Trump backs No Deal Brexit ahead of state visit to Britain, says Farage should mastermind exit negotiations with Brussels and vows to secure a UK-US trade deal after Britain leaves EU

People seem to forget that Trump is half British, so that surely gives him a good warrant to make comments about British politics.  It also tells us that his offer of a trade-deal with a post-exit Britain is a real one that he would get right behind -- to Britain's benefit.  There are many ways in which trade with America would suit Britain better than trade with the EU

Donald Trump has sensationally urged the British government to involve Nigel Farage in Brexit negotiations with the EU.

The President hailed the Brexit Party leader as a 'very smart person' who could have bolstered Theresa May's botched deal that she failed to push through Parliament.

On the eve of his state visit to the UK, his criticism of the Prime Minister's decision to omit Mr Farage from talks with Brussels will likely put noses out of joint in Downing Street.

'I like Nigel a lot. He has a lot to offer. He is a very smart person. They won't bring him in,' he told the Sunday Times.  'Think how well they would do if they did. They just haven't figured that out yet.' 

Mr Farage struck up a friendship with Mr Trump in 2016 when he endorsed his Presidential campaign and spoke at one of his Mississippi rallies. 

And Mr Trump - a former businessman who prides himself on his ability to strike deals - said that if he were tasked with leading negotiations he would 'walk away' if he could not broker the agreement he wanted.

He also suggested that if Mrs May had brought Mr Farage to the table earlier she may have been able to take a withdrawal agreement back to the Commons which MPs could swallow.

His branding of Mr Farage's exclusion as a 'mistake' by the Prime Minister comes a day after revelations he waded into the Tory leadership contest by seemingly backing Boris Johnson.

And tonight, it emerged ministers and courtiers fear President Trump could embarrass the Queen by publicly backing Brexit in front of her at a Buckingham Palace banquet tomorrow.

Officials involved in the planning of the controversial State visit are braced for Mr Trump to use his banquet address to heap praise on the UK's decision to quit the EU, despite the Royal Family's scrupulous attempts to remain above the political fray.

Palace sources last night insisted the Queen would be 'more than capable' of dealing with such controversy and Foreign Office insiders said they had not broached the subject with Washington.

A Whitehall source said: 'We've learnt that asking them to steer the President off a subject tends to have the opposite effect.'

And a Palace insider added: 'We are not in the business of telling a foreign leader what they can and cannot say for political reasons.'

However, such an intervention by Mr Trump would cause fury, given the lengths to which the Palace has gone to distance the Queen from the divisive debate about Britain's relationship with the EU.

When one newspaper accused the Queen of supporting Brexit in 2016, the Palace made a furious and unprecedented complaint to the Press regulator.

Comments about Brexit would mark a second breach of protocol by the President following his unusual endorsement of Boris Johnson to be the next Prime Minister – before Theresa May has officially resigned.

And after his diplomatic gaffe of backing the current Tory leadership frontrunner, Mr Trump is poised to anger Downing Street further by meeting Brexit Party boss Nigel Farage.

Mr Trump last week described him as a 'friend' and it is thought the pair could be guests at a dinner hosted by the President on Tuesday evening at the official London residence of the US Ambassador. Spokesmen for both men said last night they had yet to receive such an invitation.

In a separate development, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt was forced to deny that he had pleaded with Mr Trump to endorse his bid for No 10, after the President said in an interview that some of Mr Johnson's leadership rivals had sought his blessing.

A Foreign Office source said that while it was true that Mr Hunt was in regular contact with Mr Trump's son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, it was 'categorically untrue' that he had sought an endorsement.

Jeremy Corbyn condemned Mr Trump's intervention in the leadership contest. 'President Trump's attempt to decide who will be Britain's next Prime Minister is an entirely unacceptable interference in our country's democracy,' said the Labour leader, who has snubbed an invite to tomorrow's State banquet.

Mr Trump responded to the Labour leader's decision by saying Mr Corbyn was 'making a mistake' in not attending because as a potential future Prime Minister 'he would want to get along with the United States'.

Commons Speaker John Bercow is also boycotting the banquet.

The Government last night pleaded with the public to welcome Mr Trump to London, arguing that 'the special relationship is generational, not one person'.

Home Office Minister Ben Wallace said: 'The relationships are daily and long-developed relationships. You don't unpick that. The special relationship is not Presidents and Prime Ministers.'

The US president also praised hard Brexiteer Boris Johnson, and it looks as if he will meet with the Foreign Secretary during his visit

Last night, President Trump's intervention sparked calls for the Queen to scrap tomorrow's banquet, to punish him.

Liberal Democrat MP Sir Ed Davey, a former Cabinet Minister now bidding to replace Sir Vince Cable as his party's leader, said: 'The Queen would be perfectly entitled to cancel Trump's dinner, given he's insulted the Duchess of Sussex and interfered in the selection of our next Prime Minister at a time of national crisis. 'We don't need friends like that.'

Sir Ed was referring to interview comments Mr Trump made describing the American-born Duchess of Sussex as 'nasty' over comments she made in 2016 threatening to move to Canada if he became President.

President Trump and his family will be wined and dined by the Queen and other Royals tomorrow night, along with 170 guests picked for their cultural, diplomatic or economic links to the US, in the opulent Buckingham Palace Ballroom

President Trump will be accompanied by First Lady Melania and four of his five children – Donald Jnr, Eric, Ivanka and Tiffany.

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Electoral College Opponents Attempt to Have It Both Ways

Electoral College foes have been trying to get their way in Nevada for a decade. Have they finally succeeded?

Nevada’s state Senate approved National Popular Vote legislation on Tuesday. The measure is now awaiting approval from Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat.

The governor’s signature will add Nevada to a growing movement to ditch the Electoral College. Worse, Maine and Oregon could be close behind: National Popular Vote’s plan has already been approved by both states’ senates.

After years of stagnating, National Popular Vote has obtained support from four states in just one short year—or five states, if you count Nevada.

If Hillary Clinton had won the Electoral College in 2016, would this be happening? So far, National Popular Vote has been approved by blue states—and only blue states. Many Democratic state senators seem driven by Clinton’s loss: Democrats couldn’t win the Electoral College. Now the system must go.

Straightforward change has proven difficult, so they resort to dishonest tricks: In Minnesota, National Popular Vote’s compact was hidden in an elections omnibus bill. That didn’t work, so it was hidden, again, in an appropriations bill.

In many states, committee hearings are scheduled at the last minute, making it difficult for Electoral College defenders to testify. In Maine, National Popular Vote supporters resurrected a bill, despite the “ought not to pass” vote it earned in a legislative committee. Other state legislators and journalists have been invited to junkets in Hawaii, Aruba, or Key West, Florida.

Somehow, Electoral College defenders are never invited to these “educational” sessions. In fact, the fight over America’s presidential election process is beginning to more closely resemble kindergartners bickering on a playground—and the process has about as much integrity.

“That’s not faaaaiiir! I don’t like those rules. I’m better than you. I’m taking my ball and going home.”

Even the structure of the National Popular Vote legislation is dishonest.

The Constitution provides that America’s state-by-state presidential election system cannot be changed without the consent of three-quarters of the states (38).

Nevertheless, National Popular Vote seeks an end run around this process. It wants states to sign a simple interstate compact instead.

By the terms of that agreement, states agree to give their presidential electors to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of the outcome within a state’s borders. The compact goes into effect when states holding 270 electors (enough to win the presidency) have signed on.

To date, 14 states plus the District of Columbia have agreed to the compact’s terms. Taken together, these states hold 189 electors. Nevada adds six more, bringing the total to 195—just 75 electors short of 270. If Maine (four electors) and Oregon (seven electors) join the cause in the next few weeks, National Popular Vote will be only 64 electors short of its goal.

National Popular Vote’s compact would radically change the presidential election system, even as it pretends to leave America’s current state-based Electoral College untouched.

National Popular Vote must be laughing all the way to the bank. It relies on the state-based aspects of the system when convenient, but then switches to reliance on a national tally when that’s convenient.

Consider what is happening on another front: California legislators are working to prevent President Donald Trump from appearing on their state ballot in 2020.

