Democrat warmongering

Leftists love wars and revolutions

Some 50 State Department officials have signed a memo calling on President Obama to launch air and missile strikes on the Damascus regime of Bashar Assad. A "judicious use of stand-off and air weapons," they claim, "would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process."

In brief, to strengthen the hand of our diplomats and show we mean business, we should start bombing and killing Syrian soldiers.

Yet Syria has not attacked us. And Congress has not declared war on Syria, or authorized an attack. Where do these State hawks think President Obama gets the authority to launch a war on Syria?

Does State consider the Constitution to be purely advisory when it grants Congress the sole power to declare war? Was not waging aggressive war the principal charge against the Nazis at Nuremberg?

If U.S. bombs and missiles rain down on Damascus, to the cheers of the C-Street Pattons, what do we do if Bashar Assad's allies Iran and Hezbollah retaliate with Benghazi-type attacks on U.S. diplomats across the Middle East? What do we do if Syrian missiles and Russian planes starting shooting down U.S. planes?

Go to war with Hezbollah, Iran and Russia?

Assume U.S. strikes break Syria's regime and Assad falls and flees. Who fills the power vacuum in Damascus, if not the most ruthless of the terrorist forces in that country, al-Nusra and ISIS?

Should ISIS reach Damascus first, and a slaughter of Alawites and Christians ensue, would we send an American army to save them?

According to CIA Director John Brennan, ISIS is spreading and coming to Europe and America. Does it make sense then that we would launch air and missile strikes against a Syrian regime and army that is today the last line of defense between ISIS and Damascus?

Does anyone think these things through?

Wherever, across the Middle East, we have plunged in to wage war — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria — people continue to suffer and die, and we are ensnared. Have we not fought enough wars in this Godforsaken region?

Last week, Russian planes launched air strikes on the rebels in Syria whom we have been arming and training to overthrow Assad.

Said John Kerry, "Russia needs to understand that our patience is not infinite." But why are we arming rebels to overthrow Assad?

Who rises if he falls? Moscow's alliance with Damascus goes back decades. Syria provides Russia with a naval base in the Mediterranean. Vladimir Putin's support for the embattled Syrian regime in the civil war being waged against it is legal under international law.

It is our policy that appears questionable.

Where did Obama get the right to arm and train rebels to dump over the Damascus regime? Did Congress authorize this insurrection? Or is this just another CIA-National Endowment for Democracy project?

Why are we trying to bring down Assad, anyhow?

U.S. foreign policy today seems unthinking, reactive, impulsive.

Last week, 31,000 NATO troops conducted exercises in Poland and the Baltic republics, right alongside the border with Russia.

For the first time since 1945, German tanks appeared in Poland.

Now we are planning to base four NATO battalions — one U.S.-led, one British, one German, and perhaps one Canadian, as the French and Italians are balking at being part of a tripwire for war.

How would we react if 31,000 Russian, Chinese, Cuban, Iranian and North Korean troops conducted military exercises across from El Paso and Brownsville, Texas?

How would we react if each of those countries left behind a battalion of troops to prevent a repeat of General "Black Jack" Pershing's intervention in Mexico in 1916?  Americans would be apoplectic.

Nor are some Europeans enthusiastic about confronting Moscow. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called the NATO exercises "warmongering" and "saber-rattling." He adds, "Anyone who believes that symbolic tank parades on the alliance's eastern border will increase security is wrong. We would be well-advised not to deliver any excuses for a new, old confrontation."

Not only is Steinmeier's Social Democratic Party leery of any new Cold War with Russia, so, too, is the German Left Party, and the anti-EU populist party Alternative for Germany, which wants closer ties to Russia and looser ties to the United States.

This month, we sent the USS Porter into the Black Sea. Why? Says Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, "to deter potential aggression."

While there is talk of a NATO Black Sea fleet, Bulgaria, one of the three NATO Black Sea nations, appears to want no part of it.

The European Union also just voted to extend sanctions on Russia for annexing Crimea and supporting separatists in Ukraine.

Looking for a four-year faceoff with a nuclear-armed Russia?

SOURCE

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Heed Trump's Warning

One of Donald Trump’s political skills is giving widely condemned speeches.

His post-Orlando jeremiad fit the pattern, but the speech was a little like Wagner’s music as described in the famous Mark Twain line: Not as bad as it sounds. There is something so inherently inflammatory in Trump’s delivery that he could read the Gettysburg Address and some listeners would wonder how he could possibly say such a thing.

The kernel of Trump’s speech was rather obvious: “The bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here. That is a fact, and it’s a fact we need to talk about.”

The reaction of much of the opinion elite was nearly instantaneous: Whatever we do, let’s not talk about that fact.

Countless articles have been written on how much better we are at assimilating Muslim immigrants than Europe is, usually with back-patting over our openness and fluidity as a society in contrast to the self-defeating insularity of a country like France.

This may be true, but the assumption that we have the magic formula is under stress now that we’ve repeatedly suffered mass killings by second-generation immigrants.

The Islamic State model of inspiring “lone wolves” already here is dependent on loosely assimilated American Muslims susceptible to its hateful appeals. Disturbingly, it is finding takers.

In six months, terrorists have killed more than 60 people on our shores; two of the perpetrators were the sons of immigrants, and one an immigrant herself.

One of the reasons we have avoided the problems of a France may be sheer numbers. France has 50 percent more Muslim immigrants than we do, even though it is a much smaller country. Only 1 percent of the U.S. population is Muslim; 7.5 percent of the French population is.

The Somali community in Minneapolis, seeded with refugees and then replenished with chain migration, has proved a rich recruiting ground for Islamist extremists. This suggests that when we have our own enclaves of poor Muslim immigrants, the experience isn’t a happy one.

On the current trajectory, we will take in 1 million Muslim immigrants or more over the next decade. It can’t be out of bounds to ask whether that’s a good idea.

Or it shouldn’t be. The immigration debate is so encrusted with unexamined pieties that any suggestion that we reduce the number or the composition of the current immigrant flow is taken as an attempt to kneecap the Statue of Liberty.

At bottom, the Trump doctrine on immigration is that our policy should serve our values and interests, and the status quo fails on both counts. That said, his proposed Muslim ban is a mistake. It communicates a hostility to all Muslims and, besides, is unworkable.

Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies outlines a more sensible course. He suggests a return to a Cold War-era ideological test for new arrivals, geared to the struggle against radical Islam. It would ask potential immigrants questions such as whether they support killing religious converts or homosexuals. Anyone answering “yes” would be excluded. Applicants could lie, but at least the exercise would send a signal about what constitutes a lowest common denominator of American civic life.

Responsibility for Omar Mateen’s heinous act is all his own, but it is certainly relevant that his Dear Old Dad supports the Taliban and hates gays. He is exactly the kind of immigrant you would hope to deny the priceless privilege of coming here.

Krikorian also proposes to reduce legal immigration. If we eliminated the visa lottery, tightened the criteria for family unification and accepted fewer refugees, we would diminish the number of low-skilled immigrants who have trouble thriving here, and at the margins, the number of new Muslim entrants.

Donald Trump does the cause of immigration restriction a disservice by rendering it in caricature. But the questions he raises won’t go away, and they shouldn’t.

SOURCE

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Liberal Reporter Attempts to Buy "Assault Rifle" to Prove How Easy It Is, Gets Rejected

In the wake of the Orlando massacre, Chicago Sun Times reporter Neil Steinberg set out to buy an “assault rifle,” presumably to prove how easy it is. But the process didn't exactly go as planned.

In his column titled "Would-be Terrorists Can Buy Guns, But a Reporter? No," he points out how a journalist in Philadelphia was able to buy an "assault rifle” in less than 10 minutes. He also noted the percentage of gun transactions in America that don’t go through a background check, and so on.  But not at the gun shop he visited. After filling out the required paperwork asking if he was an illegal alien, a fugitive, or whether he had been convicted on charges of domestic abuse, the reporter handed over $842.50 for a Smith & Wesson M & P 15 Sport II. He'd just made his first gun purchase. Since Illinois has a 24-hour waiting period after buying a firearm and taking possession of it, however, Steinberg had to wait.

Unfortunately for him, the gun store later called to say they were canceling the sale, but initially did not say why, as is their right.

Steinberg insisted it was because he’s a reporter. “[H]ating the media is right behind hating the government as a pastime for many gun owners,” he writes. “They damn you for being ignorant then hide when you try to find out.”

Later, the gun store sent Steinberg’s newspaper a statement, which read in part: “it was uncovered that Mr. Steinberg has an admitted history of alcohol abuse, and a charge for domestic battery involving his wife.”

Everyone in Chicago knows about his escapades as a drunk and a wife beater because he wrote about it, the staff at Maxon knew about his past and they denied his purchase based on Steinberg’s own admissions in his writings about it. The firearms dealer has the final say in whether you get a gun or not and because of Steinberg’s local reputation, they decided not to take a chance on him.

