Another ill effect of US government meddling with corn
This is a bit overstated but it does have a point
Dr. Seth M. Holmes, a professor of Health and Social Behavior at the University of California -- Berkeley, identified the source of the problem in his watershed 2006 paper, “An Ethnographic Study of the Social Context of Migrant Health in the United States.” In the study we learn that 95 percent of agricultural workers in the United States were born in Mexico and 52 percent are undocumented. Most researchers agree that inequalities in the global market make up the primary driving force of labor migration patterns. Mexico’s current minimum wage is US$4.60 per day. In contrast, the US federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, while it is $7.65 in Arizona, $8 in California, $7.50 in New Mexico, and $7.25 in Texas.
The 2003 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) deregulated all agricultural trade, except for corn and dairy products. The Mexican government complains that since NAFTA’s initial implementation in 1994, the United States has raised farm subsidies by 300 percent. As a result, Mexican corn farmers, who comprise the majority of the country’s agricultural sector, experienced drastic declines in the domestic price of their product. It should come as no surprise, then, that the United States began to experience an influx of Mexicans looking for employment in the latter half of the 1990s. Mexican farmers are now rightly protesting because they cannot compete against prices that are artificially deflated for the sake of protecting Americans from necessary market corrections.
Holmes explains that migrant and seasonal farm workers suffer the poorest health status within the agriculture industry. For example, migrant workers have increased rates of many chronic conditions, such as HIV infection, malnutrition, anemia, hypertension, diabetes, anxiety, sterility, blood disorders, and abnormalities in liver and kidney function. This population has an increased incidence of acute sicknesses such as urinary tract and kidney infections, lung infections, heat stroke, anthrax, encephalitis, rabies, and tetanus. Tuberculosis prevalence is six times greater in this population than in the general United States population. Finally, Holmes reports, children of migrant farm workers show high rates of malnutrition, vision problems, dental problems, anemia, and excess blood lead levels.
Economically speaking, Mexico's central bank recently announced that the $22.7 billion in remittances that Mexican migrant workers sent home from the United States in 2011 increased by 6.86 percent over the previous year. Remittances are Mexico's second-largest source of foreign income following oil exports. Nearly all of that the money comes from the United States, with a Mexican citizen population of 12 million.
Can you imagine what would happen if the United States had no farm subsidies, Mexican farms were flourishing, and $22.7 billion was generated within Mexico’s economy to catalyze more wealth creating opportunities? We can only dream at present, but one thing is for certain: Mexican migrant workers would be far better off. As such, through federal corn farm subsidies, America’s government is morally culpable for the oppression, dehumanization, and poor health of Mexican migrant workers.
SOURCE
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Some inequalities are inevitable
Rick Santorum's speech at the Detroit Economic Club stirred a bit of controversy when he said: "I'm not about equality of result when it comes to income inequality. There is income inequality in America. There always has been, and hopefully – and I do say that – there always will be." That kind of statement, though having merit, should not be made to people who have little or no understanding. Let's look at inequality.
Kay S. Hymowitz's article "Why the Gender Gap Won't Go Away. Ever," in City Journal (Summer 2011), shows that female doctors earn only 64 percent of the income that male doctors earn. What should be done about that? It turns out that only 16 percent of surgeons are women but 50 percent of pediatricians are women. Even though surgeons have many more years of education and training than do pediatricians, should Congress equalize their salaries or make pediatricians become surgeons?
Wage inequality is everywhere. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Asian men and women earn more than white men and women. Female cafeteria attendants earn more than their male counterparts. Females who are younger than 30 and have never been married earn salaries 8 percent higher than males of the same description. Among women who graduated from college during 1992-93, by 2003 more than one-fifth were no longer in the workforce, and another 17 percent were working part time. That's to be compared with only 2 percent of men in either category. Hymowitz cites several studies showing significant career choice and lifestyle differences between men and women that result in income inequality.
There are other inequalities that ought to be addressed. With all of the excitement about New York Knick Jeremy Lin's rising stardom, nobody questions league domination by blacks, who are a mere 13 percent of our population but constitute 80 percent of NBA players and are the highest-paid ones. It's not much better in the NFL, with blacks being 65 percent of its players. Colleges have made diversity their primary calling, but watch any basketball game and you'd be hard-put to find white players in roles other than bench warming. Worse than that, Japanese, Chinese and American Indian players aren't even recruited for bench warming.
There's inequality in most jobs. According to 2010 BLS data, the following jobs contain 1 percent female workers or less: boilermaking, brickmasonry, stonemasonry, septic tank servicing, sewer pipe cleaning and working with reinforcing iron and rebar. Maybe the reason female workers aren't in these occupations is that too many are in other occupations. Females are 97 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers, 80 percent of social workers, 82 percent of librarians and 92 percent of dietitians and nutritionists and registered nurses.
Anyone with one ounce of brains can see the problem and solution. Congress has permitted – and even fostered – a misallocation of people by race, sex and ethnicity. Courts have consistently concluded that "gross" disparities are probative of a pattern and practice of discrimination. So what to do? One remedy that Congress might consider is to require females, who are overrepresented in fields such as preschool and kindergarten teaching, to become boilermakers and brickmasons and mandate that male boilermakers and brickmasons become preschool and kindergarten teachers until both of their percentages are equal to their percentages in the population. You say, "Williams, that would be totalitarianism!" But if Americans accept that Congress can make us buy health insurance whether we want to or not, how much more totalitarian would it be for Congress to allocate jobs in the name of social equality and the good of our nation?
Nobel laureate Milton Friedman said: "A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both." Equality before the general rules of law is the only kind of equality conducive to liberty that can be secured without destroying liberty.
SOURCE
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Leftists have got a lot of hating to do
One good example is Mariellen Jewers offering 5 Tips to Being a Responsible Consumer to her fellow progressives. Here's a quick snapshot.
1. Don't shop Walmart. They won't unionize. But progressives never quite tell us whether the majority of Walmart employees are covered by their working spouse's benefits or how many use their Walmart training to move up to better jobs.
Walmart's first union-negotiated contract (in China) "resulted in an 8% pay increase for workers," yet progressives never consider if this means an 8% markup on prices for everyone, including Walmart employees themselves, and for the poor for whom they express so much unending angst.
2. Buying Brawny paper towels generates profits for the libertarian Koch brothers who lobby against climate change and its government-imposed regulations, but Seventh Generation paper towels are recycled and "has environmentally friendly practices." So progressives must mindlessly accept climate change? Has Al Gore been officially canonized?
3. Tom’s of Maine is part of Colgate-Palmolive who isn't environmentally pure but Arm & Hammer is, so always buy environmentally good products, including, apparently, those mercury-filled light bulbs.
4. "Shoppers who get a latte with anti-minimum wage rhetoric" (whatever that means) pay the salary of Whole Foods' CEO John Mackey, "an unabashed libertarian." So libertarians are definitely evil in Jewers' personal catechism. (Note to libertarians: Don't try to explain how a minimum wage harms the poor that progressives say they're concerned about. They neither comprehend nor care about the simple logic of it, they believe in it because it "feels right" to them.)
5. AT&T lobbying funnels millions into John Boehner's pockets but Credo Mobile’s lobbying funnels millions into "progressive organizations," thereby making lobbying okay.
So all non-progressive corporations are evil if they lobby for special laws or support wrong politicians, but progressives don't think the same way about "their" corporatist cronies.
Libertarians hold that all crony corporatism is evil because they and their political cronies seek power over all of society.
The only solution is the complete separation of government and the marketplace, thereby creating a true free market, not crony corporatism, not Marxist-defined capitalism, not progressive master-planned technocratic authoritarianism, not socialism, not fascism.
SOURCE
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What Is the Male Marriage Premium?
Married men make a lot more money than single men. In the NLSY [National Longitudinal Survey of Youth], married men make 44% extra, even after controlling for education, experience, IQ, race, and number of children. How is this possible?
There are three competing economic explanations. Each of the three may be partly true.
Explanation #1: Ability bias. The causal effect of marriage on male income is smaller than it seems. Even after adjusting for all the previously listed control variables, men with higher income are simply more likely to be married. Maybe income makes it easier to attract a spouse; maybe Puritan attitudes lead to both income and marriage. In a pure ability bias story, marriage has zero causal effect on earnings.
Explanation #2: Human capital. Marriage causally increases male income by making men more productive workers. Maybe marriage makes men work more hours; maybe it makes them work harder per hour; maybe it makes them control their tempers better; maybe all of these and more. In a pure human capital story, marriage actually causes men to become 44% more productive.
Explanation #3: Signaling. Marriage causally increases male income by changing employers' beliefs about worker productivity. As long as married men happen to be more productive, and employers can't costlessly see their productivity, employers will rationally (and profitably!) pay married men more. In a pure signaling story, marriage makes employers expect you to be 44% more productive, but has zero causal effect on productivity.
Economists who study the male marriage premium usually conclude that much of it is causal. This paper, for example uses shotgun weddings to isolate the causal effect of marriage on income, and finds:
"Using the statistical experiment of premarital conception as a potentially exogenous cause of marriage, about 90% of the marriage premium remains after controlling for selection."
So what is the male marriage premium? I'm still deciding, but here's my tentative opinion.
1. The shotgun wedding paper notwithstanding, I think that about half of the marriage premium stems from ability bias. Men who marry are just more conscientious, ambitious, and cooperative, and the NLSY lacks good measures of these traits. This remains true even when men have a shotgun wedding; the stand-up guys go through with the wedding, while the slackers skulk away.
2. At least in the modern American economy, the signaling channel explains no more than 10% (not 10 percentage-points) of the male marriage premium. My reasoning: When employers make hiring decisions, they heavily scrutinize educational credentials, but barely notice marital status. I can easily believe that the signaling channel was far more important in the past; when almost every man marries, the failure to marry raises a red flag. But nowadays?
My main doubt is that I know little about hiring in more traditional occupations and regions of the country. Do employers in Kansas still raise their eyebrows when they see that a 35-year-old male applicant is single? What about CBN?
3. If the male marriage premium is 50% ability bias, and less than 10% signaling, then human capital explains the rest: 40-50%. Much of this effect probably reflects longer work hours and lower unemployment. But it's quite plausible that marriage causally increases hourly productivity by 10%.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
CO: Polis mocks state’s new DEA chief: "Democratic Rep. Jared Polis of Colorado on Wednesday poked fun at his state’s new head drug enforcement agent, joking that the Drug Enforcement Agency’s new motto was 'protecting America from mold and water damage.' Barbra Roach, the chief of Denver’s Drug Enforcement Administration, recently told the Denver Post that medical marijuana was dangerous because it caused 'mold and water damage' in the homes of people who grew it."
Study: Upper classes “more likely to lie and cheat”: "Members of the upper classes are more likely to lie, cheat and even break the law than people from less privileged backgrounds, a study has found. In contrast, members of the 'lower' classes appeared more likely to display the traditional attributes of a gentleman. It suggests that the traditional notion of the upper class 'cad' or 'bounder' could have a scientific basis."
The insanity of health insurance: "It is insane that we get our health care from our employers. That happens because we have given a tax advantage to in-kind compensation such as health care. It’s a horrible idea and it leads people to complain about our employers deciding what health care we can receive. Our employers are just a conduit for government mandates, rent-seeking and inefficiency related to health care."
The price of employment “fairness”: "If you receive an application for a position requiring a lot of driving or operating heavy machinery, and the applicant has a known history of alcohol or substance abuse, you’d probably be justified in turning the applicant down for the job, right? You probably already know the answer to this, but: wrong."
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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)
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Wednesday, February 29, 2012
America has gone insane: Church Ordered to Stop Giving Away Free Water.
The land of the free has become the land of the Fascists. I don't think even Hitler and Mussolini were this keen on regulation
A Louisiana church was ordered to stop giving away free water along Mardi Gras parade routes because they did not have the proper permits. “We were given a cease and desist order,” said Matt Tipton, pastor of Hope Church in Metairie, LA. “We had no idea we were breaking the law.”
Tipton said volunteers from his church were handing out free coffee and free bottles of water at two locations along a Mardi Gras parade route when they were stopped by Jefferson Parish officials. The church volunteers were cited for failing to secure an occupational license and for failure to register for a sales tax.
“It kind of threw me for a loop because they weren’t in uniform,” he said. “But once they pulled the ticket out, I was conviniced.” “We apologized,” Tipton said. “We didn’t know the rules.”
The church had purchased about five thousand bottles of water labeled with the church’s name and website address. They gave the remaining bottles to a local drug rehab center.
A spokesman for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office confirmed to Fox News that the church had violated the law. The spokesman said the church was initially given a verbal warning – and then a written warning. He said it was not a citation – even though the warning clearly stated it was a “vendor warning citation.”
The sheriff’s department said there was “no validity to their complaint whatever their complaint may be.”
Ken Klukowski, a senior legal fellow at the Family Research Council, said the citation was absurd. “This is a perfect example of why so many people have a problem with big government,” Klukowski said. “The idea that a church needs a permit to hand out water to thirsty people is unfortunate.”
He said it’s hard to believe that the government would get in the way of citizens helping each other out – “especially a church which was just doing its duty to be good Samaritans and help those in need.”
Pastor Tipton said he sent an email to city leaders explaining that they were just trying to show their love to the city “and to serve the city.”
He offered to provide volunteers to clean up trash or even clean portable toilets. However, city leaders did not initially respond and Tipton said he was given the runaround – told to go through three different department heads.
Klukowski said the incident is outrageous. “The idea that you need an additional level of bureaucracy stopping a church from showing kindness to members of the community is a perfect example of a waste of taxpayer money and resources,” he said.
SOURCE
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Pettiness and Mud
Thomas Sowell
The only good news for the Republicans coming out of the seemingly endless presidential candidate "debates" is that some Republican leaders are now belatedly thinking about how they can avoid a repetition of this debacle in future elections.
What could they possibly have been thinking about, in the first place, when they agreed to a format based on short sound bites for dealing with major complex issues, and with media journalists -- 90 percent of them Democrats -- picking the topics?
The conduct of the candidates made things worse. In a world with a record-breaking national debt and Iran moving toward creating nuclear weapons, they bickered over earmarks and condoms. I am against earmarks, but earmarks don't rank among the first hundred most serious problems facing this country.
Mud-slinging has replaced rational discussions of differences on serious issues -- not only during the debates themselves, where the moderators sic the candidates on each other, but even more so in the massive television character assassination ads in which Romney supporters seem to specialize.
Groups supporting Mitt Romney have turned character assassination almost into a science. You take something that most people, outside of politics, do not understand and twist it to sound terrible to those who are unaware of the facts.
Blanketing Florida with misleading ads attacking Newt Gingrich won that state for Romney, after Gingrich scored an upset victory in South Carolina. The ads made a big deal out of charges that the former Speaker broke tax laws -- charges that the Internal Revenue Service exonerated him of, after a long investigation.
When Rick Santorum suddenly surged after his upset victories in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado, the Romney character assassination machine attacked him for having voted in the Senate for various things that conservatives don't like.
But, when it comes to voting in Congress, seldom do you get a pure bill that you can agree with in all its parts. If you never voted for bills containing anything you didn't like, you might get very little voting done.
But, if it is a bill to provide American soldiers with the equipment they need to fight a war, and somebody has put into it an earmark for a federal boondoggle in his district, are you going to vote against that bill and let American soldiers go into battle without all the equipment and supplies they need?
Taking advantage of the public's lack of knowledge is something that Barack Obama already does very effectively in his political propaganda. But is that something the Republicans want to imitate?
It has worked during the primary season, when the media are perfectly happy to see Republicans destroying each other. But it will not work in the general election campaign, when even truthful criticisms of the president will have a hard time getting out through the media, which hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil when it comes to Obama.
The pettiness and mud-slinging during the Republican primary campaigns is especially irresponsible during a time when there are very serious problems, at home and abroad, that need to be addressed in a serious way.
Discussions of particular issues, one by one, often miss the larger point that goes beyond the issue at hand -- namely, this administration's steady movement toward arbitrary government that circumvents the restrictions of the Constitution.
Nothing demonstrates this more starkly than the president's arbitrary power to waive the requirement that employers have to provide ObamaCare coverage for their workers. That can be the difference between paying, or not paying, millions of dollars. What does that mean for anybody's other rights?
