Reality and Choices

The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube.

-- Ayn Rand,  Atlas Shrugged

So, true. This quote by the way isn’t from a Leftist. It’s not from a conservative. It’s not even from a libertarian. It’s from a philosopher with her own philosophy called Objectivism.

I am not an Objectivist but I do like her writings. She was a fierce supporter of the free-market system.

Since the Left likes to talk about resisting, here are my suggestions: Resist hate, resist envy, resist political correctness, resist delusional thinking, resist ignorance, resist conspiratorial theories, resist gossip, resist printing fake news, resist stereotyping people, and most of all resist evil.

The Octopus Outsmarts Darwin Again

Commentary by Eric Metaxis on Break Point.org (May 8):

Imagine being able to make yourself more intelligent than your genes allow. If you were a slimy, spineless bottom-dweller, that might be a welcome bonus.

What’s the most intelligent animal on the planet? There are a lot of ways to answer that, and depending on your standard, apes, crows, dolphins, and parrots could all be contenders. But none of these vertebrates (animals with backbones) can lay claim to the incredible feats of one highly-intelligent group of invertebrates. A group that—according to new research—ignores the rules laid down by Darwin and takes evolution into its own tentacles.

I’m talking about cephalopods—the octopi, squid, and cuttlefish, which are widely regarded as scoring at the top of their class. These Mensa-worthy mollusks have been known to open jars, climb in and out of their tanks, communicate via a kind of Morse-code, and can camouflage themselves to match their surroundings with startling accuracy, using colorful skin cells.

And as I told you some time ago on BreakPoint, these eight-armed wonders of the deep defy evolution by exhibiting traits usually found in higher vertebrates like us. It’s a mind-boggling coincidence that Darwinists have long dismissed with euphemisms like, “convergent evolution.”

But octopi, squid, and cuttlefish seem to have altogether missed the memo about Darwinism, because new science is revealing another way in which they defy evolution.

In a paper published in the journal, “Cell,” Tel Aviv University researchers Joshua Rosenthal and Eli Eisenberg report that unlike almost all other animals, cephalopods routinely bypass the instructions in their DNA and edit their own genes.

In biology class, you probably learned that ribonucleic acid, or RNA, transcribes and carries the information coded in deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, to protein-factories in the cells. These proteins, built based on instructions from the DNA, are what make up our bodies. But what if we could edit the messages in our RNA to change the kind of protein produced? As it happens, that’s what cephalopods do—on a scale unknown anywhere else in the animal kingdom, and specifically in one area of their bodies: their nervous systems and brains.

The Tel Aviv researchers found “tens of thousands” of such RNA recoding sites in cephalopods, allowing a creature like the octopus to essentially reprogram itself, adding “new riffs to its basic genetic blueprint.” In other words, these invertebrates don’t care that they didn’t inherit the smart genes. They make themselves smart, anyway. [read more]

Fascinating. Cephalopodal genetic engineering? Hmm…

The Ugly Racism of Karl Marx

Commentary by Walter E. Williams on The Daily Signal.com:

Few people who call themselves Marxists have ever even bothered to read “Das Kapital.” If one did read it, he would see that people who call themselves Marxists have little in common with Marx.

For those who see Marx as their hero, there are a few historical tidbits they might find interesting. Nathaniel Weyl, himself a former communist, dug them up for his 1979 book, “Karl Marx: Racist.”

For example, Marx didn’t think much of Mexicans. When the United States annexed California after the Mexican War, Marx sarcastically asked, “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?”

Engels shared Marx’s contempt for Mexicans, explaining: “In America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will be placed under the tutelage of the United States.”

Marx had a racial vision that might be interesting to his modern-day black supporters. In a letter to Engels, in reference to his socialist political competitor Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx wrote:

It is now completely clear to me that he, as is proved by his cranial formation and his hair, descends from the Negroes who had joined Moses’ exodus from Egypt, assuming that his mother or grandmother on the paternal side had not interbred with a n—–. Now this union of Judaism and Germanism with a basic Negro substance must produce a peculiar product.