More HERE

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Pro-choice



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

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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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Brexit vote could liberate the world

With the vote for or against Britain leaving the EU due at the end of this week, the look below at what it implies from economic historian and retired merchant banker Martin Hutchinson is valuable.  A British exit could have a similar effect to the Trump revolt: Rejection of a tired and oppressive consensus. As such, Martin rightly sees global implications for the British vote

One point that everyone seems to be overlooking is that British trade arrangements are unlikely to be much disrupted by a Brexit -- for the excellent reason that the British market is an important one for Europe.  If Britain's tariff-free access to Europe were cut off by  some big-bottomed bureaucrats in Brussels, Britain could very rapidly and very effectively retaliate.  A Prime Minister Boris Johnson could and probably would announce a complete embargo on the importation of European farm products into Britain.

That would be particularly disruptive to France, including the already-stressed French wine industry.  The Brits now buy twice as much Australian wine as French wine but Britain is still a major market for French wine. And one cannot imagine the French farmers taking that lying down. And French farmers always get their way.  One imagines them getting into their tractors and blockading the relevant building in Brussels. And when cut off from their supply of beer, chocolate and stinky cheese, the Brussels bureaucrats would undoubtedly cave in. "Temporary" or "transitional" arrangements would be made.

And there is of course NAFTA.  NAFTA would be a much better fit for Britain than the EU.  Blood is thicker than water and the legal and cultural similarities between the UK and the USA are still large -- not to mention the ease of a common language.  And an influential group of 11 U.S. congressmen have already made moves toward opening trade negotiations with Britain. The signatories to the letter include Devin Nunes and Pat Tiberi, two former chairmen of Congress’s Ways and Means Subcommittee on Trade.

Sadly, however, I doubt that there will be any change.  Australia and Britain are demographically and culturally very similar so the Australian experience with referenda is instructive. We have had rather a lot of them and they are always lost unless there is a broad consensus about their desirability.  There is no such consensus in Britain at the moment.   I would however love to be surprised -- JR


The purely economic costs and benefits of a British vote next Thursday to exit the EU are quite finely balanced. There are undoubted advantages to membership of a large free trade area, which it will be a pity to lose. While the EU leaders are pushing the union in a direction Britain does not and should not want to go, politically or economically, they could probably mostly be resisted. The short-term costs of Brexit could be considerable, if only in a “menu-changing” sense. Yet for Britain and for the world as a whole a vote for Brexit will constitute a fightback against a global consensus that badly need to be fought, for the sake of all our futures.

A year ago, this column published a piece headlined “Brexit divorce needs a good lawyer, hot new girlfriend.” It never got either. There is no assurance whatever that a British exit from the EU will be negotiated in an atmosphere of goodwill on both sides – indeed part of the Remain campaign’s “Project Fear” has been dire threats from various EU functionaries about how Britain’s departure must be made as unpleasant as possible to deter other countries from trying to follow the same path. Add to this indication that the negotiation will be a tough one the likelihood that Britain’s smoothest negotiator, David Cameron, will rule himself out of the exit negotiation by resigning (or will be ruled out by Brexiters’ distrust) and you can see that the “lawyer” problem is nowhere near being solved.

As for the “hot new girlfriend,” that has manifestly failed to appear – although if Donald Trump wins the Presidency a Trump-led United States, raising barriers against others but trusting a Brexiting Britain, would certainly qualify. Indeed, a United States that had poor relations with the politically correct EU, raised trade barriers against much of Asia, but regarded Britain as an old and valued ally, might be the hottest of all possible new girlfriends, a gigantic market suddenly cut off from many of its other trading partners to which Britain now had preferred access.

However, that possibility is currently no more than a gleam in the eye, with at most a 50-50 chance of appearing. Meanwhile the Brexit campaigners’ have failed to open discussions with plausible resource economies in Latin America or Africa, or with fast-growing Asian economies with a thirst for British exports. Thus there is no glorious prospect to dangle before the voters’ eyes, and a likelihood that the exit negotiations will be tortuous and the exit terms unpleasant. In those circumstances, one could entirely forgive the notoriously timid British electorate for wimping out of Brexit, and clinging to the skirts of the hag-like EU nanny they know.

Economically, the Brexit decision is quite a close one. While a Brexit would be economically advantageous in the long run (because Britain would be able to eliminate excess regulation and reorient its economy towards supplying countries with decent growth) it would unquestionably have substantial costs of renegotiating treaties and re-making economic arrangements, just as the entry into the EU did in the 1970s. While it is very clear that entry into the EU was a major economic error on the part of some especially feeble British prime ministers, the balance of economic factors for exit is much closer.

Politically and strategically, however, the arguments for Brexit are much stronger. Britain had a moderate amount of influence in EU councils in the years leading up to the Single European Act, which established a continent-wide market coming into effect in 1992. However ever since the Presidency of Jacques Delors (1985-95) and the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, Britain has been the odd man out, occasionally joined by one or other of the tiny East European states but otherwise dragged unwillingly down a road that the vast majority of Britons do not want to travel.

There is a minority of opinion formers in London that wishes to welcome their new insect overlords in Brussels, but that minority is both tiny and unrepresentative. It does however wield a considerable amount of influence and is not open to argument, whether from British democratic traditions or otherwise. Thus the extraordinary editorial in Reuters Breakingviews, generally reflective of “enlightened” London opinion, which advocated cancelling the Brexit referendum at the last minute. Throwing away 800 years of British political freedoms is just one of the sacrifices the pro-EU fanatics are prepared to make in the interests of their perverted ideology.

For the great majority of Britons, free trade with the EU is attractive, though there are doubts about the “free movement of labor” in EU treaties, especially as continental countries seem incapable of or unwilling to control their borders. But the feeling that the EU project has a huge hidden agenda, that is to be imposed on the British people without their democratic consent, has propelled the Brexit campaign to a level far in excess of that justified by simple economic considerations.

If the Brexit decision were a purely economic one, based only on the marginal advantages or disadvantages of membership of a trade area that was not especially suited to British needs, then Thursday’s vote would not be especially significant, except for the British themselves, and even then, the losers could console themselves that life would go on very much as before whichever way the vote went. But the hidden agenda of the EU’s leaders and the contempt for democracy evident in the more extreme of its supporters, indicate that the Brexit vote has a meaning far beyond the relatively limited confined of the European Union.

Over the past 20 years, an economic consensus has arisen among the world’s policymakers, that appears impervious either to argument or to democratic rejection. It involves extreme monetary policies, forcing interest rates far below their natural levels, to negative real rates and now even now negative nominal rates. It also involves running massive budget deficits, apparently without end – who could have imagined even a decade ago that a Republican Congress, in a period when the economy was running close to full employment, would do nothing whatever to bring down a budget deficit that runs year after year at around $500 billion, with every prospect of rising above $1 trillion in the next decade, without any recession intervening. It involves unlimited immigration, of both skilled and unskilled, so that domestic wage rates even in rich countries are forced down to global subsistence levels. Finally, it involves massive environmental and other over-regulation in the interests of crony capitalists who enjoy political favor, so that the playing field is no longer level but is tilted sharply towards those with political connections — crony capitalism at its most insidious level.

The result has been the slowest sustained period of rich country growth since the 1930s, with only the politically connected and those with access to massive amounts of cheap leverage doing well. The consensus policy is imposed by all major “respectable” parties, so that the electorate has no chance of getting it reversed, even if it had the economic understanding to want to do so.

The globalist consensus project is meeting increasing voter resistance, partly because of its manifest failure (which the consensus-globalist media does everything to conceal from voters.) The best chance to oust it was in this year’s Republican primaries (or, by all means in the Democratic primaries – Bernie Sanders represented an alternative to it, albeit an even worse one.) The Republican primary electorate rejected the globalist-consensus policy, as represented by every Republican candidate back to the first George Bush, but unfortunately replaced the consensus with Donald Trump, a man who having made his fortune in real estate, is uniquely blinkered against the need to replace funny-money Fed policies.

There will thus be no further chance to replace globalist-consensus policies until 2021 in the United States. In Britain, the globalist-consensus David Cameron is apparently in place until 2020. In Japan, nobody is advocating better policies than Shinzo Abe’s, merely worse ones. As for the EU, that polity is so undemocratic that even victory after victory for anti-consensus nationalists in individual countries merely causes it to dig in harder and demonize the assault.

The Brexit vote offers the one chance we have in 2016 to prize off the dead hand of global consensus that is holding the world economy by the throat. Should Britain vote to leave the EU, it will be a massive blow to consensus supporters both in Britain and the EU. It will also encourage separatist and nationalist movements elsewhere in Europe. If David Cameron feels the need to resign from Number 10 on a Brexit vote, Britain may have a chance to get rid of the expensive and useless Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, who has held down the British economy by persisting in ultra-low interest rate policies, thereby killing British productivity growth. A Brexit vote would also encourage the supporters of Donald Trump in the United States, who will get rid of many of the globalist consensus policies even if he is unsound on the central question of interest rates.

