Miscellaneous Thoughts Part 40

• The Invisible Hand of Salvation: Each sinner will save him/herself through self-interest—they don’t want to go to Hell.
• The reason motherships make it to planets and not fatherships is because fatherships didn’t stop and ask for directions and are now lost.
• Obama says that Trump is unfit to be president. Well, that didn’t stop Obama from being elected president twice.
• There is quite a few “mothers against” organizations. But there isn’t a “mothers for personal responsibility” or even “mothers for self-control.” Hmmm.
• The Left always talks about “sharing the wealth” but never “sharing the power” especially with the republicans.
• To the Left, woman and minority votes matter. Nothing else.
• An artificial intelligence android, robot or computer that does not care about human life or dignity could very easily turn into a sociopath. After all it is not human.
• The truth exists. Mankind may not always find the truth but it does exist because God knows about it.
• I don’t care if illegal immigrants (or for that matter legal immigrants) love Americans or not. I just want them to be peaceful and law abiding. If they love the Constitution even better.
• If a dictator wanted to oppress a country he would legalize marijuana. Not only legalize it but encourage it and possibly even supply it. Why? Because marijuana dulls the mind and a person doesn’t know if he/she is being oppressed. I wonder if that’s why the Left wants it legalized? Hmm.

Your Brain on Pot: Reasons to Avoid Marijuana

From News Max.com (Dec. 6, 2016):

More than half of our states have legalized marijuana for medical use, and the list of those legalizing recreational marijuana is growing rapidly. Many experts have focused on the positive medical aspects of marijuana to ease certain physical problems, such as chronic pain from nerve damage and painful muscle spasms associated with multiple sclerosis.

However, marijuana contains over 400 chemicals, and their impact on the brain and body is still largely unknown. Although studies have warned of the dangers of smoking pot and its effect on the brain for decades, two recent studies are even more troubling in light of the rush to legalize its recreational use.

"The proponents of legalization tried to make the medicinal benefits the focus and ignored the numerous damaging effects," neurosurgeon Dr. Russell Blaylock told Newsmax Health.

The most recent study, which was published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, found that smoking marijuana lowers blood flow in every area of the brain, including those areas especially vulnerable to Alzheimer's.

Study participants included almost 1,000 marijuana smokers who had psychiatric problems that were resistant to treatment. They underwent a sophisticated imaging study called single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) that evaluates blood flow and activity patterns.

Compared to healthy non-marijuana users, researchers at Amen Clinics found abnormally low blood flow in almost every area of the brain in virtually every patient who used marijuana. The hippocampus, an area of the brain known to be impacted by Alzheimer's, was especially affected. [read more]

The article goes on to say that abusing pot makes you more psychotic. That’s not good.

Popular Science article (July 1, 2013): SCIENCE CONFIRMS THE OBVIOUS: SMOKING POT MAKES YOU LESS MOTIVATED

Progressive Liars Part IV: Woodrow Wilson

Speaking to business leaders at the Time Squares Hotel Astor, Wilson pushed back against the complaints that his ideas opposed the free enterprise system. He believed that wealthy families such as the Astors had turned the American Republic into their own fiefdom. The rich, he said, had to be reined in and their wealth confiscated for the public good, if necessary:

The very thing that government cannot let alone is business.

Government cannot take its hands off business. Government must regulate business because that is the foundation of every other relationship.

The tragic sinking of the Titanic, a ship that its owners boasted was unsinkable, was the consequence of a hubristic, humanist assumption about man’s ability to control natural law and to defy the will of God. And so was the candidacy of Woodrow Wilson.

Few presidents have displayed such open contempt for the Constitution they swore to preserve, protect and defend. Even fewer had such severe disdain for women, minorities and anyone else who deviated from Wilson’s view of the “perfect citizen.”

Source: Progressive Liars Part IV: Woodrow Wilson.

Basically, the “perfect citizen” is anyone who believes the Left’s ideology otherwise your an unbeliever or at worst an inferior person or a “deplorable.”

Here are some FEE.org articles on Wilson:

• Woodrow Wilson: This So-Called Progressive was a Dedicated Racist
• Should We Follow George Washington or Woodrow Wilson?

Woodrow Wilson Asks “What Is Progress?”

