Poll: Majority of Americans Oppose Taking Syrian Refugees Into the U.S.

A Chicago Council on Global Affairs poll released Monday found that just 36 percent of Americans overall said they were in favor of “accepting Syrian refugees into the United States.”

The responses reflect a partisan split, with 56 percent of Democrats and 18 percent of Republicans in favor of accepting Syrian refugees.

Support for accepting Syrian refugees has fallen overall from 42 percent in the 2014 poll. Democrat support has risen slightly from 55 to 56 percent since 2014 while Republican support has fallen from 27 to 18 percent.

The 2016 poll also asked Americans about U.S. military actions in Syria.

Overall those surveyed favored a limited amount of action. Seventy-two percent overall were in favor of conducting airstrikes against violent Islamic extremist groups and 57 percent favored sending Special Operations Forces into Syria to fight Islamic State terrorists.

Just 42 percent overall supported sending combat troops into Syria.

The 2016 Chicago Council Survey based its poll results on a national sample of 2,061 adults, 18 years of age or older, living in all 50 US states and the District of Columbia. The poll was conducted June 10-27.

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Milwaukee Sheriff Clarke on Riots: ‘This Thing Has Been Hijacked for a Political End’

According to Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, the riots over the weekend in Milwaukee in protest of the fatal shooting of a black man by police have “been hijacked for a political end; it’s a political construct now”

“We get our authority from the consent of the governed, if something’s bothering them we should have discussions about it. But this thing has been hijacked for a political end; it’s a political construct now. I mentioned it two years ago if you want to go back and look at some of the tapes. I said this was a political construct this whole war on police- that in fact a war on police, mirrored what had gone on in the 1960’s,” Clarke said during a press conference on Sunday.

“There’s a lot of misunderstanding I think in terms of what causes these situations. The police use of force serves as an igniter, there’s no doubt, but to an already volatile situation a volatile mix of urban pathologies – failed urban policy that exacerbates inescapable poverty, failing public schools, inadequate parenting, father-absent homes – we all know when fathers are not around to shape the behavior of young boys they often times grow up to be unmanageable misfits that the police have to deal with in an aggressive fashion,” Clarke said.

“Pathologies like, lifestyle choices – questionable lifestyle choices, gang involvement, drug and alcohol abuse, as well as massive unemployment – those are the ingredients those are the things that cause resentment, anger and frustration to boil beneath the surface then all of a sudden a police situation comes along and that’s why I said it’s an igniter, but it’s an igniter to an already festering situation.”

Clarke later added, that failing to punish criminals leads to a repeat of criminal behavior.

“Just about everybody in this room has heard me over the last five years minimum-talking about the role of the criminal justice system. The prosecutor’s office, the sentencing practices in this area of Milwaukee County and – I don’t know I guess people didn’t think it played a big role – but we’re seeing it now. Not just last night but we’re seeing it time and time again - when some individual goes out and does something heinous, we look and they have a long, lengthy criminal history that nobody applied any sanctions to – or any meaningful sanctions let’s put it that way. Maybe some sanctions – a slap on the wrist – but that’s not meaningful.

As I look, the individual that lost his life- 13 arrests. Some serious stuff. Recklessly endangering safety, that’s a felony first degree. Felony – dismissed -  I don’t know why, I don’t have the reason but somebody- it isn’t going to be me- if you all have an interest you’ll go back and start peeling back the layers to find out what happened.”

“You punish unwanted behavior you’ll see less of it. If you do nothing about unwanted behavior you’re going to see a repeat of more of it,” Clarke said.

SOURCE

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Beginning of the End: The ‘Un’Affordable Care Act Continues to Unravel

Obamacare banner hangs torn on the side of a building. (AP Photo)
Health plan companies left and right are seriously questioning their involvement in Obamacare or dropping out altogether. And these are heavy hitters—UnitedHealthcare, Humana, Aetna and some Blue Cross Blue Shield companies. Cooperatives established under the law are collapsing as well. Just seven of the 23 remain.

Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom (CCHF, www.cchfreedom.org) points to these occurrences as the beginning of the end—the unraveling of the Affordable Care Act. President Obama’s legacy act is in deep trouble.

These departures are the “tremors” before the earthquake, the total implosion of Obamacare. Now it’s time to repeal the law and head back to health freedom.

Insurance companies will issue double-digit premium increases this fall, on or around Nov. 1, when Obamacare enrollment begins again. And of special note—premium increases and open enrollment will come just a week before the election.

The impending expiration of two of the federal “3R” subsidy programs that were instituted to shield health plans from the high cost of adding uninsured people with pre-existing conditions—reinsurance and risk corridors—is one reason premiums will skyrocket. Some politicians want to establish a national government insurance company—the public option—and some insurers suggest Congress create permanent federal subsidies to keep them in the game, but isn’t it time we go back to the affordability of freedom and free markets?

This is where CCHF’s new initiative, The Wedge of Health Freedom (www.JointheWedge.com), comes in.

The Wedge restores affordability and patient-centered care and is a new way of doing health care that puts patients and doctors in control and makes affordable pricing available to the insured, the uninsured and the subsidized.

Wedge-like practices are already operating nationwide but many Americans don’t know about them. So CCHF is branding this affordable option as The Wedge of Health Freedom to draw the public’s attention to the patient-centered, freedom-embracing slice of American health care that is mostly invisible to the public today. We aim to make The Wedge visible, protect it and grow it. The Wedge, focused on the delivery of care, will let patients and doctors come together in an affordable, confidential relationship that benefits both of them.

SOURCE

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Perhaps the Ancients Weren’t So Dumb: A Flood of Evidence Is Embarrassing the ‘Experts’

Were the ancients dummies? If so, why does archaeology keep confirming what they wrote? I’ll tell you why a healthy dose of humility can help us understand the past.

In his conversion story, “Surprised by Joy,” C. S. Lewis explains how his close friend, Owen Barfield, demolished his “chronological snobbery.” Lewis defined chronological snobbery as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.”

In Lewis’s time, much of academia was already convinced that every past generation formed a staircase of progress, leading (of course) to enlightened modernity. And since Lewis’s death, many intellectuals have only become more convinced of their own perch at the pinnacle of history. These days, we barely even notice the snobbery.

But it’s time to notice, especially in archaeology. An article last week in The New York Times describes new evidence for the Chinese great flood, an event which ancient records say coincided with the rise of China’s first imperial dynasty. For many years, Western academics have considered this flood a myth—on par with Noah’s Flood in Genesis which, unsurprisingly, they also dismiss as fiction.

But several new dig sites have unearthed inscriptions that refer to just such a flood along the Yellow River, almost 4,000 years ago. And a team of geologists led by Qinglog Wu of Peking University in Beijing says they’ve found evidence in the rocks of a natural dam that trapped several cubic miles of water. When the dam collapsed, it sent a deluge downriver large enough to wipe out a civilization—just as the Chinese legends suggest.

Western experts were less than enthused at the news. The Times quotes several prominent archaeologists who scoff at the discoveries as attempts to read too much into Chinese myths. Dr. Paul Goldin of the University of Pennsylvania derides what he sees as a “fixation” among Chinese archaeologists with “[proving] that all the ancient texts and legends have some fundamental truth … It shouldn’t be every archaeologist’s first instinct,” he says, “to see if their findings are matched in the historical sources.”

Come again? Shouldn’t archaeologists want to know if what they’re digging up has significance in known history? Sadly for many in the West, the answer is a resounding “not really.” This dismissal of ancient writings—including the Bible—is rooted in chronological snobbery. The ancients, experts today assume, were just too dumb or superstitious to get their own histories right.

This attitude has not only blinded us to potential discoveries, it’s made it very embarrassing for archaeologists when the ancients do turn out to be correct. I think, for example, of the recent discovery of Goliath’s hometown, Gath. Or what about the unearthing of evidence for the biblical King Hezekiah, the likely discovery of the palace where Pilate tried Jesus, or the compelling evidence that “the house of David,” contrary to decades of secular scholarship, was founded by a real, historical man after God’s own heart?

All of these discoveries came as shocks to archaeologists and historians who doubted that such figures, places, or people ever existed. But again and again, our belief that the ancients were better at making myths than they were at recording history has handicapped archaeology, and left a lot of smart folks scraping egg off their faces.

Now, I’m not suggesting every legend is a history textbook, or even that Scripture renders archaeology superfluous. What I’m suggesting is that we set aside our chronological snobbery and stop dismissing the ancients out-of-hand.

