Thursday, November 26, 2015


Leftists believe in nothing except their own power



Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne is a hyperfeminist, a lesbian activist. She hates patriarchies, especially old white men who tell women what to do.

But see a photo that she herself published, wearing a hijab [in white scarf] and sitting in the women's only section of an Ottawa mosque, like a good little subservient, submissive woman, obedient to sharia law!

Of course, if sharia law were really in effect, she’d be thrown off the top of an apartment block, or hanged from a crane, which is the usual death sentence for homosexuality under radical Islam.

This isn’t just a case of, anything for a vote. It’s an insight into her mind. She despises our western, Judeo-Christian culture. But she’s an obedient little girl when it comes to the most reactionary patriarchy in the world — radical Islam.

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The America-Basher in Chief Rolls On

By David Limbaugh

How could America have twice elected a president who not only can't stand America but also won't perform his constitutional duty of defending it?

Even some former administration officials and rank-and-file Democrats are finally recognizing that there is something strange about a commander in chief who declines to listen to his advisers on terrorism, won't read their daily briefings and is uninterested in their threat assessments.

It's sad that so many refused to take Obama seriously when he promised to fundamentally transform America. It's inexcusable that the media and so many naive voters believed that his radical past and his ongoing affiliation with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's racist church were irrelevant. It's disgraceful that a man who pledged to unite America on race, gender and income groups has intentionally polarized us to a point not seen since the 1960s. It's contemptible that he has used his office to alienate citizens from law enforcement officials throughout the nation. It's abominable that he is systematically dismantling our defense capabilities and approaching foreign policy as if his actions and inactions had no more consequences than a chalkboard exercise by a clique of airheaded leftist professors in their faculty lounge.

Islamist terrorists are waging a global war against America and our allies, and the president won't even identify our enemy. He sees Christians, Republicans and conservatives as the real threat to America — the distorted version of America, that is, that he envisions. He continues to trash America on foreign soil at every opportunity.

I (and others) have long been saying that Obama is obsessed with apologizing for America. Many of us documented his world apology tour, whereby he deeply criticized this nation at every stop of his globe-trotting junket. Yet his shameless defenders say he was just building bridges and alliances. Talk about a bridge to nowhere.

I wonder whether these intellectually dishonest defenders will still deny that Obama is apologizing for America after hearing his words from Malaysia last week. Actually, I don't wonder. They'll love it. They are fellow America haters and have never been more ecstatic about a president — one who is finally using the immense power of the presidential office to tear this nation apart.

If you think my words are harsh, it's only because you are not talking to people all over this nation who are feeling and thinking exactly as I am. They are legion. They are fed up. They are not having any more of it.

At a town hall meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Friday, Obama denigrated the United States for its hypocrisy, its "growing inequality" and the inadequacies of our political system. A Martian traveler might well conclude that this man hasn't occupied the Oval Office for the past seven years. Why doesn't Obama just go on TV and confess that his entire presidency has been a failure — by his own regrettable benchmarks?

Concerning America's hypocrisy, he told his rapt audience that we have to have some humility and not tell other nations what to do because we don't have such a great track record ourselves. We've meddled in other nations' internal affairs, and we have problems in our own country. Here again, Obama forgets that he has been president and that he has improperly intermeddled with other nations, especially our reliable ally Israel. And problems in our own country? I know this is news to the utopian left, but every nation is always going to have problems.

He particularly lamented our "growing inequality" and even blames it for our divisive politics and cynicism — two conditions to which he has been the greatest contributor for years. What's that you said about hypocrisy, Mr. Obama?

But he gets the biggest prize for audaciously complaining about our political system, claiming that money is overwhelming ideas. Politicians are listening more to their wealthy contributors than to "ordinary people."

Well, that may be true as far as it goes. We conservatives are tired of the ruling class and the establishment elite and their incestuous lobbyists, but we don't believe that the left's proposals of suppressing speech are the solution. And if anyone's hands are dirty on this score, Obama's are.

More importantly, Obama has no credibility in complaining about politicians who fail to listen to the American people — whether or not because of money. No one listens less to the people than he does. No one is more self-assured with less justification than he is. The American people are aghast at his arrogant refusal to defend America and listen to his advisers, his insistence on bringing terrorist-imbedded refugees and immigrants into this nation, his bizarre assertion that global warming is a greater threat to this nation than Islamic terrorism, his endless lies on Obamacare, his constant slandering of this country, and on and on.

It will be a sheer joy when we have a new president, God willing, who genuinely loves this nation and sees it as a force for good throughout the world and begins to return it to that path. No, this nation is not over, but it needs to turn back to its founding principles and believe in itself again.

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A new bureaucratic nightmare

As we observed in “Financial Crisis and Leviathan,” in its first 14 months the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new federal agency, did little besides expanding an already bloated and wasteful government. The CFPB duplicates the work of existing regulators and worsens a crisis government played a major role in causing through programs such as the Carter-Era Community Reinvestment Act. Unfortunately, the damage does not stop there.