What does freedom of speech mean if criticizing the administration can mean you get no exemption, while your competitor who keeps quiet, or who praises the administration, gets a waiver? The Constitution requires "equal protection of the laws" for a reason.
And what about nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran, the world's leading sponsor of international terrorism? Is that not worth discussing in something other than sound bites?
SOURCE
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Christian Conservatives Guard Religious Liberty
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution contains two clauses addressing religious liberty: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
It's a shame that in their modern misguided zeal to read the first clause as mandating a complete separation of church and state, liberals do great damage to the second clause and defeat the overarching purpose of both: ensuring religious liberty.
Ever since the so-called Christian right began its organized activism during the 1980s, liberals (and some others) have become increasingly nervous about (and critical of) Christian influence in politics, let alone the public square.
This issue has reared its controversial head during the Republican presidential primary because of candidate Rick Santorum's unashamed and outspoken commitment to his Catholic faith and Christian values. It's not just leftists who are complaining; many on the right are, as well.
For years, there has been an uneasy alliance inside the Republican "big tent," between those who embrace social conservatism and those who would just as soon see it deleted from the party platform. With our anxiety about the national debt, economic issues are naturally at the forefront of people's concerns. Some believe that those who are still articulating social issues in this period of crisis are at least annoying and possibly detrimental to the cause of electing a Republican who can build a wide enough coalition to defeat the primary culprit in America's race to bankruptcy: President Barack Obama.
I think it's a false choice to say that we conservatives must pick between economic issues and social ones. It's also a mistake to believe there is a clear dichotomy between economic conservatives and social conservatives. As I've written before, Reagan conservatism is a three-legged stool -- economic, social and national defense issues -- and the three are compatible and probably embraced by most Republicans.
Our center-right tent is big enough to include libertarians, economic conservatives who either are indifferent to social issues or consider themselves socially liberal, and so-called neoconservatives, who tend to emphasize national defense issues over the other two -- although they might reject that characterization. We all must unite to defeat President Obama.
But with Santorum's rise in the polls, many are expressing their anxiety about his perceived religiosity and are depicting him as a threat to religious liberty.
Some are abuzz about his interview this past weekend with George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week," in which Santorum stated that he does not believe separation of church and state is absolute. He stated that the First Amendment's free exercise clause guarantees that the church and its members have as much right to try to influence policy as anyone else. And he's absolutely correct.
Not only are the words "separation of church and state" not contained in the Constitution but this phrase from Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists does not mean what many people say it does.
The First Amendment's establishment clause says that Congress shall not establish a national church, because the Framers didn't want the government telling us whom or how to worship. Their overarching concern, then, was protecting religious liberty. The free exercise clause also strengthens the religious freedom guarantee.
The point is that both clauses are dedicated to religious liberty, and neither purports to ban religious expression from the public square or from the mouths of public officials.
No matter how expansively one reads the First Amendment's establishment clause, no one, including Jefferson, would have made the ludicrous argument that presidents (or other public officials) must leave their worldview at the door of the White House and govern apart from it, as if that would be possible. Advocating policy positions based on one's worldview is light-years away from establishing -- or even supporting -- a national religion.
Christian conservatives are not the ones demonstrating intolerance and threatening the freedoms of religion and religious expression. They would never consider being so presumptuous and tyrannical as to try to silence those who disagree with them, ban them from the public square, or advance the spurious argument that they are not entitled to advocate policies based on their worldview.
Ironically, it is probably the secular left that is most responsible for the dramatic rise and persistent influence of the Christian political right in politics, with their gross judicial activism in abortion jurisprudence and their judicial tyranny coercing states to accept same-sex marriage against the will of the people. They are the ones who demonize as "homophobes" and "bigots" those seeking to preserve traditional marriage. Christian conservatives don't try to shut them up, but many are now trying to shut us up -- through the specious application of the First Amendment, no less.
The last people anyone needs to fear on religious liberty are Christian conservatives, who are its strongest guardians. Above all others, they will fight to preserve everyone's right to express and practice his religion or non-religion as he pleases.
SOURCE
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The God Gap
There have been many "gaps" in modern politics. There is the gender gap, the generation gap and now the God gap, which is the gulf between people who take God's instructions seriously and those who don't. Which side of the gap you're on could influence your vote. The God gap is growing wider.
I asked Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum about this. In a telephone interview with me, Santorum, whose rhetoric is loaded with religious and cultural language, said, "While (such language) may be upsetting to some, there's a hunger out there for talking about what's true."
How, then, would he explain a recent New York Times story that reported for the first time in our history, that "more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage." Santorum acknowledged, "I'm probably talking to Republican audiences, so it's a little different. I'm not talking to the general audience at this point. Marriage is on the decline. The culture is changing."
The problem for presidential candidates -- and for President Obama, who occasionally appeals to Scripture to justify his policies -- is that fewer people are listening to the voice of God, or to voices claiming to speak for Him.
Not too long ago, a report about growing numbers of out-of-wedlock births would have produced sermons calling for repentance and set revival fires burning in churches across the land. Today, there's only the sound of silence.
The Times story, citing government data compiled by Child Trends, a Washington research group, noted that the shift in the makeup of American families was likely to produce children who face "...elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems." Yawn.
How is this social virus to be cured when older religious people speak a language and advocate a belief system that either many younger people don't understand, or do not wish to hear?
The failure to communicate across the God gap brings to mind something former president George H.W. Bush said about broccoli. Bush said his mother made him eat broccoli, but he never liked it. When he became president, he said it meant he no longer had to eat it.
So people who might have been taken to religious services as children are now grown up and many feel they no longer have to "stomach" faith, or conform to a standard outside themselves. Some who grew up in a secular household are spiritually deaf, if not biblically illiterate. A general cultural morality is fast disappearing.
The God gap will not be shrunk by politicians, though to rally "the base" they often talk as if it can. The goal of cultural transformation has historically been the work of clergy, whose "hellfire" messages scared people awake from their comfortable and what used to be called "sinful" lives. But this was before having a baby without a husband became an acceptable thing to do.
Too many of today's clergy seem preoccupied with building personal empires and monstrous buildings. They go on costly TV instead of investing in the less visible "work of the church," which is people, not brick and mortar. The first Christians met in homes, not megachurches. They took care of each other and did not rely on government to sustain them. Many pastors today dislike sermons about sin and repentance because it makes people uncomfortable. And so we get instead the discomfort of social decay and an ever-widening God gap.
Materialism and pleasure contribute to social rot. Social rot precedes national decline. These have become our twin false gods; contemporary "golden calves," as unable to produce satisfaction as the idols of biblical times. Most politicians won't urge restraint or personal sacrifice and too many ministers allow the secular world to set their agenda.
And so the God gap widens and the wisdom and understanding of the older generation goes unheard and unheeded.
SOURCE
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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 land of the free has become the land of the Fascists. I don't think even Hitler and Mussolini were this keen on regulation
A Louisiana church was ordered to stop giving away free water along Mardi Gras parade routes because they did not have the proper permits. “We were given a cease and desist order,” said Matt Tipton, pastor of Hope Church in Metairie, LA. “We had no idea we were breaking the law.”
Tipton said volunteers from his church were handing out free coffee and free bottles of water at two locations along a Mardi Gras parade route when they were stopped by Jefferson Parish officials. The church volunteers were cited for failing to secure an occupational license and for failure to register for a sales tax.
“It kind of threw me for a loop because they weren’t in uniform,” he said. “But once they pulled the ticket out, I was conviniced.” “We apologized,” Tipton said. “We didn’t know the rules.”
The church had purchased about five thousand bottles of water labeled with the church’s name and website address. They gave the remaining bottles to a local drug rehab center.
A spokesman for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office confirmed to Fox News that the church had violated the law. The spokesman said the church was initially given a verbal warning – and then a written warning. He said it was not a citation – even though the warning clearly stated it was a “vendor warning citation.”
The sheriff’s department said there was “no validity to their complaint whatever their complaint may be.”
Ken Klukowski, a senior legal fellow at the Family Research Council, said the citation was absurd. “This is a perfect example of why so many people have a problem with big government,” Klukowski said. “The idea that a church needs a permit to hand out water to thirsty people is unfortunate.”
He said it’s hard to believe that the government would get in the way of citizens helping each other out – “especially a church which was just doing its duty to be good Samaritans and help those in need.”
Pastor Tipton said he sent an email to city leaders explaining that they were just trying to show their love to the city “and to serve the city.”
He offered to provide volunteers to clean up trash or even clean portable toilets. However, city leaders did not initially respond and Tipton said he was given the runaround – told to go through three different department heads.
Klukowski said the incident is outrageous. “The idea that you need an additional level of bureaucracy stopping a church from showing kindness to members of the community is a perfect example of a waste of taxpayer money and resources,” he said.
SOURCE
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Pettiness and Mud
Thomas Sowell
The only good news for the Republicans coming out of the seemingly endless presidential candidate "debates" is that some Republican leaders are now belatedly thinking about how they can avoid a repetition of this debacle in future elections.
What could they possibly have been thinking about, in the first place, when they agreed to a format based on short sound bites for dealing with major complex issues, and with media journalists -- 90 percent of them Democrats -- picking the topics?
The conduct of the candidates made things worse. In a world with a record-breaking national debt and Iran moving toward creating nuclear weapons, they bickered over earmarks and condoms. I am against earmarks, but earmarks don't rank among the first hundred most serious problems facing this country.
Mud-slinging has replaced rational discussions of differences on serious issues -- not only during the debates themselves, where the moderators sic the candidates on each other, but even more so in the massive television character assassination ads in which Romney supporters seem to specialize.
Groups supporting Mitt Romney have turned character assassination almost into a science. You take something that most people, outside of politics, do not understand and twist it to sound terrible to those who are unaware of the facts.
Blanketing Florida with misleading ads attacking Newt Gingrich won that state for Romney, after Gingrich scored an upset victory in South Carolina. The ads made a big deal out of charges that the former Speaker broke tax laws -- charges that the Internal Revenue Service exonerated him of, after a long investigation.
When Rick Santorum suddenly surged after his upset victories in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado, the Romney character assassination machine attacked him for having voted in the Senate for various things that conservatives don't like.
But, when it comes to voting in Congress, seldom do you get a pure bill that you can agree with in all its parts. If you never voted for bills containing anything you didn't like, you might get very little voting done.
But, if it is a bill to provide American soldiers with the equipment they need to fight a war, and somebody has put into it an earmark for a federal boondoggle in his district, are you going to vote against that bill and let American soldiers go into battle without all the equipment and supplies they need?
Taking advantage of the public's lack of knowledge is something that Barack Obama already does very effectively in his political propaganda. But is that something the Republicans want to imitate?
It has worked during the primary season, when the media are perfectly happy to see Republicans destroying each other. But it will not work in the general election campaign, when even truthful criticisms of the president will have a hard time getting out through the media, which hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil when it comes to Obama.
The pettiness and mud-slinging during the Republican primary campaigns is especially irresponsible during a time when there are very serious problems, at home and abroad, that need to be addressed in a serious way.
Discussions of particular issues, one by one, often miss the larger point that goes beyond the issue at hand -- namely, this administration's steady movement toward arbitrary government that circumvents the restrictions of the Constitution.
Nothing demonstrates this more starkly than the president's arbitrary power to waive the requirement that employers have to provide ObamaCare coverage for their workers. That can be the difference between paying, or not paying, millions of dollars. What does that mean for anybody's other rights?
What does freedom of speech mean if criticizing the administration can mean you get no exemption, while your competitor who keeps quiet, or who praises the administration, gets a waiver? The Constitution requires "equal protection of the laws" for a reason.
And what about nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran, the world's leading sponsor of international terrorism? Is that not worth discussing in something other than sound bites?
SOURCE
***********************
Christian Conservatives Guard Religious Liberty
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution contains two clauses addressing religious liberty: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
It's a shame that in their modern misguided zeal to read the first clause as mandating a complete separation of church and state, liberals do great damage to the second clause and defeat the overarching purpose of both: ensuring religious liberty.
Ever since the so-called Christian right began its organized activism during the 1980s, liberals (and some others) have become increasingly nervous about (and critical of) Christian influence in politics, let alone the public square.
This issue has reared its controversial head during the Republican presidential primary because of candidate Rick Santorum's unashamed and outspoken commitment to his Catholic faith and Christian values. It's not just leftists who are complaining; many on the right are, as well.
For years, there has been an uneasy alliance inside the Republican "big tent," between those who embrace social conservatism and those who would just as soon see it deleted from the party platform. With our anxiety about the national debt, economic issues are naturally at the forefront of people's concerns. Some believe that those who are still articulating social issues in this period of crisis are at least annoying and possibly detrimental to the cause of electing a Republican who can build a wide enough coalition to defeat the primary culprit in America's race to bankruptcy: President Barack Obama.
I think it's a false choice to say that we conservatives must pick between economic issues and social ones. It's also a mistake to believe there is a clear dichotomy between economic conservatives and social conservatives. As I've written before, Reagan conservatism is a three-legged stool -- economic, social and national defense issues -- and the three are compatible and probably embraced by most Republicans.
Our center-right tent is big enough to include libertarians, economic conservatives who either are indifferent to social issues or consider themselves socially liberal, and so-called neoconservatives, who tend to emphasize national defense issues over the other two -- although they might reject that characterization. We all must unite to defeat President Obama.
But with Santorum's rise in the polls, many are expressing their anxiety about his perceived religiosity and are depicting him as a threat to religious liberty.
Some are abuzz about his interview this past weekend with George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week," in which Santorum stated that he does not believe separation of church and state is absolute. He stated that the First Amendment's free exercise clause guarantees that the church and its members have as much right to try to influence policy as anyone else. And he's absolutely correct.
Not only are the words "separation of church and state" not contained in the Constitution but this phrase from Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists does not mean what many people say it does.
The First Amendment's establishment clause says that Congress shall not establish a national church, because the Framers didn't want the government telling us whom or how to worship. Their overarching concern, then, was protecting religious liberty. The free exercise clause also strengthens the religious freedom guarantee.
The point is that both clauses are dedicated to religious liberty, and neither purports to ban religious expression from the public square or from the mouths of public officials.
No matter how expansively one reads the First Amendment's establishment clause, no one, including Jefferson, would have made the ludicrous argument that presidents (or other public officials) must leave their worldview at the door of the White House and govern apart from it, as if that would be possible. Advocating policy positions based on one's worldview is light-years away from establishing -- or even supporting -- a national religion.
Christian conservatives are not the ones demonstrating intolerance and threatening the freedoms of religion and religious expression. They would never consider being so presumptuous and tyrannical as to try to silence those who disagree with them, ban them from the public square, or advance the spurious argument that they are not entitled to advocate policies based on their worldview.
Ironically, it is probably the secular left that is most responsible for the dramatic rise and persistent influence of the Christian political right in politics, with their gross judicial activism in abortion jurisprudence and their judicial tyranny coercing states to accept same-sex marriage against the will of the people. They are the ones who demonize as "homophobes" and "bigots" those seeking to preserve traditional marriage. Christian conservatives don't try to shut them up, but many are now trying to shut us up -- through the specious application of the First Amendment, no less.
The last people anyone needs to fear on religious liberty are Christian conservatives, who are its strongest guardians. Above all others, they will fight to preserve everyone's right to express and practice his religion or non-religion as he pleases.
SOURCE
************************
The God Gap
There have been many "gaps" in modern politics. There is the gender gap, the generation gap and now the God gap, which is the gulf between people who take God's instructions seriously and those who don't. Which side of the gap you're on could influence your vote. The God gap is growing wider.
I asked Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum about this. In a telephone interview with me, Santorum, whose rhetoric is loaded with religious and cultural language, said, "While (such language) may be upsetting to some, there's a hunger out there for talking about what's true."
How, then, would he explain a recent New York Times story that reported for the first time in our history, that "more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage." Santorum acknowledged, "I'm probably talking to Republican audiences, so it's a little different. I'm not talking to the general audience at this point. Marriage is on the decline. The culture is changing."
The problem for presidential candidates -- and for President Obama, who occasionally appeals to Scripture to justify his policies -- is that fewer people are listening to the voice of God, or to voices claiming to speak for Him.
Not too long ago, a report about growing numbers of out-of-wedlock births would have produced sermons calling for repentance and set revival fires burning in churches across the land. Today, there's only the sound of silence.
The Times story, citing government data compiled by Child Trends, a Washington research group, noted that the shift in the makeup of American families was likely to produce children who face "...elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems." Yawn.