Assuming Trump is the Republican nominee, how could he possibly win the national popular vote when he will be unable to win even a single vote from the largest state in the Union? With the National Popular Vote Compact in effect, the election will be over before it begins.

California is entitled to omit candidates from its own ballot in America’s state-by-state election process. Indeed, many presidential candidates have been omitted from state ballots in the past, including Abraham Lincoln, Harry S. Truman, and Grover Cleveland. But it’s dishonest, at best, to seize the rights of state sovereignty for one purpose but then to pretend that a national tally can work for another.

Don’t worry. Red states such as Texas are likely to omit the Democratic candidate from their own ballots in self-defense.

And so the race to the bottom begins.

Everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten. One important rule? You don’t change the rules of the game just because you lost. Instead, you work on your weaknesses, improving so you can win next time.

SOURCE 

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The Left's battle against 'inequality'

The fallback race card.

In his book "Discrimination and Disparities," economist Thomas Sowell notes that a disproportionate percentage of first-born siblings become National Merit scholars compared to siblings born later, presumably because the first-born starts life with no sibling competition for parental attention. This, says Sowell, illustrates the absurdities of expecting equal results when equal results do not even occur within the same family among siblings raised under the same roof with the same parents.

When I was growing up in South Central Los Angeles, one of my closest friends was "Paul." We met in the second grade and attended the same elementary school, middle school and high school. Not only did we take many of the same courses with the same teachers, our houses were identical.

When I first invited Paul to my home, about a half-mile from his, he was astonished. "Whoever built your house," he said, "built mine, too." He was right. When I visited his house, I found that the only difference was that my house had one tiny additional window that his did not. Same schools. Same teacher. Same neighborhood. Same house design.

Paul was a gifted athlete. Name the sport, he excelled. He was a starting pitcher for the baseball team, the starting shooting guard for the basketball team and the starting quarterback for the football team. He picked up a tennis racquet, hit balls against a backboard for a few weeks and then made the tennis team.

His parents were divorced, making Paul was one of the few kids in the neighborhood at that time to come from what my parents called a "broken home." Paul saw his dad infrequently. He rarely spoke about him. When he did, it was not positive.

Paul had a problem with anger. For the smallest offense, he could tell someone off, friend or foe, sometimes even his basketball coach. One time, after Paul came late to practice again, his basketball coach threatened to bench him the following game. Paul barked back, "Either I play or we lose." He played. They won.

When the coaches from major colleges came to see Paul play basketball, his best sport, they were impressed. But then they asked the high school coach about Paul's character, whether he was "coachable." Paul's coach, concerned about maintaining his reputation with college coaches, told the truth. Paul, he said, was a "coach killer." Bye-bye, Notre Dame. Bye-bye, Duke. Bye-bye, UCLA.

Paul ended up going to a small local college, not known for basketball. Did he double down, get better in hopes of transferring to a powerhouse basketball school? Hardly. Paul sulked, blamed racism and spent his first year of college playing basketball halfheartedly — that is, when he wasn't smoking dope and opining on "the oppression of the black man in America."

I went off to college in the East. When I returned during the summer, I visited Paul, who by then had changed his name to "Jamal" to distance himself from the "slave" religion of Christianity. When I informed him that Arab slavers took more blacks out of Africa and transported them to the Middle East and to South America than Europeans slavers took out of Africa and transported to North America, he told me to stop reading "the white man's history." He insisted "racism" had wrecked his basketball career, a career he argued that, but for the racism he encountered, was destined for the NBA. "Paul," I said, "you and I lived in the same neighborhood, in houses designed by the same builder, went to the same schools, took the same classes, had the same teachers. Why didn't 'racism' stop me?"

When I was in law school in Michigan, I visited my aunt who lived in a suburb of Detroit. During one visit, a friend of hers stopped by. He was a black man, about 40 years old. He sat near my aunt and me as we discussed my law school classes. Suddenly, the man began to cry. I could not imagine what I'd said that could've caused such a reaction. "Sorry," I said, "did I say something to offend you?" He gathered himself. "No," he said. "I wanted to go to law school and become a lawyer. But I got sidetracked with 'jackassery,' hung around with a bunch of knuckleheads and just wasted my time."

It doesn't have to be like this. My father always told my brothers and me the following: "Hard work wins." "You get out of life what you put into it." "You cannot control the outcome, but you are 100% in control of the effort." And "before you complain about what somebody did to you, go to the nearest mirror and say to yourself, 'What could I have done to change the outcome?'"

And finally, my dad said: "No matter how good you are, bad things will happen. How you respond to those bad things will tell your mother and me whether or not we raised a man."

SOURCE 

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China not as great a threat on rare earths as they’d like you to think

“Don’t say we didn’t warn you!”  That was a People’s Daily commentary threatening that China will cut the U.S. off from rare earth minerals used to make high tech components for computers, smart phones and military weapons systems.

The People’s Daily is an official newspaper for Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the largest newspaper group in the nation, and the threat comes as U.S. and Chinese trade officials attempt to find a way forward from their current impasse in negotiations.

The commentary was headlined “United States, don’t underestimate China’s ability to strike back” and spoke of America’s “uncomfortable” reliance on rare earth minerals from China.

That part is at least true. We do rely on rare earths from China (and elsewhere). The U.S. consumed about 9,500 metric tons of rare earths in 2018, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and we are 100 percent reliant on imports of rare earth metals.

Most of it, 80 percent, does come from China.

But left out of the analysis is that China has been losing global market share since its high-water mark of 95 percent of global production in 2010, down to 80 percent global market share now, mostly thanks to Australia ramping up production, which is now the number two producer in the world at 20,000 metric tons in 2018. Australia also has all of the elements we would be looking for, according to Geoscience Australia.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, “The estimated value of rare-earth compounds and metals imported by the United States in 2018 was $160 million, an increase from $137 million in 2017.”

These numbers do not account for rare earths used in manufacturing in China and then exported. But what’s China going to do, stop making computers and exporting them?

With all of that context, it does not seem like China blocking exports of rare earths may be much of a threat. Certainly not worthy of the hysteria we’re seeing.

What the U.S. has lacked is a domestic source. But that is changing. We have about 1.4 million metric tons of reserves in the U.S., and after years of not mining rare earths, in 2018 the U.S. ramped up production to 15,000 tons of compounds according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Barrett reports the Mountain Pass site has reopened in California’s San Bernardino County, and is currently exporting to China for processing but, as Barrett happily notes, MP Minerals, the company that owns it, “says it will re-open the mothballed processing facilities at Mountain Pass next year so that the mine can extract rare earth metals at home.”

SOURCE 

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

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Barr: Trump Isn't the One 'Shredding Our Institutions'

Attorney General William Barr, in a lengthy interview with CBS's Jan Crawford, said he doesn't regret taking the job, even though he knew it would make him a target for President Trump's political opponents.


"I love the Department of Justice. I love the FBI. I think it's important that we not, in this period of intense partisan feeling, do not destroy our institutions.

I think one of the ironies today is that people are saying it's President Trump that's shredding our institutions. I really see no evidence of that.

From my perspective, the idea of resisting a democratically elected president and basically throwing everything at him, and you know, is really changing the norms, on the grounds that we have to stop this president. That's where the shredding of our norms and our institutions is occurring."


Barr said he expected to find himself surrounded by controversy, and that's one of the reasons he took the job, because at this point in his career, "it doesn't make any difference."

"I realize we live in a crazy, hyper-partisan period of time, and I knew that it would only be a matter of time if I was behaving responsibly and calling them as I see them that I'd be attacked.

Because nowadays people don't care about the merits or the substance. They only care about who it helps...whether my side benefits or the other side benefits. Everything is gauged by politics. And as I say, that's antithetical to the way the Department runs.

And any attorney general in this period is going to end up losing a lot of political capital, and I realized that. And that's one of the reasons that I ultimately was persuaded that maybe I should take it on. Because I think at my stage in life, it doesn't make any difference. I'm at the end of my career."

Crawford asked Barr how he could exonerate the president when Special Counsel Robert Mueller said he couldn't:

"Well, I think Bob said that he was not going to engage in the analysis. He was not going to make the determination one way or the other.

