Building the Next Master Race?

Commentary from John Stonestreet on Break Point.org (May 18):

The attempts to create a master Aryan race is not the stuff of science fiction or history books anymore.

I’m going to tell you a story about an attempt to build a strong nation by breeding better babies. These babies “would be superior in quality, intelligence, looks, and other aspects.” They would be taller and fairer in complexion that their peers. These babies hold the key, we are told, to national greatness.

Now you’re probably thinking the story comes from the Third Reich or maybe a science fiction novel. But you’d be wrong. This story is not from 1930s Germany nor is it the stuff of dystopian novels. It’s from contemporary India.

A group in India, Arogya Bharati, which means “Indian Wholeness” in Sanskrit, is working with couples to produce, in its words, “customized” babies. It hopes to “have [produced] thousands of such babies by 2020.” Its long-term goal is to build a strong India through these children.

What’s required to produce such a child? “Three months of [purification] for parents, intercourse at a time decided by planetary configurations, complete abstinence after the baby is conceived, and procedural and dietary regulations.”

The pay-off? According to the head of Arogya Bharati, “extremely bright,” “fair-complexioned,” and “tall” babies born to less-bright, dark, and short parents.

As this suggests, the groups methods aren’t rooted in modern genetics. Instead, they’re indebted to a combination of Indian folk medicine, astrology, and Hindu beliefs.  [read more]

So, this group in India doesn’t want future children to look like the current generation? Weird. I wonder if this group thinks Gandhi was inferior because he had dark skin and was short? Then again, as the article says, Hindu nationalists insist that the Aryans were from northern Indian not where Hitler thought Aryans were from.

The Financial CHOICE Act

From Daily Signal.com (May 18):

Have you noticed that free checking accounts are now nearly nonexistent, and locally owned stores are increasing the $5 minimum charge on debit cards?

These are not the result of some financial conspiracy. They are a direct result of Dodd-Frank regulations.

After the financial crash of 2008, President Barack Obama decided to increase the role of the federal government in the economy and impose massive new regulations on banks. As one might assume, this hasn’t worked out so well.

Included in the over 3,500-page Dodd-Frank bill are rules restricting access to credit for investors and homebuyers, raising lending costs for entrepreneurs, and making it harder for small businesses to get capital to start or grow.

…………………….

Reform Is Urgently Needed

Enter the Financial CHOICE Act (or the Creating Hope and Opportunity for Investors, Consumers, and Entrepreneurs Act), which was introduced this April by House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas.

The CHOICE Act takes positive steps forward in repealing Dodd-Frank, restoring economic stability in America, and allowing financial markets to grow and thrive.

According to the House Financial Services Committee website, the bill would:

… end taxpayer-funded bailouts of large financial institutions; relieve banks that elect to be strongly capitalized from growth-strangling regulation that slows the economy and harms consumers; impose tougher penalties on those who commit financial fraud; and demand greater accountability from Washington regulators.

There are three major benefits to the CHOICE Act:

1. Repeals the most harmful parts of Dodd-Frank.

The CHOICE Act repeals most of Title I and all of Title VIII of Dodd-Frank. These were the most harmful sections that solidified the “too big to fail” policies that led to massive taxpayer bailouts. Additionally, it would repeal Title II, stopping the government from seizing troubled financial firms and putting them back in the hands of a time-tested bankruptcy system.

2. Enhances checks and balances.

The CHOICE Act would fundamentally reform the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by putting it under congressional oversight and a proper appropriations process. It would also rein in the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending authority, making it more difficult for the Fed to conduct bailout-style loans. In addition, it would put any new major rule by financial regulatory agencies to congressional approval as part of the REINS Act (or Regulatory from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act).

3. Allows small business and free markets to thrive.

The CHOICE Act would unleash small business creation, innovation, and entrepreneurship by eliminating rules that limited capital formation over the last few years. It would also strengthen penalties on Wall Street for engaging in fraud, insider trading, and other corrupt practices.   [read more]

Sounds like a good bill. If it reaches the president’s desk I hope Trump signs it into law.