How is this social virus to be cured when older religious people speak a language and advocate a belief system that either many younger people don't understand, or do not wish to hear?
The failure to communicate across the God gap brings to mind something former president George H.W. Bush said about broccoli. Bush said his mother made him eat broccoli, but he never liked it. When he became president, he said it meant he no longer had to eat it.
So people who might have been taken to religious services as children are now grown up and many feel they no longer have to "stomach" faith, or conform to a standard outside themselves. Some who grew up in a secular household are spiritually deaf, if not biblically illiterate. A general cultural morality is fast disappearing.
The God gap will not be shrunk by politicians, though to rally "the base" they often talk as if it can. The goal of cultural transformation has historically been the work of clergy, whose "hellfire" messages scared people awake from their comfortable and what used to be called "sinful" lives. But this was before having a baby without a husband became an acceptable thing to do.
Too many of today's clergy seem preoccupied with building personal empires and monstrous buildings. They go on costly TV instead of investing in the less visible "work of the church," which is people, not brick and mortar. The first Christians met in homes, not megachurches. They took care of each other and did not rely on government to sustain them. Many pastors today dislike sermons about sin and repentance because it makes people uncomfortable. And so we get instead the discomfort of social decay and an ever-widening God gap.
Materialism and pleasure contribute to social rot. Social rot precedes national decline. These have become our twin false gods; contemporary "golden calves," as unable to produce satisfaction as the idols of biblical times. Most politicians won't urge restraint or personal sacrifice and too many ministers allow the secular world to set their agenda.
And so the God gap widens and the wisdom and understanding of the older generation goes unheard and unheeded.
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)
****************************
America has gone insane: Church Ordered to Stop Giving Away Free Water.
The land of the free has become the land of the Fascists. I don't think even Hitler and Mussolini were this keen on regulation
A Louisiana church was ordered to stop giving away free water along Mardi Gras parade routes because they did not have the proper permits. “We were given a cease and desist order,” said Matt Tipton, pastor of Hope Church in Metairie, LA. “We had no idea we were breaking the law.”
Tipton said volunteers from his church were handing out free coffee and free bottles of water at two locations along a Mardi Gras parade route when they were stopped by Jefferson Parish officials. The church volunteers were cited for failing to secure an occupational license and for failure to register for a sales tax.
“It kind of threw me for a loop because they weren’t in uniform,” he said. “But once they pulled the ticket out, I was conviniced.” “We apologized,” Tipton said. “We didn’t know the rules.”
The church had purchased about five thousand bottles of water labeled with the church’s name and website address. They gave the remaining bottles to a local drug rehab center.
A spokesman for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office confirmed to Fox News that the church had violated the law. The spokesman said the church was initially given a verbal warning – and then a written warning. He said it was not a citation – even though the warning clearly stated it was a “vendor warning citation.”
The sheriff’s department said there was “no validity to their complaint whatever their complaint may be.”
Ken Klukowski, a senior legal fellow at the Family Research Council, said the citation was absurd. “This is a perfect example of why so many people have a problem with big government,” Klukowski said. “The idea that a church needs a permit to hand out water to thirsty people is unfortunate.”
He said it’s hard to believe that the government would get in the way of citizens helping each other out – “especially a church which was just doing its duty to be good Samaritans and help those in need.”
Pastor Tipton said he sent an email to city leaders explaining that they were just trying to show their love to the city “and to serve the city.”
He offered to provide volunteers to clean up trash or even clean portable toilets. However, city leaders did not initially respond and Tipton said he was given the runaround – told to go through three different department heads.
Klukowski said the incident is outrageous. “The idea that you need an additional level of bureaucracy stopping a church from showing kindness to members of the community is a perfect example of a waste of taxpayer money and resources,” he said.
SOURCE
***********************
Pettiness and Mud
Thomas Sowell
The only good news for the Republicans coming out of the seemingly endless presidential candidate "debates" is that some Republican leaders are now belatedly thinking about how they can avoid a repetition of this debacle in future elections.
What could they possibly have been thinking about, in the first place, when they agreed to a format based on short sound bites for dealing with major complex issues, and with media journalists -- 90 percent of them Democrats -- picking the topics?
The conduct of the candidates made things worse. In a world with a record-breaking national debt and Iran moving toward creating nuclear weapons, they bickered over earmarks and condoms. I am against earmarks, but earmarks don't rank among the first hundred most serious problems facing this country.
Mud-slinging has replaced rational discussions of differences on serious issues -- not only during the debates themselves, where the moderators sic the candidates on each other, but even more so in the massive television character assassination ads in which Romney supporters seem to specialize.
Groups supporting Mitt Romney have turned character assassination almost into a science. You take something that most people, outside of politics, do not understand and twist it to sound terrible to those who are unaware of the facts.
Blanketing Florida with misleading ads attacking Newt Gingrich won that state for Romney, after Gingrich scored an upset victory in South Carolina. The ads made a big deal out of charges that the former Speaker broke tax laws -- charges that the Internal Revenue Service exonerated him of, after a long investigation.
When Rick Santorum suddenly surged after his upset victories in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado, the Romney character assassination machine attacked him for having voted in the Senate for various things that conservatives don't like.
But, when it comes to voting in Congress, seldom do you get a pure bill that you can agree with in all its parts. If you never voted for bills containing anything you didn't like, you might get very little voting done.
But, if it is a bill to provide American soldiers with the equipment they need to fight a war, and somebody has put into it an earmark for a federal boondoggle in his district, are you going to vote against that bill and let American soldiers go into battle without all the equipment and supplies they need?
Taking advantage of the public's lack of knowledge is something that Barack Obama already does very effectively in his political propaganda. But is that something the Republicans want to imitate?
It has worked during the primary season, when the media are perfectly happy to see Republicans destroying each other. But it will not work in the general election campaign, when even truthful criticisms of the president will have a hard time getting out through the media, which hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil when it comes to Obama.
The pettiness and mud-slinging during the Republican primary campaigns is especially irresponsible during a time when there are very serious problems, at home and abroad, that need to be addressed in a serious way.
Discussions of particular issues, one by one, often miss the larger point that goes beyond the issue at hand -- namely, this administration's steady movement toward arbitrary government that circumvents the restrictions of the Constitution.
Nothing demonstrates this more starkly than the president's arbitrary power to waive the requirement that employers have to provide ObamaCare coverage for their workers. That can be the difference between paying, or not paying, millions of dollars. What does that mean for anybody's other rights?
What does freedom of speech mean if criticizing the administration can mean you get no exemption, while your competitor who keeps quiet, or who praises the administration, gets a waiver? The Constitution requires "equal protection of the laws" for a reason.
And what about nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran, the world's leading sponsor of international terrorism? Is that not worth discussing in something other than sound bites?
SOURCE
***********************
Christian Conservatives Guard Religious Liberty
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution contains two clauses addressing religious liberty: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
It's a shame that in their modern misguided zeal to read the first clause as mandating a complete separation of church and state, liberals do great damage to the second clause and defeat the overarching purpose of both: ensuring religious liberty.
Ever since the so-called Christian right began its organized activism during the 1980s, liberals (and some others) have become increasingly nervous about (and critical of) Christian influence in politics, let alone the public square.
This issue has reared its controversial head during the Republican presidential primary because of candidate Rick Santorum's unashamed and outspoken commitment to his Catholic faith and Christian values. It's not just leftists who are complaining; many on the right are, as well.
For years, there has been an uneasy alliance inside the Republican "big tent," between those who embrace social conservatism and those who would just as soon see it deleted from the party platform. With our anxiety about the national debt, economic issues are naturally at the forefront of people's concerns. Some believe that those who are still articulating social issues in this period of crisis are at least annoying and possibly detrimental to the cause of electing a Republican who can build a wide enough coalition to defeat the primary culprit in America's race to bankruptcy: President Barack Obama.
I think it's a false choice to say that we conservatives must pick between economic issues and social ones. It's also a mistake to believe there is a clear dichotomy between economic conservatives and social conservatives. As I've written before, Reagan conservatism is a three-legged stool -- economic, social and national defense issues -- and the three are compatible and probably embraced by most Republicans.
Our center-right tent is big enough to include libertarians, economic conservatives who either are indifferent to social issues or consider themselves socially liberal, and so-called neoconservatives, who tend to emphasize national defense issues over the other two -- although they might reject that characterization. We all must unite to defeat President Obama.
But with Santorum's rise in the polls, many are expressing their anxiety about his perceived religiosity and are depicting him as a threat to religious liberty.
Some are abuzz about his interview this past weekend with George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week," in which Santorum stated that he does not believe separation of church and state is absolute. He stated that the First Amendment's free exercise clause guarantees that the church and its members have as much right to try to influence policy as anyone else. And he's absolutely correct.
Not only are the words "separation of church and state" not contained in the Constitution but this phrase from Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists does not mean what many people say it does.
The First Amendment's establishment clause says that Congress shall not establish a national church, because the Framers didn't want the government telling us whom or how to worship. Their overarching concern, then, was protecting religious liberty. The free exercise clause also strengthens the religious freedom guarantee.
The point is that both clauses are dedicated to religious liberty, and neither purports to ban religious expression from the public square or from the mouths of public officials.
No matter how expansively one reads the First Amendment's establishment clause, no one, including Jefferson, would have made the ludicrous argument that presidents (or other public officials) must leave their worldview at the door of the White House and govern apart from it, as if that would be possible. Advocating policy positions based on one's worldview is light-years away from establishing -- or even supporting -- a national religion.
Christian conservatives are not the ones demonstrating intolerance and threatening the freedoms of religion and religious expression. They would never consider being so presumptuous and tyrannical as to try to silence those who disagree with them, ban them from the public square, or advance the spurious argument that they are not entitled to advocate policies based on their worldview.
Ironically, it is probably the secular left that is most responsible for the dramatic rise and persistent influence of the Christian political right in politics, with their gross judicial activism in abortion jurisprudence and their judicial tyranny coercing states to accept same-sex marriage against the will of the people. They are the ones who demonize as "homophobes" and "bigots" those seeking to preserve traditional marriage. Christian conservatives don't try to shut them up, but many are now trying to shut us up -- through the specious application of the First Amendment, no less.
The last people anyone needs to fear on religious liberty are Christian conservatives, who are its strongest guardians. Above all others, they will fight to preserve everyone's right to express and practice his religion or non-religion as he pleases.
SOURCE
************************
The God Gap
There have been many "gaps" in modern politics. There is the gender gap, the generation gap and now the God gap, which is the gulf between people who take God's instructions seriously and those who don't. Which side of the gap you're on could influence your vote. The God gap is growing wider.
I asked Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum about this. In a telephone interview with me, Santorum, whose rhetoric is loaded with religious and cultural language, said, "While (such language) may be upsetting to some, there's a hunger out there for talking about what's true."
How, then, would he explain a recent New York Times story that reported for the first time in our history, that "more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage." Santorum acknowledged, "I'm probably talking to Republican audiences, so it's a little different. I'm not talking to the general audience at this point. Marriage is on the decline. The culture is changing."
The problem for presidential candidates -- and for President Obama, who occasionally appeals to Scripture to justify his policies -- is that fewer people are listening to the voice of God, or to voices claiming to speak for Him.
Not too long ago, a report about growing numbers of out-of-wedlock births would have produced sermons calling for repentance and set revival fires burning in churches across the land. Today, there's only the sound of silence.
The Times story, citing government data compiled by Child Trends, a Washington research group, noted that the shift in the makeup of American families was likely to produce children who face "...elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems." Yawn.
How is this social virus to be cured when older religious people speak a language and advocate a belief system that either many younger people don't understand, or do not wish to hear?
The failure to communicate across the God gap brings to mind something former president George H.W. Bush said about broccoli. Bush said his mother made him eat broccoli, but he never liked it. When he became president, he said it meant he no longer had to eat it.
So people who might have been taken to religious services as children are now grown up and many feel they no longer have to "stomach" faith, or conform to a standard outside themselves. Some who grew up in a secular household are spiritually deaf, if not biblically illiterate. A general cultural morality is fast disappearing.
The God gap will not be shrunk by politicians, though to rally "the base" they often talk as if it can. The goal of cultural transformation has historically been the work of clergy, whose "hellfire" messages scared people awake from their comfortable and what used to be called "sinful" lives. But this was before having a baby without a husband became an acceptable thing to do.
Too many of today's clergy seem preoccupied with building personal empires and monstrous buildings. They go on costly TV instead of investing in the less visible "work of the church," which is people, not brick and mortar. The first Christians met in homes, not megachurches. They took care of each other and did not rely on government to sustain them. Many pastors today dislike sermons about sin and repentance because it makes people uncomfortable. And so we get instead the discomfort of social decay and an ever-widening God gap.
Materialism and pleasure contribute to social rot. Social rot precedes national decline. These have become our twin false gods; contemporary "golden calves," as unable to produce satisfaction as the idols of biblical times. Most politicians won't urge restraint or personal sacrifice and too many ministers allow the secular world to set their agenda.
And so the God gap widens and the wisdom and understanding of the older generation goes unheard and unheeded.
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 land of the free has become the land of the Fascists. I don't think even Hitler and Mussolini were this keen on regulation
A Louisiana church was ordered to stop giving away free water along Mardi Gras parade routes because they did not have the proper permits. “We were given a cease and desist order,” said Matt Tipton, pastor of Hope Church in Metairie, LA. “We had no idea we were breaking the law.”
Tipton said volunteers from his church were handing out free coffee and free bottles of water at two locations along a Mardi Gras parade route when they were stopped by Jefferson Parish officials. The church volunteers were cited for failing to secure an occupational license and for failure to register for a sales tax.
“It kind of threw me for a loop because they weren’t in uniform,” he said. “But once they pulled the ticket out, I was conviniced.” “We apologized,” Tipton said. “We didn’t know the rules.”
The church had purchased about five thousand bottles of water labeled with the church’s name and website address. They gave the remaining bottles to a local drug rehab center.
A spokesman for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office confirmed to Fox News that the church had violated the law. The spokesman said the church was initially given a verbal warning – and then a written warning. He said it was not a citation – even though the warning clearly stated it was a “vendor warning citation.”
The sheriff’s department said there was “no validity to their complaint whatever their complaint may be.”
Ken Klukowski, a senior legal fellow at the Family Research Council, said the citation was absurd. “This is a perfect example of why so many people have a problem with big government,” Klukowski said. “The idea that a church needs a permit to hand out water to thirsty people is unfortunate.”
He said it’s hard to believe that the government would get in the way of citizens helping each other out – “especially a church which was just doing its duty to be good Samaritans and help those in need.”
Pastor Tipton said he sent an email to city leaders explaining that they were just trying to show their love to the city “and to serve the city.”
He offered to provide volunteers to clean up trash or even clean portable toilets. However, city leaders did not initially respond and Tipton said he was given the runaround – told to go through three different department heads.
Klukowski said the incident is outrageous. “The idea that you need an additional level of bureaucracy stopping a church from showing kindness to members of the community is a perfect example of a waste of taxpayer money and resources,” he said.
SOURCE
***********************
Pettiness and Mud
Thomas Sowell
The only good news for the Republicans coming out of the seemingly endless presidential candidate "debates" is that some Republican leaders are now belatedly thinking about how they can avoid a repetition of this debacle in future elections.
What could they possibly have been thinking about, in the first place, when they agreed to a format based on short sound bites for dealing with major complex issues, and with media journalists -- 90 percent of them Democrats -- picking the topics?
The conduct of the candidates made things worse. In a world with a record-breaking national debt and Iran moving toward creating nuclear weapons, they bickered over earmarks and condoms. I am against earmarks, but earmarks don't rank among the first hundred most serious problems facing this country.
Mud-slinging has replaced rational discussions of differences on serious issues -- not only during the debates themselves, where the moderators sic the candidates on each other, but even more so in the massive television character assassination ads in which Romney supporters seem to specialize.
Groups supporting Mitt Romney have turned character assassination almost into a science. You take something that most people, outside of politics, do not understand and twist it to sound terrible to those who are unaware of the facts.
Blanketing Florida with misleading ads attacking Newt Gingrich won that state for Romney, after Gingrich scored an upset victory in South Carolina. The ads made a big deal out of charges that the former Speaker broke tax laws -- charges that the Internal Revenue Service exonerated him of, after a long investigation.