They were not dummies. And we who dig up the remains of their civilizations aren’t always as clever as we like to believe.

SOURCE

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A libertarian gun-hater??

Libertarians normally view the right to bear arms as an important liberty.  How come then the current Libertarian Presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, threw straight into the trash a historic pistol that was given to him?  A libertarian vote is normally a wasted vote but that is doubly true this time.  Story here

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There is no evidence that Aristotle actually said this but the American Left seems to be trying all-out to prove it right anyway



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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.

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

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Wealth Tax Looms As Greeks Forced To Declare All 'Assets' To Tax Authority

The USA is only a little behind Greece in heavy debt usage so Greece may offer a vision of what is in all our futures

In Greece's ongoing collapse into utter farce, The Greek finance ministry confirmed some more details of the long-planned registration of all kinds of private wealth that will go into effect in February 2017. As KeepTalkingGreece reports, more than 8,500,000 tax payers registered in Greece will be called to declare all moveable and immovable assets, their total “wealth”, and even cash they possess even if it is below 100 euro.

Furthermore, the taxpayers will have to register changes in their assets when they occur and not annually.

And under the new scheme, Greeks are mandated to have registered everything they own, with taxpayers having to add moveable and immovable possessions such as paintings, antiques, jewelry, even historical weapon, etc but also the cash they have in their wallets or under the mattress.

“Taxpayers must declare all the cash they have in their hands, even one euro!” an official from the Finance Ministry told newspaper To Vima on conditions of anonymity.

Within a month, the taxpayer will have to submit a modification statement, if there are any changes in his possessions status.

"This will affect any case of property transfer or acquisition, but not of income, which is being declared each year, and are directly updated by the tax authorities.

The simple question every Greek (and European and American and Japanese) citizen should be asking - why does the government want to know this? ...and besides what gives them the right to invade the citizenry's privacy to such a degree?

The answer is sadly simple. The road the dystopian "wealth tax" endgame has been long-written. As we pointed out in 2011, the "muddle through" is dead... and there are only painful ways out... And now it is time to face the facts. What facts?

The facts which state that between household, corporate and government debt, the developed world has more than $20 trillion in debt over and above the sustainable threshold by the definition of "stable" debt to GDP of 180%.

The facts according to which all attempts to eliminate the excess debt have failed, and for now even the Fed's relentless pursuit of inflating our way out this insurmountable debt load have been for nothing.

The facts which state that the only way to resolve the massive debt load is through a global coordinated debt restructuring (which would, among other things, push all global banks into bankruptcy) which, when all is said and done, will have to be funded by the world's financial asset holders: the middle-and upper-class, which, if BCS is right, have a ~30% one-time tax on all their assets to look forward to as the great mean reversion finally arrives and the world is set back on a viable path.

But not before the biggest episode of "transitory" pain, misery and suffering in the history of mankind. Good luck, politicians and holders of financial assets, you will need it because after Denial comes Anger, and only long after does Acceptance finally arrive.

The truth is far, far uglier than anything anyone in a position of power will tell you because acknowledgment would imply the need to come up with solutions that involve more than merely extending the event horizon for a little longer. Alas, even politicians now realize there is only so far that the can can be kicked.

There is one thing we would like to bring to our readers' attention because we are confident, that one way or another, sooner or later, it will be implemented.

Namely a one-time wealth tax: in other words, instead of stealth inflation, the government will be forced to proceed with over transfer of wealth. According to BCG, the amount of developed world debt between household, corporate and government that needs to be eliminated is just over $21 trillion. Which unfortunately means that there is an equity shortfall that will have to be funded with incremental cash which will have to come from somewhere. That somewhere is tax of the middle and upper classes, which are in possession of $74 trillion in financial assets

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IRS Increases 'Marriage Penalty,' Unmarried Cohabitants To Get Twice The Mortgage Interest Deduction

There are a thousand good reasons to never get married: in-laws, divorce attorneys, and the inevitable ravages of age on one’s attractiveness come immediately to mind.

But there are also significant tax hits that come with getting hitched, or as they’ve collectively been coined, the “marriage penalty.” For example, the 28% tax bracket kicks in at $91,150 of income if you’re single, but at only $151,900 — an amount basic math tells you is less than double $91,150 — for married taxpayers. In addition, single taxpayers start to lose 3% of itemized deductions when adjusted gross income exceeds $258,250; married taxpayers, however, will lose itemized deductions once adjusted gross income exceeds only $309,900.

Late last week, the IRS exacerbated the marriage penalty by offering a very large reward for unmarried taxpayers who co-own a home: double the mortgage interest deduction available to married taxpayer.

In AOD 2016-02, the IRS acquiesced in the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Sophy v. Commissioner, in which the appeals court overturned a Tax Court decision and allowed a same-sex, unmarried, co-habiting couple to each deduct the mortgage interest on $1.1 million of acquisition and home equity debt. In reaching its conclusion, the Ninth Circuit determined that the mortgage interest limitation is meant to apply on a per-taxpayer, rather than a per-residence, basis. The AOD issued by the IRS confirms that the Service will follow this treatment.

Let’s take a look at what this means:

Mortgage Interest Deductions, In General

Section 163(h)(3) allows a deduction for qualified residence interest on up to $1,000,000 of acquisition indebtedness and $100,000 of home equity indebtedness. Should your mortgage balance (or balances, since the mortgage interest deduction is permitted on up to two homes) exceed the statutory limitations, the mortgage interest deduction is limited to the amount applicable to only $1,100,000 worth of debt.

Now assume for a moment that you and your non-spouse lifemate/bookie/Japanese body pillow go halfsies on your dream house, owning the home as joint tenants. And assume the total acquisition mortgage debt is $2,000,000 and the total home equity loan $200,000, making total debt $2,200,000, with each of you paying interest on only your $1,100,000 share of the debt.

Are each of you entitled to a full mortgage deduction — since you each paid interest on only $1,100,000 of debt, the maximum allowable under Section 163 — or is your mortgage deduction limited because the total debt on the house exceeds the $1,100,000 statutory limitation?

In 2012, the Tax Court concluded that the answer was the latter. In Sophy v. Commissioner, this issue was surprisingly addressed for the first time in the courts (it had previously been addressed with a similar conclusion in CCA 200911007), with the Tax Court holding that the $1,100,000 limitation must be applied on a per-residence basis.

Thus, in the above example, even though the joint tenants each paid mortgage interest on only the maximum allowable $1,100,000 of debt, each owner’s mortgage interest deduction would be limited under the holding in Sophy because the maximum amount of qualified residence debt on the house — regardless of the number of owners — is limited to $1,100,000. Assuming the joint tenants each paid $70,000 in interest, each owner’s limitation would be determined as follows:

$70,000 * $1,100,000 (statutory limitation)/$2,200,000 (total mortgage balance) = $35,000

Instead of each owner being entitled to a full $70,000 interest deduction, the Tax Court concluded that the mortgage interest deduction was limited for both because the total debt on the house exceeded the statutory limits. The court reached this conclusion after examining the structure of the statute and determining that the plain language required the applicable debt limitation to be applied on a per-residence basis:

Qualified residence interest is defined as “any interest which is paid or accrued during the taxable year on acquisition indebtedness with respect to any qualified residence of the taxpayer, or home equity indebtedness with respect to any qualified residence of the taxpayer.” Sec. 163(h)(3)(A)

The court then added, “The definitions of the terms ‘acquisition indebtedness’ and ‘home equity indebtedness’ establish that the indebtedness must be related to a qualified residence, and the repeated use of the phrases “with respect to a qualified residence” and “with respect to such residence” in the provisions discussed above focuses on the residence rather than the taxpayer.

In an illustration of how multiple smart people can look at the same set of facts and reach a different conclusion, late last year the Ninth Circuit reversed the Tax Court’s holding, deciding instead that the $1,100,000 limitation on qualified debt is determined on a per-taxpayer, rather than a per-residence basis.

Key to the Ninth Circuit’s decision was the statute’s treatment of married taxpayers who file separate returns for purposes of deducting mortgage interest. Section 163(h)(3) provides that “in the case of” a married taxpayer who files a separate return, the $1,000,000 limit on qualified residence interest and $100,000 of home equity interest are reduced to $500,000 and $50,000 respectively. The Ninth Circuit placed great emphasis on the use of the phrase “in the case of,” noting that it suggests an exception to the general limitations, and that aside from that specific exception, married taxpayers filing separately should be treated identically to married taxpayers under Section 163.