What is the Proper Role of Governments Lecture Notes

1. Punish evil, reward good. Romans 13.
2. For Israel then, not for us now.
3. God is sovereign over all nations.
4. Serve the people and seek the good of the people.
5. Citzens should obey the laws (usually).
6. Safeguard liberty.
7. Church and state have a relationship that is distinct.
8. Law applies even to rulers.
9. The Bible gives support to democracy.
10. Nations should value patrotism.

Source: What is the Proper Role of Government? lecture from Politics and the Bible.org.

How to Repeal and Replace Obamacare

From Fee.org (Dec. 8):

Vice President-elect Mike Pence recently described Price to Fox News as “someone who literally, for the last half a dozen years, has been in the forefront of efforts, not only to repeal Obamacare, but put forward common sense, free-market solutions that will lower the cost of health insurance, without growing the size of government.”

Jason Miller, Communications Director for the Trump transition team, told the San Francisco Gate that replacing the ACA is "one of the things he's going to lead the charge on as secretary of HHS."

Lowering the Cost of Care

Evidence is scant that Obamacare did anything to help with the biggest problem facing the American healthcare system: the cost of care. According to Consumer Reports, health care spending is at $3 trillion, making it alone the world’s fifth-largest economy. In the US, health care costs nearly double what the rest of the developed world is paying per person.

One reason healthcare in America is so expensive is that there are no more actual health insurance companies in this country. Instead, insurance companies have become cost-pools.

Consumer Reports sums it up nicely: “If you have health insurance, you may think [the cost of care] doesn’t matter because someone else is paying the bill.”

Health care works nothing like other market transactions. As a consumer, you are a bystander to the real action, which takes place between providers—hospitals, doctors, labs, drug companies, and device manufacturers—and the private and governmental entities that pay them. Those same providers are also pushing Americans into newer and more expensive treatments, even when there’s no evidence they’re any better.

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“What currently passes for health insurance in America is really just prepaid health care — on a kind of all-you-can-consume buffet card,” San Jose State University Economics instructor Warren C. Gibson wrote. “There is no price transparency. The resulting overconsumption makes premiums skyrocket, and health resources get misallocated relative to genuine wants and needs.”

“There is no such thing as a legitimate price for anything in healthcare,” according to George Halvorson, former chairman of Kaiser Permanente, the giant health maintenance organization based in California. “Prices are made up depending on who the payer is.”

1. Separating employment and health insurance. By killing the requirement that larger employers provide health insurance, the Empowering Patients First Act helps to sever the tie between employment and health insurance. Another method for severing that tie in the bill is a provision that limits how much tax-free health insurance coverage businesses can offer their employees. Individual employee could only get $8,000 worth of tax-free health insurance, and families $20,000, adjusted for inflation.
2. Incentivizing smart choices. Up to 30% of Americans’ medical care is unnecessary, according to the Congressional Budget Office. This is a natural result of the fee-for-service payment model. It means that a doctor who innovates a way to do with one CT scan what used to require three, is discouraged from implementing the new practice because it means the hospital loses money.
3. Re-legalizing low-cost catastrophic care plans. The ACA outlawed catastrophic care plans. By forcing insurers to cover a variety of treatments and procedures of varying necessity, the ACA made low-cost plans illegal.

[read more]

It’s a good start to get rid of the Unaffordable No-Care Act. President-elect Trump should have a look at it if he hasn’t already.

Progressive Liars Part III: Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger, the so-called mother of birth control and founder of what has become modern day Planned Parenthood, believed in a policy of improvement to “create a race of thoroughbreds.”

In 1922, Sanger wrote:

Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly. People who cannot support their own offspring are encouraged by church and state to produce large families. Many of the children thus begotten are diseased and feebleminded. Many become criminals. Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to the maintenance of those who should have never been born.

In 1926, Sanger presented her views to a women’s chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, which led to more speaking engagements to similar groups. How did an American woman arrive at this kind of thinking? As with many progressive leaders, a traumatic childhood event helped shape her radical beliefs about preventing birth among certain “undesirables.”

Source: Progressive Liars Part III: Margaret Sanger.

Karl Marx called the “undesirables” lumpenproletariats- the beggars, prostitutes, etc. He really had no use for the poor either. His main concern was the middle class and the wealthy business owners. Then there was Hitler. He just exterminated his “undesirables.”