When Rick Santorum suddenly surged after his upset victories in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado, the Romney character assassination machine attacked him for having voted in the Senate for various things that conservatives don't like.
But, when it comes to voting in Congress, seldom do you get a pure bill that you can agree with in all its parts. If you never voted for bills containing anything you didn't like, you might get very little voting done.
But, if it is a bill to provide American soldiers with the equipment they need to fight a war, and somebody has put into it an earmark for a federal boondoggle in his district, are you going to vote against that bill and let American soldiers go into battle without all the equipment and supplies they need?
Taking advantage of the public's lack of knowledge is something that Barack Obama already does very effectively in his political propaganda. But is that something the Republicans want to imitate?
It has worked during the primary season, when the media are perfectly happy to see Republicans destroying each other. But it will not work in the general election campaign, when even truthful criticisms of the president will have a hard time getting out through the media, which hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil when it comes to Obama.
The pettiness and mud-slinging during the Republican primary campaigns is especially irresponsible during a time when there are very serious problems, at home and abroad, that need to be addressed in a serious way.
Discussions of particular issues, one by one, often miss the larger point that goes beyond the issue at hand -- namely, this administration's steady movement toward arbitrary government that circumvents the restrictions of the Constitution.
Nothing demonstrates this more starkly than the president's arbitrary power to waive the requirement that employers have to provide ObamaCare coverage for their workers. That can be the difference between paying, or not paying, millions of dollars. What does that mean for anybody's other rights?
What does freedom of speech mean if criticizing the administration can mean you get no exemption, while your competitor who keeps quiet, or who praises the administration, gets a waiver? The Constitution requires "equal protection of the laws" for a reason.
And what about nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran, the world's leading sponsor of international terrorism? Is that not worth discussing in something other than sound bites?
SOURCE
***********************
Christian Conservatives Guard Religious Liberty
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution contains two clauses addressing religious liberty: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
It's a shame that in their modern misguided zeal to read the first clause as mandating a complete separation of church and state, liberals do great damage to the second clause and defeat the overarching purpose of both: ensuring religious liberty.
Ever since the so-called Christian right began its organized activism during the 1980s, liberals (and some others) have become increasingly nervous about (and critical of) Christian influence in politics, let alone the public square.
This issue has reared its controversial head during the Republican presidential primary because of candidate Rick Santorum's unashamed and outspoken commitment to his Catholic faith and Christian values. It's not just leftists who are complaining; many on the right are, as well.
For years, there has been an uneasy alliance inside the Republican "big tent," between those who embrace social conservatism and those who would just as soon see it deleted from the party platform. With our anxiety about the national debt, economic issues are naturally at the forefront of people's concerns. Some believe that those who are still articulating social issues in this period of crisis are at least annoying and possibly detrimental to the cause of electing a Republican who can build a wide enough coalition to defeat the primary culprit in America's race to bankruptcy: President Barack Obama.
I think it's a false choice to say that we conservatives must pick between economic issues and social ones. It's also a mistake to believe there is a clear dichotomy between economic conservatives and social conservatives. As I've written before, Reagan conservatism is a three-legged stool -- economic, social and national defense issues -- and the three are compatible and probably embraced by most Republicans.
Our center-right tent is big enough to include libertarians, economic conservatives who either are indifferent to social issues or consider themselves socially liberal, and so-called neoconservatives, who tend to emphasize national defense issues over the other two -- although they might reject that characterization. We all must unite to defeat President Obama.
But with Santorum's rise in the polls, many are expressing their anxiety about his perceived religiosity and are depicting him as a threat to religious liberty.
Some are abuzz about his interview this past weekend with George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week," in which Santorum stated that he does not believe separation of church and state is absolute. He stated that the First Amendment's free exercise clause guarantees that the church and its members have as much right to try to influence policy as anyone else. And he's absolutely correct.
Not only are the words "separation of church and state" not contained in the Constitution but this phrase from Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists does not mean what many people say it does.
The First Amendment's establishment clause says that Congress shall not establish a national church, because the Framers didn't want the government telling us whom or how to worship. Their overarching concern, then, was protecting religious liberty. The free exercise clause also strengthens the religious freedom guarantee.
The point is that both clauses are dedicated to religious liberty, and neither purports to ban religious expression from the public square or from the mouths of public officials.
No matter how expansively one reads the First Amendment's establishment clause, no one, including Jefferson, would have made the ludicrous argument that presidents (or other public officials) must leave their worldview at the door of the White House and govern apart from it, as if that would be possible. Advocating policy positions based on one's worldview is light-years away from establishing -- or even supporting -- a national religion.
Christian conservatives are not the ones demonstrating intolerance and threatening the freedoms of religion and religious expression. They would never consider being so presumptuous and tyrannical as to try to silence those who disagree with them, ban them from the public square, or advance the spurious argument that they are not entitled to advocate policies based on their worldview.
Ironically, it is probably the secular left that is most responsible for the dramatic rise and persistent influence of the Christian political right in politics, with their gross judicial activism in abortion jurisprudence and their judicial tyranny coercing states to accept same-sex marriage against the will of the people. They are the ones who demonize as "homophobes" and "bigots" those seeking to preserve traditional marriage. Christian conservatives don't try to shut them up, but many are now trying to shut us up -- through the specious application of the First Amendment, no less.
The last people anyone needs to fear on religious liberty are Christian conservatives, who are its strongest guardians. Above all others, they will fight to preserve everyone's right to express and practice his religion or non-religion as he pleases.
SOURCE
************************
The God Gap
There have been many "gaps" in modern politics. There is the gender gap, the generation gap and now the God gap, which is the gulf between people who take God's instructions seriously and those who don't. Which side of the gap you're on could influence your vote. The God gap is growing wider.
I asked Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum about this. In a telephone interview with me, Santorum, whose rhetoric is loaded with religious and cultural language, said, "While (such language) may be upsetting to some, there's a hunger out there for talking about what's true."
How, then, would he explain a recent New York Times story that reported for the first time in our history, that "more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage." Santorum acknowledged, "I'm probably talking to Republican audiences, so it's a little different. I'm not talking to the general audience at this point. Marriage is on the decline. The culture is changing."
The problem for presidential candidates -- and for President Obama, who occasionally appeals to Scripture to justify his policies -- is that fewer people are listening to the voice of God, or to voices claiming to speak for Him.
Not too long ago, a report about growing numbers of out-of-wedlock births would have produced sermons calling for repentance and set revival fires burning in churches across the land. Today, there's only the sound of silence.
The Times story, citing government data compiled by Child Trends, a Washington research group, noted that the shift in the makeup of American families was likely to produce children who face "...elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems." Yawn.
How is this social virus to be cured when older religious people speak a language and advocate a belief system that either many younger people don't understand, or do not wish to hear?
The failure to communicate across the God gap brings to mind something former president George H.W. Bush said about broccoli. Bush said his mother made him eat broccoli, but he never liked it. When he became president, he said it meant he no longer had to eat it.
So people who might have been taken to religious services as children are now grown up and many feel they no longer have to "stomach" faith, or conform to a standard outside themselves. Some who grew up in a secular household are spiritually deaf, if not biblically illiterate. A general cultural morality is fast disappearing.
The God gap will not be shrunk by politicians, though to rally "the base" they often talk as if it can. The goal of cultural transformation has historically been the work of clergy, whose "hellfire" messages scared people awake from their comfortable and what used to be called "sinful" lives. But this was before having a baby without a husband became an acceptable thing to do.
Too many of today's clergy seem preoccupied with building personal empires and monstrous buildings. They go on costly TV instead of investing in the less visible "work of the church," which is people, not brick and mortar. The first Christians met in homes, not megachurches. They took care of each other and did not rely on government to sustain them. Many pastors today dislike sermons about sin and repentance because it makes people uncomfortable. And so we get instead the discomfort of social decay and an ever-widening God gap.
Materialism and pleasure contribute to social rot. Social rot precedes national decline. These have become our twin false gods; contemporary "golden calves," as unable to produce satisfaction as the idols of biblical times. Most politicians won't urge restraint or personal sacrifice and too many ministers allow the secular world to set their agenda.
And so the God gap widens and the wisdom and understanding of the older generation goes unheard and unheeded.
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)
****************************
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
A wonderful story and an evocative picture
Once upon a time everybody understood the bonds that could form between people and their horses and this picture brings that back to us.
Can someone who knows horses well read anything in the expression of the horse?
It was a race against the tide that pulled at the heartstrings.
For three hours, show horse Astro was stuck neck deep in thick mud at Avalon Beach on Corio Bay in Victoria [Australia] as the tide inched closer.
Rescue crews first tried to pull the 18-year-old, 500kg horse free with fire hoses, and then a winch before a vet turned up to sedate Astro and pull him clear with a tractor.
The crews knew by 5pm the tide would have come all the way in. But within minutes of the waters rising around him, Astro was being dragged up on to solid ground slowly but surely, the team filthy but ecstatic.
Owner Nicole Graham said she and daughter Paris, 7, set off at noon when without warning she sunk up to her waist in thick, smelly muck.
She wouldn't leave Astro's side until he was free. "It was terrifying," Ms Graham said. "Every time I moved it sucked me back down."
Source
***********************
Highest-earning 1% in Britain pay £47billion a year... almost a third of all income tax
Similar to the USA
The highest-earning 1 per cent of Britons pay almost 30 per cent of all income taxes, according to research. The 308,000 on the 50p top rate – who earn more than £150,000 – pay £47billion a year to the Treasury.
Since 2000, the share of tax paid by the highest earners has risen from 22.2 to 27.7 per cent.
Research by Oriel Securities shows the 3.7million who earned more than £35,000 and pay 40 per cent tax, hand over £57billion in tax, 34 per cent of the total.
The lower-earning 50 per cent pay £17bn – less than the housing benefit bill.
Overall, 90 per cent of all income tax is paid by half the working population.
About 3.7m people earn between £35,000 and £150,000, placing them in the bracket that pays the 40 per cent income tax rate. Collectively they pay £57bn in income tax, about 34 per cent of the total.
Michael Spencer, chief executive of the City broker Icap and former treasurer of the Conservative party, said: ‘The debate about tax in this country has sadly become more and more about politics and less and less about what is good for the economy and for growth.
‘All we hear about is “the rich must pay more; soak the rich”. Well the facts are clear; the rich are paying much more. 'Once you factor in national insurance, for each £1m paid as a bonus the employee receives £480,000 and the Exchequer gets £658,000.
‘The top marginal rate of income tax is actually 58 per cent, the highest in the developed world. No wonder we are losing mobile high earners with rates like that. ‘This is becoming a great and increasing loss to our country and we need to realise quickly that we cannot tax our way back to growth.’
SOURCE
********************************
FDR and his Soviet friends in WWII
FDR was as bad for Europe as he was for America. But, like Obama, he was a smooth talker
The anniversary of the Allied bombing of Dresden on February 13 and 14, 1945 has become an increasingly contentious memory for thousands of Germans. Historians have debated the military value of the old and crowded city, some saying it had little significance, with others pointing out that until the bombing it was still active with war production. What few doubt is that the war was already lost for Germany before the bombing of Dresden, and that the unconditional surrender demanded by President Roosevelt was inevitable in a few weeks no matter what.
What is even more certain is that the intractable decision of FDR to settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender by the Axis Powers cost tens of millions of lives, lengthened the war, and extended the reach of Soviet power dramatically. Such an outcome is what traitors deep within the U.S. government wanted. In Europe, the demand for unconditional surrender meant that the brave Germans who worked to end the evil of national socialism worked without hope. The Anglo-American nations threw back every overture from these anti-Nazi Germans, some of whom held positions of influence in the military and government (though not in the Nazi Party).
The impact upon other Axis Powers created a horrific muddle which prolonged the war. Italy, for example, was willing not only to quit the Axis but to actively enter the war on the side of the Allied Powers. If its overture had been cleanly and quietly accepted by the Allies, then the whole bloody battle up the Italian peninsula might have been avoided and German military units in Italy in 1943 could have been disarmed and interned.
Nations such as Finland, perversely listed on the Military Channel’s program on Nazi collaborators as a helper of Hitler, wanted simply the return of territory taken from it by Stalin, the most important “Nazi collaborator” in the world. Interestingly, the Military Channel is not including in the series this biggest collaborator — the Soviet Union — the facilitator of the division of Poland, the Marxist regime which turned over German Jews to the Gestapo, as the chilling personal accounts of Margarete Buber-Neumann demonstrate in her Between Two Dictators. Nations such as Hungary — which loathed Nazi anti-Semitism (Jews continued to serve in the Hungarian national legislature deep into the war) — likewise had no way out.
Strategic bombing, rather than negotiated surrenders, was not something that naturally appealed to Americans, most of whom wanted the concentration camps and death camps shut down as soon as possible. It is a horrific historical truth that half of those who died in those camps did so in the last six months of the war, long after most European Axis powers and a large percentage of the German army leaders saw that the war was lost.
Even if bombing had been the only way to defeat the Nazis, the immolation of Dresden was disastrously ineffective (however, in no way diminishing the courage and nobility of American airmen who fought and died in large numbers for their country). Two years before Dresden, in “Operation Gomorrah,” British night bombers and American daylight bombers pounded Hamburg around the clock until fire services were overwhelmed, streets quite literally melted, and Germans of all ages were sucked by hundred-mile-an-hour winds into firestorms which killed in a few nights as many as would die in Dresden.
What happened in Europe was mirrored in the Pacific. As Professor Anthony Kubek recounted in his magisterial work, How the Far East was Lost: American Foreign Policy and the Creation of Communist China, 1941–1941 (Regnery: 1963), there need never have been a decision about whether to drop a fission bomb on Hiroshima or later on Nagasaki. Most historians say the decision to bomb Japanese cities was the natural consequence of Japanese imperialism, which made them unwilling to surrender under any conceivable circumstances; additionally, they assert that factored into the decision was the number of American soldiers who would likely die in the initial assault on the Home Islands of Japan.
But, unlike the need for an unconditional surrender by Nazi Germany, there was no need to demand unconditional surrender of Japan. More than a year before Hiroshima, General Douglas MacArthur received surrender proposals from Japan and transmitted them, along with his own advice to accept these terms, prior to the Yalta Conference.
What did these terms provide?
1. Full surrender of the Japanese forces on the sea, in the air, at home, and in occupied countries
2. Surrender of all arms and munitions
3. Occupation of the Japanese homeland and island possessions by Allied troops under American direction
4. Japanese relinquishment of Manchuria, Korea, Formosa, as well as all territory seized during the war
5. Regulation of Japanese industry to halt present and future production of implements of war
6. Surrender of all designated war criminals
7. Release of all prisoners of war and interns in Japan proper and in areas under Japanese control
These seven terms were Japan’s initial bargaining position for peace. The proposals were made on no less than seven occasions through American and British channels. However, FDR preferred to continue the war and, critically, to seek the “help” of Stalin against Japan — this despite the fact that Stalin had scrupulously adhered to his 1941 non-aggression pact with Japan until late 1945.
MacArthur urged FDR to begin immediate negotiations and pleaded with the President not to invite Stalin to enter the war against Japan. FDR observed tersely, “MacArthur is our greatest general and our poorest politician.” But MacArthur considered that the lives of America's bravest — the Marines and infantrymen who need not have died on Okinawa and Iwo Jima in horrific campaigns if these surrender terms had been accepted — were worth something.
The grotesque failure of rational American statecraft in the last year of WWII was sadly not an accident. American and British military leaders, to say nothing of the Commonwealth Dominion democracies who had joined in the war, simply wanted what most commanders wanted: for the fighting to cease as quickly as was consistent with the objects of war.
By 1944, however, the Roosevelt administration was honeycombed with Soviet agents; Britain, also, had been infiltrated at different levels. The firebombing of German and Japanese cities by the Allies would insure bitterness lasting for many generations. The invitation of the Soviet Union to occupy half of Europe and half of Asia — despite Stalin’s de facto alliance with Hitler and his faithful four-year allegiance to his wartime non-aggression pact with Japan — guaranteed that that Marxist power could enslave and impoverish hundreds of millions of souls.
As Sherman said, war is hell. It is also an unnatural condition for a nation whose principal objects are liberty, faith, and peaceful relations with all other countries who wish it. The legacy of Dresden and of Hiroshima lingers because America was not guided by those who loved her, but by those who used her.
SOURCE
************************
Sneaky State Dept. bureaucrats giving away American territory without a shot being fired!