The statute gives each separately filing spouse a separate debt limit of $550,000 so that, together, the two spouses are effectively entitled to a $1.1 million debt, the same amount allowed for single taxpayers. Thus, the point of the language was to treat two married taxpayers who file separately the same as married taxpayers or a single taxpayer, which indicates that the limitations are to be applied on a per-taxpayer, rather than a per-residence basis.

Lastly, the court reasoned that if the limitation is to be applied on a per-residence basis, there would be no need to impose a 1/2 limitation on married couples filing separately. If the limit were indeed intended to be $1,100,000 per house, then married couples who live together but file separately would be forced to split the limit; there would be no need to add additional language to the statute to accomplish that result. If the $1,100,000 limitation is to be applied on a per-taxpayer, basis, however, the limiting language would serve a purpose, as it would prevent a married couple who files separately from deducting interest on a total of $2,200,000 and get twice the benefit of a married couple who files jointly.

Impact

The impact of Sophy and the Service’s subsequent acquiescence are a bit muted in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Windsor and its 2015 ruling in Obergfell, which together represent a seismic shift in the treatment of same-sex couples for federal tax purposes. Going forward, same-sex couples who are legally married under state law will no longer be forced to file as unmarried taxpayers; rather, any couple that is married under state law, same-sex or otherwise, will only be permitted to file married filing jointly or married filing separately. In other words: same-sex couples — welcome to the marriage penalty!!

Cohabitation, of course, is not limited to same-sex couples, and so the Service’s decision to allow each taxpayer who co-owns a house to claim an interest deduction on the full $1,100,000 of debt — provided they are not married filing separately — should be a welcome one for many.

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.

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

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The abandonment of traditional values has negatively affected the nation as a whole, but blacks have borne the greater burden

Walter E. Williams

One of the unavoidable consequences of youth is the tendency to think behavior we see today has always been. I’d like to dispute that vision, at least as it pertains to black people.

I graduated from Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin High School in 1954. Franklin’s predominantly black students were from the poorest North Philadelphia neighborhoods.

During those days, there were no policemen patrolling the hallways. Today, close to 400 police patrol Philadelphia schools. There were occasional after-school fights—rumbles, as we called them—but within the school, there was order. In contrast with today, students didn’t use foul language to teachers, much less assault them.

Places such as the Richard Allen housing project, where I lived, became some of the most dangerous and dysfunctional places in Philadelphia. Mayhem—in the form of murders, shootings, and assaults—became routine.

By the 1980s, residents found that they had to have window bars and multiple locks. The 1940s and ’50s Richard Allen project, as well as other projects, bore no relation to what they became. Many people never locked their doors; windows weren’t barred. We did not go to bed with the sound of gunshots. Most of the residents were two-parent families with one or both parents working.

How might one explain the greater civility of Philadelphia and other big-city, predominantly black neighborhoods and schools during earlier periods compared with today? Would anyone argue that during the ’40s and ’50s, there was less racial discrimination and poverty? Was academic performance higher because there were greater opportunities? Was civility in school greater in earlier periods because black students had more black role models in the form of black principals, teachers, and guidance counselors? That’s nonsense, at least in northern schools. In my case, I had no more than three black teachers throughout primary and secondary school.

Starting in the 1960s, the values that made for civility came under attack. Corporal punishment was banned. This was the time when the education establishment and liberals launched their agenda that undermined lessons children learned from their parents and the church.

We have replaced what worked with what sounds good.

Sex education classes undermined family/church strictures against premarital sex. Lessons of abstinence were ridiculed, considered passé, and replaced with lessons about condoms, birth control pills, and abortion. Further undermining of parental authority came with legal and extralegal measures to assist teenage abortions, often with neither parental knowledge nor parental consent.

Customs, traditions, moral values, and rules of etiquette are behavioral norms, transmitted mostly by example, word of mouth, and religious teachings. As such, they represent a body of wisdom distilled through the ages by experience and trial and error.

The nation’s liberals—along with the education establishment, pseudo-intellectuals, and the courts—have waged war on traditions, customs and moral values. Many people have been counseled to believe that there are no moral absolutes. Instead, what’s moral or immoral is a matter of personal convenience, personal opinion, what feels good, or what is or is not criminal.

We no longer condemn or shame self-destructive and rude behavior, such as out-of-wedlock pregnancies, dependency, cheating, and lying. We have replaced what worked with what sounds good.

The abandonment of traditional values has negatively affected the nation as a whole, but blacks have borne the greater burden. This is seen by the decline in the percentage of black two-parent families. Today, a little over 30 percent of black children live in an intact family, where as early as the late 1800s, over 70 percent did. Black illegitimacy in 1938 was 11 percent, and that for whites was 3 percent. Today, it’s respectively 73 percent and 30 percent.

It is the height of dishonesty, as far as blacks are concerned, to blame our problems on slavery, how white people behave, and racial discrimination. If those lies are not exposed, we will continue to look for external solutions when true solutions are internal. Those of us who are old enough to know better need to expose these lies.

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What Can Racial Discrimination Explain?

Walter E. Williams

A guiding principle for physicians is primum non nocere, the Latin expression for “first, do no harm.” In order not to do harm, whether it’s with medicine or with public policy, the first order of business is accurate diagnostics.

Racial discrimination is seen as the cause of many problems of black Americans. No one argues that racial discrimination does not exist or does not have effects. The relevant question, as far as policy and resource allocation are concerned, is: How much of what we see is caused by current racial discrimination?

From the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, black youth unemployment was slightly less than or equal to white youth unemployment. Today, black youth unemployment is at least double that of white youth unemployment. Would anyone try to explain the difference with the argument that there was less racial discrimination during the ’40s and ’50s than today?

Some argue that it is the “legacy of slavery” and societal racism that now explain the social pathology in many black neighborhoods. Today’s black illegitimacy rate is about 73 percent. When I was a youngster, during the 1940s, illegitimacy was around 15 percent.

In the same period, about 80 percent of black children were born inside marriage. In fact, historian Herbert Gutman, in an article titled “Persistent Myths about the Afro-American Family” in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (Autumn 1975), reported the percentage of black two-parent families, depending on the city, ranged from 75 to 90 percent.

Today, only a little over 30 percent of black children are raised in two-parent households. The importance of these and other statistics showing greater stability and less pathology among blacks in earlier periods is that they put a lie to today’s excuses. Namely, at a time when blacks were closer to slavery, faced far more discrimination, faced more poverty, and had fewer opportunities, there was not the kind of social pathology and weak family structure we see today.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, nationally, the average black 12th-grader’s test scores are either basic or below basic in reading, writing, math, and science.

“Below basic” is the score received when a student is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for proficient work at his grade level. “Basic” indicates only partial mastery. Put another way, the average black 12th-grader has the academic achievement level of the average white seventh- or eighth-grader. In some cities, there’s even a larger achievement gap.

Is this a result of racial discrimination? Hardly. The cities where black academic achievement is the lowest are the very cities where Democrats have been in charge for decades and where blacks have been mayors, city councilors, superintendents, school principals, and teachers. Plus, these cities have large educational budgets.

I am not arguing a causal relationship between black political control and poor performance. I am arguing that one would be hard put to blame the academic rot on racial discrimination. If the Ku Klux Klan wanted to destroy black academic achievement, it could not find a better means for doing so than encouraging the educational status quo in most cities.

Intellectuals and political hustlers who blame the plight of so many blacks on poverty, racial discrimination, and the “legacy of slavery” are complicit in the socio-economic and moral decay. But one can earn money, prestige, and power in the victimhood game.

As Booker T. Washington long ago observed, “there is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs—partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

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Compensating Differences

By Walter E. Williams

What economists call an ability to make "compensating differences" is a valuable tool in everyone's arsenal. If people are prohibited from doing so, they are always worse off. You say, "Williams, I never heard of compensating differences. What are they?"

Jimmy Soul's 1963 hit song, "If You Wanna Be Happy," explained the concept of compensating differences. His lyrics went: "If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife. So from my personal point of view, get an ugly girl to marry you." His point was that an ugly woman would treat you better. But more importantly, a less attractive woman's willingness to compensate for her differences enables her to effectively compete with a pretty woman.

It goes the other way around, too. I've presented people with the following scenario: Suppose you saw a fat, ugly cigar-smoking old man married to a beautiful young woman. What kind of prediction would you make about the man's income? Everybody I've asked guesses that he would have a high income. The fat, ugly cigar-smoking old man would essentially be telling the beautiful young woman, "I can't compete for your hand the same way a guy like Williams can, so I'm going to offset my handicap by offering you a higher price."