"We analyzed the law and the facts, and a group of us spent a lot of time doing that and determined that, both as a matter of law, many of the instances would not amount to obstruction....In other words, we didn't agree with the legal analysis -- a lot of the legal analysis in the report. It did not reflect the views of the Department. It was the views of a particular lawyer or lawyers, and so we applied what we thought was the right law."

SOURCE 

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Saudi King:'We Demand the International Community...Use All Means to Stop the Iranian Regime'

Saudi King Salman on Thursday demanded that the international community “use all means” to counter Iranian threats to maritime navigation and terror sponsorship, charging that the absence of a “firm” response up to now has encouraged an escalation in malign behavior.

Addressing Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) counterparts in Mecca, Salman accused Iran of responsibility for the sabotage of four oil tankers near the Persian Gulf, as well as drone attacks on key oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia.

Iranian threats to maritime navigation ‘jeopardize world oil supplies,” he said.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, heading for a European visit where Iran will be on the agenda, told reporters flying with him that the recent incidents “were efforts by the Iranians to raise the price of crude oil throughout the world.”

The official Saudi Press Agency quoted Salman as telling GCC leaders their nations must work seriously to preserve security in the light of “the recent criminal acts targeting one of the world’s most important trade routes through sabotage act against four commercial carriers close to the territorial waters of the United Arab Emirates in addition to targeting two oil pumping stations and a number of vital installations in the kingdom.”

He argued that a “lack of a deterrent and firm stance to confront the subversive activities of the Iranian regime in the region has led the Iranian regime to continue and escalate these activities as we see today.”

“We demand the international community to shoulder its responsibilities towards the threat posed by Iranian practices to the international peace and security, use all means to stop the Iranian regime from interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, sponsoring terrorist activities in the region and the world, and threatening the freedom of maritime navigation in the international straits.”

Saudi Arabia on Thursday night opened two of three major “emergency” summits it is hosting this week, with a strong focus on Iran.

The summit of the six-member GCC (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain) was followed by an Arab League summit, while an Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) summit was taking place on Friday.

‘If American citizens or facilities are threatened or attacked …’

Saudi Arabia and the UAE are Iran’s major rivals in the region, and in the former in particular there have been calls for stronger action to be taken against the regime in Tehran following the recent incidents.

Earlier this month a newspaper close to the government in Riyadh published a front page editorial calling for “surgical strikes” against the regime.

During a visit to the UAE Wednesday, National Security Advisor John Bolton characterized the U.S. response to the Iranian aggression as measured – and evidently effective, noting that there had been no further incidents since the first “three attacks.”

The “three attacks” referred to were the sabotage of the oil tankers on May 12 – which Bolton attributed to “naval mines, almost certainly from Iran” – the drone attacks on the Saudi oil infrastructure on May 14, and the firing of a rocket that landed near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on May 19.

“I think there is no doubt in anybody’s mind in Washington who is responsible for this,” Bolton said. “And I think it’s important that the leadership in Iran know that we know.”

Before the three incidents occurred the Trump administration, citing “troubling and escalatory indications and warnings,” sped up the deployment of an aircraft carrier strike group and sent strategic bombers to the region to send a message to Iran.

Following the attacks, President Trump approved a request from U.S. Central Command for 1,500 additional U.S. troops to be sent to the region for force protection, including some 600 already deployed to man a Patriot missile defense battery.

Asked Wednesday how the U.S. will respond to attacks targeting its regional allies, Bolton said that the U.S. was “trying to be prudent and responsible.”

“We gathered evidence about the nature of the attacks on the tankers and the attack on the Saudi pipeline. We have sent additional forces into the region to act as a deterrent, which – knock on wood – has been successful since the round of three attacks that I mentioned earlier.”

“The point is to make it very clear to Iran and its surrogates that these kinds of actions risk a very strong response from the United States,” Bolton added.

During a visit to London on Thursday, Bolton said again he did not think anyone who knows the region had any doubt who was responsible for the attacks.

The countries whose tankers were targeted – Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Norway – could soon make public the result of their investigations, he told Sky News.

Asked what it would take for the U.S. to take action against Iran – since it hadn’t after the allies were targeted – Bolton said, “We’ve made it particularly clear that if American citizens or facilities are threatened or attacked, that there will be a very strong response.”

The Iranian regime has denied responsibility for the attacks, and a foreign ministry spokesman called Bolton’s allegation about naval mines “ridiculous.”

SOURCE 

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What's More Expensive: Tariffs or Illegals?

The president says he will raise tariffs on Mexico until the flow of migrants stops.   

How much does illegal immigration cost American taxpayers every year? Some estimates put that total conservatively at $116 billion annually for housing, education, healthcare, etc. And with the humanitarian crisis on our border exploding, as a growing number of Central and South American migrant caravans cross through Mexico on their way to the U.S. southern border, the costs are increasing exponentially.

President Donald Trump upped the pressure on the Mexican government to stop the flow of migrants by announcing a 5% tariff on all goods from Mexico.

The president explained: “For decades, the United States has suffered the severe and dangerous consequences of illegal immigration. Sadly, Mexico has allowed this situation to go on for many years… From a safety, national security, military, economic, and humanitarian standpoint, we cannot allow this grave disaster to continue. The current state of affairs is profoundly unfair to the American taxpayer, who bears the extraordinary financial cost imposed by large-scale illegal migration.

Even worse is the terrible and preventable loss of human life. Mexico must step up and help solve this problem… my highest duty is the defense of the country and its citizens. A nation without borders is not a nation at all. I will not stand by and allow our sovereignty to be eroded, our laws to be trampled, or our borders to be disrespected anymore.”

Trump further noted the toll of illegal immigration on Americans, stating: “Thousands of innocent lives are taken every year as a result of this lawless chaos. It must end NOW! … Mexico’s passive cooperation in allowing this mass incursion constitutes an emergency and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States.”

Trump said the tariff would remain “until such time as illegal migrants coming through Mexico, and into our Country, STOP.” The tariffs are set to begin on June 10. Trump added, “The Tariff will gradually increase until the Illegal Immigration problem is remedied … at which time the Tariffs will be removed.”

The president is exactly right in his criticisms. And we’d argue that concerns about the cost of new tariffs are significantly outweighed by the annual cost of illegal immigration. In fact, were the flow of illegals through Mexico into the U.S. to stop, it would present significant savings for taxpayers.

Mexico’s socialist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (nicknamed AMLO), a disciple of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega and Hugo Chávez, responded to Trump with this collectivist claptrap: “‘America First’ is a fallacy because until the end of times, even beyond national borders, justice and universal fraternity will prevail. … Social problems are not solved with duties or coercive measures.” We’ll see.

However, there actually are questions as to how effectively the Mexican government can act to stop the flow of illegals, as human trafficking has become a lucrative industry of the powerful drug cartels. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Trump has been repeatedly hindered in his efforts to secure the southern border by the Democrat cartel of politicians, activist judges, and Leftmedia fake news. Trump’s latest action is a new tactic to get around the Democrats’ roadblock.

SOURCE 

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The True Life Story Hollywood Won't Tell

Hollywood hypocrites threaten Georgia while abetting human-rights abusers. 

Louisiana Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards signed the nation’s latest pro-life bill Thursday. Like other measures around the country, the bill, authored by Democrat Sen. John Milkovich of Shreveport, bans abortion once a baby’s heartbeat can be detected, which usually happens at about six weeks’ gestation. Beyond the bipartisan nature of Louisiana’s effort to protect life, however, is Edwards’ incredible personal pro-life story.

Edwards and his wife Donna faced an excruciating choice 28 years ago. CatholicPhilly reported in 2016, “Doctors informed the couple their baby would have spina bifida and strongly advised an abortion, to the point of taking Donna to see a clinic that treated spina bifida children, some seriously impaired and others less so. At the time there was no way to determine what effects it would have on a particular child.”

Donna said, “I was devastated — but, John Bel never flinched. He said, ‘No, no; we’re going to love this baby no matter what.’ And, at that moment, I watched the boy I fell in love with become the man I’m still in love with today.”

“It was our belief that God has a purpose in everything and we would have this child,” Edwards added. “I credit Donna. She is a very courageous person. … I cannot imagine what our life would be without [our daughter].”