Karl Marx, Western Civilization and Hypocrisy

Both theoretician and  practitioner, Marx strove to destroy Western civilization as we know it, by unraveling both strands of its cultural DNA and replacing them with his version of communism.

He repudiated the Abrahamic faiths with dialectical materialism: No God, one book (Das Kapital), one pamphlet (the Communist Manifesto), one profit (Karl Marx). He defied Aristotle by disording the hierarchy of arts and sciences, and promoting economics uber alles. He placed politics--and therefore all of the other arts and sciences under central economic control. This economic theory was intended to remedy the grevious wrongs suffered by the working classes during the Industrial Revolution, and was meant to spread worldwide. Capitalism was seen as evil, communism as good.

Marx himself privately envied the lives and lifestyles of the so-called "petty bourgeoisie"-- the middle class-- whom he accused of complicity in exploiting the proletariat. Having found a friend and benefactor in Frederick Engels, who himself had inherited factories in England's industrialized Midlands, Marx is eventually managed to lead the pampered upper-middle-class lifestyle that he otherwise sought to destroy--in a London town house and paid for by the sweat of the workers in Engels' factories.

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Nonetheless, Marxism represented the terminus of a widespread romantic and utopian European rebellion against the myriad sufferings of the hapless masses, imposed by successive centuries and layers of feudalism, monarchy, theocracy, mercantilism, imperialism, and industrialization.  The ongoing democratic and socialist reforms were not enough for Marx, who sought more rapid and more radical change.

Source: The Middle Way. Finding Happiness in a World of Extremes  (2007) by Lou Marinoff, Ph. D.

Capitalism is seen today by most of the far-Left as evil especially by far-Left professors. Then they teach this warped view to their students who grow up and teach this hate to their young. The hate continues. It doesn’t help if the parents of the students believe this crap too.

As for the Marx living a pampered upper-middle-class lifestyle—that’s expected. After all he is special—he’s one of the Elites.

The Intellectual Conceit of IQ Ideology

From Fee.org:

The cultural fascination with the idea of an “intelligence quotient” or IQ seems to be experiencing a resurgence. Relentless testing is a feature of schooling and school admissions, and tests are used for a variety of occupational screenings. The practice reflects an intuition we all have: some bulbs are brighter than others. Surely there is nothing wrong with knowing, measuring, and acting on that information, however difficult it might be to assess.

Where matters become elusive is in codifying those skills, reducing them all to a single quantitative number, aggregating them based on other demographic traits, assessing the variability of the results, comparing the results across large population groups, determining the variety of causal factors – genetic, environmental, sheer personal determination – that make up what we call intelligence, and cobbling together a plan for what to do with the results.

Here we have a much more complex problem, as complex as the human mind itself. The amatuer commentator might read a book on the topic and hope to come away with a sense that within this literature we find the key to the rise and fall of whole civilizations. The would-be central planner salivates at the prospect! But the more you read, the less certain you become, and the more in awe of the unknowns, the surprises, and the way the real world continues to defy the predictions of the scientific elite.

The IQ as a Central Planning Tool

And then there are the social and political implications of the efforts. What’s not usually understood is that the search for some measurable standard of intelligence – and implicitly human value itself – has a deep history that is bound up with the emergence of the planned society, eugenics, and the 20th century leviathan state.

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The story of IQ begins at the end of the Franco-Prussian war when France’s civic institutions were remodelled to never lose another war. The prevailing theory was that France lacked the technical skills necessary for modern warfare. Citizens needed training and that meant education reform. Schooling would raise up a citizen army and therefore must be forced. From 1879 to 1886, legislation imposed compulsory schooling on the entire population.

With all kids now forced into non-religious schools, it was time to impose a rational method on steering the conscripts into socially and politically optimal paths. In 1904, just as fascination with the idea of scientific socialism had gained fashion, the French Ministry of Education contacted the psychologist Alfred Binet (1857-1911) to come up with some assessment test. He came up with a series of questions from easiest to hardest, and ranked the kids based on their performance of the tests.

The result was the Binet-Simon scale. From Binet’s point of view, the only purpose was to identify which kids needed special focus and attention so that they would not be left behind. But the idea of quantity, ranking, and assessing cognitive performance caught on in the United States, where eugenics was a prevailing intellectual fashion. It was driving public policy in labor regulations, immigration, forced sterilizations, marriage licenses, welfare policy, business regulation, and segregation strategies.