Some might view it as unfair that a fat, ugly cigar-smoking old man could not win a pretty woman's hand on the same terms as a handsome man. Suppose they enacted a law saying beautiful women cannot treat fat, ugly cigar-smoking old men any differently than they treat handsome men. Then what would happen to the probability of a fat, ugly cigar-smoking old man's marrying a beautiful woman? Most people would guess that it would go to zilch. What the law would do would be to remove the less preferred man's most effective tool for competing with the more preferred man.

There are many real-world examples of compensating differences. Full-fledged doctors receive hourly pay that ranges between $80 and $157. A brand-new intern earns about $34 an hour. What do you think would happen to a hospital's willingness to hire an intern if there were a minimum hourly wage for interns of, say, $60, $70 or $100? There would be less willingness. Worse, there would be reduced learning opportunities for brand-new doctors. Worse still is that a hospital administrator would say, "If I must pay that higher minimum hourly wage no matter whom I hire, I might as well hire the most qualified." Thus, the higher minimum hourly wage would discriminate against the employment and skills acquisition of the least skilled intern.

During the 1930s, '40s and '50s, one could not prevent whole neighborhoods in the north from going from white to black occupancy virtually overnight. This was before government anti-discrimination laws related to housing. You might wonder how poor, discriminated-against people managed to seize the land-use control of neighborhoods. They did it through the market mechanism. For example, there might have been a racially discriminatory landlord who rented his three-story brown stone building to a white family for $100 a month. Maybe six black families approached the owner with the proposition that if he cut the building up into six apartments, each family would pay him $50 a month. That would mean that he could earn $300 a month renting to blacks rather than $100 renting to a white family. The evidence suggests that landlords opted for the higher earnings. Black people simply outbid white families.

Compensating differences abound. Even though chuck steak is less preferred, it outsells filet mignon. Less-preferred Toyotas compete effectively with Mercedes-Benzes. Costume jewelry competes with fine jewelry. In each, the lower price compensates for the difference. You might say, "Williams, people are not cars, steaks or jewelry!" That's true, but they respond to the same economic laws as cars, steaks and jewelry — just as people would obey the law of gravity the same way bricks would if they fell off the Empire State Building.

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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.

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

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An explanation of Arab reality-denial

Historian David Pryce-Jones: Writing of the Arab defeat of 1973, he observes, "It appeared impossible to admit this disaster, indeed parties of school children are taken round the military museum in Cairo that presents as victory a war that ended with Israeli tanks closing on Cairo. In their culture, the dread of shame is so strong it enforces denial of reality. Mistakes are inadmissible, and repetition therefore takes the place of correction."

SOURCE

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Trump Detroit Speech Separates GOP Wheat from Chaff

Donald Trump’s speech before the Detroit Economic Club was an economic conservative tour de force and there is no longer any excuse for anyone who claims to be a believer in free enterprise and limited government to not support the GOP nominee.

Don’t like Obama’s pen and phone approach? Trump announced that he will rescind Obama’s Executive Orders, effectively wiping out his extra-Constitutional legacy. Hillary Clinton will expand the Constitution ripping pen and phone approach taking away power from the people’s representatives in Congress.

Concerned that having the highest corporate tax rate in the world is harming economic growth? Trump’s tax plan lowers this corporate tax rate encouraging investment in America rather than draining mid-sized and small business, which don’t have armies of accountants, of the profits needed to reinvest and grow their businesses. Hillary wants to raise the corporate tax rate making this a very simple choice.

Perhaps regulatory overreach is your bête noire? Trump’s speech made it clear that he will rip Obama’s job killing regulatory expansion out by the roots, curtailing the power grabs at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Departments of Labor, Interior and various agencies ranging from the IRS to the National Labor Relations Board to the Federal Communications Commission.  Freeing American business from just some of the trillions of dollars of economic costs attributed to Obama’s regulatory spree will be a boon for workers and will give hope to those who have either abandoned or never entered the workforce that they can prosper in 21st century America.

Hillary, on the other hand, promises more of the regulatory onslaught that has played a role in making the last decade the worst in terms of economic growth since the Great Depression. Accepting Obama’s new normal of sub 3 percent annual growth is consigning America to a declining future and our young people to a world where the American dream is an Ozzie and Harriet illusion.

And if you are concerned about what you think Donald Trump’s trade policy will be, he made it clear that the goal is not to be isolated, but instead to negotiate better deals for America. Hillary Clinton on the other hand claims to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership while her confidante, Governor Terry McAuliffe of Virginia publicly assures Wall Street that once elected Hillary will once again support it.

Even after Trump’s triumphant economic address which hit all the touchstones of free market policy, with a direct contrast to Hillary Clinton, Senator Susan Collins announced that she will not vote for him largely because she thinks he is uncivil.

It is ironic that every six years, Senator Collins asks GOP conservatives to hold their noses and vote for her because she votes for a Republican for Senate Majority Leader, but in denouncing Trump for tone, she admits that lower taxes, growing the economy, rolling back the Obama regulatory machine and establishing a trade policy that helps Mainers from having their jobs offshored are not what is important to her.

The choice is stark. Trump’s economic vision is largely a conservative one designed to get the government out of the way and allow American business and workers to compete on a fair playing field in the world economy. Hillary’s economic policies continue the slide toward national insolvency, giving more power to D.C. and strip-mining the nation’s wealth to engorge the public employee unions who support her. Now, any GOP leader or consultant who still supports Hillary or continues playing the absurd #NeverTrump game can no longer claim that protecting free enterprise is a primary goal.

SOURCE

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The Left’s War on Grit

Eric Bolling

I hate the question, “What’s the secret of your success?” There is no secret to being successful. Ask anybody who is successful and they will say some version of the same thing—perseverance, mental toughness, or my personal favorite: grit.

Grit is getting up again and again after being knocked down to continue the fight. Grit is going over, around, or straight through obstacles to reach your goals—no matter how much it hurts to do so. Grit is the power to try, fail, and rebuild yourself in a nation of endless possibilities. Grit is the soul of the American spirit.

But in our society, we value grit less every day. Thanks to radical leftists, the liberal media, and collectivist stalwarts teaching our kids at all educational levels, “grit” is no longer considered an essential component of success—or of the American character. We value our personal security and our personal liberty, but they’re not the same thing. Sometimes, the freedoms we enjoy under personal liberty can shake the foundations of our personal security.

Here’s the thing: To be gritty and tough, you have to take risks, and by definition with risk comes the possibility of failure—a lack of security. The grit comes in when you fail, get back up, dust yourself off, and keep trying, as many times as it takes for you to get the job done.

That’s why grit is such an essential component of the American character. We’ve always been a mentally tough people—because we had to be. You can’t survive slavery or brave weeks on a rickety ship on the Atlantic without some serious grit, folks.

Grit, however, is anathema to liberals. Gritty, free-thinking citizens are harder to control. Oh, sure, liberals love to spout happy talk about perseverance and the American dream, but they are doing everything they can to make sure there is only one path to this dream: through the government.

What they don’t realize is that if the government is the way, it actually isn’t the American dream anymore. Because the American dream is about building something for yourself, not about being handed something by someone else, especially not a bloated, inefficient, deck-stacking government.

Liberals, by nature, just aren’t comfortable with risk. The dirty little secret of liberalism is that, at least in today’s form, it’s not liberal at all. Liberals don’t want “liberty.” They can’t handle the messiness of real democracy in a dynamic republic. Instead of allowing individual citizens to pave their own way in life, liberals want a bunch of technocratic “experts” to decide what is best for the rest of us.

So, it is very much in the left’s interests for the citizenry to be soft, docile, and obedient. That’s why liberals have spent decades putting forth what I sometimes call the “softness doctrine,” which tells Americans that the ideal person is conformist, collectivist, and in need of government assistance in nearly every aspect of life.

Think of the 2012 Obama campaign’s “Life of Julia” nonsense as the perfect example. This slideshow tells the life story of the fictional cartoon character “Julia” and how she benefited from a benevolent government literally from cradle to grave.

Grit, however, is anathema to liberals. Gritty, free-thinking citizens are harder to control.

It’s also perfect nonsense. Do you think it was an accident that the Obama team created a cartoon to tell this story? It’s fitting that the tale is told in the same media form as a Disney fairy tale, because Julia’s life is just as much a fantasy as Cinderella’s or Snow White’s. It’s the Joe Camel of political advertisements.