That is exactly the kind of engaging, emotional story of love and sacrifice that would make for a fantastic Hollywood movie.

Unfortunately, Hollywood hypocrites are too busy attacking Georgia for its pro-life legislation. Georgia has become a hub for filming movies and TV shows, with productions made there by industry titans like Disney (“Avengers: Endgame”) and Netflix (“Stranger Things”). But, along with those two companies, WarnerMedia, CBS, Showtime, NBCUniversal, AMC Networks, Sony Pictures, STX, and Viacom are all now threatening to boycott the state for protecting life.

Why is that hypocritical? While Disney is heavily marketed to children, the company partners with and does a great deal of business in China, where abortions are not always by choice, and where the communist government abuses human rights and imprisons people for their political and religious beliefs. Netflix is no better, producing series in Egypt and Jordan, where abortion is illegal and punishable due to laws far stricter than Georgia’s. Yet numerous famous people had the gall to write to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp saying they would “do everything in our power to move our industry to a safer state for women.” Just don’t tell Harvey Weinstein where those women are.

We’d say Hollywood’s craven display is all about the almighty dollar, except it’s hard to see how it’s profitable for these production companies to tell half of their American audiences that they’re “deplorable.” In reality, this is nothing more than the Hollywood hive mind at work. “I think many people who work for us will not want to work there, and we will have to heed their wishes in that regard,” opined Disney CEO Bob Iger. It’s a wretched hive of scum and villainy, where the only people they care to please are themselves.

SOURCE 

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Trump the Disruptor

When people complain about the president's "style," try to remember his accomplishments

Everyone has an opinion about President Donald Trump, especially the younger crowd. Primarily, they dislike him because of what they hear from the media. They may be short on facts, but they certainly know how they “feel” about him. I recently saw where a Democrat congressman who is pushing for impeachment proceedings said, “Trump is raping the country!” No hype there. I’m sure we can have a reasonable conversation regarding his claim.

Most of the dislike of President Trump seems to focus around his style on social media — caustic, blunt, in your face, hit me and I’ll hit you back, along with other descriptions that would take too much time to list. But I think it might be a good time to pause, take a deep breath, and look at some facts.

I have to admit, there are many times I wished the president would just stop tweeting. But then I realize, when he hits back at those who are slandering him daily with wall-to-wall coverage of accusations, innuendos, and flat out phony stories, he gives it right back to them. And it’s driving them crazy.

For those of you who get upset because Trump does not act presidential, let me ask you a question. What did the last, say, three or four presidents actually do for our country? Did they stop the problem of illegal immigration? Did they stop making bad trade deals with other countries? Some I appreciated; others I had no respect for. But I prayed for them all.

We need to realize there will never be a perfect president because there is no such thing as a perfect person. There has only been ONE perfect person and He lived 2,000 years ago. Most Americans have set unrealistic expectations for what we expect our president to “be.” We should be more focused on what the president actually DOES!

President Trump has kept more campaign promises than any politician in recent history. We have historic unemployment for African-Americans, Hispanics, and women. Deregulation has allowed many businesses to rise to levels not seen for decades. There are so many good indicators of what has happened in our country since President Trump took office. When all these people complain about his “style,” I see his accomplishments.

We expect our presidents to act with decorum and style. What has that accomplished over the past 20-plus years? Trump just does it, and when the Left goes crazy, he simply throws Twitter gasoline on their phony indignation. I may not like his style, but I really do like his results. Maybe that’s why we “deplorables” voted for him. We got tired of talk and wanted some results.

In closing, let me give you something to chew on. In the New Testament, there is a very interesting passage in light of current events. The Apostle Paul, writing to the church in Corinth, made this statement: “But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise” (I Corinthians 1:27). If that doesn’t sound like the 2016 election results, I don’t know what does.

President Trump has been a disruptor to the status quo. He drives liberals absolutely crazy (some didn’t have that far to drive…) but he is getting things done. I believe God put Trump where he is today to shake things up a bit. King Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus the Persian ruler were not “godly people,” but God used them just the same.

Something to think about?

SOURCE 

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Twitter is working with academic researchers to decide whether it should ban white supremacists from its platform

There seems to be no agreed definition of white supremacy. Does it include immigration critics and patriots?  It seems to on many occasions.  The only definition that fits all the cases seems to be anyone who disagrees with the Left.

But even if a reasonable definition of white supremacism can be devised,  it is supported only by a few isolated individuals.  It has no substantial organization -- unlike Islamic supremacism or Leftist supremacism.  A supremacist wants to rule the world so is in principle obnoxious.  If it is going to ban anything, Twitter should ban Islamic supremacism and Leftist supremacism. White supremacism is the least of the world's supremacism problems


Twitter says it's looking into whether or not white supremacists should be allowed on its platform, amid increasing calls for a crackdown on extremist content.

The social media giant is examining how white nationalists and supremacists use its platform to help it decide whether the groups should be banned, or if they should be allowed to continue to post so that other users can debate them, according to Motherboard. 

It comes as Twitter has faced criticism over the plethora of extremist content shared on its site and the fact that it has taken few measures to curb hateful rhetoric.

Researchers are looking at what roles Twitter plays in making conversations around white nationalism and white supremacy worse or better.  From there, it hopes to have a better idea of whether or not banning these groups would be the right move.

'Is it the right approach to deplatform these individuals? Is the right approach to try and engage with these individuals? How should we be thinking about this? What actually works?' Vijaya Gadde, Twitter's head of trust and safety, told Motherboard.

Last month, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Gadde met with President Donald Trump to discuss the 'health of public conversations on the site.

Twitter has become notorious for its characteristically slow responses to pressing problems on the site, such as abuse, trolls and hateful content.

For that reason, many aren't surprised by the company's decision to look into the issue of white supremacists and white nationalism several years after these kinds of content started to become amplified on Twitter.

'The idea that they are looking at this matter seriously now as opposed to the past indicates the callousness with which they've approached this issue on their platform,' Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, told Motherboard.

Similarly, Heidi Beirich, director of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Motherboard it has been proven that white supremacists continue to thrive on Twitter.

'Twitter has David Duke on there; Twitter has Richard Spencer,' she told Motherboard. 'They have some of the biggest ideologues of white supremacy and people whose ideas have inspired terrorist attacks on their site, and it's outrageous.'

Twitter has taken some steps to crack down on extremism, joining Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, LinkedIn and others last year in banning right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars show from its platform.

In other ways, Twitter and several social media platforms have yet to fully reckon with the amount of extremist content on their platforms.

YouTube has also become a popular destination for white nationalism and supremacy, but it has so far refused to ban either forms of content from its site.

So far, the only major social media platform to take a stand against white nationalism and white separatism is Facebook, which banned those kinds of posts in March.

Posts that include statements like 'I am a proud white nationalist' and 'Immigration is tearing this country apart' will immediately be banned.

If a user tries to publish a post around these themes, they'll instead be redirected to a nonprofit called Life After Hate, which helps individuals involved in these extremist groups exit them safely.

SOURCE 

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Leftist political violence in Czechia too

Lubos Motl writes:

Ladislav Jakl, the life-long secretary of ex-president Klaus, was brutally attacked in the Prague subway on Saturday

He was sitting in the subway, approaching Square of the Republic, Yellow Line B, and playing with his phone. Suddenly two attackers came and one screamed: "You are that Jakl, from SPD". SPD is the "nationalist" party - I voted for it on Friday for the first time but it could also be the last time, it's not really my cup of tea in the long run.

Jakl wasn't a leader of SPD, he was just nominated by SPD for Senate (failed) and a Public TV Commission (he's there).

Jakl has had a sleepless night due to pain, a physician ruled out internal injury, so he's just cosmetically impaired on his head and shoulder. He ended on the floor. The attackers left the car on the next stop.

I know Jakl in person. In particular, in late 2014, we shared the slot for a lecture on the climate in Southern Bohemia. I had the more scientific part, he had the more social one. His talk about the climate panic was wise and wonderful.

Just to make you sure that the political violence by the "liberals" doesn't avoid Czechia and climate skeptics are likely to be victims.