As the New York Times observes, the CFPB has been taking aim at the arbitration process, a longstanding way to resolve disputes outside of the court system. A new rule by the CFPB “which would prevent financial services companies from including class-action bans in consumer contracts, could in effect kill arbitration altogether.” Trouble is, as the Times notes, the CFPB is “empowered to issue rules without legislative approval, making them more difficult to defeat. Furthermore, unlike the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is overseen by a bipartisan commission, the consumer agency has a single head, appointed by the president.”

As Mother Jones explains, a recent television commercial, aired during a presidential debate, “paints the CFPB as a Kremlin-like bureaucratic nightmare,” with prime mover Elizabeth Warren “as the Stalinesque figure” on a red banner alongside CFPB boss Richard Cordray. Given the top-down autocratic structure of the CFPB, and the lack of legislative oversight, the Soviet imagery is not much of a stretch.

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Will the "mob" do the job that Obama won't?

Good if they "rub out" Jihadis before they strike

It's a little known fact, but back in World War II, the government made a pact with la cosa nostra to protect America's ports from the Nazis. After suspected Nazi sabotage at our ports, the Roosevelt administration reached out to Jewish mobster Meyer Lansky and Charles "Lucky" Luciano in what came to be known as "Operation Underworld." The collaboration prevented another such incident from happening again during the War. Now, it seems like the mob is offering its protection once again:

The son of a New York mob boss has given Islamic State a stark warning, saying if they are planning any attacks in New York, they will have to contend with the Sicilian mafia. The notorious crime syndicate say they want to do their bit to protect locals.

Giovanni Gambino, the son of a key figure in the Gambino mob organization, says the mafia is in a much better position than security bodies, such as the FBI or Homeland Security, to give New Yorkers the protection they need.

“They often act too late, or fail to see a complete picture of what's happening due to a lack of ‘human intelligence,’” he said in an interview with NBC News, as cited by Reuters, adding that the mafia’s knowledge of individual movements and interaction with locals gives it the upper hand, even compared to the latest surveillance technologies.

Gambino, who is trying to carve out a career as a Hollywood screenwriter, says that, following the horrendous terror attacks in Paris on November 13, protection is more important than ever.

"The world is dangerous today, but people living in New York neighborhoods with Sicilian connections should feel safe," he said. "We make sure our friends and families are protected from extremists and terrorists, especially the brutal, psychopathic organization that calls itself the Islamic State,”
Organizations like the mafia first rose to prominence in the United States in large part because new citizens had to find ways to protect themselves when government couldn't. If the Obama Administration isn't up for the job, it's nice to see that someone else is.

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Shiller’s Irrational Faith in Government Regulation

In a recent New York Times piece, economist Robert Shiller built an argument that was a non sequitur resting on two false premises. Specifically, Shiller argued:

(Premise 1:) Economics courses teach students that market outcomes are “Pareto optimal.”

(Premise 2:) In reality, market forces lead to systematic deception and manipulation of the public.

(Conclusion:) Therefore, we shouldn’t have blind reliance on unregulated markets, but instead we need sensible government oversight such as the kind that the FDA provides to the medical arena.

To repeat, Shiller’s conclusion doesn’t follow from his premises, but beyond that, his premises are false. So it’s a rather dubious argument, all around.

In the first place, outside of a few schools with faculty trained in Austrian economics, I think Shiller is quite mistaken when he argues, “Perhaps the most widely admired of all the economic theories taught in our universities is the notion that an unregulated competitive economy is optimal for everyone.” What percentage of economics professors teaching in the U.S. would endorse such a claim? I’m guessing it’s about 5 percent.

Second, it is not true that market forces leave the public helpless in the face of deception. For example, Shiller says that grocery stores tried “no candy” checkout lanes decades ago but that “these efforts have largely failed.” Thus, Shiller thinks this is a good example of how the profit motive can lead companies to take measures (such as putting candy in checkout lines) that will not make their customers happy, in a certain sense.

Yet I can remember seeing “no candy” lanes in the not too-distant past, and so the efforts must not have failed that much. In any event, with the rise of self-checkout lanes, this is now a moot point. It’s quite easy for parents who are so inclined to avoid pushing their young whiny children past candy bars in even conventional grocery stores. Furthermore, the rise of health food stores has also given more options to parents who want to shop in such an environment. It wasn’t the aim of the people opening such stores to specifically solve the “we know parents will hate us for it but we want to make a buck” problem that Shiller brings up, but they did solve it nonetheless.

Finally and most important, it doesn’t really matter how much we think markets encourage honesty vs. duplicity in some absolute sense. All that matters is whether voluntary processes are more honest than coercive mechanisms imposed from Washington.

Yes, it is true that major companies that fund scientific research have an interest, but by the same token wouldn’t we expect government-funded research to yield outcomes that the political class desires?

And yes, it is true that mass-market commercial campaigns appeal to the baser motives and emotionally manipulate the public. But how does Shiller think political campaigns work, when the public periodically selects the government officials who will then (supposedly) tweak and improve the dishonest, manipulative marketplace?

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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) and Coral reef compendium. (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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