This is how they spread the “softness doctrine.” Our government, media, and academia are brainwashing all of us—especially our kids—into being mushy blobs of fragile self-esteem, all in the name of “progressivism.”

As they do with masculinity itself, today’s liberals treat grit like an anachronism from a time when people hadn’t evolved enough to live in the progressive paradise that they believe is just around every corner. Grit is unnecessary. You don’t have to be mentally tough, because if you have a problem, a supposedly benevolent government will take care of it for you—and take care of you.

While this cotton candy philosophy may make sense to sophomoric college students and sheltered media elites, those of us who have fought in the trenches of our own lives, the global economy, and the nation’s politics know better. You can’t save everyone, and when you try to do so, you end up doing much more harm than good.

This isn’t just a social problem—though it most certainly is that—it is also an economic and national security problem. Do you think China and Russia will sit back and let us continue to be the most powerful nation in the world once we’re too soft to fight for market share—or even our homeland?

As a nation, we need to toughen up, stop whining, and get to work.

SOURCE

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DOJ action against Baltimore police part of national takeover of local police

Americans for Limited Government today issued the following statement in response to findings by the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division against the Baltimore Police Department:

“The courts in Baltimore have already found that Baltimore police were not guilty of any criminal wrongdoing in the death of Freddie Gray. The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division reopening and pouring salt in this wound is a travesty both for the people of Baltimore, and for law enforcement officers across the country who risk their lives every day to keep the peace. If not for the DOJ’s callous politicization of incidents in Ferguson and Baltimore, communities and police might have already come together in an honest dialogue on how to prevent future tragedies. Unfortunately, President Obama would rather attempt to score cheap political points with key voting constituencies than to allow reconciliation.

“The DOJ action in Baltimore is just the first step by the Obama administration to federalize police activity in that city. Eventually, this will become a federal court order consent decree, where the DOJ will sue Baltimore, and the city will settle without contest, agreeing to federal regulation, as has been done in cities across the nation. This regime has been endorsed by a representative of the UN Human Rights Council, and involves DOJ entering into consent decrees with cities to regulate every aspect of policing, including searches, stops and the use of force. This is the nationalization of local policing done through judicial fiat that Congress would never approve.

“What is truly sad is that after almost 8 years in office President Obama continues to be the divider in chief, seeking political gain from creating discord.”

SOURCE

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Obama Hid the Truth About ISIS

A special congressional joint task force has officially confirmed what has been suspected for months: The Obama administration through U.S Central Command scrubbed intelligence reports showing the rise of ISIS as a critical threat to the United States and the world. The reports were altered for political purposes to present a rosier, less threatening picture of the terror army to the American people. In other words, the administration wanted to prove ISIS was a "jayvee" team as President Obama claimed in September 2014.

According to a report released Tuesday by the task force, the scrubbing and changing of reports was done at senior levels, not by low level intelligence analysts.

"After months of investigation, this much is very clear: from the middle of 2014 to the middle of 2015, U.S. Central Command’s most senior intelligence leaders manipulated the command’s intelligence products to downplay the threat from ISIS in Iraq.  The result:  consumers of those intelligence products were provided a consistently ‘rosy’ view of U.S. operational success against ISIS.  That may well have resulted in putting American troops at risk as policymakers relied on this intelligence when formulating policy and allocating resources for the fight," Congressman Mike Pompeo, who served on the joint task force which investigated the matter, said in a statement Thursday. “The cultural breakdown in Central Command’s intelligence process resulted from an administration-wide understanding that bad news from Iraq and Syria was not welcomed.  Claims that ISIS was the ‘JV team’ and that al-Qaeda was ‘on the run’ were both a result—and a cause—of the politicization of intelligence at CENTCOM.  This intelligence manipulation provided space for both ISIS and al-Qaeda to grow and it put America at risk."

“Intelligence products always contain some level of uncertainty.  But during this period, nearly every error was in one direction:  downplaying the threat from radical Islamic terror consistent with the administration’s narrative that this threat was not significant.  I urge the Department of Defense Inspector General to hold accountable the intelligence leaders that failed our service members fighting our wars on the ground,” he continued.

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.

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

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Muslims are the sea in which the Jihadi fish swim

Consider this: A Muslim man in England decides it is time he made his trip to Mecca, which is religious obligation for all Muslims who can do it.  So he arranges his affairs, books his tickets and arrives in Mecca.  He marches around the Kaaba 3 times and abuses the Devil.  And when he gets back home he is pleased with himself and will have honorific title "Hajji" from then on.

So he will have met the obligations of his religion.  Except that he has not. Going on a Haj is only a minor command in the Koran. The big and often repeated commandment is to wage Jihad on unbelievers.  But he doesn't do that, nor do 99% of Western Muslims.  Why?  Because it is obvious  that if he does so he is very likely to end up dead or in prison for a long time.  He has the normal human instinct for survival.

But in supporting his local Mosque, he supports the teaching of the Mullah. Mullahs are always urging Jihad on their congregants.  And there will be some listeners in the Mosque who like the idea of being a hero.  They will usually be people who are psychologically or socially marginal but the point is that the Mosque is where they get the sense of mission that they have. If there was no Mosque and no Mullah preaching Jihad, they would go off in some other direction.

So the local Muslim community is the life-support system for Jihadis.  Take away that community and no-one would hear of Jihad and would certainly not have it preached at them.  So Muslim populations should be sent home not because they have done anything wrong but because they are what in law is called "accessories before the fact".  They share a responsibility for the murderous attacks on us committed by their more devout members.

Those who change their religion could stay.  How would we know that a conversion was sincere?  Easy. Just ask them to say something no Muslim would say  -- e.g.  "Islam is a false religion and the Koran is the ravings of an insane pedophile"

So he will have met the obligations of his religion.  Except that he has not. Going on a Haj is only a minor command in the Koran. The big and often repeated commandment is to wage Jihad on unbelievers.  But he doesn't do that, nor do 99% of Western Muslims.  Why?  Because it is obvious  that if he does so he is very likely to end up dead or in prison for a long time.  He has the normal human instinct for survival.

But in supporting his local Mosque, he supports the teaching of the Mullah. Mullahs are always urging Jihad on their congregants.  And there will be some listeners in the Mosque who like the idea of being a hero.  They will usually be people who are psychologically or socially marginal but the point is that the Mosque is where they get the sense of mission that they have. If there was no Mosque and no Mullah preaching Jihad, they would go off in some other direction.

So the local Muslim community is the life-support system for Jihadis.  Take away that community and no-one would hear of Jihad and would certainly not have it preached at them.  So Muslim populations should be sent home not because they have done anything wrong but because they are what in law is called "accessories before the fact".  They share a responsibility for the murderous attacks on us committed by their more devout members.

Those who change their religion could stay.  How would we know that a conversion was sincere?  Easy. Just ask them to say something no Muslim would say  -- e.g.  "Islam is a false religion and the Koran is the ravings of an insane pedophile"

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Stop Lone Wolf Terrorism by Ending Muslim Immigration

by DANIEL GREENFIELD

Lone wolf terrorism is the biggest trend in Islamic terrorism. Unlike classic Islamic terrorism, it requires no cells stretching across countries the way that 9/11 did. The perpetrators don't even need to enter the country under false pretenses the way that the World Trade Center bombers did.

In many cases, they are already citizens. Some were even born in their target country.

Classic counterterrorism is directed at organizations. It's inadequate for stopping individual Muslim terrorists like Omar Mateen who was able to murder 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando or closely related duos like the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston or the husband and wife team who carried out the San Bernardino terrorist attack which took the lives of 14 people.

Even the standard technique of planting informants into mosques, deeply opposed by the Islamic lobby in the United States, fails when individuals decide to act alone or only trust their wives or brothers to be in on the plot with them. If an individual Islamic terrorist fails to let his plans slip, either online or to an FBI informant, stopping him can be extremely difficult if not entirely impossible without a stroke of luck.

And Islamic terrorists only need to be lucky once. We have to be lucky every time.

Every absurd Islamic terror plot broken up by law enforcement, the type of thing dismissed by the media and ridiculed by commentators, launching rockets at planes, underwear bombs and blowing up trains, contained the seed of a horrific terrorist attack just like Orlando, Boston or Nice.

When you turn on the evening news and see a running death toll, it's because one of those absurd and ridiculous terror plots actually succeeded. And it's happening more and more often.

The reason is simple. Unlike classic Islamic terrorism which required organization and infrastructure, the new brand of Islamic terror only needs one thing... Muslims.