Economic trends, in particular a rise in inflation, may dislodge the global consensus before 2020, even if the British electorate fails to take the chance offered to it. However, if the British vote for Brexit, it will represent one fairly modest step for Britain in regaining its freedom, but has the potential to represent one great leap for mankind as a whole.

SOURCE

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Statins bite the dust again

Association Between Achieved Low-Density Lipoprotein Levels and Major Adverse Cardiac Events in Patients With Stable Ischemic Heart Disease Taking Statin Treatment

Morton Leibowitz et al.

ABSTRACT

Importance:  International guidelines recommend treatment with statins for patients with preexisting ischemic heart disease to prevent additional cardiovascular events but differ regarding target levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C). Trial data on this question are inconclusive and observational data are lacking.

Objective:  To assess the relationship between levels of LDL-C achieved with statin treatment and cardiovascular events in adherent patients with preexisting ischemic heart disease.

Design, Setting, and Participants: Population-based observational cohort study from 2009 to 2013 using data from a health care organization in Israel covering more than 4.3 million members. Included patients had ischemic heart disease, were aged 30 to 84 years, were treated with statins, and were at least 80% adherent to treatment or, in a sensitivity analysis, at least 50% adherent. Patients with active cancer or metabolic abnormalities were excluded.

Exposures:  Index LDL-C was defined as the first achieved serum LDL-C measure after at least 1 year of statin treatment, grouped as low (≤70.0 mg/dL), moderate (70.1-100.0 mg/dL), or high (100.1-130.0 mg/dL).

Main Outcomes and Measures:  Major adverse cardiac events included acute myocardial infarction, unstable angina, stroke, angioplasty, bypass surgery, or all-cause mortality. The hazard ratio of adverse outcomes was estimated using 2 Cox proportional hazards models with low vs moderate and moderate vs high LDL-C, adjusted for confounders and further tested using propensity score matching analysis.

Results:  The cohort with at least 80% adherence included 31 619 patients, for whom the mean (SD) age was 67.3 (9.8) years. Of this population, 27% were female and 29% had low, 53% moderate, and 18% high LDL-C when taking statin treatment. Overall, there were 9035 patients who had an adverse outcome during a mean 1.6 years of follow-up (6.7 per 1000 persons per year). The adjusted incidence of adverse outcomes was not different between low and moderate LDL-C (hazard ratio [HR], 1.02; 95% CI, 0.97-1.07; P = .54), but it was lower with moderate vs high LDL-C (HR, 0.89; 95% CI, 0.84-0.94; P < .001). Among 54 884 patients with at least 50% statin adherence, the adjusted HR was 1.06 (95% CI, 1.02-1.10; P = .001) in the low vs moderate groups and 0.87 (95% CI, 0.84-0.91; P = .001) in the moderate vs high groups.

Conclusions and Relevance:  Patients with LDL-C levels of 70 to 100 mg/dL taking statins had lower risk of adverse cardiac outcomes compared with those with LDL-C levels between 100 and 130 mg/dL, but no additional benefit was gained by achieving LDL-C of 70 mg/dL or less. These population-based data do not support treatment guidelines recommending very low target LDL-C levels for all patients with preexisting heart disease.

JAMA Intern Med. Published online June 20, 2016. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.2751.  Commentary here

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

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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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A Radical Libertarian in the British Parliament

When Murray Rothbard was a young student, he wrote under the pen name Aubrey Herbert. I thought he made it up. Not so. There really was a man named Auberon Edward William Molyneux Herbert. He was a member of the British Parliament. He lived from 1838 to 1906. He was a disciple of Herbert Spencer who kept Spencer’s youthful idealism long after his mentor lost it. He was the author of “The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State.”

That much I’ve known for a while, but I never bothered to read Auberon Herbert’s work. I did that recently, and I think I’ve found my muse. This man was incredible. I can’t say I’ve ever read more luxurious and erudite prose in defense of human liberty. And it’s not like the work of many people writing at the time, good on some stuff and bad on other stuff. Herbert’s writing is awesome on all subjects: property, markets, slavery, empire and colonialism, civil liberties, universal rights, and the state. He spoke about rights and the social consequences of violating rights with equal passion.

He wrote and spoke at a time of rising socialism in Europe. Britain resisted for a while, and Herbert was part of the reason. He presented one of the last clarion calls for pure liberty that occurred in the old world before World War I. He applied every effort to stopping the rise of the total state.

He penned his most famous writings in the 1870s, and they represented the best and most elaborate of the classical liberal school. He held the torch of liberty high and spoke out, consistently and constantly, for the principle of voluntarism. He viewed every state action that contradicted the principle of liberty to be a violation of rights.

Herbert presented one of the last clarion calls for pure liberty that occurred in the old world before World War I.

From his days in Parliament, Herbert came to be frustrated over the lack of fundamental questions regarding the purpose of politics. So many were involved in the attempted micro-regulation of every industry, all services, matters of state, and civic order, that state regulation of life was an ongoing threat. Herbert came to be appalled at how little thought was put into what this would do to people. Every law, every mandate, every rule, had to be enforced by violence against property and against people. They all violated the natural liberty that had giving rise to the glory of civilization at the time.

“Sooner or later,” he wrote, “every institution has to answer the challenge, ‘Are you founded on justice? Are you for or against the liberty of men?’”

Herbert argued that all state action violates the liberty of person, a liberty that should only be constrained according to Spencer’s rule: all should be permitted so long as no one is harmed. The state, despite the best of intentions, is always in the business of harm. It takes people’s property so that the politicians can use it. It takes away liberty so that the state can regulate industry. It takes away industry and creativity so that the state can enact its own plans. Looked at this way, everything the state is and does contradicts the principle of liberty.

An excellent example is national education. All the best-educated and well-to-do people seem to believe it is necessary. Taxes are levied against the richest in England, for they are the only ones with enough money to pay for it. The buildings are built and the teachers are hired. But who runs the system and who establishes the priorities for what is taught, when, and how it is taught? The elites and the rich. It is they whose views hold sway, while the working classes and the poor have very little to say about the matter. In the end, though the rich are bearing the greatest burdens of financing the system, it is the poor who bear the burdens of obeying the masters in charge of the system. This is contrary to justice.

It is also creates a system inconsistent with progress. National education means one plan for all, imposed without creativity or the possibility for adaptation to change. One view of religion must prevail at the expense of all other views. This is not tolerance but imposition, and it locks out perspectives that are different from those of the rich who administer the system. But cut the cord completely, grant full rights to all to their property and their own decisions, and tolerance at once becomes the rule.

As for self-responsibility, all state education drains it from parents. They are treated as if they can’t be trusted, and, in time, they come to confirm that perception. Public education acculturates the entire population to become passive and disempowered. This is contrary to progress because progress requires experimentation, toleration of differences, and celebration of new ideas and new ways of doing things.

Herbert further argues that any time a task is placed upon a government department, progress in that task comes to a halt. The system is frozen. To make a change appears dangerous to the bureaucracy, even revolutionary. Change happens to government agencies only under great pressure, and, even then, the change is perfunctory and cosmetic — enough to satisfy the public but not enough to fundamentally change the system. (The TSA comes to mind here, but so do all other government agencies.)

It is true in every sector of life, whether commerce, health, religion, family, or foreign relations. Once you grant the state the power to regulate some aspect of life, there will be no end to the arguments for how power is used. People will disagree on priorities. What makes one person happy makes another furious. What pleases one person pillages another. To realize the plans for one group is to subvert the plans of another. The result is a war of all against all, each interest group vying for control of the levers of power. This is not unity or peace but division, conflict, and war.

The state, despite the best of intentions, is always in the business of harm.

A person is either free or not free. It is not possible to split this difference and make a compromise, even by majority vote. Freedom is indivisible, Herbert said. Either our volition is our own or it is taken away and exercised by the state.

What are the implications of Herbert’s analysis? Taxation must be abolished and replaced by voluntary contributions to the government. If people are unwilling to pay, it is evidence that they do not consider the service rendered to be worth the price.

All monopolies and privileges granted by the state must be abolished, whether in education, the postal service, or trade. That includes libel law, since no one has a right to his or her reputation. When people call each other bad names, they must face those consequences themselves.

All state services must be abolished, including poor laws, nationalized mines, religious restrictions, and government subsidies for industry.

All restrictions on individual behavior must be abolished. That includes restrictions on alcohol and drug consumption, prostitution, mandatory vaccinations, and divorce. All must be free to do what they wish without being impeded by government decree. That includes repealing compulsory education laws, laws restricting what one does on Sunday, and child labor laws.