The first American enthusiast for Binet’s work was Henry H. Goddard, a leading champion of eugenics and a champion of the planning state. In 1908, Goddard translated Binet’s work and popularized it among the intellectual classes. He turned what might have been a humanitarian push to provide remedial help to students into a weapon of war against the weak.

What did Goddard believe could be done with his insights?

He summarized his political outlook as follows:

“Democracy, then, means that the people rule by selecting the wisest, most intelligent, and most human to tell them what to do to be happy. Thus Democracy is a method for arriving at a truly benevolent aristocracy. Such a consummation will be reached when the most intelligent learn to apply their intelligence…. High intelligence must so work for the welfare of the masses as to command their respect and affection.”

What’s more, “society must be so organized that these people of limited intelligence shall not be given, or allowed to hold, positions that require more intelligence than they possess. And in the positions that they can fill, they must be treated in accordance with their level of intelligence. A society organized on this basis would be a perfect society.”

Toward this end, he broke down the human population into normative categories, the underperforming of whom he labelled imbeciles, morons, and idiots – designations that survive to this day. He proposed a new form of social order in which an elite of intellectuals assigns tasks and life stations based on test results.  [read more]

Interesting article. There is no such thing as a perfect society because people can’t be made to be perfect—only God can do that although sometimes Big Gov thinks it’s God.

In the article, the author talks about three economic issues that contradict the IQ ideology:

1. Consumers have odd tastes that have little to do with intelligence, scientifically defined.  For instance, in racing (car, boat, etc.) intelligence is not the first trait that stands out.
2. The law of association makes everyone valuable. A core belief of the IQ ideology is that smart people, as measured by tests, are more valuable to the social order than dumber people. But economics has made a different discovery. It turns out that through the division of labor, or what Ludwig von Mises called the “law of association,” everyone can be valuable to everyone else, regardless of aptitude.
3. Intelligence necessary for the building of a great society does not reside in the minds of particular individuals. The highest intelligence of the social order resides in the processes and institutions of society itself. It doesn’t exist in total in any single mind and it doesn’t emerge consciously from the plans of any group.

Will socialists and the far-Left or should I say the alt-Left ever get the third point? Not until they trust people to make their own decisions about their lives. Once they can see people as adults not as children or worse cattle then they will trust the general population.

Progressive Liars Part II: German Roots

To find the roots of progressivism, one has to go back to Germany in the 1500s, and the Protestant Reformation against the Catholic Church by Martin Luther. Was Luther a progressive? Hardly, but his ideas about man’s relationship with God have morphed and metastasized the past 500 years into something unrecognizable from what he originally intended. Luther’s declaration that man could have a personal relationship with God without enlisting a papal leader inadvertently started the ball rolling toward progressivism.

More than two centuries later in the late 1700s, German professor George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would use his disbelief in God for a similar purpose — to better humanity. After surviving an epidemic, Hegel’s views on God were irrevocably changed. Hegel concluded that experts and knowledgeable persons should rule — not God — with the most perfect government and unlimited authority over the individual. Through the State and its rulers, man would essentially become God on earth. This was the foundational principle that eventually became known as progressivism.

Source: Progressive Liars Part II: German Roots.

Hegel influenced Karl Marx and Frederick Engels—the two founders of Communism.

The Right Problems

Below is Herman Cain’s important problems to solve:

1. Balance the budget.
2. Replace the tax code.
3. Restructure social security.
4. Restructure Medicare and Medicaid.
5. Secure the border and enforce existing immigration laws.
6. Achieving true energy independence and security.
7. Dramatically reduce federal regulations.
8. Enforce our constitution and laws.
9. Rebuilding our military.

Source: The Right Problems: What the President, Congress, and Every Candidate Should Be Working On (2016) by Herman Cain.

Good ideas. Interesting book.

5 Ideas at the Heart of Socialism

From FEE.org:

Marx and the Marxists would have us believe that socialism is inevitable, that it will embrace the world as surely as the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. As long as men have free will (the power to choose right over wrong), however, nothing that involves human volition can ever be inevitable. If socialism comes, it will come because men choose to embrace its principles.