Obama’s State Department is giving away seven strategic, resource-laden Alaskan islands to the Russians. Yes, to the Putin regime in the Kremlin.
The seven endangered islands in the Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea include one the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. The Russians are also to get the tens of thousands of square miles of oil-rich seabeds surrounding the islands. The Department of Interior estimates billions of barrels of oil are at stake.
The State Department has undertaken the giveaway in the guise of a maritime boundary agreement between Alaska and Siberia. Astoundingly, our federal government itself drew the line to put these seven Alaskan islands on the Russian side. But as an executive agreement, it could be reversed with the stroke of a pen by President Obama or Secretary Clinton.
The agreement was negotiated in total secrecy. The state of Alaska was not allowed to participate in the negotiations, nor was the public given any opportunity for comment. This is despite the fact the Alaska Legislature has passed resolutions of opposition – but the State Department doesn’t seem to care.
The imperiled Arctic Ocean islands include Wrangel, Bennett, Jeannette and Henrietta. Wrangel became American in 1881 with the landing of the U.S. Revenue Marine ship Thomas Corwin. The landing party included the famed naturalist John Muir. It is 3,000 square miles in size.
Northwest of Wrangel are the DeLong Islands, named for George Washington DeLong, the captain of USS Jeannette. Also in 1881, he discovered and claimed these three islands for the United States. He named them for the voyage co-sponsor, New York City newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett. The ship’s crew received a hero’s welcome back in Washington, and Congress awarded them gold medals.
In the Bering Sea at the far west end of the Aleutian chain are Copper Island, Sea Lion Rock and Sea Otter Rock. They were ceded to the U.S. in Seward’s 1867 treaty with Russia.
Now is the time for the Obama administration to stand up for U.S. and Alaskan rights and invaluable resources. The State Department’s maritime agreement is a loser – it gives us nothing in return for giving up Alaska’s sovereign territory and invaluable resources. We won the Cold War and should start acting like it.
The Obama administration must stop the giveaway immediately.
SOURCE
**************************
ELSEWHERE
California: Bankruptcy Upon the Union Altar: "Bondholders of Stockton, California debt are about to be punished as City Manager Takes Steps Toward Bankruptcy. Stockton, California, may take the first steps toward becoming the most populous U.S. city to file for bankruptcy next week because of burdensome employee costs, excessive debt and bookkeeping errors that misrepresented accounts, city officials said today. “Somebody has to suffer and in this case the city manager has decided it should be the bondholders who suffer,” Marc Levinson of the Sacramento-based law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, which represents the city, said at a news briefing at Stockton’s City Hall today. To keep the city solvent through the end of the fiscal year June 30, the City Council will be asked to default on $2 million of debt payments owned to bond holders." [And you thought government bonds were a safe investment!]
British far-Leftist dodges tax: "Ken Livingstone used a loophole to avoid £50,000 in tax, despite having attacked tax avoiders in the past as ‘rich b******s.’ Companies House documents show that Labour’s London mayoral candidate earned £232,000 in 2009, the first year after his defeat to Boris Johnson. The money was earned from personal appearances, speech making and hosting a radio show. It was paid into a personal company set up by Mr Livingstone and Emma Beal, his then partner who is now his wife. The pair are sole shareholders in the company, Silveta Ltd. Accountants told the Sunday Telegraph that the move appears designed to ensure that Mr Livingstone paid corporation tax at 20 or 21 per cent, rather than income tax at up to 40 per cent. Three years ago, Mr Livingstone criticised tax avoiders, saying: ‘These rich b******s just don’t get it. No one should be allowed to vote in a British election, let alone sit in Parliament, unless they pay their full share of tax.’"
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
**************************
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)
****************************
Once upon a time everybody understood the bonds that could form between people and their horses and this picture brings that back to us.
Can someone who knows horses well read anything in the expression of the horse?
It was a race against the tide that pulled at the heartstrings.
For three hours, show horse Astro was stuck neck deep in thick mud at Avalon Beach on Corio Bay in Victoria [Australia] as the tide inched closer.
Rescue crews first tried to pull the 18-year-old, 500kg horse free with fire hoses, and then a winch before a vet turned up to sedate Astro and pull him clear with a tractor.
The crews knew by 5pm the tide would have come all the way in. But within minutes of the waters rising around him, Astro was being dragged up on to solid ground slowly but surely, the team filthy but ecstatic.
Owner Nicole Graham said she and daughter Paris, 7, set off at noon when without warning she sunk up to her waist in thick, smelly muck.
She wouldn't leave Astro's side until he was free. "It was terrifying," Ms Graham said. "Every time I moved it sucked me back down."
Source
***********************
Highest-earning 1% in Britain pay £47billion a year... almost a third of all income tax
Similar to the USA
The highest-earning 1 per cent of Britons pay almost 30 per cent of all income taxes, according to research. The 308,000 on the 50p top rate – who earn more than £150,000 – pay £47billion a year to the Treasury.
Since 2000, the share of tax paid by the highest earners has risen from 22.2 to 27.7 per cent.
Research by Oriel Securities shows the 3.7million who earned more than £35,000 and pay 40 per cent tax, hand over £57billion in tax, 34 per cent of the total.
The lower-earning 50 per cent pay £17bn – less than the housing benefit bill.
Overall, 90 per cent of all income tax is paid by half the working population.
About 3.7m people earn between £35,000 and £150,000, placing them in the bracket that pays the 40 per cent income tax rate. Collectively they pay £57bn in income tax, about 34 per cent of the total.
Michael Spencer, chief executive of the City broker Icap and former treasurer of the Conservative party, said: ‘The debate about tax in this country has sadly become more and more about politics and less and less about what is good for the economy and for growth.
‘All we hear about is “the rich must pay more; soak the rich”. Well the facts are clear; the rich are paying much more. 'Once you factor in national insurance, for each £1m paid as a bonus the employee receives £480,000 and the Exchequer gets £658,000.
‘The top marginal rate of income tax is actually 58 per cent, the highest in the developed world. No wonder we are losing mobile high earners with rates like that. ‘This is becoming a great and increasing loss to our country and we need to realise quickly that we cannot tax our way back to growth.’
SOURCE
********************************
FDR and his Soviet friends in WWII
FDR was as bad for Europe as he was for America. But, like Obama, he was a smooth talker
The anniversary of the Allied bombing of Dresden on February 13 and 14, 1945 has become an increasingly contentious memory for thousands of Germans. Historians have debated the military value of the old and crowded city, some saying it had little significance, with others pointing out that until the bombing it was still active with war production. What few doubt is that the war was already lost for Germany before the bombing of Dresden, and that the unconditional surrender demanded by President Roosevelt was inevitable in a few weeks no matter what.
What is even more certain is that the intractable decision of FDR to settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender by the Axis Powers cost tens of millions of lives, lengthened the war, and extended the reach of Soviet power dramatically. Such an outcome is what traitors deep within the U.S. government wanted. In Europe, the demand for unconditional surrender meant that the brave Germans who worked to end the evil of national socialism worked without hope. The Anglo-American nations threw back every overture from these anti-Nazi Germans, some of whom held positions of influence in the military and government (though not in the Nazi Party).
The impact upon other Axis Powers created a horrific muddle which prolonged the war. Italy, for example, was willing not only to quit the Axis but to actively enter the war on the side of the Allied Powers. If its overture had been cleanly and quietly accepted by the Allies, then the whole bloody battle up the Italian peninsula might have been avoided and German military units in Italy in 1943 could have been disarmed and interned.
Nations such as Finland, perversely listed on the Military Channel’s program on Nazi collaborators as a helper of Hitler, wanted simply the return of territory taken from it by Stalin, the most important “Nazi collaborator” in the world. Interestingly, the Military Channel is not including in the series this biggest collaborator — the Soviet Union — the facilitator of the division of Poland, the Marxist regime which turned over German Jews to the Gestapo, as the chilling personal accounts of Margarete Buber-Neumann demonstrate in her Between Two Dictators. Nations such as Hungary — which loathed Nazi anti-Semitism (Jews continued to serve in the Hungarian national legislature deep into the war) — likewise had no way out.
Strategic bombing, rather than negotiated surrenders, was not something that naturally appealed to Americans, most of whom wanted the concentration camps and death camps shut down as soon as possible. It is a horrific historical truth that half of those who died in those camps did so in the last six months of the war, long after most European Axis powers and a large percentage of the German army leaders saw that the war was lost.
Even if bombing had been the only way to defeat the Nazis, the immolation of Dresden was disastrously ineffective (however, in no way diminishing the courage and nobility of American airmen who fought and died in large numbers for their country). Two years before Dresden, in “Operation Gomorrah,” British night bombers and American daylight bombers pounded Hamburg around the clock until fire services were overwhelmed, streets quite literally melted, and Germans of all ages were sucked by hundred-mile-an-hour winds into firestorms which killed in a few nights as many as would die in Dresden.
What happened in Europe was mirrored in the Pacific. As Professor Anthony Kubek recounted in his magisterial work, How the Far East was Lost: American Foreign Policy and the Creation of Communist China, 1941–1941 (Regnery: 1963), there need never have been a decision about whether to drop a fission bomb on Hiroshima or later on Nagasaki. Most historians say the decision to bomb Japanese cities was the natural consequence of Japanese imperialism, which made them unwilling to surrender under any conceivable circumstances; additionally, they assert that factored into the decision was the number of American soldiers who would likely die in the initial assault on the Home Islands of Japan.
But, unlike the need for an unconditional surrender by Nazi Germany, there was no need to demand unconditional surrender of Japan. More than a year before Hiroshima, General Douglas MacArthur received surrender proposals from Japan and transmitted them, along with his own advice to accept these terms, prior to the Yalta Conference.
What did these terms provide?
1. Full surrender of the Japanese forces on the sea, in the air, at home, and in occupied countries
2. Surrender of all arms and munitions
3. Occupation of the Japanese homeland and island possessions by Allied troops under American direction
4. Japanese relinquishment of Manchuria, Korea, Formosa, as well as all territory seized during the war
5. Regulation of Japanese industry to halt present and future production of implements of war
6. Surrender of all designated war criminals
7. Release of all prisoners of war and interns in Japan proper and in areas under Japanese control
These seven terms were Japan’s initial bargaining position for peace. The proposals were made on no less than seven occasions through American and British channels. However, FDR preferred to continue the war and, critically, to seek the “help” of Stalin against Japan — this despite the fact that Stalin had scrupulously adhered to his 1941 non-aggression pact with Japan until late 1945.
MacArthur urged FDR to begin immediate negotiations and pleaded with the President not to invite Stalin to enter the war against Japan. FDR observed tersely, “MacArthur is our greatest general and our poorest politician.” But MacArthur considered that the lives of America's bravest — the Marines and infantrymen who need not have died on Okinawa and Iwo Jima in horrific campaigns if these surrender terms had been accepted — were worth something.
The grotesque failure of rational American statecraft in the last year of WWII was sadly not an accident. American and British military leaders, to say nothing of the Commonwealth Dominion democracies who had joined in the war, simply wanted what most commanders wanted: for the fighting to cease as quickly as was consistent with the objects of war.
By 1944, however, the Roosevelt administration was honeycombed with Soviet agents; Britain, also, had been infiltrated at different levels. The firebombing of German and Japanese cities by the Allies would insure bitterness lasting for many generations. The invitation of the Soviet Union to occupy half of Europe and half of Asia — despite Stalin’s de facto alliance with Hitler and his faithful four-year allegiance to his wartime non-aggression pact with Japan — guaranteed that that Marxist power could enslave and impoverish hundreds of millions of souls.
As Sherman said, war is hell. It is also an unnatural condition for a nation whose principal objects are liberty, faith, and peaceful relations with all other countries who wish it. The legacy of Dresden and of Hiroshima lingers because America was not guided by those who loved her, but by those who used her.
SOURCE
************************
Sneaky State Dept. bureaucrats giving away American territory without a shot being fired!
Obama’s State Department is giving away seven strategic, resource-laden Alaskan islands to the Russians. Yes, to the Putin regime in the Kremlin.
The seven endangered islands in the Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea include one the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. The Russians are also to get the tens of thousands of square miles of oil-rich seabeds surrounding the islands. The Department of Interior estimates billions of barrels of oil are at stake.
The State Department has undertaken the giveaway in the guise of a maritime boundary agreement between Alaska and Siberia. Astoundingly, our federal government itself drew the line to put these seven Alaskan islands on the Russian side. But as an executive agreement, it could be reversed with the stroke of a pen by President Obama or Secretary Clinton.
The agreement was negotiated in total secrecy. The state of Alaska was not allowed to participate in the negotiations, nor was the public given any opportunity for comment. This is despite the fact the Alaska Legislature has passed resolutions of opposition – but the State Department doesn’t seem to care.
The imperiled Arctic Ocean islands include Wrangel, Bennett, Jeannette and Henrietta. Wrangel became American in 1881 with the landing of the U.S. Revenue Marine ship Thomas Corwin. The landing party included the famed naturalist John Muir. It is 3,000 square miles in size.
Northwest of Wrangel are the DeLong Islands, named for George Washington DeLong, the captain of USS Jeannette. Also in 1881, he discovered and claimed these three islands for the United States. He named them for the voyage co-sponsor, New York City newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett. The ship’s crew received a hero’s welcome back in Washington, and Congress awarded them gold medals.
In the Bering Sea at the far west end of the Aleutian chain are Copper Island, Sea Lion Rock and Sea Otter Rock. They were ceded to the U.S. in Seward’s 1867 treaty with Russia.
Now is the time for the Obama administration to stand up for U.S. and Alaskan rights and invaluable resources. The State Department’s maritime agreement is a loser – it gives us nothing in return for giving up Alaska’s sovereign territory and invaluable resources. We won the Cold War and should start acting like it.
The Obama administration must stop the giveaway immediately.
SOURCE
**************************
ELSEWHERE
California: Bankruptcy Upon the Union Altar: "Bondholders of Stockton, California debt are about to be punished as City Manager Takes Steps Toward Bankruptcy. Stockton, California, may take the first steps toward becoming the most populous U.S. city to file for bankruptcy next week because of burdensome employee costs, excessive debt and bookkeeping errors that misrepresented accounts, city officials said today. “Somebody has to suffer and in this case the city manager has decided it should be the bondholders who suffer,” Marc Levinson of the Sacramento-based law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, which represents the city, said at a news briefing at Stockton’s City Hall today. To keep the city solvent through the end of the fiscal year June 30, the City Council will be asked to default on $2 million of debt payments owned to bond holders." [And you thought government bonds were a safe investment!]
British far-Leftist dodges tax: "Ken Livingstone used a loophole to avoid £50,000 in tax, despite having attacked tax avoiders in the past as ‘rich b******s.’ Companies House documents show that Labour’s London mayoral candidate earned £232,000 in 2009, the first year after his defeat to Boris Johnson. The money was earned from personal appearances, speech making and hosting a radio show. It was paid into a personal company set up by Mr Livingstone and Emma Beal, his then partner who is now his wife. The pair are sole shareholders in the company, Silveta Ltd. Accountants told the Sunday Telegraph that the move appears designed to ensure that Mr Livingstone paid corporation tax at 20 or 21 per cent, rather than income tax at up to 40 per cent. Three years ago, Mr Livingstone criticised tax avoiders, saying: ‘These rich b******s just don’t get it. No one should be allowed to vote in a British election, let alone sit in Parliament, unless they pay their full share of tax.’"
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
**************************
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)
****************************
Monday, February 27, 2012
Progressives and the Politics of Victimhood
Charles M. Blow, communist, er, columnist for The New York Times, pulled back the curtain on the progressive mindset a little this week, as much as there is a mind behind it. Upon hearing something Mitt Romney said about single parents, Blow, who apparently is one, took exception. On Twitter he sent out the following:
"Let me just tell you this Mitt "Muddle Mouth": I'm a single parent and my kids are *amazing*! Stick that in your magic underwear."
For those who don't know, the website Buzzfeed describes the "magic underwear" this way, "Mormon men and women wear "temple garments" beneath their clothes as a reminder of their religious commitments, a rough equivalent of Jews' yarmulkes or tzitzit."
That, of course, makes Blow's tweet an attack on Romney's Mormon faith, done willingly and before the whole world. At a time when ESPN fires a writer for using the common phrase "Chink in the Armor" to describe a bad game by Jeremy Lin because Lin happens to be Asian, you'd think the blowback on Blow would be swift. You would be wrong. There was no blowback - or at least none to speak of.