Lone wolf terrorism operates entirely off the existing Muslim population in a particular country. The bigger the Muslim population, the bigger the risk. Any Muslim or Muslims who have settled in a particular non-Muslim country can answer the call of Jihad at any given time without warning.

There is no way that the FBI or other law enforcement agencies could begin to monitor even a fraction of the Islamic settler population sympathetic to terror. The FBI alone has almost 1,000 active ISIS cases it was investigating last year in all 50 states. It does not have nearly the resources it needs to handle them.

As the Muslim settler population in the country increases, the number of cases will grow. No matter how much law enforcement expands the scope of its operations, it will not be able to keep up with the high natural birth rates of the Muslim settler population whose terrorists don't need a fraction of the training or skills that trained law enforcement figures do. The more the Muslim population grows, the more terror attacks like Orlando, Boston and Nice will get past law enforcement.

Any technological or logistical solutions to this crisis on the law enforcement end will only be band aids.

The source of the problem is Islamic immigration. That is the only possible solution. The only way to reduce the growth of the lone wolf Islamic terrorism problem is to reduce or end Muslim migration.

If this is how bad it is when Muslims are only 1% of the population, what happens when the Muslim settler population doubles and then doubles again? Accompanying these rising population numbers will be rising influence by the Islamic lobby. Islamic groups such as CAIR with a history of terror ties and opposition to counterterrorism will have even more power to stymie law enforcement investigations. The end result will be far more successful Muslim terrorist massacres taking place on a constant basis.

Muslim immigrants are already inherently privileged when it comes to their ability to enter this country ahead of far more peaceful and far more deserving groups. For example, the vast majority of Syrian refugees admitted to this country are the Muslims who perpetrated and are perpetuating their religious war in the region rather than their Christian and Yazidi victims who face slavery and genocide at their hands.

This Islamic immigration privilege must be withdrawn. Muslim immigration must at the very least be scaled back to a level that law enforcement can cope with. At best it must end entirely until the Muslim world manages to stabilize its way of life to the extent that it can peacefully co-exist with non-Muslims.

There will be endless arguments over what percentage of Muslims support terrorism, but our own experience of recent attacks shows that many of them came from attackers who overtly appeared to be "moderate" and "ordinary". For every Islamist activist dressed in Salafist fashion and tweeting praise of ISIS, there is at least one, if not many more, whom you would pass on the street without a second look.

Before the Boston Marathon bombing, the Tsarnaevs did not seem like Jihadists. They would have been classed with the general category of "moderate" Muslims. And then they struck.

That is how it is.

The internet has decentralized terrorist training camps. Any Muslim can acquire the skills and equipment he needs to kill a few or a dozen or even a hundred if he chooses to follow his religion.

Not every Muslim will shoot up a nightclub or bomb a marathon, but we have no foolproof way of telling them apart. And even many Muslims who would not shoot up an office party in San Bernardino will still sympathize with the perpetrators. And even those Muslims who don't will often continue supporting the Muslim lobby of organizations like CAIR that stymie law enforcement investigations of Islamic terrorism.

Muslim immigration makes Muslim terrorism worse.

Once we understand this inconvenient truth, then everything else naturally flows from it. The type of terrorism that we are dealing now won't be beaten by breaking up organizations or droning terrorist leaders in training camps in Yemen or Pakistan. The enemy is right here. He speaks our language. He walks down our streets. He looks at us with hate in his Halal heart and he plots to kill us.

He may pledge allegiance to ISIS or Al Qaeda, but he is part of the larger organization of Islam. It is this organization, more than any of its Jihadist factional subdivisions, that represents the true threat.

Lone wolf terrorism is a viral threat that is spread by Islamic migration. We can only end it by closing the door. As long as the door to the Muslim migrant stays open, we will live under the threat that our neighbor or co-worker will be the one to kill us tomorrow or the day after that.

SOURCE

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McCARRAN-WALTER ACT OF 1952......TRUMP IS RIGHT!

The post below has been out for a couple of months now but almost entirely on Facebook.  Time to circulate it more widely, I think

Well, well, I bet if you asked your Senator or Congressman, they would say they have never heard of this law.  And who was the last President who enforced this law?  The most "holier than thou" president and a Democrat, Jimmy Carter

Trump was recently severely criticized for suggesting that the U.S. should limit or temporarily suspend the immigration of certain ethnic groups, nationalities, and even people of certain religions (Muslims).

The critics condemned such a suggestion as, among other things, being “Un-American,” dumb, stupid, reckless, dangerous and racist.

Congressmen and Senators swore that they would never allow such legislation, and our (Muslim) president called such a prohibition on immigration 'unconstitutional'.

Well, as Gomer Pyle would say, “Surprise, Surprise!”  It seems that the selective immigration ban is already law and has been applied on several occasions.

Known as the McCarran-Walter Act, (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952) allows for the "Suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions by a president.  Whenever the president finds that the entry of aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, the president may, by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or non-immigrants or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”

The act was utilized by Jimmy Carter, no less, in 1979 to keep Iranians out of the United States,  but he actually did more.  He made all Iranian students already here check in, and then he deported a bunch.  Seven thousand were found in violation of their visas and 15,000 Iranians were forced to leave the United States in 1979.

It is of note that the act requires that an applicant for immigration must be of good moral character and "attached to the principles of the Constitution.”  Since the Quran forbids Muslims to swear allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, technically, all Muslims should be refused immigration.

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There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- covering most of his usual themes

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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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Note

I've got a bad cold at the moment so no  blogging today.  I may be out of action for a few days

Equality of respect

There could be few more idiotic assertions than the compulsive Leftist claim that all men are equal.  The obvious fact is that all men are different.  But the absurd assertion does have a purpose.  It is aimed at getting everyone TREATED equally.  That is of course also hopeless but it makes slightly more sense than the original assertion.

So why do Leftists want everyone to be treated equally?  They don't.  They just use the prospect as a battle cry to get the less fortunate segments of society involved in the tearing down of the existing system which is their real aim.  It is just a con.

But conservatives are sufficiently disturbed by the potential aggression behind equality calls to propose a compromise.  Having seen what equality calls led to in Russia, China and elsewhere, it would be most unwise simply to ignore the push for equality.  So conservatives have embraced as a value that there should be equality of opportunity.

But that too is basically unreachable.  All people may (for instance) have an equal opportunity of gaining a High School education but some students -- the brighter ones -- will get more out of it and will go on to better things than the less intelligent students.  So there is no way that all students will have an equal opportunity to move into the top echelons of employment.  And, as a result, we don't hear much about equality of opportunity these days.  Cynicism about it has set in.

But there is one way in which equality can largely be reached and thus sidetrack social unrest.  It is equality of respect.  And I happen to live in a society where equality of respect has largely been achieved -- so it is not an airy-fairy idea. Australia has a national ideology of egalitarianism. It's sometimes summarized as "Jack is as good as his master". People largely treat one another in a friendly manner regardless of who or what they are.  The cleaner and the businessman will both normally speak to one another politely, with no  regard for the differences between them.  There will be no condescension from the businessman and no hostility or suspicion from the cleaner.

It is of course not perfect and social status differences are still there but the attitude that one man is as good as another does rule most interactions.  I am pleased to live in such a friendly society.  Australia does have a national ideology that makes everybody's life less stressful and more peaceful.

Could such an ideology be transplanted elsewhere?  Probably not.  Any attempt to transplant it to class-ridden England would be a joke and the competitive element in American culture would also  rule it out.  But it is nice to know that there is one way in which we can make practical sense of "all men are equal".  They are not equal in Australia but they mostly act as if they were.  Perhaps it's an aspiration for other societies.

Note:  In the above I am speaking of native-born Australians with descent from the British Isles and Northern Europe.  Such people are seen as a single distinct group in Australia.  There are however small East Asian and Indian minorities so what applies to the first group cannot automatically be generalized to minorities.  In my observation, however, the Australian-born Chinese and Indians do assimilate strongly to the majority culture so a lot of what I said above will also be true of them  -- JR

UPDATE:  I have just thought of two things that exemplify what I was talking about above.  The first was a very small event but I was in the presence of a friend when I witnessed it today so I was able to point it out: A mother had drawn four twenties out of a cash machine and gave them to her little daughter aged about 2 to hold.  She was involving the girl in life.  But the little girl dropped them onto the floor.  So did a nearby parasite swoop and grab them?  That would have been the form in some countries which I will decline to name. I travelled widely when I was younger.