Via email

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Millennial Attitudes Are Out of Sync with Economic Realities

These days, young Americans are a pessimistic bunch. Earlier this month, Deloitte released its 2019 Millennial Survey, taking a snapshot of public opinion among more than 13,000 Millennials and over 3,000 Gen Z respondents in the United States and beyond.

What did Deloitte find? In a word, pessimism. As the company put it, “Optimism, trust reach troubling low levels.” In other words, young America is a “generation disturbed.”

While many factors fuel my generation’s pessimism, economic uncertainty tops the list. Nearly half of all respondents believe that the changing nature of work will make it more difficult to find or change jobs, while another 70 percent believe they may lack the skills required to thrive in the modern workplace. Meanwhile, barely one-quarter of respondents expect economic conditions in their respective countries to improve over the next year—down from 45 percent a year ago.

Given the changing labor market, much of that uncertainty is justifiable. But there’s more: Young Americans are more skeptical of the business community than ever before, with many perceiving corporate America as a problem facing our country and not a potential solution to many of its shortcomings. According to Deloitte’s research, only 55 percent of Millennials see businesses as having a positive impact on society, compared to 61 percent in 2018.

That’s right: Barely half of all Millennials see businesses as “having a positive impact on society.” Think about that for a second.

Laura Banks, a Millennial cited in the Deloitte report, put it this way: “We have less trust in employers because so many of our parents did lose their jobs, and they had been loyal to companies.”

Indeed, globalization is not an entirely positive experience. While yielding many benefits, the outsourcing of American supply chains to continents like Africa and Asia has resulted in disrupted industries, shuttered factories, and countless lost jobs.

But entirely ignoring the merits of globalization and vilifying the business community as a “negative impact” is quite a leap. In fact, to denigrate the private sector is intellectually irresponsible, considering that private enterprise is primarily responsible for the economic prosperity that we see today.

The numbers bear it out. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the totality of U.S. industry—public and private—combines to account for more than $36 trillion in gross economic output. Of those industries, the private sector alone accounts for nearly $33 trillion of that output—over 90 percent of the U.S. economy.

Economic output translates to job creation, and vice versa. As of April 2019, the private sector employed more than 128 million working Americans. The government (federal, state, and local), on the other hand, put fewer than 23 million Americans to work. These are jobs that would be impossible to finance without the productive capacity of private enterprise.

Here’s another way to look at it: In terms of job creation, the private sector is about five times more powerful than its public counterpart, which is financially dependent on the free market.

Without it, the U.S. economy would simply fall apart. Moreover, it would pale in comparison to the global competitors that have sought to replicate America’s success for decades. Despite the never-ending talk of American decline, U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) accounts for roughly a quarter of the world’s GDP. In fact, America’s share of global GDP is on par with those of China, Japan, and Germany combined.

Because of its productive and innovative private sector, the U.S. economy is without precedent, and is the most prosperous economy in the history of civilization. And our economy remains the global standard, as it was for much of the 20th century.

Ironically, young Americans have a lot to do with that. After all, Millennials represent the largest generation in the U.S. workforce. By next year, the Millennial generation is projected to make up 50 percent of the workforce, populating all levels of the corporate ladder.

And there are plenty of reasons for Millennials—and all Americans—to be optimistic. Our economy continues to expand, hitting a robust 3.2 percent growth rate in the first quarter of 2019. The U.S. unemployment rate has dropped below four percent, and the unemployment rate for the least-skilled workers is outperforming its average to a greater extent than for higher-skilled employees.

In the last four decades, real GDP per person has increased from about $28,000 to more than $55,000, and 60 percent of today’s 30-year-olds are better off than their parents at the same age (when adjusting for family size). Upward mobility may not be guaranteed, but it is still commonplace.

And yet, young America remains pessimistic. While some of that pessimism can indeed be justified, much is totally unfounded, considering America’s socioeconomic status in the world.

Is there room to criticize the business community? Yes. Is our free-market economic system perfect? Of course not. There is always room for improvement.

But to suggest the business community has anything but a “positive impact on society”—in its totality—is to plead ignorance. Quite frankly, our business leaders deserve better.

SOURCE 

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Why the British loathe The Donald

To our elite, Trump is the wrong kind of rich person.

Now, Trump is an offensive guy, and he has said some truly nasty stuff. But that doesn’t quite explain why he can bring London’s middle classes on to the streets at the drop of a hat. Yes, he has been turned, quite effectively, into a symbol of all that is wrong with the world. But I wonder if there’s something peculiarly British about the fury he elicits here. I reckon it’s got something to do with snobbery. Trump may have been born rich, become a reality-TV star, and is now the most powerful man in the world, but under our class system he is still a person to be looked down upon.

In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell writes about his private-school education and his younger years as ‘an odious little snob’. As a child of the ‘lower-upper-middle class’, he learned to loathe those above him as much as those below him. ‘I despised anyone who was not describable as a “gentleman”, but also I hated the hoggishly rich, especially those who had grown rich too recently.’ That is Trump to a tee. He’s the wrong kind of rich. The new rich. The beauty-pageant rich. The flashy rich. This is why – prior to politics – he was beloved by so many rappers. And this is why he is so loathed by the British bourgeoisie.

The US, of course, has inherited much of that snobbery. Witness the way the death of the supposedly ‘genteel’ New England aristocrat George Bush Sr became another opportunity to knock Trump for being brash and uncouth. Or the constant unflattering comparisons between the professorial, new-class Obamas and the tacky, new-money Trumps. But there is still something distinct about the British revulsion at The Donald. Not least because ‘don’t give him a state visit – he’ll embarrass our queen!’ is an argument now being made by nominal left-liberals.

Regardless, this rage against Trump is also not just about him, on either side of the pond. It’s about the people who voted for him because they were fed up of the people now slating him. It’s about the people ‘stupid’ enough to fall for this orange charlatan. One moment in Fire and Fury – the much-disputed, probably fictionalised account of the Trump White House by Michael Wolff – provides an instructive anecdote. Trump is asked by an Eastern European model what ‘white trash’ is. ‘They’re people just like me, only they’re poor’, was his (alleged) response.

That’s what the anger and the double standards and the blimp are really about. And deep down, the protesters know it.

SOURCE 

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Federal Agency Blames Diversity, Ignores Cause of Deadly 2017 Amtrak Derailment

Must not blame the driver.  That would upset the union

On December 18, 2017, in Dupont, Washington, if an Amtrak engineer had negotiated a curve at the proper speed of 30 miles per hour instead of 78 mph, the deadly derailment that claimed three lives and injured 57 would not have occurred. Two and a half years later, that wasn’t how the federal National Transportation Safety Board saw it.

As Fox News reports, “instead of blaming the engineer, the NTSB cast a wide net that included the various agencies that constructed and operated the line.” The federal board excoriated the Seattle-area Sound Transit agency for “not sufficiently mitigating the danger of the sharp bend.” Amtrak was to blame for “not better training the engineer.” The NTSB blamed the Washington State Department of Transportation for “not ensuring the route was safe before green-lighting a passenger train.” The NTSB also blamed and the Federal Railroad Administration for “using rail cars beneath regulatory standards.”

Relatives of the victims might wonder how all this was allowed to proceed without supervision from the FTSB and other state, local and federal agencies. None of the alleged lapses cancel the blame of the engineer, who hit the curve at more than twice the speed limit. So when NTSB Robert Sumwalt said the accident could have prevented, he was confirming a stranglehold on the obvious. Trouble is, if this is an “institutional problem,” as some regulators claimed, then no person is to blame. Amtrak employees are members of government employee unions, a highly protected class, so no surprise that the NTSB even fails to name the engineer.

As this case confirms, the NTSB is basically a historian of accidents and contributes little if anything to public safety. The Trump administration should mark the NTSB for deep cuts and take a hard look at Amtrak as well. In typical style, Amtrak failed to name the faulty engineer or indicate whether he had been fired or what he might be doing now. But as Amtrak said in a statement, “We remain deeply saddened by the loss of life and injuries due to this tragic event.”