Engels shared Marx’s racial philosophy. In 1887, Paul Lafargue, who was Marx’s son-in-law, was a candidate for a council seat in a Paris district that contained a zoo. Engels claimed that Lafargue had “one-eighth or one-twelfth n—– blood.”  [read more]

The Soviet Union was very nationalistic. Or maybe a better word is xenophobic. The country didn’t allow any foreign music imports. I guess the leadership thought it would contradict the communist propaganda they were spewing out. The funny thing is Putin said he liked The Beatles in an interview. The Beatles was an English rock band. So, how did he get their albums? Hmmm. It’s good to be king or one of the elites.

The Soviet Union did allow the TV show Dallas to be shown on TV there. But that only because they leaders wanted the public to see how greedy America was.  It backfired. The public saw much their own country sucked economically.

Three Tips to Help Entrepreneurs Navigate Consumer Trends

From FEE.org:

Trends are important indicators. But when misinterpreted and misread, they can lead you down a destructive path of false hope and incorrect assumptions.

Here are three of the most common mistakes entrepreneurs make when interpreting a trend and how you can avoid them.

1. Mistaking a Trend for a Fad

As Faith Popcorn, marketing author and founder of the consulting firm BrainReseve writes, “fads are about products, whereas trends are about what drives consumers to buy products.”

The largest differentiator is that trends are based on a growing change in consumer behavior, whereas fads tend to be linked to products that don’t necessarily respond to a particular change in consumer behavior or solve a consumer problem.

2. Identifying the Right Trend but Offering the Wrong Solution

In the early '90s, as consumers were becoming more health-conscious and looking for diet-friendly foods and beverages, McDonald’s introduced the McLean Deluxe Burger.

McDonald’s correctly interpreted its customers' changing eating habits as a trend towards healthy eating and created a low-fat burger to meet those changing needs. Which would have been a smart interpretation of the trend and a great plan until it did two things. First, McDonald's named it the McLean Deluxe Burger, which didn’t sell well with its male demographic, and, second, it removed 91 percent of the burger's fat and replaced it with water. According to consumers, it tasted awful, and it quickly failed.

Right trend, wrong solution.

3.  Assuming People No Longer Want the Opposite of the Trend

Reading about the micro and macro trends in the health and wellness space would lead you to rightly assume that consumers are moving away from indulgent foods. But they're not abandoning them completely.

For example, In-n-Out Burger has grown massively by focusing on made-to-order burgers using high-quality ingredients and non-frozen beef patties (a micro trend in the burger industry!). If it interpreted these health and wellness trends and began offering salads and wraps, it'd be offering what consumers were looking for – but ruin its brand as the go-to for cheat days in the process.

If in researching trends you find your business is in direct opposition, don’t throw in the towel just yet. Here, you want to ask yourself (and research!): Are people still spending money on what I want to bring to market? Are they still buying soda, for example, even if they’re buying more water?

If the answer is yes – and consistently stays at “yes” – there’s still a market for you to explore and own. [read more]

Big Government Policies that Hurt the Poor

From Heritage.org (April 5):

Concern for the poor is often equated with expanding government programs. In other words, expanding government is frequently seen as good for those in need, and limiting government is often portrayed as hurting them. The reality is that, in many cases, government policy can make it more difficult for those striving to make ends meet. This Special Report identifies nearly two dozen big government policies that particularly hurt the poor. These policies, at the local, state, and federal levels, are just the tip of the iceberg. The report does not address the harms imposed by the distorted incentives of the current welfare system, which discourages work and self-sufficiency, or cover some critical areas, such as education and health care policy. This Special Report covers many other issues, with a particular emphasis on the harmful impact of economic regulation on poorer Americans.