Finally, justice demands the end to all colonialism and imperialism against neighboring states. All people everywhere should be free to choose their own government. Nothing should be imposed on anyone, foreign or domestic.

Herbert was a voluntarist who rejected the term “anarchism,” which he took to mean lawlessness. He also rejected the use of violence in the reform of the system, writing that it is a different matter to hate the current system versus loving liberty. To love liberty is to seek peace, understanding, and universal rights and cooperation. To hate the system is to use every tactic to overthrow it, including violence. That second path does nothing to secure a lasting liberty.

As for socialism, Herbert saw it as a system resting fundamentally on force by the government against person and property. All the theories of socialism come down to this: the government can do to anyone whatever it wants in the guise of collectivization or any other excuse. It is a map for the total state — the total abolition of liberty.

SOURCE

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Money Going to Washington

By Walter E. Williams

According to a New York Post article (May 22, 2016), in just two years, Hillary Clinton — former first lady, senator from New York and secretary of state — collected over $21 million in speaking fees. These fees were paid by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Fidelity Investments, UBS, Bank of America and several hedge fund companies.

In 2015, lobbyists spent $3.22 billion lobbying Congress. In 2013 and 2014, just 10 chemical companies and allied organizations spent more than $154 million lobbying the federal government. The Center for Responsive Politics in 2013 reported that The Dow Chemical Co. "posted record lobbying expenditures" in 2012, "spending nearly $12 million," and was "on pace to eclipse" that amount. Fourteen labor unions were among the top 25 political campaign contributors between 1989 and 2014.

Many Americans lament the fact that so much money goes to Washington. Let's ask ourselves why corporations, labor unions and other groups spend billions upon billions of dollars on political campaigns, pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a speech and wine and dine politicians and their staffs. Do you think that these are just civic-minded Americans who want to encourage elected officials to live up to their oath of office to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution? Do you think that people who spend billions of dollars on politicians just love participating in the political process? If you believe that either one of those notions applies, you're probably a candidate for a straitjacket and padded cell.

A much better explanation for the billions of dollars spent on Washington politicians lies in the awesome growth of government power over business, property, employment and most other areas of our lives. Having such life-and-death power, Washington politicians are in the position to grant favors. The greater their power to grant favors the greater the value of being able to influence Congress. The generic favor sought is to get Congress, under one ruse or another, to grant a privilege or right to one group of Americans that will be denied to another group of Americans. In other words, billions of dollars are spent to get Congress to do things that would be reprehensible and criminal if done privately. Let's look at one tiny representative example among the tens of thousands.

The Fanjuls are among the biggest sugar cane growers in the U.S. Both they and Archer Daniels Midland benefit immensely from reducing the amount of sugar imported to our shores from the Caribbean and elsewhere. As a result of the reduction, they can charge Americans higher prices for sugar, and because of these higher prices, ADM can sell more of its corn syrup sweetener. If they used guns and goons to stop foreign sugar from entering the U.S., they'd wind up in jail. However, if they find ways to persuade congressmen to impose tariffs and quotas on foreign sugar, they get the same result without risking imprisonment. In 2014, the combined lobbying expenditures of the Fanjuls and ADM totaled $2.8 million, and they spent $754,002 in political contributions.

The two most powerful committees of Congress are the House Ways and Means and the Senate Finance committees. Congressmen fight to be on these committees, which are in charge of tax laws. As a result, committee members are besieged with campaign contributions. Why? A tweak here and a tweak there in the tax code can mean millions of dollars to individuals and corporations.

You might ask: What can be done? Campaign finance and lobbying reforms will only change the method of influence-peddling. If Americans would demand that Congress do only what's specifically enumerated in our Constitution, influence-peddling would be much smaller. That's because our Constitution contains no authority for Congress to grant favors or special privileges or give one American the earnings of another American.

Seeing as most Americans do not want a constitutionally bound Congress, I am all too afraid that an observation attributed to Benjamin Franklin is correct: "When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up --  about immigration and such things

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

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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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Why Liberals Support Muslims Who Hate Everything They Stand For

The explanation below is part of the story but I think we need to add to it that Leftists in reality believe in nothing at all.  Their "policies" are just whatever sounds good at the time.  The real essence of Leftism is hatred of the society they live in.  And that causes them to want to destroy as much of current Western civilization as they can.  Muslims want that too.  So Leftists and Muslims are what Marxists used to call "fellow travellers"

"I also now realize, with brutal clarity, that in the progressive hierarchy of identity groups, Muslims are above gays. Every pundit and politician -- and that includes President Obama and Hillary Clinton and half the talking heads on TV -- who today have said ‘We don't know what the shooter's motivation could possibly be!’ have revealed to me their true priorities: appeasing Muslims is more important than defending the lives of gay people. Every progressive who runs interference for Islamic murderers is complicit in those murders, and I can no longer be a part of that team." -- Anonymous at PJ Media

Liberalism is generally hostile to Christianity and it particularly seems to dislike anyone who has strong religious convictions that conflict with liberalism. This describes every devout Muslim on the planet.

At first glance, the liberal approach to Islam makes no sense whatsoever.

Liberals go on and on endlessly about a war on women and Islam treats women like garbage. In many parts of the Islamic world, women are forced to wear burkas or veils, are given clitoridectomies to take the pleasure out of sex for them, can’t leave the house or drive without a male relative and may be raped or beaten with impunity.

Libs obsess endlessly about gun violence and constantly trash our troops when they accidentally kill civilians. In a large minority of the Islamic world (and a majority in many more fundamentalist countries), innocent women and children are considered fair game and terrorists who murder them in large numbers in places like the Palestinian territories are considered to be heroes.

The Left has gone so insane over imaginary violations of “gay rights” that liberals are in favor of driving Christians out of any profession that caters to weddings and they insist that women have to use the bathroom with men because the less than .2% of men who “feel like” women would be uncomfortable using the men’s bathroom. Meanwhile, Islam goes with homophobia the way peanut butter goes with jelly. There are a number of Islamic countries where being gay is a crime with jail or even DEATH as the penalty.

So, how can liberals continue to turn a blind eye to all of this?

As my friend Evan Sayet has explained, it has to do with the liberal emphasis on “indiscriminateness.”

They were raised to believe that indiscriminateness is a moral imperative. That the only way to be moral is to not discriminate between right and wrong, good and evil, better and worse, truth and lies because your act of discrimination – discriminating between these things might just be a reflection of your personal discrimination, your bigotries.

They were raised to believe that indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because its opposite is the evil of having discriminated. The second bullet point, and this is an essential corollary, is that indiscriminateness of thought does not lead to  indiscriminateness of policy. It leads the modern liberal to invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Why? Very simply if nothing is to be recognized as better or worse than anything else then success is de facto unjust.

There is no explanation for success if nothing is better than anything else and the greater the success the greater the injustice. Conversely and for the same reason, failure is de facto proof of victimization and the greater the failure, the greater the proof of the victim is, or the greater the victimization.

Once you understand this facet of liberal thinking, many of the illogical things that liberals believe make more sense.

Why are American liberals so hostile to the rich? As that old quote often attributed to Honoré de Balzac goes, “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.” That’s the thinking.

Why do so many liberals seem to loathe America even though we’re the richest, most successful country in history? Because the very fact that we’re the richest, most successful country in history proves we must be doing something wrong and unfair.

Why do white Americans have to be benefitting from racism and “white privilege?” Because white Americans are a majority in the United States and they’re doing better than most other racial groups.

Additionally, this way of viewing the world makes it extremely difficult for liberals to deal with Islam in a rational way. They are unable to admit that among religions, Islam has a unique problem with terrorism, violence and rape. They are not capable of admitting that there is a particular risk to bringing in Muslim immigrants. Even when a Muslim tells everyone he’s killing people because of his religion, liberals can’t acknowledge his motivation because to do so would mean that they’d have to admit Islam has issues.

Until liberals can get past their “indiscriminateness” blind spot, when it comes to Muslims, expect them to keep blaming anything and everything other than religion for the horrible things radical Islamists do.

SOURCE

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Washington Post pretends racial disparities in crime and misbehavior don’t exist

As the late Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson observed, the “truth is often unpopular,” and people will frequently choose “agreeable fantasy” over “disagreeable fact.” This is particularly true of liberal reporters writing about intractable racial problems, like the persistently high-rates of crime and misbehavior among black and inner-city students. They claim that high black student suspension rates are simply the result of poorly trained teachers harboring unconscious racism, rather than student misconduct, and thus can be solved simply by changing school discipline to reflect the latest progressive fads, such as “restorative justice.”

In reality, suspensions of black students often reflect serious misbehavior by students from broken homes, who bring their disorderly home environment with them to school. Most black kids are born out of wedlock, and it is harder to raise a well-behaved child when you are a single parent with no partner to help you, living in a community with a high crime rate and lots of misbehaving children, than it is to live in a stable home environment with two parents to instill discipline in a child.

