare brush aside the shame tactics or fight fire with fire in the courtroom, the left has enacted speech and anti-bullying codes that serve as more stringent forms of behavior control. Promoted by those like GLSEN and the ACLU, the speech codes are prevalent on high school and university campuses where even certain student-sponsored statements and phrases are disallowed unless uttered in a designated “free speech” area. And on the same campuses, diversity campaigns, and the “anti-bullying” campaigns that usually accompany them, result in the implementation of policies that actually create a caste system for those whose sensitivities are not protected from insult and discrimination, and that usually means a Christian ministry that wants to spread the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
One last point: these methods of intimidation are bolstered by the left’s use of cripplingly costly lawsuits, which go above and beyond their “normal” use of the court system to rid our landscape of crosses, references to Scripture, “In God We Trust” inscriptions, etc.
Frivolous lawsuit after lawsuit is filed against things like Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s call to voluntary prayer or any public mention of one’s faith by a political figure with the hope not simply of ending a day of prayer but of scaring small municipalities into scrubbing their speech free of any religious reference—or else. (For example, groups like the Freedom From Religion Foundation maintain an Internet link which exists solely for the purpose of reporting any “violators.”)
Reality is thus twisted and turned upon its head in a world where the left ignores the metaphysical while waging war on logic and tradition. In the end, they have to intimidate people into playing along or being silent because they lack arguments sufficient to convince us that their way is better.
SOURCE
*********************
ELSEWHERE
The war on lemonade: "America is a country founded on entrepreneurship and free enterprise. That’s why one of its most enduring childhood traditions is the lemonade stand. It teaches children initiative, about the value of money and how to earn it. Recently, however, children have been learning entirely different lessons -- that bureaucrats are in charge and you cross them at your peril. Bureaucrats have the power to pick winners and losers -- a power many are happy to exploit."
The Democratic Party and the language of bankruptcy: "What does a political regime do when its philosophy doesn’t work and is leading to ruin? It can’t scrap the philosophy, which is its raison d'etre and the basis of its power. Were it to chuck the philosophy, its core constituencies would abandon it. So instead it blames those who have most cogently pointed out the defects of the philosophy. It calls them liars and haters."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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