SOURCE 

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

**************************

Expanded or "positive" rights lead directly to authoritarian government -- and that can be very bad

If someone has a "right" to be fed, someone has to be given a duty to feed him.  But what if he refuses that duty?  Coercion is the next step

Liberalism is, after all, based on the idea that individual liberty is the highest political virtue – and who doesn’t love liberty? ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ These were the words that created the United States of America, and ultimately the global liberal order.

But over time the kinds of liberties demanded by liberals have evolved and expanded. They have shifted from a historical focus on ‘negative’ freedoms toward a contemporary focus on ‘positive’ rights. The philosophical construction of the concept of liberty is contentious and convoluted, but there is an obvious and intuitive difference between the simple freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution (freedom of religion, speech, assembly, and the press) and the expansive rights promised by Article 25 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights (rights to food, clothing, housing, medical care, social services, unemployment insurance and social security).

Political philosophers may be able to derive one from the other, but ordinary people will understand that there is a basic qualitative difference, even if the line between the two is sometimes blurred. Nothing in philosophy is ever simple, but simply put, the freedom to pursue happiness is something very different from the right to be happy. Political liberalism has evolved over nearly three centuries from a philosophy of safeguarding freedoms into a philosophy of demanding rights.

There have been good reasons for this shift. Liberals have come to realise that freedoms on their own are not always sustainable. People sometimes vote to relinquish their freedoms. Very often people use their freedoms to enslave others. Freedom may be just as likely to be used irresponsibly as it is to be used responsibly. Thus the mainstream of liberal opinion has come to the view that the protection of basic human rights, especially the protection of minority rights, is an indispensable prerequisite for the maintenance of individual freedom.

To some extent this is true. But the principle that some human rights must be ensured prompts the question of which ones. Someone has to decide, and if that decision preempts democratic decision-making, then clearly the decision cannot be left up to the people. In fact, among liberal political scientists, the whole idea that the people should define the scope of basic human rights is now sneeringly referred to as ‘majoritarian’ democracy, qualified as if it were no kind of democracy at all.

Mainstream liberals have reasoned that the delineation of the set of human rights that are necessary for the maintenance of individual freedom can only be properly performed by experts. Those experts, the experts in human rights, are by definition educated professionals like academics, lawyers, judges, journalists, civil servants, social workers, medical doctors and lobbyists. By virtue of dedicated study and professional practice they have made themselves the legitimate authorities on the subject. And they truly are the legitimate authorities on the subject. When you want an authority on chemistry, you consult a chemist. When you want an authority on human rights, you consult a human-rights lawyer.

The whole idea that the people should define the scope of human rights is now often sneeringly referred to as ‘majoritarian’ democracy, qualified as if it were no kind of democracy at all

The problem is that politics is a unique field of human activity. Authoritarianism in chemistry may be unproblematic, even desirable. Authoritarianism in politics is dangerous, even when the authorities themselves are above reproach. In the contemporary liberal worldview, certain policies are mandatory, others are beyond the pale, and only the experts can tell which is which. Liberal democracy thus requires the obedience of the voters (or at least the citizens) to expert authority. The people are the passive recipients of those rights the experts deem them to possess. As the domain of rights expands, experts end up making more and more of the decisions – or at least more of the decisions that matter – in an ever-increasing number of the most important aspects of public life: economic policy, criminal justice, what’s taught in schools, who’s allowed to enter the country, what diseases will be cured, even (in many cases) who will have the opportunity to run for elective office. In these areas and more, experts arrogate to themselves the authority to adjudicate competing claims for public resources and private benefits. As society evolves, the areas reserved to expert adjudication seem only to expand. In the course of normal politics, previously depoliticised policy domains rarely return to the realm of democratic determination.

The new authoritarianism of the 21st century has nothing to do with the Trump presidency. It is neither a right-wing authoritarianism, nor a nationalist authoritarianism, nor even a conservative authoritarianism. The new authoritarianism of the 21st century is, paradoxically, a liberal authoritarianism.

SOURCE 

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Trump’s campaign manager has a plan to punish twitter

Brad Parscale is reportedly nudging his boss to join Twitter competitor and far-right hub Parler.

Donald Trump’s beef with social-media giants is well-documented—just last month, he brought Twitter C.E.O. Jack Dorsey to the White House to whine about the dip in his following that’s supposedly due to anti-conservative bias. Yet despite his gripes, and the gripes of his far-right allies over the de-platforming of people like Alex Jones, Twitter has remained the president’s megaphone of choice. That’s in part because no platform rivals the reach of Twitter, where Trump can broadcast his every thought to millions of people in seconds. But a new report suggests the president’s aides are pushing him to lend his online clout to a Twitter competitor, raising the specter of a social-media ecosystem that’s even more deeply polarized.

According to Politico, Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale is weighing setting up a presidential account on Parler, a Twitter-style site that controversial conservatives, exiled from larger platforms and leery of censorship, have begun to adopt. “It’s something [Parscale is] aware of and is checking out,” a Trump campaign official said of Parler, which has attracted right-wing notables like Milo Yiannopoulos and Candace Owens. (Owens herself endorsed the idea: “Donald Trump should just switch social media platforms altogether because everyone will follow him,”she told Politico.) Per the campaign official, there’s currently no plan to “make a big move to the platform.” But Parscale and Utah Sen. Mike Lee, a Trump ally, have both created Parler accounts and started posting on the site.

The president and his allies have complained increasingly loudly about the supposed “shadow-banning” of conservatives on social media. “Facebook, Twitter and Google are so biased toward the Dems it is ridiculous!” Trump tweeted in December without a hint of irony. “When is Twitter going to allow the very popular Conservative Voices that it has so viciously shut down, back into the OPEN?” he demanded more recently. If Trump were to migrate to Parler, or at least include it in his daily rage-posting, it would certainly attract a great deal of attention to the upstart platform, and would likely increase its usership. It could also worsen polarization, creating a scenario in which Democrats and Republicans don’t merely talk over one another online, but occupy different digital spaces entirely.

SOURCE 

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Privately-Funded Group Builds El Paso Border Wall, Closing ‘Ridiculously Large Gap’ Used by Smugglers

“We Build The Wall,” a privately-funded organization, announced Monday it has built the country’s first border wall on private land.

Kris Kobach, former Kansas secretary of state, told Fox and Friends the new wall in El Paso, Texas fills a half-mile gap in the existing border, which was constantly exploited by illegal aliens and drug smugglers:

“This is the first time in American history that a private organization called ‘We Build The Wall’ - this is the first time any organization has built border wall on private land. And, it’s happening right here in the El Paso area and it’s not just any piece of land. This piece of land is right where the El Paso wall that separates El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, where that wall ends, there’s been a half-mile gap between the existing wall and Mount Cristo Rey.

“And, it was a ridiculously large gap that the smuggling of both people and drugs would go through.”

Kobach said the organization worked non-stop over the past weekend in order to give the nation a Memorial Day present:

“The wall has been going up over the weekend. We’ve been working 24/7 over the holiday weekend to give America a present on this Memorial Day.”

Rather than using the “garden-variety” steel employed by government wall-builders, which has a useful life of 25 years, “This is all weathering steel that lasts 75 years,” Kobach said.

And, even though the average donation to We Build The Wall is only $67, the privately-funded organization is set to begin building its second stretch of wall, Kobach added.

As Independent Journal Review reports, We Build The Wall was founded by a veteran and is dependent on private donations to fund its wall construction projects:

“We Build The Wall was founded by triple amputee veteran Brian Kolfage who saw a way to build fill in the gaps in the border with funding construction through private donations. Kobach pointed out that the specific gap they were closing up had been used to smuggle drugs as well.”

SOURCE 

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The Real Inclusive Approach to Immigrants

Some people make better immigrants than others -- but the Left cannot admit that as it clashes with their idiotic belief that all men are equal

Is President Donald Trump’s call for patriotic assimilation, which is a part of his immigration package, a step toward totalitarianism and fascism? These are the hyperbolic claims made in a contentious op-ed by Fabiola Santiago, a columnist at the Miami Herald.

Santiago highlighted my own work in this field, citing a 2016 paper. While ordinarily I don’t react to criticism, especially when over the top, in this case a response makes it possible to elucidate some points.

For starters, she’s wrong.