But that reality is just too politically incorrect for many liberal reporters (almost all education reporters are liberal) to accept. A recent example is provided by Joe Davidson, who writes the Federal Insider column for the Washington Post. In his Monday column, “Preschool suspensions are made worse by racial disparities,” he claims that suspensions of preschool students show not misbehavior by kids, but an “adult behavior problem” by bad teachers who need to learn “constructive methods of discipline.”

Since “black preschool children are 3.6 times as likely” to be suspended “as white preschool children,” Davidson claims teachers must harbor veiled “bias” that “feeds an implicitly racist system.” But this is simply untrue. That statistic just reflects the fact that black kids misbehave more. Students who repeatedly bite or attack their classmates, or constantly disrupt class, need to be suspended, even if they are preschoolers.  Even preschoolers deserve to be safe from violence when they go to school.

As Katherine Kersten wrote months ago in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, black students’discipline rate is higher than other students’ because, on average, they misbehave more. In fact, a major 2014 study in the Journal of Criminal Justice found that the racial gap in suspensions is “completely accounted for by a measure of the prior problem behavior of the student.” That problem behavior can manifest itself in other ways. Nationally, for example, young black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at 10 times the rate of white and Hispanics of the same ages combined.

(Kersten, “The School Safety Debate: Mollycoddle No more,” March 18, 2016).

 Why such a gap? A primary reason is likely dramatic differences in family structure. Figures for St. Paul are not available, but nationally, 71 percent of black children are born out of wedlock — with the rate much higher in many inner cities — while the rate for whites is 29 percent. Research reveals that children from fatherless families are far more likely than others to engage in many kinds of antisocial behavior.

Both school misconduct and criminal behavior likely stem from the same source — the lack of impulse control and socialization that can result from chaotic family life. Tragically, the problem we confront is not so much a “school-to-prison” pipeline as a “home-to-prison” pipeline.

Davidson’s column ignores that study in the Journal of Criminal Justice,which has been cited not just in the Star-Tribune, but also by other publications, such as Investor’s Business Daily and the National Review.[See John Paul Wright, Mark Alden Morgan, Michelle A. Coyne, Kevin M. Beaver, & J.C. Barnes, Prior problem behavior accounts for the racial gap in school suspensions, Journal of Criminal Justice, Volume 42, issue 3, May-June 2014, Pages 257-266].

Instead, he cites the discredited work of Russel Skiba, who pretends there are no differences in misbehavior rates.

Davidson lectures his readers that “Those who think black students are suspended at higher rates because their behavior is worse should find the facts, as Russell J. Skiba and Natasha T. Williams did for a report published by the Equity Project at Indiana University. The top line of their 2014 study asks “Are Black Kids Worse?” The answer is no.”

But it’s Davidson who is wrong. Even the so-called “study” he cites had to admit that “once referred to the principal, white students were expelled at the same rate as black students.” It only managed to cry racism by recasting common-sense, colorblind disciplinary decisions as suspicious signs of racism: It labeled offenses committed fairly evenly by students of all races as “objective,” but called offenses committed heavily by black students — like threats — “subjective” even when there was nothing subjective about them, in order to minimize their seriousness and imply that discipline was improper.

As the National Review explained, Skiba and his colleagues claim that offenses such as “threat” are “subjective” and that when discipline of many black students results for such an offense, it shows that “schools were arbitrarily disciplining blacks.” But “try telling a teacher being threatened with physical retaliation that her plight is merely “subjective.'”

Given the staggering percentage of black kids born into fatherless homes, higher rates of misbehavior among black kids are to be expected. Consider these frightening statistics about how the vast majority of juvenile delinquents and young criminals come from broken homes:

* 85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes (Source: Center for Disease Control)

* 80% of rapists motivated with displaced anger come from fatherless homes (Source: Criminal Justice & Behavior, Vol 14, p. 403-26, 1978.)

* 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions come from fatherless homes (Source: U.S. Dept. of Justice, Special Report, Sept 1988)

* 85% of all youths sitting in prisons grew up in a fatherless home (Source: Fulton Co. Georgia jail populations, Texas Dept. of Corrections 1992)

Given that out-of-wedlock births are so much more common among blacks than among whites, it would be astonishing if the crime rate and juvenile delinquency rates were not significantly higher among blacks. This is just basic common sense. But Skiba disregards this basic reality in his reports.

More HERE

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

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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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Progressive Insanity Endangers America



If we should not blame 10 million law-abiding American Muslims for the shooting, why then would you blame 50 million innocent gun owners for what some psycho does?

“This is the saddest day of my life. I can’t even wrap my mind around the horror of what happened … in Orlando, where 50 joyful dancing queers were murdered by a religious extremist. I’m sad — devastated, in my soul — about that; but I’m also sad that the events of Orlando have shattered my political beliefs, as I can no longer swear allegiance to a peace-love-and-unicorns progressive philosophy that only helps to get my fellow queers killed."—from a column written by "Anonymous” for PJ Media.

Anonymous was just getting started. Later in the same column he utterly eviscerated the progressive obsession with identity politics. “I also now realize, with brutal clarity, that in the progressive hierarchy of identity groups, Muslims are above gays,” he states. “Every pundit and politician — and that includes President Obama and Hillary Clinton and half the talking heads on TV — who today have said ‘We don’t know what the shooter’s motivation could possibly be!’ have revealed to me their true priorities: appeasing Muslims is more important than defending the lives of gay people. Every progressive who runs interference for Islamic murderers is complicit in those murders, and I can no longer be a part of that team.”

Unfortunately, it’s not just the hierarchy of identity groups. It is also the progressive determination to obliterate common sense and replace it with political correctness. Thus, following pressure from Muslim organizations like CAIR — utterly irrespective of their status as an un-indicted co-conspirator in the 2004 Holy Land Foundation terror fundraising case — the Obama administration purged any references to Islamic terror from the FBI’s counter-terrorism training materials beginning in 2011.

Yet it’s even worse than that. The FBI had Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. They had Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. They had San Bernardino killers Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife. They interviewed Orlando murderer Omar Mateen three times and not only let him go, but refused to put anything in his file that would have prevented him from buying a gun.

Why? “Former FBI Agent John Guandolo said the FBI mistakenly closed its investigation because it had no idea how to respond to jihadist threats because the bureau does not teach agents about Islamist doctrine, such as Sharia law, that is used as a guide for terrorist operations and activities,” reports the Washington Beacon.

“I was ordered by my superiors at the Department of Homeland Security to delete or modify several hundred records of individuals tied to designated Islamist terror groups like Hamas from the important federal database, the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS),” explained former DHS employee Philip Haney in February. “These types of records are the basis for any ability to ‘connect dots.’”

Why delete or modify files to the point of operational impotency? The administration’s obsession with political correctness demands nothing less.

To what degree? In 2008, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed offered to plead guilty to that atrocity in a military hearing at Guantanamo Bay. A year later, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder rejected that plea and suspended the hearings because the Obama administration insisted the slaughter of 2,996 people was a “law enforcement” issue requiring a trial in civilian court. Public outrage sent the case back to the military commission, where the case remains bogged down by an endless series of procedural roadblocks engendered by the Military Commissions Act. When is a resolution of the case anticipated to occur?

In 2021 — literally one generation removed from an act of war.

And make no mistake: The carnage will continue. It will continue because the American Left, with ample help from an utterly corrupt mainstream media, will continue to obscure the carnage wrought by Islamists, by declaring a lack of gun control to be the principal problem. Thus, it doesn’t matter that strict gun control laws in both Paris and Brussels didn’t stop terrorist carnage there, that gun control laws mean absolutely nothing to terrorists or criminals, or that extrapolating on the Left’s despicable “logic” would necessitate a ban on box cutters, knives, pressure cookers — and jetliners.

All that matters is deflection. Deflection from the reality that Islam has institutionalized contempt for homosexuals, a contempt the Left has tried to equate with that of Christian Evangelicals, even as they remain willfully oblivious to the difference between Christians professing reservations about the homosexual lifestyle, and Islamists tossing them off rooftops and stoning them to death. Deflection away from the innumerable warnings given to this administration as far back as 2014 that allowing a “JV team” like the Islamic State to remain viable gives them enormous recruitment powers. Deflection that equates a desire to limit Muslim immigration, conduct law enforcement investigations of mosques, or notice that enormous numbers of Muslims have views utterly antithetical to this nation’s founding principles, constitutes Islamophobia.

Even worse, deflection away from cultural differences the Left insists do not exist, or are simply two sides of the same coin. Thus at the National Prayer Breakfast last year, Barack Obama declared that global jihad “is not unique to one group or one religion.” A year earlier, Hillary Clinton insisted “smart power” requires “respect even for one’s enemies — trying to understand, insofar as psychologically possible, empathize with their perspective and point of view.”