Climate Change Regulations. Throughout his tenure in office, President Barack Obama made it one of his top policy priorities to combat manmade global warming. Although legislation to cap greenhouse-gas emissions ultimately died in Congress, the Obama Administration empowered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from a variety of sources, most prominently by regulating carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from new and existing power plants.

If allowed to stand, the New Source Performance Standards for new electricity-generating units would effectively prohibit the construction of new coal-fired power plants, and the regulations for existing plants, the Clean Power Plan, would force states to re-engineer their respective energy mix to meet state-specific reduction targets. Additionally, the government promulgated regulations to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from light and heavy-duty vehicles. The EPA also developed regulations for another greenhouse gas, methane, for oil and natural gas production, transportation, and storage.

Cumulatively, these regulations, if unchecked, will drive energy prices substantially higher. A Heritage Foundation analysis found that, as a result of the Obama Administration’s climate policies, household electricity expenditures could increase between 13 percent and 20 percent, hitting America’s poorest households hardest.

……………………

Federal Sugar Program. The federal government tries to limit the supply of sugar that is sold in the United States. This federal sugar program uses price supports, marketing allotments that limit how much sugar processors can sell each year, and import restrictions that reduce the amount of imports. As a result of government attempts to limit the supply of sugar, the price of American sugar is consistently higher than world prices; domestic prices have been as high as double that of world prices.

This big government policy may benefit the small number of sugar growers and harvesters, but it does so at the expense of sugar-using industries and consumers. An International Trade Administration report found that “[f]or each sugar-growing and harvesting job saved through high U.S. sugar prices, nearly three confectionery manufacturing jobs are lost.”

…………………..

International Monetary Fund Bailouts. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was established after World War II to enhance stable, private-sector-led global economic growth through trade and investment—and the biggest group to benefit from that growth has been the world’s poor. Too often, however, economists at the IMF have bailed out the governments of developing countries whose politicians ran up huge debts to achieve short-term and self-serving political objectives. The biggest losers from those financial crises? The poor.

The world’s poor lose, not once but twice. First, they lose when governments borrow money from global markets to buy their votes via ineffective and often corruptly administered social welfare programs. Second, they lose again when those countries cannot repay their debts, are ejected from world credit markets, and seek bailouts from the IMF. [read more]

The Left doesn’t care if these policies hurt the poor or not because they believe the policies are good for the poor whether they are or not. Other polices include: Energy efficiency regulations for appliances, renewable fuel standard, U.S. Department of Agriculture’s catfish inspection program, home-sharing regulations, etc.

Woodrow Wilson Made the World Unsafe for Democracy

From FEE.org:

Lies, Censorship, and Poison

In his speech to Congress, Wilson declared, "We have no quarrel with the German people" and feel "sympathy and friendship" towards them. But his administration speedily commenced demonizing the "Huns." One Army recruiting poster portrayed German troops as an ape ravaging a half-naked damsel beneath an appeal to "Destroy this mad brute."

Wilson acted as if the congressional declaration of war against Germany was also a declaration of war against the Constitution. Harvard professor Irving Babbitt commented in 1924: "Wilson, in the pursuit of his scheme for world service, was led to make light of the constitutional checks on his authority and to reach out almost automatically for unlimited power." Wilson even urged Congress to set up detention camps to quarantine "alien enemies."

Wilson unleashed ruthless censorship of any criticism. Anyone who spoke publicly against military conscription was likely to get slammed with federal espionage or sedition charges. Possessing a pamphlet entitled Long Live the Constitution of the United States earned six months in jail for a Pennsylvania malcontent. Censorship was buttressed by fanatic propaganda campaigns led by the Committee on Public Information, a federal agency whose shameless motto was "faith in democracy... faith in fact."