As it is often the case with those whose proposals actually lead to a reduction in our freedoms, Santiago wraps her argument as a rousing defense of liberty: Assimilation would mean “the end of the romantic notion that we are a free people who can speak as we like, feel as we feel, be who we are, without fear of government reprisals,” she writes.

Let me make three points about this.

First, the survival of political liberty and a political community depends on a shared culture and the habits of character that protect it.

Second, the leading thinkers of the multiculturalism Santiago defends no longer even pretend to be on the side of political liberty.

And third, the comparison she draws between America and totalitarian Cuba gets things exactly backward.

Let’s start with the survival of political liberty. Some cultural traits and habits are necessary to self-rule, and others undermine it. A government charged with protecting our freedoms must promote the former and discourage the latter.

Thrift, self-reliance, a strong work ethic, perseverance, volunteerism, and moderation are qualities that make a population free and prosperous. These also are virtues long associated with America, a nation ahistorically free and prosperous. They must be instilled and practiced. They don’t come in the bloodstream.

A statist, bureaucratic mindset that does not prize the right to private property, the right to freedom of speech and conscience, or the belief that all humans are born free and equal, would on the other hand render our society less free. Immigrants who come freighted with these habits of mind must be invited to forget them and take up new ones.

And indeed, immigrants from countries with these cultural habits always have faced pressure, from the American government and civil society alike, to leave them behind and adopt new ones.

A prime example is the wave of German immigrants who came to America in the 1800s, economically due to the dislocation of industrialization and politically because of the failure of revolutions in 1848. Culturally, many had statist proclivities that were unknown among most Americans.

In 1854, their political leaders in Kentucky adopted a “Platform of the Free Germans of Louisville” that had radical anti-property notions.

One of these notions read that “to occupy nature, the soil, as exclusive property, this no individual has the right to do.” Another said that “labor has an incontestable claim to the value of its product” and if “the capitalist” did not agree, then the government “has to interfere” to secure this right. A third called for the government to pay for instruction in German to the children of immigrants.

That same year, German immigrants in Richmond, Virginia, passed a similar platform calling for these same rollbacks of freedom and adding funds for a German-language university. The Virginia platform also called for a government takeover of the railroads, taxation of church lands, and abolishment of religious schools.

The Americans of the day decided pretty quickly to protect their way of life and compel the new German immigrants to adopt the American worldview, not import their own, thank you very much. The immigrant was not obliged to give up his beer and wiener, which were adopted into the national cuisine. We should all be thankful for all aspects of that arrangement today.

The process worked. By the 1880s, the German-born Wisconsin Congressman Richard Guenther was rallying crowds with these words: “After passing through the crucible of naturalization we are no longer Germans; we are Americans. … America first, last, and all the time. America against Germany; America against the world; America right or wrong; always America.”

The multiculturalism that Santiago defends is at odds with the liberty she purports to advocate, which brings us to our second point.

Santiago—who seems never to be have considered the allure of understatement—maintains that patriotic assimilation “and all the nationalist jargon that comes with it—is the concoction of right-wing think tanks that detest multiculturalism.”

“What Trump proposes,” she writes, “has the markings of the type of domination we fought against in World War II: Fascism.”

A fondness for multiculturalism seems nearly always to go hand in hand with an attachment to cosmopolitanism, or the belief that we are all citizens of the world, with loyalty first to all human beings rather than our own nation. They are both the opposite of assimilation.

Thus, contra Guenther’s hardy call for “America against the world,” Santiago seems oddly vexed that Trump’s call for merit-based immigration would “gut countries of their best minds”—as if they were compelled to come to America. (Doesn’t she care about their self-determination?)

But cosmopolitan aspirations, writes my Heritage Foundation colleague Arthur Milikh, “lack the power to constrain and tutor strong natural proclivities toward anger, pride, and selfishness” and it is the restraint of passions such as these that produce civility and the ability to govern oneself.

So it’s no surprise that the purveyors of multiculturalism no longer hide their disdain for natural rights. Progressive academics from Catharine A. MacKinnon to Louis Michael Seidman, Frederick Schauer, and Kathleen M. Sullivan all have come out against free speech because, in the words of MacKinnon, the First Amendment “has become a sword for authoritarians, racists and misogynists.”

As the most famous textbook on multiculturalism, “Critical Race Theory, an Introduction” by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, puts it, critical race theorists “are suspicious of another liberal mainstay, namely rights” because they “believe that moral and legal rights are apt to do the right holder much less good than we like to think.”

These beliefs already have been put into practice, with foreseeable consequences, in Cuba, an unfortunate country that Santiago appears not to understand very well, though I gather she was born there.

Before the revolution’s triumph in 1959, Cuba’s culture had accrued organically, going back to the colonization of the island in 1511 and the founding of Havana in 1519. The Cuban revolution has gone out of its way to eradicate this culture and destroy even its physical manifestations, which is why Havana’s once stately architecture has been purposely left to putrefy.

Cuba’s innate traditions prior to Year Zero are thus rendered by the revolution as corrupt and immoral, a narrative that the international left is only too happy to propagate. In the place of this culture, the revolution has imposed through force a fabricated one.

It is this process that a return to American norms would hope to arrest in this country.

An invitation to assimilate to practices that produce freedom and solidarity and have been part of the American character for centuries—truly the inclusive approach—would be a last-ditch attempt to return America to its organic traditions.

SOURCE 

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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DESPERATION: After Failing On Collusion And Obstruction, Democrats Unveil New ‘Get Trump’ policy

They really are out of ideas. The claim that Trump is mentally unfit goes right back to his 2016 campaign.  I have looked at several of the claims e.g here and here and here and show how shallow they are

I was amused by the claim below that Trump had a very strict father.  That is in fact a boilerplate Leftist claim about conservatives generally but the speaker gives no evidence of it in Trump's case. To me, Trump's behaviour has all the hallmarks  of a very permissive upbringing -- which was the fashion during his childhood in the 40s and '50s -- Dr. Spock and all that

It's probably just old age in her case but Pelosi's mental meanderings  suggest that she is the one who is unfit for office.  There is a video of her going about which compiles many instances of her slurring her words and stuttering.


Democrats spent the past two years claiming they had proof that President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the election and obstructed justice to block Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

After Mueller’s report clearly stated there is no evidence of collusion or obstruction, Democrats have unveiled a new “get Trump” plan.

Now, Democrats are claiming that Trump is not “mentally fit” for office and must be impeached.

Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “I pray for the President of the United States.” When asked if she was concerned about Trump’s mental state, Pelosi answered, “I am.”

Pelosi implied to reporters that Trump had mental issues, said she was “praying” for the president, and suggested that his family ought to “stage an intervention.”

This paved the way for Democrats to now claim that Trump should be impeached because he has “mental issues.”

Last week, Howard Stern spoke to CNN’s Anderson Cooper to discuss Trump’s mental health and said:

From what I know of Donald and his relationship with his father, it sounds traumatic. It sounds like the father was very domineering.

The father expected a lot of him. And the father, I don’t know, there was military school. You know, you read these drips and drabs and you go wow. I can assure you he’s been traumatized because, you know, Donald, you know, his level of narcissism is so strong.

He has trouble with empathy. We know that. And I wish he’d go into psychotherapy.

During an interview on Friday with MSNBC’s Joy Reid, Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin pushed the same talking point:

“Today, the 25th Amendment has come back into focus because of the extraordinary events that took place in the White House.”

“Speaker Pelosi showed her compassionate side when she said there should be a family intervention. Unfortunately, some conditions are way beyond the capacity of a family intervention to address. This might be far more serious. Professor Bandi Lee, the psychiatrist up at Yale Medical School, had a group do a mental health analysis of the special counsel’s report and they came back and said basically, the president is failing at every level of basic mental and cognitive health.”

“He cannot take in information successfully, he cannot process information successfully, he cannot engage in decision-making without bias, distortion, impulsivity, impetuosity. And he cannot keep himself and others free from danger, which I guess are like the basic minimal requisites of mental health and they’re saying it’s missing in that case. So, the constitution has a mechanism for this. The 25th Amendment.”

After Mueller’s report clearly stated there is no evidence of collusion or obstruction, it is more than clear that Trump’s “deteriorating mental health” is the new plan Democrats will use to push impeachment.