Perhaps Hillary might ask the families of the Orlando victims how much “empathy” and “respect” they have for Omar Mateen.

And when the Left isn’t busy denying reality, they are simply censoring it. Facebook and Reddit removed pages and posts revealing Mateen’s religion. Ironically, the story was reported by Russia Today (RT), a Russian government-funded television network. What does it say about the current state of progressive ideology when a news site in a “former” totalitarian nation is more reliable than American social media sites?

What it says, among other things, is that progressive ideology has devolved to the point where it is every bit as sick and twisted as Islamism. It is an ideology that elevates post-atrocity handwringing and candlelight vigils over national security and self-defense. It is the ideology of “borderless” futures, “outdated” Constitutions and the mindless “diversity” and “multiculturalism” that abets Balkanization in lieu of assimilation, even as that orchestrated divisiveness literally endangers our lives. It is the ideology of an arrogant and feckless president more interested in confronting those who oppose him than those who would annihilate us.

“There is only one religion whose adherents are consistently involved in murder for political purposes,” writes New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin.

And there is only one ideology consistently dedicated to the denial of reality. One whose adherents' relentless attempts to bend the national conversation toward their bankrupt agenda must be rejected with impunity.

Our survival as a nation depends on it.

SOURCE

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America desperately needs relief from regulations. Ryan's plan is a good place to start

The United States is in the midst of a constitutional crisis. The lines that clearly delineate the boundaries of the three branches of government, specifically, the executive and legislative branches, have become blurred. Presidents have claimed powers that far exceed what the framers intended, and Congress has been complicit by its failure to reestablish itself as the rightful and sole lawmaking authority.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, however, unveiled a plan this week that begins the process of reclaiming the ground Congress has ceded to the executive branch and its ever-growing army of unelected bureaucrats.

The regulatory state -- which has become an unconstitutional fourth branch of the federal government -- has been a serious problem for years. Notably, President George W. Bush aggressively expanded the regulatory state. “The Bush team,” Veronique de Rugy wrote in January 2009, “spent more taxpayer money on issuing and enforcing regulations than any previous administration in U.S. history.”

But it has only come into focus under President Barack Obama, who, boastfully, with his “pen and phone,” has frequently circumvented Congress to create law, and his regulatory agenda pales in comparison to his predecessor. Left to pick up the cost are businesses and consumers.

Regulations are the silent killer. In its most recent annual report, Ten Thousand Commandments, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) estimated that rules and regulations cost Americans nearly $1.9 trillion each year. At a cost of roughly $15,000 per family, regulations dwarf ordinary household expenditures, save for the cost of housing. In fact, these hidden taxes cost more than food, clothing, and health care, combined.

This $1.9 trillion in 2015 regulatory spending, not including the cost of state and local regulations, is a staggering 11 percent of of the $17.95 trillion  U.S. GDP. If the regulatory state were its own country, it would have the tenth largest economy in the world, ahead of the Russian Federation, Canada, and Australia.

Ryan’s regulatory reform agenda takes aim at the regulatory state in several ways, such as enhancing congressional involvement and oversight of the rulemaking and regulatory process, ending the judiciary branch’s deference to executive-level agencies, and asserting more control over agencies in the appropriations process, and increasing oversight of the executive branch. Another part of the Speaker’s agenda is the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act, or REINS Act, which mandates that any major regulations, those with an annual cost of $100 million or more, must be approved by Congress.

The Obama administration has a particular proclivity for major regulations. As CEI noted, “President Obama’s seven years so far have averaged 81, or a 29 percent higher average annual output than that of Bush. Obama has already issued 570 major rules during his seven years, compared with Bush’s 505 over eight years.” This administration owns six of the seven highest annual numbers of pages added to the Federal Register, which documents all proposed and final rules and regulations.

The red tape of the regulatory state is strangling the economy, preventing Americans from experience the benefits of the prosperity and opportunity that would come if the economy were allowed to achieve its full potential. The problem, of course, is that President Obama and Democrats, as well as many big government Republicans, view the government as what makes America great.

If the Speaker and House Republican leadership can successfully move this regulatory reform agenda through the lower chamber, it would be a victory for grassroots conservatives, who are anxious for Republicans in Washington to fight back against the regulatory state.

Let’s hope that when this agenda clears the House, that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell acts to send it President Obama’s desk. Even if Obama vetoes these reforms, passage out of both chambers of will show that Republicans are serious about taking one of the real threats to our prosperity head on.

SOURCE

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Pro-Clinton College Professor: Repeal Second Amendment!



At a time when it’s more important than ever to maintain the right of the American people to keep and bear arms for self-defense, law professor David S. Cohen is calling for repeal of the Second Amendment.  “Americans’ rights are in mortal danger,” he says, unless Hillary Clinton is elected president and stacks the Supreme Court with progressive judges.

In the repeatedly discredited rag, Rolling Stone, Cohen writes, “sometimes we just have to acknowledge that the Founders and the Constitution are wrong. This is one of those times. . . . The Second Amendment needs to be repealed because it is outdated, a threat to liberty and a suicide pact.”

By “outdated,” Cohen means that the Framers of the Bill of Rights were unable to conceive of 19th century semi-automatic firearm technology. “When the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791, there were no weapons remotely like the AR-15 assault rifle (sic),” he said.

However, as the late, great Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, “Just as the First Amendment protects modern forms of communications and the Fourth Amendment applies to modern forms of search, the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.”

And in any case, there is nothing outdated about the underlying principle of the Second Amendment: to prohibit the government from interfering with the ability of people to acquire, possess and develop proficiency with arms they might one day need to defend themselves and their loved ones.

Cohen’s rant is just one example of an astonishing amount of sheer nonsense that has filled the Internet since the terrorist attack in Orlando. Anti-gun politicians, and so-called opinion columnists and TV talking heads – who pretend to be “experts” on every topic under the sun, but who in reality know virtually nothing about even one topic – are confidently calling the AR-15 an “automatic” weapon, a “military” weapon,” and a “weapon of war,” and telling everyone that the most popular rifle in America should be banned.

Of course, the First Amendment protects the right of pundits to demonstrate that the size of their egos are only matched by the depth of their ignorance on firearms and the Second Amendment. And so it should be.

If history repeats itself, the recent slew of half-baked, culture-war-based, ideologically-motivated, attention-seeking statements against guns will only increase support for the right to arms, and additional support may develop as people increasingly realize that President Obama and Hillary Clinton, who are urging gun bans, are the very politicians most responsible for the rise of overseas terrorist groups who inspire and possibly direct evildoers within our midst.

All the more reason for the American people to protect their right to protect themselves.

SOURCE

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

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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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Racism as a convenient but flawed index of evil

Leftists are so suffused by hatred that serious thought is mostly beyond them.  So their doctrines and claims are usually extremely simplistic.  A prime example of that is the way they use cries of racism to answer any argument that is put up against them

And in so doing they make any discussion of race virtually impossible.  And yet the importance of race is as clear as crystal.  A major example of that is the fact that African Americans commit crimes of violence at a rate 9 times higher  than whites.  So the idea that there is only one race, the human race is only trivially true.

The whole of America knows that blacks are in general dangerous neighbors and takes active steps to deal with that:  By "white flight".  But that is often a difficult and costly process -- and one from which poor whites are excluded.  An ability to actually discuss black crime and remedies for it would probably do a lot to make whites safer.

Making selected residential areas "no go" places for blacks would at present be greeted by unbelievably noisy opposition from the Left but a more positive version of that could work.  Settling blacks in areas known for their liberal politics could well work magic.

But black crime is only one instance where race has visible effects.  I am a keen fan of Austro/Hungarian operetta and have, I think, all available DVDs of it.  In most of the world it is a forgotten form of musical entertainment but it lives on in the German lands, particularly in Austria, its old heartland.  So a lot of the DVDs I have are of performances in Austria, particularly from Moerbisch.

And something I note in the Austrian performances is that all the performers and "extras" in a show look just like the people I see walking down the street in my hometown of Brisbane, Australia, so I can relate to them easily.  Yet Austria is the most Southerly of the German lands, with Italy to its immediate South -- and I live half a world away from there.

So what improbable thing makes inhabitants of the two countries look so similar?  Race.  Anglo-Saxons have been separated from Germany for over a thousand years but we remain members of the same race.  It's only a trivial example of no political importance but it is another reminder that race does exist and that it can have powerful and long-lasting effects.

In my observation, most alleged racial, ethnic or national differences are either imaginary or temporary -- but some are not -- JR.

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Aspirin beats statins in preventing heart attacks

But no drug did much good

Drugs for Primary Prevention of Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease: An Overview of Systematic Reviews

Kunal N. Karmali et al.