The war enabled the American equivalent of the Taliban to triumph on the home front. Prohibition advocates "indignantly insisted that... any kind of opposition to prohibition was sinister and subversively pro-German," noted William Ross, author of World War 1 and the American Constitution. Even before the 18th Amendment (which banned alcohol consumption) was ratified, Wilson banned beer sales as a wartime measure. Prohibition was a public health disaster; the rate of alcoholism tripled during the 1920s.

Hell's Dirtiest Work

The chaos and economic depression sowed by the war and the Treaty of Versailles helped open the door to some of the worst dictators in modern times, including Germany’s Adolf Hitler, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, and Vladimir Lenin–whom Wilson intensely disliked because "he felt the Bolshevik leader had stolen his ideas for world peace," as historian Thomas Fleming noted in his 2003 masterpiece, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War 1.

Despite winning the war, Wilson’s Democratic Party was crushed at the polls in both 1918 and 1920. H.L. Mencken wrote on the eve of the 1920 election that Americans were sickened of Wilsonian "idealism that is oblique, confusing, dishonest, and ferocious."

[read more]

The Treaty of Versailles was one of the reasons why Hitler got into power. The Treaty was really harsh to Germany and caused the country great pain. The was mainly what the French wanted. Also, Japan felt slighted during the negotiations. This maybe why they dropped out later.

Scientists Use Artificial Womb to Keep Premature Lambs Alive

From NewsMax.com (Apr. 25):

Scientists have been able to keep premature lambs alive for weeks using an artificial womb that looks like a plastic bag, providing a nutrient-rich blood supply and a protective sac of amniotic fluid, researchers reported.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, researchers from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia believe the approach might one day help premature human babies have a better chance of survival.

In a video that accompanied the release of the study, Emily Partridge, a research fellow at the hospital, described being struck by the sight of the zipped-up lamb fetuses, "breathing, swallowing, swimming, dreaming" – all with "complete detachment from the placenta and from mom."  [read more]

Good to hear. Hopefully, premature human babies will be able to do the same too.

Garbage In, Garbage Out at the Federal Reserve

From FEE.org (Mar. 14):

Ignorance is Bliss at the Federal Reserve

The Fed’s employees, themselves, are blissfully unaware of changes in the price level of things like, say, food. Danielle DiMartino Booth lists the creature comforts afforded central bank employees in Dallas in her insightful new book Fed Up. In addition to a subsidized cafeteria, there is a separate executive dining room.

DiMartino Booth described how some employees would come early, work out in the Fed’s on-site gym, shower, dress, have breakfast and then “Four hours later they headed to the executive dining room for competitive discourse on the latest iteration of their models over long lunches.”

The ex Wall Streeter and financial journalist took a job at the Dallas Fed as the housing bubble was ramping up. She remembers her days on Wall Street when traders ate expensive steaks at their desks, not wanting to miss any market action.

In contrast, Fed employees, had no interest in financial news. They scattered for lunch. The cafeteria was fine for DiMartino Booth. As she writes, “The food was darn good and so cheap some people even bought dinner to take home to the spouse and kids.”

Job perks at the Fed are impervious to the business cycle, while Wall Street benefits come and go, she explains. And the only “hustle and bustle [at the Fed]: 5 p.m. on the nose.”

DiMartino Booth, with only two master's degrees, worked directly with three dozen PhD economists who didn’t take her seriously, while they ignored financial news.

The economists were satisfied parsing backward-looking data to predict future events using their mathematical models. Financial data in real time were useless to them until it had been “seasonally adjusted,” codified, and extruded into charts.

Richard Fisher, who headed the Dallas Fed at that time, actually talked to business people operating in the real economy. “He had real problems with the Fed’s designated measure of inflation, ‘core’ personal consumption expenditure (PCE), which ignores the prices of food and energy and thus did not reflect inflation’s true level.”

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Meanwhile, the Fed’s PhD army will see what it wants to see and believe what it wants to believe. Trusting the view of someone who has been there, Ms. DiMartino Booth, we should remember the Fed is “an arcane, complex, and peculiar decision-making apparatus that is virtually opaque to outsiders.”