Socialism is an age-old failure, yet the socialist idea constitutes the chief threat to liberty today. As I see it, socialism can be broken down into five ideas:

1. The Pass-a-Law Syndrome

Passing laws has become a national pastime. Business in trouble? Pass a law to give it public subsidies or restrict its freedom of action. Poverty? Pass a law to abolish it. Perhaps America needs a law against passing more laws.

Almost invariably, a new law means: (a) more taxes to finance its administration, (b) additional government officials to regulate some heretofore unregulated aspect of life, and (c) penalties for violating the law. In brief, more laws mean more regimentation, more coercion. Let there be no doubt about what the word coercion means: force, plunder, compulsion, restraint. Synonyms for the verb form of the word are even more instructive: impel, exact, subject, conscript, extort, wring, pry, twist, dragoon, bludgeon, and squeeze.

When government intervenes in the free economy, bureaucrats and politicians spend most of their time undoing their own handiwork. To repair the damage of provision A, they pass provision B. Then they find that to repair provision B, they need provision C, and to undo C, they need D, and so on until the alphabet and our freedoms are exhausted.

2. The Get-Something-from-Government Fantasy

Government by definition has nothing to distribute except what it first takes from people. Taxes are not donations.

In the welfare state this basic fact gets lost in the rush for special favors and giveaways. People speak of “government money” as if it were truly free.

3. The Pass-the-Buck Psychosis

Recently, a welfare recipient wrote her welfare office and demanded, “This is my sixth child. What are you going to do about it?”

An individual is victim to the pass-the-buck psychosis when he abandons himself as the solver of his problems. He might say, “My problems are really not mine at all. They are society’s, and if society doesn’t solve them and solve them quickly, there’s going to be trouble!”

Socialism thrives on the shirking of responsibility. When men lose their spirit of independence and initiative, their confidence in themselves, they become clay in the hands of tyrants and despots.

4. The Know-It-All Affliction

Leonard Read, in “The Free Market and Its Enemy,” identified “know-it-allness” as a central feature of the socialist idea. The know-it-all is a meddler in the affairs of others. His attitude can be expressed in this way: “I know what’s best for you, but I’m not content to merely convince you of my rightness; I’d rather force you to adopt my ways.” The know-it-all evinces arrogance and a lack of tolerance for the great diversity among people.

In government, the know-it-all refrain sounds like this: “If I didn’t think of it, then it can’t be done, and since it can’t be done, we must prevent anyone from trying.” A group of West Coast businessmen once ran into this snag when their request to operate barge service between the Pacific Northwest and Southern California was denied by the (now-defunct) Interstate Commerce Commission because the agency felt that the group could not operate such a service profitably.

5. The Envy Obsession

Coveting the wealth and income of others has given rise to a sizable chunk of today’s socialist legislation. Envy is the fuel that runs the engine of redistribution. Surely, the many soak-the-rich schemes are rooted in envy and covetousness.

What happens when people are obsessed with envy? They blame those who are better off than themselves for their troubles. Society is fractured into classes and faction preys on faction. Civilizations have been known to crumble under the weight of envy and the disrespect for property it entails.

A Common Thread

A common thread runs through these five socialist ideas. They all appeal to man’s darker side: the primitive, noncreative, slothful, dependent, demoralizing, unproductive, and destructive side of human nature. No society can long endure if its people practice such suicidal notions.   [read more]

Socialism is just about control of the masses—that’s what the socialists and the Left call everyone except themselves. They are sheep herders and the masses are the sheep who need to be guided.

Progressive Liars Part I: Fear and Hope

Chicago coliseum, July 9, 1896: Thirty-six-year old William Jennings Bryan put forth the Democratic Party’s proposed national platform to a cheering crowd that frantically waved red bandannas in a sign of solidarity. Bryan became convinced that victory was his. A new monetary policy based on the coinage of silver, free silver, had proven to be an even more enticing message than he had expected. The new supply of money would relieve crippling debt for the impoverished voters Bryan sought to mobilize. As he neared the climax of his remarks, he mustered every last ounce of energy and unleashed some of the most famous lines in American political rhetoric:

If they dare come out in the open field,” he thundered, “And defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nations of the world and having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and the toiling masses.

Bryan’s speech launched the era of progressivism, featuring the biggest liars in American history. These liars achieved their so-called progress using fear and hope, two uniquely human feelings, to impose their will upon mankind.

Source: Progressive Liars Part I: Fear and Hope.

Once the gold standard was removed, Congress had no external discipline.