ABSTRACT

Importance:  The Million Hearts initiative emphasizes ABCS (aspirin for high-risk patients, blood pressure [BP] control, cholesterol level management, and smoking cessation). Evidence of the effects of drugs used to achieve ABCS has not been synthesized comprehensively in the prevention of primary atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD).

Objective:  To compare the efficacy and safety of aspirin, BP-lowering therapy, statins, and tobacco cessation drugs for fatal and nonfatal ASCVD outcomes in primary ASCVD prevention.

Evidence Review:  Structured search of the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE), Health Technology Assessment Database (HTA), MEDLINE, EMBASE, and PROSPERO International Prospective Systematic Review Trial Register to identify systematic reviews published from January 1, 2005, to June 17, 2015, that reported the effect of aspirin, BP-lowering therapy, statin, or tobacco cessation drugs on ASCVD events in individuals without prevalent ASCVD.

Additional studies were identified by searching the reference lists of included systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and health technology assessment reports. Reviews were selected according to predefined criteria and appraised for methodologic quality using the Assessment of Multiple Systematic Reviews (AMSTAR) tool (range, 0-11). Studies were independently reviewed for key participant and intervention characteristics. Outcomes that were meta-analyzed in each included review were extracted. Qualitative synthesis was performed, and data were analyzed from July 2 to August 13, 2015.

Findings:  From a total of 1967 reports, 35 systematic reviews of randomized clinical trials were identified, including 15 reviews of aspirin, 4 reviews of BP-lowering therapy, 12 reviews of statins, and 4 reviews of tobacco cessation drugs. Methodologic quality varied, but 30 reviews had AMSTAR ratings of 5 or higher.

Compared with placebo, aspirin (relative risk [RR], 0.90; 95% CI, 0.85-0.96) and statins (RR, 0.75; 95% CI, 0.70-0.81) reduced the risk for ASCVD.

Compared with placebo, BP-lowering therapy reduced the risk for coronary heart disease (RR, 0.84; 95% CI, 0.79-0.90) and stroke (RR, 0.64; 95% CI, 0.56-0.73). Tobacco cessation drugs increased the odds of continued abstinence at 6 months (odds ratio range, 1.82 [95% CI, 1.60-2.06] to 2.88 [95% CI, 2.40-3.47]), but the direct effects on ASCVD were poorly reported. Aspirin increased the risk for major bleeding (RR, 1.54; 95% CI, 1.30-1.82), and statins did not increase overall risk for adverse effects (RR, 1.00; 95% CI, 0.97-1.03). Adverse effects of BP-lowering therapy and tobacco cessation drugs were poorly reported.

Conclusions and Relevance:  This overview demonstrates high-quality evidence to support aspirin, BP-lowering therapy, and statins for primary ASCVD prevention and tobacco cessation drugs for smoking cessation. Treatment effects of each drug can be used to enrich discussions between health care professionals and patients in primary ASCVD prevention.

JAMA Cardiology, June 2016, Vol 1, No. 3

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The Impossibility of Income Equality

There’s an old William F. Buckley quote that I love – “I’m not going to insult your intelligence by suggesting that you believe what you just said.”  This is how I feel about people who claim to want income equality.  There are just too many problems with the idea that everyone should get paid the same regardless of their skill, work ethic, or contribution to society.  The problems are so numerous that I’m having a hard time imagining a person who truly believes income equality is necessary, or even possible.

Let’s imagine someone does believe this.  There’s a probably a few college freshmen who have never had a job in their life, whose parents pay for everything, that might hold this belief.  But they don’t count.  They still live in virtual reality.  I’m talking about an actual adult, with experience, who has been in the work force.  I have some honest questions.

Who gets the equality?

First serious question:  Is this income equality for everyone?  It wouldn’t be very equal if only certain people got the equality, right?  If I choose not to go to college and just get a nice, easy, low-stress job bagging groceries, or stocking shelves, do I get the equal pay?  If so, how is that fair to the person that worked their butt off in college?  The person that gets a job in a high-demand, high-stress field like a pilot or surgeon?  Or the person that gets a dangerous job like loggers and deep-sea fishers?  All these jobs have an enormous benefit to society, shouldn’t they get compensated more than me for simply bagging groceries?

If you’re advocating for everyone to get paid the same, but you concede that some classes of jobs should get paid more than others, then you’re not advocating for income equality anymore.  You’re advocating for free market capitalism!  In a free market, you get paid for the benefit you provide to your fellow people.  The more benefit you provide, and the more you help others, the more you get paid.

Do we all get paid the same every year?

Second question:  If you still believe that we should still all get paid the same regardless of our jobs, how do you factor in age in order to remain equal?  Let’s say we all get paid $50,000 a year, the person who is 50 years old will have 30 years of that $50,000 pay, but the person who is 20 will only have a couple years of that pay.  So the 50 year old will be vastly wealthier that the 20 year old.  That 50 year old would be able to have a much nicer house, a much nicer car, better food, better clothing, better vacations, etc.  How fair is that?

How will this new inequality be dealt with?

I guess this will be part two of question two:  How do we level things out since older people will have vastly more wealth than younger people?  Do we say that younger people should start out making $100,000 a year and gradually make less every year so things even out?  If that’s the case, it’s far from equal!  Now you’ll have some people making $100,000 a year and some people making $15,000.  Or we could simply tax older people more, but that would be the same thing.  They’d bring home less money than younger people thus making it unfair again.

What about investing and gambling?

Question three:  Would there be any form of investing or gambling allowed?  I’m assuming in this world there will be no such thing as investing.  After all, if you invest wisely you’ll make a lot more money than the person that doesn’t invest wisely or doesn’t invest at all.  The easiest way to solve this “problem” would be to ban investing.

How about gambling?  Same problem.  It would have to be outlawed in all forms.  We can’t have an option for someone to win the lottery or gamble their way into wealth.  That would be unfair to the rest of us!

What about people who don’t work?

Question four:  Do the people who don’t work get the same equal pay?  I’m sure you’d say that someone who has a terrible, debilitating disability would get the pay, but what about people who just say they can’t work?  People with back pain that can’t be easily verified?  Or people who have depression?  Or anxiety?  Or people who just claim they have these things?  Once we’ve crossed that bridge into people who have unverifiable injuries and disorders getting the pay, what’s going to stop more and more people getting their pay while not having to work?  Are we going to pay disabled people less in order to stop people from faking injuries or disorders?  We can’t do that, it would create more inequality.

Income equality is unavoidable and unsolvable.

Like most political issues, income equality is unsolvable.  There will always be people who have more wealth and income than others.  Even in a perfect system, the people who are older will simply have more due to the extra time they’ve spent alive.

This is how politicians like it though.  They don’t want to deal with solvable problems.  They need to pick issues that will always need their benevolent assistance.  This is called job security.  If problems got solved, politicians wouldn’t be necessary!

The only fair system is a free market.  You get paid for what you provide to society.  The more you provide, the more you get paid.  The less you provide, the less you get paid.  What could be more fair than that?

SOURCE

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Britain's probable exit from the EU: Don’t think of it as leaving Europe; think of it as rejoining the world

Matt Ridley

Over the past nine years China and India have more than doubled the size of their economies. If that had happened in Europe it would have transformed living standards, government budgets and job opportunities throughout the continent, abolishing the scourge of high youth unemployment.

Yet Europe is the one continent that has shown almost no growth over that period. This great stagnation is not bad luck, it is the fault of policies pursued in Brussels to harmonise, regulate, punish and proscribe economic activity: the single currency, the blizzard of regulations, the precautionary principle, the external tariff and more.

SOURCE

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

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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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Memorable Donald Trump quotes about himself

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, turns 70 Tuesday. If elected, he'd be the oldest person ever elected to a first term as president.

While his 2016 presidential campaign was his first bid for public office, Trump is hardly new to the public eye. A look back at 70 quotes from interviews, books and tweets that epitomize the man, the brand, the provocateur and the potential president that is Donald J. Trump.