Had Blow been anything but a progressive, the media would have opened up on him like he was Pat Buchanan, and justifiably so. But if you're a leftist you're allowed to be a bigot. It's practically required.
In the progressive world people can't be looked at as individuals. They must be divided and subdivided so the "professional Left" can set about making them victims when it suits their needs. It's the hyphenated Americans, the gender Americans, the Americans who like to do this with their genitals. It's the ones with this color skin, or that color skin, it's this one and that one and blah, blah.
They create these groups, then tell people to identify with "their groups," so, when a member of that group is the victim of something, it's an affront to all of them.
It's the mentality that created a group called the Asian American Journalist Association and emboldened it, without invitation, to release guidelines for how the media needs to cover Jeremy Lin. See, you can't treat Jeremy Lin like any other human being, or even any other basketball player. He's different. His ancestors were of Asian descent.
As such, phrases such as "chink in the armor," though common for decades as a clich‚ about someone being discovered to not be perfect, can't be used to describe his first sub-par performance because this previously unheard of group says so.
Their release says, "As NBA player Jeremy Lin's prowess on the court continues to attract international attention and grab headlines, AAJA would like to remind media outlets about relevance and context regarding coverage of race." See, Lin is not first a person or even a basketball player; he is a member of a race.
Has the AAJA been asked by Lin to lay these guidelines? No.
The group issued seven points of "Danger Zones" of which the rest of the world needs to be aware when talking about Lin, each more insane than the last.
It also listed some biographical information, the first point of which is the most telling. It reads, in part:
" Jeremy Lin is Asian American, not Asian (more specifically, Taiwanese American). It's an important distinction and one that should be considered before any references to former NBA players such as Yao Ming and Wang Zhizhi, who were Chinese."
Not only do the group have to divide Lin from everyone else by pointing out he's of Asian descent, it subdivides him to Taiwanese.
It continues . "It's an important distinction and one that should be considered before any references to former NBA players such as Yao Ming and Wang Zhizhi, who were Chinese." Who gives a damn?
If you're a fan of the Knicks, you care that he's good. If you're a fan of whoever is playing the Knicks, you care that he's good for the opposite reason. If you didn't care about the Knicks, or basketball, before someone with your ethnic background started playing for them and doing well, the problem is yours, not some poor schlub writer for ESPN.
But that schlub from ESPN paid with his job because he didn't refer to Jeremy Lin the way people not Jeremy Lin want Jeremy Lin referred to.
By dividing people into groups, progressives are able to easily manipulate people. If a group you've been taught you're a part of is the "victim" of an affront, it's easy to rile you up. This is not to say there aren't instances of bigotry by individuals against other individuals. It's to say jackassery by one against another is nothing more than that. Unless you're trying to remove the individual and create a collective mindset to advance an agenda.
Progressive create or exacerbate issues based on the groups they've created, demonize conservatives as the cause of, or obstruction to the solution for, the problem and, with the willing help of the media, manipulate people too busy to pay close enough attention into thinking they're trying to help. But progressives never help.
Umpteen trillion dollars into the war on poverty we have just as much poverty. Try to change anything about these failed progressive programs, such as incentivizing work or attempting to curb abuse, and progressives will mobilize the necessary groups to cry racisim, sexism or whatever ism they need to create to get the needed outrage. It's a sick game that traps people in poverty, ruins lives and families and actually harms people. But it does do one important thing - it creates a bloc of voters almost uniformly ready to vote, unthinkingly, for their oppressors.
This is not a slave mentality; slaves yearned to be free and independent. This is the mentality most closely associated with monarchy. In monarchies, peasants were told their king was chosen by God, and he had their best interests at heart. Thus, they accepted it when king stole their property and liberty and sent them off to war over ego. They were told their king was their caretaker, when, in fact, he was their oppressor. It's the prefect progressive style of government. And it has no room for dissent.
Progressives spent so much time and energy creating this group mentality, they have no time or patience for those who refuse to conform. Be a black, gay or female conservative, and you not only don't qualify for the victim status afforded others, you're purposefully, and gleefully, targeted by the very tactics those groups were allegedly created to prevent.
There is virtually nothing a of a racist, sexist or homophobic nature that a progressive can say to or about a conservative that will illicit any ill will from fellow progressives, either in or out of the media. Sickeningly, the perpetrators are often rewarded. Al Sharpton, noted bigot, inciter of riots and inspiration of murderers (Google Freddy's Fashion Mart), who made his name pulling a hoax against police based on race, now has a daily hour-long TV show on the progressives MSNBC.
Sharpton's past is not anything sane people dispute, yet his hiring went largely unquestioned in the media. No one resigned from NBC News out of protest over the tainting of their brand because Sharpton's politics and tactics ARE their brand.
Were Sharpton's politics unknown, or if he were - gasp - conservative, and he'd written, "Chink in the Armor," he would've been fired. Since his views are known, and shared by the vast majority of those in position to take a stand against him, he is granted a platform to spread his lies.
The same goes for Charles Blow. There was no outcry from the Times' editorial staff or readers that Blow should be fired. We don't even know if there was any pressure on him to apologize. The entirety of their anemic response was limited to AFTER Blow tweeted an "I shouldn't have done it" non-apology apology a day and a half later, and reads, "It is enough. We are in agreement with him that the comment was inappropriate and we're glad he acknowledged it." To put it another way, they wish Blow would save that sort of talk for where it's appropriate - Upper East Side cocktail parties where everyone agrees and no one will talk about it it outside the room.
Blow never mention it again or actually use words like "I'm sorry," just moved on like it never happened. And why should he? He's a progressive, after all, which means he thinks correctly.
SOURCE
*************************
Act of Valor Trumps Hollywood’s Asinine Squalor
By Pastor Doug Giles
Finally, a 21st century movie that doesn’t portray our military as corrupt, stupid, confused torturers who murder innocent babies.
Act of Valor, which opened this weekend, features active (and anonymous) Navy SEALs in the re-creation of real events that showcase our crème de la crème rescuing our operatives and crushing our enemies in an OMG type of way.
I’ve got two words for the manner in which our boys were depicted in this flick … Sa-lute!
If I were a wannabe enemy of the U.S.A. (foreign or domestic) I’d be crapping my cargo pants (or tunic) after viewing Act of Valor—chiefly because our special forces are some bad mamajambas who have the tools and the tenacity to jack you up.
Yep, be afraid, villains, as our troops are effective ministers of God poised, ready and willing with stealth and style to inflict the wrath of God on those who do evil. I’m talkin’ Romans 13:1-5 style. Look it up if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
Another thing that I truly enjoyed about this film was the unambiguous patriotism of the soldiers and their families. Yep, no whining about their missions from their families or the SEALs who sacrificed their lives and limbs for God and country. It almost felt like I was in America again as I watched this movie. It was weird—but a good weird.
Even though it’s shocking to see our troops displayed in a magnificent manner within this Occuculture that loathes them, it was not a shocker to me; I have had the good fortune to spend time with many of our special ops and other soldiers in hunting camps from Alaska to Texas and have found them just as the movie displayed them: consummate class acts without a hint of the BS Hollyweird has smeared them with over the last decade.
I can’t say enough good things about this movie. In the theater in which my wife and I watched it we spotted several older gents and couples who sat in their seats and silently wept as the credits rolled. It was sacred.
I’m sure all the scabs and the venomous wood lice of the Left are going to crawl out from under the rocks where they dwell and bash this war pic, but that’s alright. Our SEALs and others have afforded you the right to be stupid and bray your insanity by keeping bad guys at bay, both at home and abroad, and thereby giving you the wherewithal to play your silly and ungrateful games against our fair land.
Lastly, parents, take your teenagers to see Act of Valor. Maybe, just maybe, some of the courage, patriotism and dignity depicted in this film will erase the film this crappy culture has slimed your kid with.
God bless America, our warriors who protect her, and those involved with this movie. Amen.
SOURCE
***************************
Why Does the Left Despise Valor
Because they are personally gutless, too yellow to risk their own precious skins for anybody or any thing. And yes: I have served in the army myself -- JR
There is a pretty reliable predictor in America today. If someone says something nice about our military, the need to support them, or show demonstrative appreciation for them outright--that person is likely a person of the political and theological right.
I'm not sure why that's the case, but it is so doggone accurate in the circles of punditry, media, and entertainment, I have to think it's not much different in other places where hard core partisan ranks exist.
This weekend is the perfect example.
One of the most important films to be made in such a long time--honoring our military--reinforces the love of family, the honor of sacrifice, the love of country, and most importantly deep appreciation for men who do things most of us would shrink from. Yet almost universally in media, punditry, and entertainment circles it is being panned as pro-war-mongering-propaganda-responsible-for-all-that-is-wrong. They base these arguments on everything from video games, to perceived war crimes.
They lay these charges at the feet of Act Of Valor, an independently produced film debuting this weekend.
But what I want to know more specifically is why? Why were there repeated articles on GAWKER and HUFFINGTON POST this week--prior to the film’s release and in a couple of instances complete admission by the person writing the critique that admitted they hadn't seen more than the trailer--that included denouncements of danger, lies, and propaganda that this film contained?
Everybody knows that the left hates war. To a fault. I've debated leftists who believed freeing slaves, stopping the Holocaust, or liberating fifty million people from the suffocation of tyranny is somehow an abuse.
What the media will never tell you is that the right doesn't like war either.
But the difference between the two mindsets is simple: sometimes stopping a known evil is worth the sacrifice of the price paid.
The overarching problem for the left is that increasingly evil is indistinguishable, unrecognizable, and in some cases ignored. Pious platitudes about negotiating, compromising, or blaming America for her wrongs, somehow become a relevant response from the left when staring into the eyes of a tyrant who would kill us if he had the power to do so.
SOURCE
************************
ELSEWHERE
Santorum on Obama Pushing College for All Americans: "What a Snob": "Well said, Santorum -- well said. At a campaign stop in Michigan on Saturday morning: "Not all folks are gifted in the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands... and want to work out there making things. President Obama once said, he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob. There are good decent men and women, who go out everyday to put their skills to test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college -- he wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his."
Another crooked Kennedy: "The son of Robert F. Kennedy has been arrested for allegedly attacking two nurses who tried to stop him removing his newborn baby from hospital. Douglas Kennedy, a journalist, is charged with harassment and endangering the welfare of a child following the altercation, which happened last month. He is alleged to have twisted the arm of one nurse and kicked another in the crotch as they tried to make sure his two-day-old son Boru was not being treated roughly. Mr and Mrs Kennedy started to take the baby for a walk outside, but were stopped by nurses concerned for the boy's safety. They asked him to return the newborn to the emergency room, but he refused. When Mr Kennedy ignored them and walked in to the elevator, nurses triggered a 'code pink', which alerts staff that someone is trying to abduct a baby. But Mr Kennedy then allegedly kicked her in the pelvis and caused her to fall over. Mr Kennedy then fell on the floor, still holding his son, and jumped up to run downstairs, according to the police report, but was 'stopped by security and escorted back to the infant's room'."
**************************
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)
****************************
Charles M. Blow, communist, er, columnist for The New York Times, pulled back the curtain on the progressive mindset a little this week, as much as there is a mind behind it. Upon hearing something Mitt Romney said about single parents, Blow, who apparently is one, took exception. On Twitter he sent out the following:
"Let me just tell you this Mitt "Muddle Mouth": I'm a single parent and my kids are *amazing*! Stick that in your magic underwear."
For those who don't know, the website Buzzfeed describes the "magic underwear" this way, "Mormon men and women wear "temple garments" beneath their clothes as a reminder of their religious commitments, a rough equivalent of Jews' yarmulkes or tzitzit."
That, of course, makes Blow's tweet an attack on Romney's Mormon faith, done willingly and before the whole world. At a time when ESPN fires a writer for using the common phrase "Chink in the Armor" to describe a bad game by Jeremy Lin because Lin happens to be Asian, you'd think the blowback on Blow would be swift. You would be wrong. There was no blowback - or at least none to speak of.
Had Blow been anything but a progressive, the media would have opened up on him like he was Pat Buchanan, and justifiably so. But if you're a leftist you're allowed to be a bigot. It's practically required.
In the progressive world people can't be looked at as individuals. They must be divided and subdivided so the "professional Left" can set about making them victims when it suits their needs. It's the hyphenated Americans, the gender Americans, the Americans who like to do this with their genitals. It's the ones with this color skin, or that color skin, it's this one and that one and blah, blah.
They create these groups, then tell people to identify with "their groups," so, when a member of that group is the victim of something, it's an affront to all of them.
It's the mentality that created a group called the Asian American Journalist Association and emboldened it, without invitation, to release guidelines for how the media needs to cover Jeremy Lin. See, you can't treat Jeremy Lin like any other human being, or even any other basketball player. He's different. His ancestors were of Asian descent.
As such, phrases such as "chink in the armor," though common for decades as a clich‚ about someone being discovered to not be perfect, can't be used to describe his first sub-par performance because this previously unheard of group says so.
Their release says, "As NBA player Jeremy Lin's prowess on the court continues to attract international attention and grab headlines, AAJA would like to remind media outlets about relevance and context regarding coverage of race." See, Lin is not first a person or even a basketball player; he is a member of a race.
Has the AAJA been asked by Lin to lay these guidelines? No.
The group issued seven points of "Danger Zones" of which the rest of the world needs to be aware when talking about Lin, each more insane than the last.
It also listed some biographical information, the first point of which is the most telling. It reads, in part:
" Jeremy Lin is Asian American, not Asian (more specifically, Taiwanese American). It's an important distinction and one that should be considered before any references to former NBA players such as Yao Ming and Wang Zhizhi, who were Chinese."
Not only do the group have to divide Lin from everyone else by pointing out he's of Asian descent, it subdivides him to Taiwanese.
It continues . "It's an important distinction and one that should be considered before any references to former NBA players such as Yao Ming and Wang Zhizhi, who were Chinese." Who gives a damn?
If you're a fan of the Knicks, you care that he's good. If you're a fan of whoever is playing the Knicks, you care that he's good for the opposite reason. If you didn't care about the Knicks, or basketball, before someone with your ethnic background started playing for them and doing well, the problem is yours, not some poor schlub writer for ESPN.
But that schlub from ESPN paid with his job because he didn't refer to Jeremy Lin the way people not Jeremy Lin want Jeremy Lin referred to.
By dividing people into groups, progressives are able to easily manipulate people. If a group you've been taught you're a part of is the "victim" of an affront, it's easy to rile you up. This is not to say there aren't instances of bigotry by individuals against other individuals. It's to say jackassery by one against another is nothing more than that. Unless you're trying to remove the individual and create a collective mindset to advance an agenda.
Progressive create or exacerbate issues based on the groups they've created, demonize conservatives as the cause of, or obstruction to the solution for, the problem and, with the willing help of the media, manipulate people too busy to pay close enough attention into thinking they're trying to help. But progressives never help.
Umpteen trillion dollars into the war on poverty we have just as much poverty. Try to change anything about these failed progressive programs, such as incentivizing work or attempting to curb abuse, and progressives will mobilize the necessary groups to cry racisim, sexism or whatever ism they need to create to get the needed outrage. It's a sick game that traps people in poverty, ruins lives and families and actually harms people. But it does do one important thing - it creates a bloc of voters almost uniformly ready to vote, unthinkingly, for their oppressors.
This is not a slave mentality; slaves yearned to be free and independent. This is the mentality most closely associated with monarchy. In monarchies, peasants were told their king was chosen by God, and he had their best interests at heart. Thus, they accepted it when king stole their property and liberty and sent them off to war over ego. They were told their king was their caretaker, when, in fact, he was their oppressor. It's the prefect progressive style of government. And it has no room for dissent.
Progressives spent so much time and energy creating this group mentality, they have no time or patience for those who refuse to conform. Be a black, gay or female conservative, and you not only don't qualify for the victim status afforded others, you're purposefully, and gleefully, targeted by the very tactics those groups were allegedly created to prevent.
There is virtually nothing a of a racist, sexist or homophobic nature that a progressive can say to or about a conservative that will illicit any ill will from fellow progressives, either in or out of the media. Sickeningly, the perpetrators are often rewarded. Al Sharpton, noted bigot, inciter of riots and inspiration of murderers (Google Freddy's Fashion Mart), who made his name pulling a hoax against police based on race, now has a daily hour-long TV show on the progressives MSNBC.