No.  The mother, my friend and I were too slow to respond but another lady passing by swooped, picked up the notes and gave them back to the little girl.  It was only a tiny thing but it is an example of how nice Australians are to one another.

Another example is much more significant because it actually involves one of Australia's longest-serving Prime Ministers.  I have noted the event before so I should not have forgotten it above.  PM John Howard was waiting in a line at his local voting station to lodge his vote in favour of himself.  The man in front of him turned and noticed Australia's Prime Minister behind him.  The man said:  "Good to see you.  But I am still not going to vote for you".  Howard told that story with great pleasure on election night. (He won). He saw it as what a great place Australia was that no respect was given to even extreme social differences.  Both men celebrated Australia's real egalitarianism of respect.

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Ridiculous Rules For Swordfish, Ceiling Fans, Grain Barges Help Make 2016 The Most Highly Regulated Year In History

With the approval of new rules for catching swordfish, manufacturing cement, and weighing the contents of grain barges, the federal government's listing of regulations surpassed 50,000 pages in length.

Not all-time. Oh, no, no. That's just for this year.

Don't let anyone tell you that nothing gets done in Washington, D.C., these days, because the bureaucratic cogs in the federal machine have been hard at work this year. It's only August, but the Federal Register is on pace to reach more than 85,900 pages before the end of the year—breaking the all-time record of 81,611 pages that was set just last year.

Ryan Young, a fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute who tracks the daily increases in the federal regulatory state, points out that the compliance cost for regulations approved in 2016 along tally between "$3.92 billion and $6.12 billion."

That's a huge amount of money, and even though it will never show up on a bill or be taken out of a paycheck, it's still being paid in hidden ways.

For a perfect example of this, look at the most expensive regulation passed in the last week, according to Young's tracking, which had do with school lunches.

The feds say those new rules for the National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program will help save as much as $1.4 billion in long-term costs by reducing childhood obesity. Whether it will accomplish that goal is questionable, but it will only cost a schools an additional 1.5 percent in their food budgets, the government reckons.

Those higher costs will be paid for by students buying lunch, or by school district budgets funded with tax dollars or by federal school lunch subsidy programs funded by tax dollars. It's coming out of someone's pocket, somewhere, that much is certain.

Individually, these are little things. A few more pennies for a school lunch. Extra tests required before motors for ceiling fans can be put on the market. A quota on how many swordfish can be harvested each year. Emissions standards for cement manufacturers. None of these things are likely to force businesses to close and won't inspire headlines or partisan bickering on the campaign trail.

Those little things pile up, like the pages in the Federal Register, to create something much more substantial.

There is little doubt that we'll finish 2016 with the largest version of the federal registry ever produced, since this year is also the final year of President Barack Obama's time in office. If history is any guide, you can expect a flurry of new regulations during the last 60 days of his administration—the Clinton administration published some 26,000 pages of "midnight regulations" during the same period in late 2000 and early 2001.

SOURCE

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The Federal Government Wants to Re-regulate the Railroads

The United States has the most developed and efficient freight railroad system in the world. In contrast to Europe, where the large majority of freight is moved by road, by weight and distance travelled freight rail provides the largest share of the transportation mix in the US. This is no accident. In 1980, recognizing the sclerotic and weak state of the heavily-regulated rail industry, a deliberate decision was made to deregulate freight rail. The subsequent recovery of the freight rail industry might seem to be a lesson in the value of reducing federal interference to the average person, but not to a regulator. Perhaps offended by their example, regulators in Washington have been hunting for ways to re-impose regulatory control over American freight rail.

Freed from the heavy hand of federal government micromanaging, freight rail in America has boomed, creating a system that is the envy of the world. To maintain this world-beating system, the rail industry since 1980 has invested about 17% of revenues in maintenance and expansion of rail networks. This investment amounted to $28 billion in 2014, an amount equal to more than half of total federal government expenditure on transit, highway, and airport construction and improvement programs. The removal of federal controls gave rail companies the incentive to make these investments. As owners of the tracks, in a less regulated market rail companies have every incentive to upgrade and expand their transportation network.

The success of freight rail in this country, though, has attracted the attention of regulators and their special interest group allies. The most recent of these regulatory proposals is a proposed rule that would require freight rail companies to get permission from the federal government before deciding how many employees to have in the cab of a locomotive. This is not about safety, according to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), the agency proposing the rule: “[we] cannot provide reliable or conclusive statistical data to suggest whether one-person crew operations are generally safer or less safe than multiple-person crew operations.” But the railroad unions have been lobbying for this rule for some time. Staffing decisions on trains are normally part of the negotiation process between the union and the railroad, but with this rule the unions are trying to enlist the power of the federal government on their side.

The FRA has produced no evidence for why this regulation is necessary. As mentioned above, they have no safety justification. Indeed, the FRA does not even track how many employees railroads have in train cabs. At a public hearing on July 15, witness after witness explained the shortcuts and inconsistencies in the proposed rule and its justification. Indeed, both the National Transportation Safety Board and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs [criticized parts of the proposed rules](https://www.aar.org/Documents/Crew Size Comments - Association of American Railroads %28June 15 2016%29.pdf). Imagine that, even other federal regulators think that the FRA is off the rails. In this case, the attitude of FRA is regulate first, come up with a reason later. It is yet another example of an out of control federal regulator looking for a reason to justify its existence.

This sort of regulation may seem small and insignificant for the average American. Why should you worry about an argument over how many people are in a train cab? Because these sorts of regulations increase the cost of any number of products you buy: anything transported by rail or any product made from an input that is transported by rail. Regulations like these are death by 1000 cuts, raising costs and reducing efficiency, for no other reason than a special interest handout.

SOURCE

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Republicans Consider Next Steps After News of Obama Administration Cash Transfer to Iran

Republicans in Congress are criticizing President Barack Obama’s administration for its approval of a $400 million delivery of cash to Iran on the same day the country released four American prisoners and formally implemented the nuclear deal.

Though the administration says the timing of the $400 million money transfer was coincidental, and part of a resolution of a failed arms deal between the two countries that dates to the Iranian revolution, critics say that a link between the payment and the prisoner exchange is undeniable.

“The claim that the timing is coincidental is beyond unbelievable,” said Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., an outspoken critic of U.S. policy toward Iran. “It is clear at this point that one of two possibilities apply to this administration: either the president has absolutely no idea what he is doing or the president knows exactly what he is doing and is playing for some other team.”

“Unfortunately, paying a $400 million ransom is no game and the consequences are grave,” Zeldin told The Daily Signal in an interview.

Critics of the deal on Wednesday called on the White House to disclose details of the payment. “Unfortunately, paying a $400 million ransom is no game and the consequences are grave,” says @RepLeeZeldin.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew demanding answers on the timing and nature of the money transfer, and how the remaining $1.3 billion will be paid.

Other opponents of the deal predicted the money transfer would have broader repercussions.

“The revelation that the Obama administration ransomed the three Americans being unjustly detained by Iran with $400 million in cash is only the most recent piece of evidence that the so-called nuclear deal with the mullahs is fundamentally illegitimate,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said in a statement.

“It is nothing but a series of bribes and secret agreements that will do nothing to prevent Iran from reaching nuclear capability, yet will provide funding for their sponsorship of terrorism and encourage them to detain more of our citizens. This ‘deal’ should be ripped to shreds immediately before more damage is done.”

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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The contented versus the discontented people

I have been looking at the differences between the Left and the Right of politics since 1968, when I submitted my Master's dissertation  on that subject.  And my aim has been to understand WHY Leftists behave like SoBs so much of the time. How is it that implementing Leftist policies always results in harm and destruction of some sort, if not mass murder?

So my interest has been not only in Leftist claims and policies but also in their underlying psychology.  I think, in fact, that it is only at the psychological level that Leftism can be understood.  And, in that, I find myself in a degree of agreement with Leftist psychologists.  Leftists never stop offering accounts of the psychology of conservatives, adverse accounts, of course. It is one of the more popular fields of research in psychology.  So Leftists are most emphatic that you need to delve into the psychological realm to understand politics.  In any argument on the facts they will be defeated by conservatives so impugning the motives of their opponent is essentially all that they have left.

I am VERY familiar with the Leftist claims in that regard. Most of my 200+ academic journal articles were devoted to showing that the research they relied on in support of their claims was flawed, often hilariously so.

But there was one redeeming feature in their research.  In purporting to decribe conservatives they usually were quite clearly describing themselves!  An accusation that they never seem able to let go of, despite much contrary evidence, is that conservatives are "authoritarian".  Yet what could be more authoritarian than wanting to "fundamentally transform" America? (In Mr Obama's words -- words which elicited an enormous cheer from his Leftist audience).