1) "I'm just a f------ businessman." (Fortune, 2004)

2) “The show is ‘Trump.’ And it is sold-out performances everywhere.” (Playboy, 1990)

3) “Certainly a businessperson on television has never had anything close to this success. It’s like being a rock star. Six people do nothing but sort my mail. People come in and want my secretary Robin’s autograph. If a limo pulls up in front of Trump Tower, hundreds of people gather around, even if it’s not mine. I ask, ‘Can this be a normal life?’ Maybe it’s the power that comes from having the hottest show on television, but people like me much better than they did before The Apprentice. And if you think about it, all I did on the show was fire people, which proves how bad my reputation must have been before this.” (Playboy, 2004)

4) “A lot of people like me, and a lot of people don’t. That’s okay, because my brand is solid and so am I. I can take the negative commentary because the positive impressions are so superior to the reports of the detractors.” (Midas Touch, 2011)

5) “If you don’t tell people about your success, they probably won’t know about it.” (How to Get Rich, 2004)

6) “It’s not that I’ve suffered a knockout blow. Far from it. But after a long winning streak I’m being tested under pressure. I’ve also been in the public eye long enough so that the pendulum has swung, and many of the same media people who once put me on a pedestal now can’t wait for me to fall off. People like a hero, a Golden Boy, but many like a fallen hero even better. That was a fact of life long before I came along, and I can handle it. I know that, whatever happens, I’m a survivor — a survivor of success, which is a very rare thing indeed.” (Trump Surviving at the Top, 1990)

7) “I think Eminem is fantastic, and most people think I wouldn’t like Eminem. And did you know my name is in more black songs than any other name in hip-hop? Black entertainers love Donald Trump. Russell Simmons told me that. Russell said, ‘You’re in more hip-hop songs than any other person,’ like five of them lately. That’s a great honor for me.” (Playboy, 2004)

8) “The truth was that (being on the cover of Time) didn’t feel like much of anything. There I was, looking out from every newsstand in America, and holding an ace of diamonds in my hand. But in my mind all I could hear, once again, was Peggy Lee singing ‘Is That All There Is?’ ” (Trump Surviving At The Top, 1990)

9) "You think I'm going to change? I'm not changing." (Press conference, May 2016)

10) “I play into people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.” (The Art of the Deal, 1987)

11) “Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest — and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure. It’s not your fault.” (Twitter, 2013)

12) Show me someone without an ego, and I'll show you a loser — having a healthy ego, or high opinion of yourself, is a real positive in life!” (Facebook, 2013)

13) “Every successful person has a very large ego.” (Playboy, 1990)

14) “Because I’ve been successful, make money, get headlines, and have authored bestselling books, I have a better chance to make my ideas public than do people who are less well known.” (The America We Deserve, 2000)

SOURCE

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The Left's Culture War 'Victory'

If one is conservative, a recent Washington Post article by Barton Swaim should raise one’s hackles on two counts. First, Swaim asserts the Left has won the culture war. Second, while some conservatives will resist that assertion, Swaim contends “many do not.” He argues, “Many have finally given up on the whole idea of a culture war or are willing to admit they lost it. They are determined only to remain who they are and to live as amiably and productively as they can in a culture that doesn’t look like them and doesn’t belong to them.” Perhaps the surrenderists should reconsider for the simplest of reasons: If the Left has won the culture war, it is the epitome of a Pyrrhic victory.

Or to paraphrase a familiar quote from the Vietnam War era, the Left had to destroy the nation in order to save it.

The signs are everywhere. “In 2014, 28% of young men were living with a spouse or partner in their own home, while 35% were living in the home of their parent(s),” a Pew study reveals. Pew further notes this particular change in status for adults between the ages of 18 and 34 is occurring “for the first time in more than 130 years.” The remaining 22% are living with another relative, a non-relative, or in group quarters such as college dormitories. The primary reason? A “postponement of, if not retreat from, marriage,” Pew explains. “In addition, a growing share of young adults may be eschewing marriage altogether.”

In other words, we are seeing the postponement of a critical component of adulthood for as long as possible by the same cohort of Americans who have heartily embraced “safe spaces” — the foremost of which is apparently mom and dad’s house.

Nevertheless life, as it were, goes on. And it goes on courtesy of another leftist culture war “victory,” as in the reality that by 2012, more than 50% of women under the age of 30 were having babies out of wedlock. “It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal,” the New York Times informs us. The paper also says that statistic is class-based: College graduates “overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.”

And since single parenthood is one of the surest roads to economic deprivation — as in single-parent families are six times more likely to live in poverty than married-parent families — perhaps the victorious leftist culture warriors who champion the “diversity” of family arrangements should also take responsibility for the lion’s share of the “income gap” they routinely attribute to other factors. Even more so for the greater instances of emotional and behavioral problems that attend single parenthood.

The destruction of the nuclear family was made possible by the leftist triumph known as the “Great Society,” an initiative spearheaded by President Lyndon Johnson and a Democrat-controlled Congress. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan rightly predicted in 1966, “A community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families … asks for and gets chaos.”

How conservatives are supposed to live as amiably and productively as they can amid chaos, such as the deadliest May shooting spree in Chicago in 21 years, is anyone’s guess. And Chicago is not alone. Black Lives Matter, another group of leftist “winners,” has demonized police forces to the point where many officers are reluctant to do their jobs. As a result, murder and other violent crimes are soaring in a number of American cities.

Swaim is hopeful the Left’s victory “may bring about a more peaceable public sphere.” But, he says, “that will depend on others — especially the adherents of an ascendant social progressivism — declining to take full advantage of their newfound cultural dominance.” He cites “principled pluralism,” a concept advocating the idea that those who disagree on fundamental principles can still find equitable compromises, as the best path to that peace.

Leftists are many things. Proponents of equitable compromise, a.k.a. live and let live, is not one of them.

Nothing epitomizes this better than the ongoing attempts to completely silence dissent on college campuses across the nation. Even some leftists have noticed. “Wasn’t liberal academe a way for ideas, good and bad, to be subjected to enlightened reason?” asks the New Yorker’s Nathan Heller. “Generations of professors and students imagined the university to be a temple for productive challenge and perpetually questioned certainties. Now, some feared, schools were being reimagined as safe spaces for coddled youths and the self-defined, untested truths that they held dear.”

Generations of professors and students haves turned college campuses into de facto leftist indoctrination camps. Take for instance Yale students' effort to abolish literature requirements that include works by William Shakespeare, John Milton and T.S. Eliot because a curriculum focused on white male authors “creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of color.” “It’s time for the English major to decolonize — not diversify — its course offerings,” states a petition circulated by undergraduates.

Yale is hardly an outlier. Similar historical “purges” are occurring on other college campuses where leftists demand the removal of names, mascots, statues and other symbols of historical figures that “offend” them.

And not just on college campuses. During a recent session of the Louisiana state legislature, Democrat Rep. Barbara Norton opposed a bill mandating that schoolchildren be taught the Declaration of Independence because “only Caucasians [were] free” when it was written, and teaching it to children is a “little bit unfair.” Norton apparently “forgets” the paradigm shift in thinking regarding inalienable rights contained in that document paved the way for the abolition of inequality. But one suspects, like so many other leftists, she prefers historical elimination in lieu of historical enlightenment. Who else demonstrates an appetite for such preferences?

The Islamic State.

Furthermore, purges are not the only problem. The Left is also determined to force-feed their agenda to a recalcitrant public. Thus the attempt to suspend biological and chromosomal reality by force of law continues apace, along with the attempt to prosecute those who deny the Left’s “settled science” with regard to climate change.

Yet the most critical point missed by Swaim is the most obvious: A cultural victory requires a culture. And nothing brings to mind the aforementioned Vietnam-era mindset of “destructive salvation” better than the ongoing invasion of illegal aliens the Left champions. For these power-hungry victors, better the “fundamental transformation of the United States” into a Third World banana republic where they maintain a vice-like grip on power than a First World nation where they’re forced to compete in the arena of ideas. Better the “borderless world” advocated by a clueless John Kerry, even as the Constitution would be rendered meaningless as a result.

A genuine culture war victory requires no coercion, censorship or, as evidenced last Thursday, mob violence to sustain it. Yet with each passing day, it becomes ever clearer leftist victors conflate crushing hearts and minds with winning them. It doesn’t get any hollower — or less sustainable — than that.

As for Swaim’s “pliable” conservatives, they would do well to remember the words often attributed to Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Even worse? Collaborating with evil to live as amiably and productively as possible amidst it. If that’s not the essence of political correctness — and consummate surrender — one is hard-pressed to imagine what is.

SOURCE

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Democrats' Rank Politicization of Death

Democrats in the House didn't even sit through a moment of silence before they stood on the coffins of the Orlando dead to push their gun control agenda. The leftists in the chamber re-introduced legislation that would prevent anyone on the no-fly list from purchasing a firearm or explosives.

To be clear: Democrats don't care about the 49 dead. Monday evening, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced a moment of silence to remember the Americans who died Sunday. In video of the moment, as most of the chamber stood with head bowed, some Democrats paid the ultimate disrespect by walking out of the chamber. Others interrupted the somber moment by chanting, "Where's the bill?" Just as some leftists belittle the prayers of people petitioning God after such a murder spree, these lawmakers demonstrated a disregard for the plight of real Americans so that they could push for bills like the one they introduced this week. Never let a crisis go to waste.

The bill Democrats revived was a measure defeated by Senate Republicans in December. As we pointed out then, preventing people on the terror watch list (which contains 280,000 Americans with no ties to terrorism) from buying guns in no way prevents those on the list from getting guns illegally. Furthermore, the bill would take away Americans' constitutional rights without due process.

SOURCE

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

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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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