……………….

What we know for sure, is what the Fed does is mislead entrepreneurs with ill-conceived monetary monkey business. Sadly, while they rest on their PhDs, they don’t know what they don’t know.  [read more]

Like most elites, the Fed believes its own fellow elites and doesn’t think it needs outside information that may contradict their own theories.

Effectiveness of Strict Gun Laws

France, Great Britain and Australian have some of the strictest gun laws in the world. In a mandatory government “buyback” program, Australian gun owners were forced to relinquish their guns — or go to jail, removing nearly 661,000 guns from law-abiding Aussies. Citizens were paid for their guns, but how do you put a price on security and freedom? One gun owner said, There’s no ifs or buts about it, by taking that gun away from me, they’ve stolen something from me.

How effective has Australia’s gun control program been? The NRA reported on a University of Melbourne and British Journal of Criminology study that took place 12 years after the imposed ban. The cold, hard facts cannot be denied:

• Armed robberies skyrocketed 69 percent
• Assaults involving guns rose 28 percent
• Gun murders increased 19 percent
• Home invasions jumped 21 percent

Over and over, the evidence shows that banning guns and imposing strict laws consistently raises homicide rates.

Cities like Chicago and Washington, D.C., have the toughest gun laws in the nation, along with the highest gun murder rates. The state of Illinois has a gun murder rate of 2.8 per 100,000 people, but Chicago is right at 16 per 100,000 — five times the rate of Illinois. The states of Maryland and Virginia compare similarly with regard to Washington, D.C.

Even though progressives have failed to overturn the Second Amendment, they have made inroads by establishing things like gun-free zones — the locations where most mass shootings now take place. Why? Because they’re easy targets for those wishing to perpetrate evil and violence.

Source: Gun Control: The Four-Part Series

Anyone who watches the ID channel at all will know that people kill people in different ways and not all weapons used are firearms. But the Left will still blame the gun. The culprit is evil pure and simple. People have been killing other people since before the invention of gunpowder. Taking away guns or restricting them in unreasonable ways won’t prevent murder by firearms. It will just make it harder for people to protect themselves.

18 Spectacularly Wrong Prophecies from the First Earth Day

From FEE.org (April 22, 2016):

Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started:

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.
3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

[read more]

Boy, those environmental extremists are a fun, optimistic bunch of people.

In other news, Climate change could shrink animals, warn scientists. You just can’t make this up. I think the Left has gone down the rabbit hole and don’t want to leave. They’re home. (Some might say they have already gone down the rabbit hole many years ago. Could be.)

Five Forgotten Champions of the Total State: TS Eliot

From FEE.org:

TS Eliot (1888-1965) seems like an implausible candidate for inclusion in this gallery of rogues, simply because this paragon of civility and erudition is so widely championed in the annals of anti-liberalism. The American-born Anglophile is the author, after all, of the most famous and revered poem of the 20th century, "The Waste Land" (1922). Its impenetrable narrative captures the post-WWI despair of the English-speaking world, giving the impression that it was not only the war that civilization should regret but the whole of what life had become in the age of mass commerce. Nothing is salvageable, and everything is corrupt.

C.S. Lewis, who regarded Eliot’s work as nothing short of “evil,” said of this poem: “no man is fortified against chaos by reading the Wasteland, but that most men are by it infected with chaos.” What is that chaos? It is the dark longing for some long-dead past and a conviction of the irredeemability of the present, an attitude which is anathema to the classical liberal tradition that sees hope and wonder in what freedom can achieve. It is not a stretch to see Eliot’s literary contribution as part of the entire Modernist literary project in England to put down and condemn everything that capitalism had done for the world. For Eliot in particular, the cost was the integrity of culture itself.