Sharpton's past is not anything sane people dispute, yet his hiring went largely unquestioned in the media. No one resigned from NBC News out of protest over the tainting of their brand because Sharpton's politics and tactics ARE their brand.
Were Sharpton's politics unknown, or if he were - gasp - conservative, and he'd written, "Chink in the Armor," he would've been fired. Since his views are known, and shared by the vast majority of those in position to take a stand against him, he is granted a platform to spread his lies.
The same goes for Charles Blow. There was no outcry from the Times' editorial staff or readers that Blow should be fired. We don't even know if there was any pressure on him to apologize. The entirety of their anemic response was limited to AFTER Blow tweeted an "I shouldn't have done it" non-apology apology a day and a half later, and reads, "It is enough. We are in agreement with him that the comment was inappropriate and we're glad he acknowledged it." To put it another way, they wish Blow would save that sort of talk for where it's appropriate - Upper East Side cocktail parties where everyone agrees and no one will talk about it it outside the room.
Blow never mention it again or actually use words like "I'm sorry," just moved on like it never happened. And why should he? He's a progressive, after all, which means he thinks correctly.
SOURCE
*************************
Act of Valor Trumps Hollywood’s Asinine Squalor
By Pastor Doug Giles
Finally, a 21st century movie that doesn’t portray our military as corrupt, stupid, confused torturers who murder innocent babies.
Act of Valor, which opened this weekend, features active (and anonymous) Navy SEALs in the re-creation of real events that showcase our crème de la crème rescuing our operatives and crushing our enemies in an OMG type of way.
I’ve got two words for the manner in which our boys were depicted in this flick … Sa-lute!
If I were a wannabe enemy of the U.S.A. (foreign or domestic) I’d be crapping my cargo pants (or tunic) after viewing Act of Valor—chiefly because our special forces are some bad mamajambas who have the tools and the tenacity to jack you up.
Yep, be afraid, villains, as our troops are effective ministers of God poised, ready and willing with stealth and style to inflict the wrath of God on those who do evil. I’m talkin’ Romans 13:1-5 style. Look it up if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
Another thing that I truly enjoyed about this film was the unambiguous patriotism of the soldiers and their families. Yep, no whining about their missions from their families or the SEALs who sacrificed their lives and limbs for God and country. It almost felt like I was in America again as I watched this movie. It was weird—but a good weird.
Even though it’s shocking to see our troops displayed in a magnificent manner within this Occuculture that loathes them, it was not a shocker to me; I have had the good fortune to spend time with many of our special ops and other soldiers in hunting camps from Alaska to Texas and have found them just as the movie displayed them: consummate class acts without a hint of the BS Hollyweird has smeared them with over the last decade.
I can’t say enough good things about this movie. In the theater in which my wife and I watched it we spotted several older gents and couples who sat in their seats and silently wept as the credits rolled. It was sacred.
I’m sure all the scabs and the venomous wood lice of the Left are going to crawl out from under the rocks where they dwell and bash this war pic, but that’s alright. Our SEALs and others have afforded you the right to be stupid and bray your insanity by keeping bad guys at bay, both at home and abroad, and thereby giving you the wherewithal to play your silly and ungrateful games against our fair land.
Lastly, parents, take your teenagers to see Act of Valor. Maybe, just maybe, some of the courage, patriotism and dignity depicted in this film will erase the film this crappy culture has slimed your kid with.
God bless America, our warriors who protect her, and those involved with this movie. Amen.
SOURCE
***************************
Why Does the Left Despise Valor
Because they are personally gutless, too yellow to risk their own precious skins for anybody or any thing. And yes: I have served in the army myself -- JR
There is a pretty reliable predictor in America today. If someone says something nice about our military, the need to support them, or show demonstrative appreciation for them outright--that person is likely a person of the political and theological right.
I'm not sure why that's the case, but it is so doggone accurate in the circles of punditry, media, and entertainment, I have to think it's not much different in other places where hard core partisan ranks exist.
This weekend is the perfect example.
One of the most important films to be made in such a long time--honoring our military--reinforces the love of family, the honor of sacrifice, the love of country, and most importantly deep appreciation for men who do things most of us would shrink from. Yet almost universally in media, punditry, and entertainment circles it is being panned as pro-war-mongering-propaganda-responsible-for-all-that-is-wrong. They base these arguments on everything from video games, to perceived war crimes.
They lay these charges at the feet of Act Of Valor, an independently produced film debuting this weekend.
But what I want to know more specifically is why? Why were there repeated articles on GAWKER and HUFFINGTON POST this week--prior to the film’s release and in a couple of instances complete admission by the person writing the critique that admitted they hadn't seen more than the trailer--that included denouncements of danger, lies, and propaganda that this film contained?
Everybody knows that the left hates war. To a fault. I've debated leftists who believed freeing slaves, stopping the Holocaust, or liberating fifty million people from the suffocation of tyranny is somehow an abuse.
What the media will never tell you is that the right doesn't like war either.
But the difference between the two mindsets is simple: sometimes stopping a known evil is worth the sacrifice of the price paid.
The overarching problem for the left is that increasingly evil is indistinguishable, unrecognizable, and in some cases ignored. Pious platitudes about negotiating, compromising, or blaming America for her wrongs, somehow become a relevant response from the left when staring into the eyes of a tyrant who would kill us if he had the power to do so.
SOURCE
************************
ELSEWHERE
Santorum on Obama Pushing College for All Americans: "What a Snob": "Well said, Santorum -- well said. At a campaign stop in Michigan on Saturday morning: "Not all folks are gifted in the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands... and want to work out there making things. President Obama once said, he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob. There are good decent men and women, who go out everyday to put their skills to test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college -- he wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his."
Another crooked Kennedy: "The son of Robert F. Kennedy has been arrested for allegedly attacking two nurses who tried to stop him removing his newborn baby from hospital. Douglas Kennedy, a journalist, is charged with harassment and endangering the welfare of a child following the altercation, which happened last month. He is alleged to have twisted the arm of one nurse and kicked another in the crotch as they tried to make sure his two-day-old son Boru was not being treated roughly. Mr and Mrs Kennedy started to take the baby for a walk outside, but were stopped by nurses concerned for the boy's safety. They asked him to return the newborn to the emergency room, but he refused. When Mr Kennedy ignored them and walked in to the elevator, nurses triggered a 'code pink', which alerts staff that someone is trying to abduct a baby. But Mr Kennedy then allegedly kicked her in the pelvis and caused her to fall over. Mr Kennedy then fell on the floor, still holding his son, and jumped up to run downstairs, according to the police report, but was 'stopped by security and escorted back to the infant's room'."
**************************
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)
****************************
Sunday, February 26, 2012
In the Soviet era, American "liberals" tried to deceive America into not defending itself against Communist hostility. Now they are trying to deceive Americans into not defending themselves against Muslim hostility
The idea of America being punished for its success and prosperity gives them erections so they do anything they can to bring disaster to America
Federal law enforcement has amassed an impressive record identifying and interdicting would-be jihadists bent on waging terrorist attacks before they can acquire the means to kill people. The American military has killed or detained senior terrorist leaders, including those tied to a slew of homegrown terror plots.
So when a spike in those plots from 2009 ebbs, those seeking an explanation might start by looking at these documented successes.
Not University of North Carolina sociologist Charles Kurzman.
In a report issued last week, Kurzman tallied 20 terrorism prosecutions in 2011 as further proof of his theory that the threat of Islamist terrorism is exaggerated and the country's response still rooted more in emotion and fear than reason.
The New York Times promoted the report a day before its release, leading with Kurzman's conclusion that, "A feared wave of homegrown terrorism by radicalized Muslim Americans has not materialized."
"The public perception of threat does not match actual case-by-case attacks," Kurzman also told the Raleigh News & Observer. "We're getting a skewed perception of the prevalence of these figures."
Neither newspaper challenged Kurzman's premise and methodology and neither sought out an opposing viewpoint. For the Times, it is yet another example of its long time collaboration with uncritically and falsely presenting militant Islamist groups and officials as "moderate."
But the Kurzman report is flawed by its assumptions and by Kurzman's conclusion that the data shows the threat of radicalization has been repelled, an opinion for which he offers no evidence.
He is careful to say there is a threat, noting that "revolutionary Islamist organizations overseas continue to call for Muslim-Americans to engage in violence." But in a Muslim-American population of 2 million, such cases barely register a blip in a country "on track to register 14,000 murders in 2011."
Murderers and terrorists both kill. But the comparison ends there. Murders tend to be individual acts, committed for personal or monetary reasons. Terrorist attacks seek mass casualties and seek to instill mass fear to deep economic harm and political surrender.
Kurzman authored a book last year detailing his theory. In a question-and-answer posting on his webpage, he explains that if Islamic radicalism were a genuine crisis, "we would see far more than the 20 Muslim-Americans, on average, who engage in terrorist plots each year." Until perspective comes to the debate, he writes, "we may wind up scaring ourselves into panicky policy decisions and a paranoid quality of life."
James Carafano, deputy director of the Heritage Foundation's Institute for International Studies, said it was misleading to use raw numbers on an issue like terrorism. Terrorists are "fringe elements of society" whose number never will equate to the damage they can cause.
"You could quadruple the number of attacks by Islamic terrorists and it would still be a small number [of the population]," said Carafano, who studied 40 disrupted homegrown terror threats. "Would people say that's not a problem because it is less than 2 percent? No, they would be apoplectic."
More HERE
********************
Shoulder-Fired Defense Missile Systems to Be Installed on All Israeli Passenger Planes
No sign that Americans will be similarly protected. It would cost only a fraction of what Obama has wasted on all his failed "green job" schemes
Defense officials have decided that systems against shoulder-fired missiles will be installed onboard all Israeli passenger planes, due to increased terror threats. Prior to this decision, discussions proposed the installation of the system on some of the aircraft, primarily those routinely traveling to “problematic" destinations.
El Al, Arkia, and Israir will all install the C-MUSIC system onboard all aircraft. The C-MUSIC system was designed and developed by Elbit System's ElOP division. Elbit Systems is presently completing the production of the initial systems, and several aircraft will be equipped with the system before the middle of the year.
The installation of the systems will conclude one of the largest failures in the history of the Israeli defense establishment. Several warnings which were brought up in the past year concerning the threat posed by shoulder-fired missiles have accelerated the process that began nearly a decade ago. On November 2002, terrorists attempted to shoot down an Arkia passenger plane departing from Mombasa airport.
The missiles were launched and missed, and a disaster was narrowly avoided.
El Al is readying for the installation of the initial systems. The company will serve as an installation contractor for Arkia and Israir as well. The system has generated tremendous interest throughout the world, and professional delegations from numerous aircraft companies interested in protecting their aircraft from the threat posed by shoulder-fired missiles are expected to arrive to Israel after the installation of the first system.
SOURCE
**************************
Obama to Law Enforcement: Stop Linking Muslims to Terrorism
In yet another curtsy to the politically correct orthodoxy, President Barack Obama's White House plans to tinker with federal police curriculums for counterterrorism training classes. The first bit of "revamping" is the removal of all material that groups, such as the Council on American Islamic Relations, or CAIR, find offensive or containing a "negative" image of Muslims.
It’s a government-wide call to end Islamophobia, according to a blog by a Washington, DC-based watchdog group that investigates, exposes and prosecutes government corruption.
A few months after the Obama White House ordered an investigation of government counterterrorism training, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has destroyed instructional material that characterizes Muslims as prone to violence or terrorism, according to the Judicial Watch blog.
So far 700 pages of documents from about 300 presentations given to agents since the 2001 terrorist attacks have been purged, according to a new report published this week. The White House order came after the same publication reported in late November that the FBI, Department of Justice (DOJ) and Pentagon taught employees that mainstream Muslims embrace violence and compared the Islamic religion to the death star.
And the purge of training material regarding Islamic terrorism from law enforcement training is only the beginning. Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress that anti-Muslim instructional materials hurt the country’s fight against terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. As a result of this mentality, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were asked to collect counterterrorism training materials at all military academies and academic centers such as the National Defense Intelligence College and the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center.
"The goal, evidently, is to banish any material that could be viewed as offensive to Muslims," said the Jihadist Watch blog.
To fulfill this politically-correct mission, the FBI enlisted the Army Combating Terrorism Center at West Point to purge material that conflates terrorism with mainstream Islam, according to inside information cited in the Judicial Watch report. The cleansing also includes a White House review on any information related to “cultural awareness” training for troops that were preparing to deploy to the Middle East.
This appears to be part of a wider Muslim outreach effort on the part of the Obama Administration and the president’s allies in Congress. Last spring, for instance, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee quietly scheduled a special hearing to better protect Muslim civil rights in America. Organized by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin -- arguably one of the most sympathetic lawmakers to Islamic causes -- the event came in “response to the spike in anti-Muslim bigotry” and marked the first ever congressional hearing on Muslim civil rights.
It was Durbin who on the floor of the Senate in 2004 called U.S. soldiers Nazis, and detention centers such as Guantanamo Bay "gulags." He later apologized, but his constituents were happy to hear him denigrating U.S. troops since his district has a very large Muslim population, according to news reports.
According to the Examiner, other Muslim outreach efforts under Obama included: Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano meeting to discuss national security matters with a group of extremist Muslim organizations including members of the Muslim Brotherhood; the nation’s space agency (NASA) being ordered to focus on Muslim diplomacy; and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signing a special order to allow the re-entry of two radical Islamic academics whose terrorist ties long banned them from the U.S.
SOURCE
****************************
"Liberals" and the Cult of Moral Relativism
Liberals as seen from a libertarian viewpoint -- by Sam Wells
Beyond the myths and fallacies of socialism, Keynesianism, and regulatory welfare statism, and beyond the junk science of fraudulent sham environmentalism, and beyond the rotten philosophical and ethical underpinnings of leftism, when it comes to basic motivations and the attitudes that drive the left-wing mindset, one will look in vain for a non-psychological explanation -- and one does not have to be a trained psychologist to be able to discern the whim-worshipping, power-lusting infantile complex that underlies leftism and its hatred for private property, capitalism, freedom, humankind, the United States, and non-arbitrary morality.
One reason dizzy liberals hate and fear principled freedom advocates so much is that we individualists often render value judgments -- and when the Liberal Mentality hears someone render a value judgment with which the "liberal" disagrees, the liberal wants to pretend that the value judgment is "invalid" because "there are never any absolutes" (a statement which, if true, is self-contradictory and therefore false). So, when a rational individualist renders a value judgement that a liberal doesn't like, the liberal often tries to attack ALL value judgements as invalid rather than dealing with the specific issue at hand -- and sometimes even accuses the principled individualist of wanting to "legislate morality" or somehow forcibly impose his moral judgement on him!
For example, if the rational individualist claims that using heroin and cocaine can be addictive and is bad for one's health, the liberal relativist reacts very defensively and with barely suppressed guilt symptoms, perhaps even petulantly stamping his or her foot in indignation and screeching something like "What right do you have to impose your moral judgements on me or other people! I have a right to do what I want!"
Notice that the rational individualist has in no way used force, either personal or political, to impose his views on the "liberal" or anyone else -- nor has he advocated using the force of political legislation to impose his observations about private personal behavior or anyone; but, the "liberal" -- almost always intellectually dishonest to the core -- wants to try to get away with portraying those who express moral sentiments as somehow threatening to impose their morality on others.
What the "liberal" really feels threatened by is not legislation but the idea that the morality of human behavior might not be arbitrary and subjective but based on rational principles and on absolute standards which if ignored could affect his life and happiness.
(Of course this same liberal sees nothing wrong or hypocritical with him using Big Government to impose his notions of morality on other people -- from compulsory school attendance laws, forced bussing of school children, anti-discrimination laws, Affirmative Action, compulsory seat belts, FDA restrictions on what vitamins you can take, laws against "quack" cancer cures, compulsory Social Security taxes, restrictions on using one's own land, antitrust laws, income taxes, price controls, and many other coercive interventions against peoples' freedom to engage in capitalist acts among consenting adults.)