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Foolish impeachment talk

South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham has a bold warning for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — and she won’t like this one bit.

During an interview on “Fox News Sunday” with host Chris Wallace, Graham warned that if Pelosi tries to impeach President Donald Trump, her political career will likely be over. “She knows that impeachment would be political suicide because there’s no reason to impeach the president,” Graham said.

The South Carolina Republican went on to warn that Pelosi will lose control of the U.S. House of Representatives and possibly her job if she pushes impeachment.

“She’s trying to keep the party intact. If she goes down the impeachment road, Republicans take back the House, we keep the Senate, President Trump gets reelected, but her job is very much at risk,” Graham said.

“So what I think is going to happen here – I think that she’s going to be driven towards impeachment. If she goes down that road, it will be suicide for the Democratic Party,” he added.

Later in the interview, Graham went nuclear on Wallace for trying to paint him as a hypocrite on impeachment.

Wallace played a clip of Graham from the late 1990s, where he called for the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton after it was revealed he lied to Congress and the special counsel about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

“It is your job to supply us with the things we need to provide oversight over you,” Graham said in the video.

“Why is it an impeachable offense for Clinton or Nixon back then to ignore congressional subpoenas, but it’s okay for President Trump to do now?” Wallace asked.

Wallace was clearly trying a “gotcha question” with Graham, but it backfired on him.

Graham set the record straight and explained how his comments about Clinton from 20 years ago aren’t comparable to Trump today.

“Mueller is the final word on this for me,” Graham said. “If Clinton had stiffed Ken Starr, that’s different. What [Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY)] is doing is trying to destroy the president and his family.”

“If I were the president, I’d fight back against this political revenge coming out of the House,” Sen. Graham said.

“Mueller was the man of the law. Mueller was an independent voice that we all trusted to be fair. I don’t trust House Democrats to be fair,” he said.

To Graham’s point, Attorney General William Barr put the final nail in the collusion coffin and said that Robert Mueller found no evidence that Trump, his campaign, or any American colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential election.

The president has been completely vindicated after the two-year Russia witch hunt.

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Ex-CNN Contributors Drop MASSIVE Truth Bomb: ‘Hate Trump’ Network ‘Openly Despises Conservatives’

Former CNN contributors are coming out to reveal the truth about the far-left network that serves as the communications wing of the Democrat Party. For the American people to have a hunch is one thing, but to hear it from the mouths of multiple horses is another beast altogether.

According to several former contributors to the cable news network, CNN has increasingly become the anti-conservative, “hate Trump” network that allows only Republicans critical of the president on their airwaves and has systematically “squeezed out” conservative voices.

“Most of us got squeezed out involuntarily,” former CNN contributor and former Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) told Mediaite. “I was there for 2 years and was certainly willing to continue. It was clear to me in the end that the Republicans they prefer are anti-Trump Republicans.”

Mediaite also spoke with former CNN analyst Stephen Moore, who echoed Kingston’s sentiments about the network’s apparent preference for anti-Trump Republicans, noting that one of the few Republicans they feature is former Ohio Gov. and vocal Trump critic John Kasich.

“CNN is the hate Trump network,” said Moore. “They just trash Trump every single hour of every single day. All they’ve talked about for two years is the Muller report and how bad does it make them look now that it proved nothing?”

Another former CNN contributor that has not been shy about voicing complaints about CNN’s “obvious” bias is talk radio host Buck Sexton, who told Mediate that the network now “openly despises conservatives who are pro-Trump.”

For instance:

President Trump defended his now infamous Charlottesville comments. His exact words from 2017, per Real Clear Politics:

“Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”

After another question at that press conference, Trump became even more explicit:

“I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.”

Enter CNN’s Jim Acosta, who got torched for lying:

Trump defends his “very fine people” comments on Charlottesville: “People were there protesting the taking down of the monument of Robert E. Lee. Everybody knows that.” Fact check: There were many neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

Fact check this: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”

That’s what @realDonaldTrump said that day and you were standing 10 feet away from him. You do your network proud.

Yellow Journalism

*  Trump openly condemned the neo-Nazis & white supremacists
*  called them “criminals and thugs”
*  said “racism is evil”
*  said those responsible would be “held fully accountable”

This is brazen revision of history that would make the Katyn murderers proud.

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Trump Overrules Congress, Uses Emergency Powers To Push Through MAJOR Deal

No hope of co-operation from the Democrat Lower house

President Donald Trump is overruling Congress and attempting to use emergency powers to push through a major deal in the Middle East.

According to The Hill, the Trump administration has invoked an emergency provision of the law to immediately finalize an $8.1 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf allies without getting a measure passed in Congress.

With Iran’s continued threats and hostility towards the United States, the president is attempting to provide more weapons to America’s allies in the Middle East.

The Trump administration also announced on Friday that 1,500 U.S. troops will be deployed to the Middle East to protect American forces and personnel already there from any potential attacks from Iran.

The package — which is composed of more than 20 separate deals and is valued at $8.1 billion — includes precision guided munitions, bombs, ammunition, and aircraft maintenance support.

The arms are being sold to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, with the UAE then transferring some to Jordan.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo released a statement on Friday saying the 22 arms sales are needed to “help these nations to deter and defend themselves from the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

“Delaying this shipment could cause degraded systems and a lack of necessary parts and maintenance that could create severe airworthiness and interoperability concerns for our key partners, during a time of increasing regional volatility,” Pompeo said.

He added: “These national security concerns have been exacerbated by many months of congressional delay in addressing these critical requirements, and have called into doubt our reliability as a provider of defense capabilities, opening opportunities for U.S. adversaries to exploit.”

Pompeo added that using the emergency provision is intended as a “one-time event.”

“Section 36 is a long-recognized authority and has been utilized by at least four previous administrations since 1979, including Presidents Reagan and Carter,” he said. “This specific measure does not alter our long-standing arms transfer review process with Congress. I look forward to continuing to work with Congress to develop prudent measures to advance and protect U.S. national security interests in the region.”

Notices posted on the Defense Security Cooperation Agency website show the approvals include sales to the Saudis for surveillance aircraft support and maintenance of Saudi aircraft, and to the Emiratis for 20,004 precision guided munitions kits, 331 Javelin anti-tank missiles and 20 RQ-21A Blackjack drones.

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Liberal Activist Judge Gets SUSPENDED For Six Months, And It’s All Because Of President Trump

A Utah judge has been suspended for six months without pay after he made a series of critical statements about President Donald Trump online and in his courtroom over the past few years.

The Utah Supreme Court filed its court ruling this past week on Judge Michael Kwan’s actions.

Kwan, who has served as a justice court judge in Taylorsville for 20 years, was cited for “improper use of judicial authority and his inappropriate political commentary,” the latter often involving President Trump.

The court noted multiple times when Kwan had provided political comments that criticized Trump, as a presidential candidate in 2016 and as president on his Facebook page and in court.

Three days after the 2016 election, Kwan wrote on Facebook, “Think I’ll go to the shelter to adopt a cat before the President-Elect grabs them all” — a reference to the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump was heard bragging about grabbing women’s genitals without consent.

Almost a month after Trump’s inauguration, Kwan said “welcome to the beginning of the fascist takeover” and questioned whether Congressional Republicans would be “the American Reichstag,” this time referring to the political body of Nazi Germany.

SOURCE

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Democrat policies breed disease

Thousands of lives may be at risk this summer in Los Angeles and politicians could be to blame, according to one famous TV doctor.... “I want to give you a prediction here. There will be a major infectious disease epidemic this summer in Los Angeles.”

Pinsky described to Kilmeade what he believes to be the almost medieval conditions in the City of Angels and compared local politicians to Nero, the infamous Roman Emperor who allegedly fiddled while his nation burned.

“We have tens and tens of thousands of people living in tents. Horrible conditions. Sanitation. Rats have taken over the city. We’re the only city in the country, Los Angeles, without a rodent control program. We have multiple rodent-borne, flea-borne illnesses, plague, typhus. We’re gonna have louse-borne illness. If measles breaks into that population, we have tuberculosis exploding. Literally, our politicians are like Nero. It’s worse than Nero,” Pinsky said.

SOURCE 

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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