So to find out what is true of Leftists, a good first approximation is to look at what they say about conservatives. They do Freudian projection on a grand scale.  Real self-insight is beyond them. Their motivations are so dismal that they can't afford to acknowledge what they really are.  They can only project it onto others.

But before you study a thing you have to define it and that can be tricky.  Conservatives themselves offer many different accounts of what is meant by conservatism and its opposite. The different accounts usually have a lot in common but none seem to me to strike at the heart of the Right/Left divide.

So I want to offer what is my simplest yet definition of the difference between the two camps.  I propose that the Left/Right divide consists of the discontented versus the contented people.  But the difference is a difference between characteristic mood rather than an invariable divide.  All the surveys show that conservatives are happier than Leftists but that does not mean that they are ALWAYS happy.  That would be absurd. And Trump supporters are clearly not content with the present Left-dominated state of politics, with its pervasive strictures of political correctness greatly limiting what everyone can say and do.

So conservatives have a DISPOSITION, presumably with genetic roots, to be happy and contented, whereas Leftists can't help  finding things to be discontented about.  One must rather pity them.

Exactly WHAT Leftists get discontented about will obviously vary.  There seem to be few things they are contented with and some of their discontents are quite amazing.  At the moment, for instance, they want to tear down most of America's electricity infrastructure in the name of the absurd global warming theory, a theory that is in constant divergence from reality.

So, basically, Leftists are discontented with EVERYTHING and, in consequence, want to tear down as much of the existing state of affairs as they can.  The harm and destruction that flows from their policies is INTENDED.

One of the more nauseous discontents among Leftists is discontent with their personal fame and prestige.  They have a very high opinion of themselves and are greatly grieved that the world at large does not have a similar opinion of them.  So they lash out in all sorts of ways.  Academics are particularly prone to that.  They have in fact by their employment reached a small degree of personal distinction but are quite burned up that many business people get paid far more than they do.

So they lash out at society by promulgating fanciful theories about the evils of the world that will get them taken seriously at least by other Leftists. They gain distinction by being seen by some as heroic critics of a world in vast need of reform and reorientation.

The global warming theory is a good example of that.  It's intellectual underpinnings are pure speculation but it has succeeded in creating great disruption.  And it continues to be taken seriously because a relatively small clique of scientists continue to proclaim it energetically.  The famous "97%" paper by John Cook in fact shows, if you read it carefully,  that only one third of climate scientists voice support for the theory.

So, because of their miserable psychological state, Leftists have great potential to do harm and we should never forget that, regardless of what face they put on it, their AIM is to do harm, harm that will usually affect us all in one way or another.  Their claims of "compassion" are no more than necessary camouflage for their destructive intentions.

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Picture gallery update

Every now and I put up a collection of recent pictures on my blog that I liked best.  You can access the collection for the first half of this year here or here. There's even a glamor pic included!

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WTF is Google up to?

Google run the blogspot facility that hosts this blog.  And they  always seem to be working on "improvements" to it.  The improvements are however so detrimental to this humble blogger that I have to wonder if they are trying to chase content providers such as myself away.

The first big decrement to the service came about two years ago when some blogdspot sites were connected to an html interpreting program that REFUSED to allow more than one paragraph to be indented or italicized.  You can go into the resulting html and alter it back to what you wanted but that is pesky.  The odd thing is that the restriction applies only to some blogs.  About half of my blogs are affected.

The next goof was quite recent.  They made all their blogs accessible over a https (protected) connection.  That's fine but for some reason most images I find are apparently incompatible with https.  So every time I put up an image, I get a red warning that I have to click off.  More wasted time.

And the very latest is that if I re-edit a post after I have first put it up, the system puts up TWO copies of the revised  post.  So again I have to waste time clicking the unwanted copy off.  Crazy.  If anybody knows how I can evade these idiocies, I would be most grateful to hear of it

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Queen Elizabeth I

Agrguably the greatest of the Tudor monarchs, Elizabeth was a very wise woman.  She was even fairly libertarian for her times.  There are therefore quite a few collections of her wise sayings on the net.  Frustratingly, one of her better sayings does not apprear anywhere.  She on one occasion wrote to the King of Spain, who was very tyrannical towards anybody who questioned the Catholic religion.  Elizabeth herself practiced tolerance towards Catholics even though she was a Protestant monarch.  So she wrote to the king what my memory records as:  "Why cannot your majesty let your subjects go to hell in their own way?"

I would like to get the exact wording and the date of the letter.  So again, I would be much obliged if anybody readring this could enlarge on the matter.

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Quora

For some reason, I seem to have become a rather popular author on quora.com.  I get about a dozen requests for comment per day. I basically don't have the time to answer most of the questions so when I do answer, my answers tend to be extremely brief.  The interesting thing, however, is how dumb most of the questions are.  Really basic stuff about politics and history seems to be unknown to lots of people.  You can see here the questions I have answered, some of which are very basic.  But  bear in mind that the REALLY dumb questions I have not bothered with.  Life is too short.

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3 Ways to Talk About Conservatism With a Liberal

As the mantra of “Don’t discuss politics or religion” repeats like a drumbeat in your head, you settle on “How about that game?”

Your desperate search for the safest question to ask a colleague as you wait for the morning coffee to brew is understandable. But you can find a way.

If conservatives refrain from engaging in the narrative, we let the media and politicians (ahem, President Barack Obama) paint us as crazy people who cling to “guns or religion.”

That’s where this column comes in —a place to help you talk to the people in your life (think neighbors, co-workers, family, friends) about conservative issues. Trust me, it’s possible.

While I will explore a wide variety of relevant topics in the weeks to come, I’d like to start with something basic and broad: the term “conservative.”

Connecting

If you look at The Heritage Foundation’s definition, you find that conservatism is five pillars: free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.

So, there’s your answer, right? Just memorize and repeat when someone wants to know why you are conservative.

Wrong. There is no faster way to kill a conversation than to categorize your perspective like it’s a to-do list. When talking about any issue, you have to connect with the other person’s interests. And that starts by being a good listener.

If you find your colleague doesn’t give much insight into her ideology, ask questions. Find out what makes her tick by starting a conversation about her day at work or what’s going on in the news. It’s amazing how much you learn when you ask a question and then … stop talking.

Once you gain insight into what issues someone cares about, the real work begins. You now have a blueprint for how to approach the conversation in a way that resonates with him or her, not you.

For example, if you find that your colleague talks about how expensive it is to run her side business, the free enterprise pillar is a good area to explore. Now, you’re off to the races.  Here are a few strategies that work well:

1. Common Ground

Don’t underestimate the power of establishing common ground. Doing so makes you seem reasonable and can go a long way in diffusing any tension or unwillingness to hear you out. If you’re in agreement with someone on the goal, like his business succeeding, he is more likely to stick around and listen to your solution.

2. Examples

Don’t underestimate the power of relatable examples, which can help people visualize your point. Often, the conservative principles we talk about can seem very abstract. Examples put issues into context, especially when you can illustrate a point using a reference from their daily lives. For instance, if you want to promote free enterprise, talk about all the regulations their business currently faces and how there would be significantly fewer if free enterprise was more valued by our lawmakers.

3. Words

Finally, you have to use the right words. Don’t even think about using the term “free enterprise.” Instead, steal a page from the liberals’ playbook: use emotion to push an agenda. Own words like “fair” or “choice,” and statements like “you know better than a bureaucrat in D.C.” Using emotional language will set you up for success.

Before you think that attempting a conversation is hopeless because “you don’t know how liberal my co-workers are,” keep in mind that people will listen if you talk about issues that matter to them. If done well, it’s possible they won’t recognize that you are approaching the conversation from a conservative perspective.

Take millennials. You may think it’s hopeless to talk to that generation about free enterprise since so many view themselves as socialists. But when millennials are starting more businesses than the baby-boomer generation there’s reason to question their dedication to socialism (Do they really know what socialism is?) and an opportunity to use their entrepreneurism as a gateway to talking about free enterprise.

So, talk to a liberal today. Employ the strategies we just discussed and see if you can have a meaningful conversation about conservatism on her terms. Identify her interests, choose one of the five pillars that align with her interests, and use examples.

No pressure, but you may be the only conservative that tries to challenge her world view. And if we are going to preserve the American dream, it’s going to take all of us doing our part by first talking to the people we know.

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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