In "Notes Toward a Definition of Culture," Eliot takes hard aim at the entire liberal/Hayekian view of culture as a spontaneous evolution extending from the gradual emergence of norms, tastes, and manner of a free people. For Eliot, the right kind of culture must emanate from an elite, chosen from excellent educational institutions. Everything about industrialization wars against culture, even the advances in publishing. “In our time,” he declared, “we read too many new books… We are encumbered not only with too many new books: we are further embarrassed by too many periodicals, reports and privately circulated memoranda.”  [read more]

Source: Five Forgotten Champions of Fascist Control.

Communism Part IV: American Radicals

The lofty goals and idealistic promises of communism include income equality, thriving economies and perpetual peace. In essence, Utopia on earth. In reality, communism has resulted in millions killed during peacetime, continual war (or the threat of it), economic disaster, state-controlled media, governmental lies, labor camps, concentration camps, starvation, police states, lack of freedom and state-sponsored atheism. By its fruits ye shall know them.

Thanks in large part to the Constitution of the United States of America, Americans have largely avoided the fruits of communism — but not entirely. There are those who believe America should scrap its founding principles and embrace Marxism, communism and socialism.

While very few openly advocate for communism, most hide behind the gentler moniker of Progressivism. Like Marxists, progressives seek social justice and the redistribution of wealth to obtain income equality. Unlike Marxists, they try to do it within the system rather than through revolution.

Some of American’s radicals from the 1960s are now respected professors or politicians. Illinois’ Bobby Rush, for instance, who cofounded the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers is now a U.S. congressman from Illinois. This man who has helped write and pass legislation for the United States of America, had his apartment raided when he served as the defense minister for the Black Panthers. Police discovered illegal firearms, including rifles, a shotgun, training manuals on explosives, booby traps and an assortment of communist literature and propaganda.

Another respected member of American society is Bill Ayers, the cofounder of the violent, communist revolutionary terrorist group called the Weather Underground. Ayers is on record recounting an event in which a room of highly educated revolutionary figures plotted the logistics of eliminating 25 million Americans who were avowed capitalists that could not be “re-educated.” Ayers later became a fugitive after bombings and plots targeting the military, police, the U.S. Capitol Building and the Pentagon. Astonishingly, Ayers never served time for his involvement with the Weather Underground, and later became a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was also a neighbor and fellow board member with another Chicago radical — the future President of the United States, Barack Obama.  [read more]

Source: Communism Part IV: American Radicals.

She Never Joined a Union. But Union Fees Got Deducted From Her Paycheck

From The Daily Signal.com (Mar. 30):

ST. PAUL, Minn.—Patricia Johansen has worked as a home caregiver for her two special-needs grandchildren for about 10 years.

Since she never agreed to join the union that represents such Medicaid-eligible caregivers in Minnesota, Johansen was surprised to discover that union dues had been deducted from her benefit check for about four months.

In an affidavit, the Fergus Falls resident says she is convinced the union, SEIU Healthcare Minnesota, forged her signature so it could start deducting the dues.

Johansen’s story is one reason a state lawmaker is scheduling a hearing where she expects the head of the state’s labor relations agency, a political appointee of Gov. Mark Dayton, to explain how SEIU Healthcare Minnesota won a unionization election—and why it should continue to represent the home caregivers.  [read more]

The union says her signature was an error. Sounds fishy. If the union did this deliberately they should be prosecuted.

Communism Part III: The Rise in America

Ever since communism took root in Russia and began spreading its philosophy around the globe, the United States has been fighting its spread from the outside. The more difficult battle, however, has come from within. Even with the freedom, prosperity and quality of life in America, for a variety of reasons, there have always been dissenters.

At the turn of the 20th century, men like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson adopted progressive ideology, believing the Constitution to be a living, breathing document. Like socialists and communists, progressives believe more in government than the individual. For them, the power and influence of government is the key to achieving social justice.

The term “social justice” has long been a euphemism for socialism and communism.* Progressives share much in common with both socialists and communists, but progressives are simply more patient, willing to progress slowly, rather than through revolution.