The irony is that ONLY in a free society -- a society in which government is restricted by a policy of Laissez Faire -- are (adult) individuals recognized as responsible human beings who are free (from coercive interference) to do with their own bodies and properties whatever they want as long as they do not violate (through coercive interference) the same right of other adult citizens to do what they want with their own bodies and properties. This INCLUDES the freedom to do some things the rational individualist himself may disapprove of, such as self-mutilation, using LSD or heroin, putting gerbils up ones rectum, eating banana peels, drilling holes in the top of ones skull, sniffing glue, watching Jerry Springer or Geraldo Rivera, or reading Newsweek magazine.
Under the Laissez-Faire Republic which we advocate, people would be free to perform immoral follies on up to and including suicide -- as long as such actions do not involve the initiation of the use of coercive force in violation of the rights of others to their own persons and properties. Under freedom, ALL citizens' rights to person and property would be recognized, respected, and defended by law, including that of the "liberals" as well -- but not JUST the freedom of "liberals" to indulge in their own whims. The law would also protect the freedom of other people to disagree with the "liberals" and even the freedom of speech and of press to express disapproval of the immoral personal behaviors or foolish practices that are condoned and championed by the "liberals" and other moral relativists. It is this freedom -- the freedom to disagree with and disapprove of their pet vices and social programs -- that enrages "liberals" so much -- and why the "liberal"-left has sought to suppress any and all dissent and disagreement with its agenda by using its fascistic program of "political correctness" on college campuses and in the kept media. Their goal is to stamp out all publicly expressed views contrary to their own -- and especially those that reject epistemological and moral relativism in favor of rational standards and absolute principles and values.
The implicit reason that liberal relativists want to try to pretend that "there are no absolutes" or that morality is "relative" is that they want to reject any and all PRINCIPLES as such -- not just political legislation imposed by the power of the state, but also any NON- IMPOSED rules dealing with good conduct and bad habits to avoid. They want to be able to flaunt their vices & follies publicly while imposing a gag on anyone who would dare call their behavior "immoral" or foolish or imply that there could be any rational, absolute standards for behavior beyond their own personal whims or momentary feelings. They want the "luxury" of pretending that any and all chosen behavior has no consequences, no relevance one way or another to human life and morality. They want to replace rational principle with their own arbitrary whims. Of course, this is a recipe for disaster, both in the life of an individual and in the course of a nation.
The advance of human progress and civilization has been the result of the discovery, recognition, and implementation of sound principles and the abandonment of the arbitrariness of whim and the irrationality of superstition. By their vehement rejection of rational principles and absolute standards, today's left-wingers and "liberals" have abandoned progress and civilization and true science in favor of their own mystic religious cult, no longer pretending (as did Marx) that their socialism is "scientific" and rational.
Beyond that, it must be kept in mind that relativism in the areas of truth and morals necessarily leads to absolute tyranny in politics. If reality is seen as subjective and relative, that is, if reason is abandoned, then reality can no longer serve as an independent frame of reference or common ground by which disputes may be resolved, so that the only other way disputes can be dealt with is by brute force -- might makes right. Thus, the relativist premises of modern "liberalism" lead inevitably to more conflict in society and eventually to some form of statist tyranny.
Force -- especially the legal force of political government -- must never be allowed to be wielded by subjective Whim. Our Founding Fathers knew this. That's why they wanted to bind down men in government by the chains of a written Constitution. The relativist premises of modern liberalism are contrary to the vision, intent, and spirit of the American idea of using law to impose limitations on political government. It is high time Americans reimposed Constitutional limits on government by putting it under an iron-clad strait jacket called the policy of Laissez Faire based on the rational principle of individual human rights; otherwise, the tyranny of Whimarchy will continue down the road to absolute statism.
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 idea of America being punished for its success and prosperity gives them erections so they do anything they can to bring disaster to America
Federal law enforcement has amassed an impressive record identifying and interdicting would-be jihadists bent on waging terrorist attacks before they can acquire the means to kill people. The American military has killed or detained senior terrorist leaders, including those tied to a slew of homegrown terror plots.
So when a spike in those plots from 2009 ebbs, those seeking an explanation might start by looking at these documented successes.
Not University of North Carolina sociologist Charles Kurzman.
In a report issued last week, Kurzman tallied 20 terrorism prosecutions in 2011 as further proof of his theory that the threat of Islamist terrorism is exaggerated and the country's response still rooted more in emotion and fear than reason.
The New York Times promoted the report a day before its release, leading with Kurzman's conclusion that, "A feared wave of homegrown terrorism by radicalized Muslim Americans has not materialized."
"The public perception of threat does not match actual case-by-case attacks," Kurzman also told the Raleigh News & Observer. "We're getting a skewed perception of the prevalence of these figures."
Neither newspaper challenged Kurzman's premise and methodology and neither sought out an opposing viewpoint. For the Times, it is yet another example of its long time collaboration with uncritically and falsely presenting militant Islamist groups and officials as "moderate."
But the Kurzman report is flawed by its assumptions and by Kurzman's conclusion that the data shows the threat of radicalization has been repelled, an opinion for which he offers no evidence.
He is careful to say there is a threat, noting that "revolutionary Islamist organizations overseas continue to call for Muslim-Americans to engage in violence." But in a Muslim-American population of 2 million, such cases barely register a blip in a country "on track to register 14,000 murders in 2011."
Murderers and terrorists both kill. But the comparison ends there. Murders tend to be individual acts, committed for personal or monetary reasons. Terrorist attacks seek mass casualties and seek to instill mass fear to deep economic harm and political surrender.
Kurzman authored a book last year detailing his theory. In a question-and-answer posting on his webpage, he explains that if Islamic radicalism were a genuine crisis, "we would see far more than the 20 Muslim-Americans, on average, who engage in terrorist plots each year." Until perspective comes to the debate, he writes, "we may wind up scaring ourselves into panicky policy decisions and a paranoid quality of life."
James Carafano, deputy director of the Heritage Foundation's Institute for International Studies, said it was misleading to use raw numbers on an issue like terrorism. Terrorists are "fringe elements of society" whose number never will equate to the damage they can cause.
"You could quadruple the number of attacks by Islamic terrorists and it would still be a small number [of the population]," said Carafano, who studied 40 disrupted homegrown terror threats. "Would people say that's not a problem because it is less than 2 percent? No, they would be apoplectic."
More HERE
********************
Shoulder-Fired Defense Missile Systems to Be Installed on All Israeli Passenger Planes
No sign that Americans will be similarly protected. It would cost only a fraction of what Obama has wasted on all his failed "green job" schemes
Defense officials have decided that systems against shoulder-fired missiles will be installed onboard all Israeli passenger planes, due to increased terror threats. Prior to this decision, discussions proposed the installation of the system on some of the aircraft, primarily those routinely traveling to “problematic" destinations.
El Al, Arkia, and Israir will all install the C-MUSIC system onboard all aircraft. The C-MUSIC system was designed and developed by Elbit System's ElOP division. Elbit Systems is presently completing the production of the initial systems, and several aircraft will be equipped with the system before the middle of the year.
The installation of the systems will conclude one of the largest failures in the history of the Israeli defense establishment. Several warnings which were brought up in the past year concerning the threat posed by shoulder-fired missiles have accelerated the process that began nearly a decade ago. On November 2002, terrorists attempted to shoot down an Arkia passenger plane departing from Mombasa airport.
The missiles were launched and missed, and a disaster was narrowly avoided.
El Al is readying for the installation of the initial systems. The company will serve as an installation contractor for Arkia and Israir as well. The system has generated tremendous interest throughout the world, and professional delegations from numerous aircraft companies interested in protecting their aircraft from the threat posed by shoulder-fired missiles are expected to arrive to Israel after the installation of the first system.
SOURCE
**************************
Obama to Law Enforcement: Stop Linking Muslims to Terrorism
In yet another curtsy to the politically correct orthodoxy, President Barack Obama's White House plans to tinker with federal police curriculums for counterterrorism training classes. The first bit of "revamping" is the removal of all material that groups, such as the Council on American Islamic Relations, or CAIR, find offensive or containing a "negative" image of Muslims.
It’s a government-wide call to end Islamophobia, according to a blog by a Washington, DC-based watchdog group that investigates, exposes and prosecutes government corruption.
A few months after the Obama White House ordered an investigation of government counterterrorism training, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has destroyed instructional material that characterizes Muslims as prone to violence or terrorism, according to the Judicial Watch blog.
So far 700 pages of documents from about 300 presentations given to agents since the 2001 terrorist attacks have been purged, according to a new report published this week. The White House order came after the same publication reported in late November that the FBI, Department of Justice (DOJ) and Pentagon taught employees that mainstream Muslims embrace violence and compared the Islamic religion to the death star.
And the purge of training material regarding Islamic terrorism from law enforcement training is only the beginning. Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress that anti-Muslim instructional materials hurt the country’s fight against terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. As a result of this mentality, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were asked to collect counterterrorism training materials at all military academies and academic centers such as the National Defense Intelligence College and the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center.
"The goal, evidently, is to banish any material that could be viewed as offensive to Muslims," said the Jihadist Watch blog.
To fulfill this politically-correct mission, the FBI enlisted the Army Combating Terrorism Center at West Point to purge material that conflates terrorism with mainstream Islam, according to inside information cited in the Judicial Watch report. The cleansing also includes a White House review on any information related to “cultural awareness” training for troops that were preparing to deploy to the Middle East.
This appears to be part of a wider Muslim outreach effort on the part of the Obama Administration and the president’s allies in Congress. Last spring, for instance, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee quietly scheduled a special hearing to better protect Muslim civil rights in America. Organized by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin -- arguably one of the most sympathetic lawmakers to Islamic causes -- the event came in “response to the spike in anti-Muslim bigotry” and marked the first ever congressional hearing on Muslim civil rights.
It was Durbin who on the floor of the Senate in 2004 called U.S. soldiers Nazis, and detention centers such as Guantanamo Bay "gulags." He later apologized, but his constituents were happy to hear him denigrating U.S. troops since his district has a very large Muslim population, according to news reports.
According to the Examiner, other Muslim outreach efforts under Obama included: Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano meeting to discuss national security matters with a group of extremist Muslim organizations including members of the Muslim Brotherhood; the nation’s space agency (NASA) being ordered to focus on Muslim diplomacy; and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signing a special order to allow the re-entry of two radical Islamic academics whose terrorist ties long banned them from the U.S.
SOURCE
****************************
"Liberals" and the Cult of Moral Relativism
Liberals as seen from a libertarian viewpoint -- by Sam Wells
Beyond the myths and fallacies of socialism, Keynesianism, and regulatory welfare statism, and beyond the junk science of fraudulent sham environmentalism, and beyond the rotten philosophical and ethical underpinnings of leftism, when it comes to basic motivations and the attitudes that drive the left-wing mindset, one will look in vain for a non-psychological explanation -- and one does not have to be a trained psychologist to be able to discern the whim-worshipping, power-lusting infantile complex that underlies leftism and its hatred for private property, capitalism, freedom, humankind, the United States, and non-arbitrary morality.
One reason dizzy liberals hate and fear principled freedom advocates so much is that we individualists often render value judgments -- and when the Liberal Mentality hears someone render a value judgment with which the "liberal" disagrees, the liberal wants to pretend that the value judgment is "invalid" because "there are never any absolutes" (a statement which, if true, is self-contradictory and therefore false). So, when a rational individualist renders a value judgement that a liberal doesn't like, the liberal often tries to attack ALL value judgements as invalid rather than dealing with the specific issue at hand -- and sometimes even accuses the principled individualist of wanting to "legislate morality" or somehow forcibly impose his moral judgement on him!
For example, if the rational individualist claims that using heroin and cocaine can be addictive and is bad for one's health, the liberal relativist reacts very defensively and with barely suppressed guilt symptoms, perhaps even petulantly stamping his or her foot in indignation and screeching something like "What right do you have to impose your moral judgements on me or other people! I have a right to do what I want!"
Notice that the rational individualist has in no way used force, either personal or political, to impose his views on the "liberal" or anyone else -- nor has he advocated using the force of political legislation to impose his observations about private personal behavior or anyone; but, the "liberal" -- almost always intellectually dishonest to the core -- wants to try to get away with portraying those who express moral sentiments as somehow threatening to impose their morality on others.
What the "liberal" really feels threatened by is not legislation but the idea that the morality of human behavior might not be arbitrary and subjective but based on rational principles and on absolute standards which if ignored could affect his life and happiness.
(Of course this same liberal sees nothing wrong or hypocritical with him using Big Government to impose his notions of morality on other people -- from compulsory school attendance laws, forced bussing of school children, anti-discrimination laws, Affirmative Action, compulsory seat belts, FDA restrictions on what vitamins you can take, laws against "quack" cancer cures, compulsory Social Security taxes, restrictions on using one's own land, antitrust laws, income taxes, price controls, and many other coercive interventions against peoples' freedom to engage in capitalist acts among consenting adults.)
The irony is that ONLY in a free society -- a society in which government is restricted by a policy of Laissez Faire -- are (adult) individuals recognized as responsible human beings who are free (from coercive interference) to do with their own bodies and properties whatever they want as long as they do not violate (through coercive interference) the same right of other adult citizens to do what they want with their own bodies and properties. This INCLUDES the freedom to do some things the rational individualist himself may disapprove of, such as self-mutilation, using LSD or heroin, putting gerbils up ones rectum, eating banana peels, drilling holes in the top of ones skull, sniffing glue, watching Jerry Springer or Geraldo Rivera, or reading Newsweek magazine.
Under the Laissez-Faire Republic which we advocate, people would be free to perform immoral follies on up to and including suicide -- as long as such actions do not involve the initiation of the use of coercive force in violation of the rights of others to their own persons and properties. Under freedom, ALL citizens' rights to person and property would be recognized, respected, and defended by law, including that of the "liberals" as well -- but not JUST the freedom of "liberals" to indulge in their own whims. The law would also protect the freedom of other people to disagree with the "liberals" and even the freedom of speech and of press to express disapproval of the immoral personal behaviors or foolish practices that are condoned and championed by the "liberals" and other moral relativists. It is this freedom -- the freedom to disagree with and disapprove of their pet vices and social programs -- that enrages "liberals" so much -- and why the "liberal"-left has sought to suppress any and all dissent and disagreement with its agenda by using its fascistic program of "political correctness" on college campuses and in the kept media. Their goal is to stamp out all publicly expressed views contrary to their own -- and especially those that reject epistemological and moral relativism in favor of rational standards and absolute principles and values.
The implicit reason that liberal relativists want to try to pretend that "there are no absolutes" or that morality is "relative" is that they want to reject any and all PRINCIPLES as such -- not just political legislation imposed by the power of the state, but also any NON- IMPOSED rules dealing with good conduct and bad habits to avoid. They want to be able to flaunt their vices & follies publicly while imposing a gag on anyone who would dare call their behavior "immoral" or foolish or imply that there could be any rational, absolute standards for behavior beyond their own personal whims or momentary feelings. They want the "luxury" of pretending that any and all chosen behavior has no consequences, no relevance one way or another to human life and morality. They want to replace rational principle with their own arbitrary whims. Of course, this is a recipe for disaster, both in the life of an individual and in the course of a nation.
The advance of human progress and civilization has been the result of the discovery, recognition, and implementation of sound principles and the abandonment of the arbitrariness of whim and the irrationality of superstition. By their vehement rejection of rational principles and absolute standards, today's left-wingers and "liberals" have abandoned progress and civilization and true science in favor of their own mystic religious cult, no longer pretending (as did Marx) that their socialism is "scientific" and rational.
Beyond that, it must be kept in mind that relativism in the areas of truth and morals necessarily leads to absolute tyranny in politics. If reality is seen as subjective and relative, that is, if reason is abandoned, then reality can no longer serve as an independent frame of reference or common ground by which disputes may be resolved, so that the only other way disputes can be dealt with is by brute force -- might makes right. Thus, the relativist premises of modern "liberalism" lead inevitably to more conflict in society and eventually to some form of statist tyranny.
Force -- especially the legal force of political government -- must never be allowed to be wielded by subjective Whim. Our Founding Fathers knew this. That's why they wanted to bind down men in government by the chains of a written Constitution. The relativist premises of modern liberalism are contrary to the vision, intent, and spirit of the American idea of using law to impose limitations on political government. It is high time Americans reimposed Constitutional limits on government by putting it under an iron-clad strait jacket called the policy of Laissez Faire based on the rational principle of individual human rights; otherwise, the tyranny of Whimarchy will continue down the road to absolute statism.
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)
****************************
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