In 1920, faced with a depression even greater than that of 1929, the Harding-Coolidge administration took a hands-off approach to government and cut spending in half. The economy bounced back almost immediately, bringing in the Roaring Twenties.

In 1929, however, the Hoover administration took the opposite approach, intervening to deal with the crisis. And in 1932, newly elected progressive Democrat Franklin Roosevelt became even more committed to government intervention and programs. The depression lasted another 13 years in America, much longer than the rest of the world, due to FDR’s so-called New Deal, with sky-high unemployment, rationing, inflation and a decade of misery.

By the ’30s and ’40s, suspicions were rampant that communists had infiltrated the highest levels of the U.S. government, although hard-core proof was hard to come by. Even U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt seemed to share the ideology of communists, proposing a second Bill of Rights that outlined work, rest and leisure, health protection, care in old age and sickness, housing, education and cultural benefits — rights included in the Soviet communist constitution.

The late 1940s and ’50s were a dangerous time for the United States. The Soviets had just successfully tested their first nuclear weapon after Soviet spies had stolen the technology from America. Communists took over China. And North Korean communists invaded South Korea, bringing us into yet another war. And a senator from Wisconsin, Joel McCarthy claimed to have the list of some 57 communists in the State Department. Eventually, even Hollywood entertainers, actors, directors and producers were blacklisted.^

The social upheaval of the 1960s made the perfect breeding ground for a Marxist community organizer named Saul Alinsky to significantly influence young minds. Alinsky was a Marxist agitator, who believed that people could be agitated — even if they didn’t know they needed to be. The youth, affected by Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, would grow up heavily influenced by him. However, rather than protest and agitate, they decided to effect change from the inside the political system.  [read more]

Source: Communism Part III: The Rise in America.

*As well as economic justice, environmental justice, and any other “justices” you can think of.

^McCarthy went to far when he went after entertainers, actors, directors and producers. Who cares about these people. They can’t really affect gov’t policy. But congressmen and people in CIA, FBI, etc. and other gov’t positions can.

Five Forgotten Champions of the Total State: Giovanni Gentile

From FEE.org:

Giovanni Gentile (1874-1944) might be the most clownish and ridiculous of all the figures mentioned here, but he was a big shot in his time. He aspired to be the Marx of fascism, a leading theorist of the idealist tradition who finally put together the essential pieces of a thorough-going non-Marxist statism. His writings enjoyed some degree of fame in America in the interwar period, working on his own writings and ghost-writing for Benito Mussolini who was frequently solicited for American-published academic writings in the 1920s.

Most familiar to American readers was Gentile’s 1922 book The Reform of Education published by Harcourt, Brace, and Company. The book contains the usual call for education to be compulsory, militarized, and nationalistic, rooted in a view of the heroic enterprise of nation building. For the most part, the book consists of pseudo-scholarly blather of the insufferably ponderous sort, but it does contain his theory of the state, as a kind of warm up to the educational material:

A nation can under no circumstances exist prior to the form of its State ... a State is always a future. It is that state which this very day we must set up, or rather at this very instant, and with all our future effort bent to that political ideal which beams before us, not only in the light of a beautiful thought, but as the irresistible need of our own personality. The nation therefore is as intimately pertinent and native to our own being as the State, considered as Universal Will, is one with our concrete and actual ethical personality.

And so on for 250 pages. Despite the relentless statism of his vision, and his love of centralized power and planning, Gentile’s writings lacked some features that characterized other works in this genre. It is mercifully free of racism, perhaps because of his region of origin. He was Sicilian, and thereby belonged to a people who had been demonized by American thinkers as dysgenic since the 1880s. Indeed, if it is possible to talk this way, Gentile was a relative liberal among the fascists of the period, having criticized German anti-Semitism and having met his death at the hands of an anti-fascist mob having returned from arguing for the release of anti-fascists from prison. [read more]