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]

Five Forgotten Champions of the Total State: Houston Stewart Chamberlain

From FEE.org:

Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) is an exceedingly strange figure in the history of politics and ideas: a British-born German whose influence bled into Germany and back again to his home. As son-in-law to the famed composer Richard Wagner, he became a dear friend and fanatical admirer of Adolph Hitler and the most aggressive proponent of virulent anti-Semitism ever to come out of England.

He had decided early in life to locate the source of all political and economic evil in the Industrial Revolution, preferring his own made-up vision of what he called “Merry Old England” consisting of a beautiful aristocracy, hard-toiling and thrifty peasants, and patriotic citizens dedicated to preserving the language and race against the commercial forces of modernity. Under these conditions, unlike the demographic mess unleashed by capitalism, women were submissive to the wills of their fathers and husbands, devoted only to furthering the superior race.

His weird 1899 book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century became a bestseller, many times over, throughout the Continent. Heavily influenced by the racial typologies that were increasingly popular, he described the Jews as mindlessly materialistic and the source of most evil in the modern world.

The Jews, he said, caused the downfall of Rome, for example. He argued that Jesus cannot possibly have been a Jew since all good in the world emanates from the pure Aryan race. Instead, he was “of exceptional beauty, tall and slim with a noble face inspiring respect and love; his hair blond shading into chestnut brown, his arms and hands noble and exquisitely formed.” It was in this book that he laid out his theory that a Jewish plot was afoot to wipe out the Aryan race and turn all Europe into a race of “pseudo-Hebraic mestizos.”

His book, which was printed in eight editions in the first ten years of its publication, and eventually sold as many as 250,000 copies by 1938, catapulted him into the status of a celebrity intellectual. And so his every utterance became gospel for his followers, even his proclamation that the Great War, which he believed the Jews had started, had led England “totally into the hands of the Jews and the Americans” and capitalist machinery.

It was in the midst of his fame that he reached out to an emergently powerful Hitler. Hearing that both Hitler and Joseph Goebbels could be counted among his fan base, he wrote Hitler in 1923:

“Most respected and dear Hitler ... It is hardly surprising that a man like that can give peace to a poor suffering spirit! Especially when he is dedicated to the service of the fatherland. My faith in Germandom has not wavered for a moment, though my hopes were – I confess – at a low ebb. With one stroke you have transformed the state of my soul. That Germany, in the hour of her greatest need, brings forth a Hitler – that is proof of her vitality ... I can now go untroubled to sleep ... May God protect you!”

After Hitler’s conviction of high treason following the Beer-hall putsch, Chamberlain stuck by him and kept hope alive. Hitler was touched, and, following Hitler’s release from prison, Hitler paid a visit to Chamberlain in Bayreuth in 1927, accompanied by Goebbels. Chamberlain assured Hitler that he was certainly “the chosen one,” thereupon lifting Hitler’s spirits. The leading Nazi in-house philosopher, Alfred Rosenberg, was perhaps an even greater fan of Chamberlain. An ailing Chamberlain died in 1927, never knowing of the Nazi attempt to deal with the “Jewish problem” he had dedicated his life to exposing.

Source: Five Forgotten Champions of the Total State.

Communism Part II: The Scourge Spreads

Communism’s first leader — Vladimir Lenin — fell ill and died in 1924, setting the stage for Josef Stalin. Just as it had been under the first few years of communist policies, the Soviet Union fell into another great famine in the early ’30s. Stalin brutally kept food from starving people, ordering his soldiers to shoot and kill peasants that came near it. Adding to the five million who had succumbed to the famine of 1921, another six million people died.

Former Ukrainian president, Victor Yushchenko, in a speech to the United States, put the total number of his dead countrymen at 20 million. It was essentially a genocide of the Ukrainian people, believed to have been planned by Stalin to eliminate the Ukrainian Independence Movement.

By the 1920s and 1930s, an Austrian named Adolf Hitler, once considered a joke in Germany, was a joke no longer. After joining and rising to the top of the National Socialist German Workers Party — the Nazi Party — Hitler attempted a coup in 1925, winding up in prison where he wrote Mein Kampf.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler laid out his intentions for ridding Germany of Jews and invading multiple nations. Somehow, the book captivated the imagination of many Germans. Hitler himself made a fortune from the proceeds. In 1933, he became chancellor of Germany and began implementing the policies he’d laid out to the German people. Hilter saw his brand of National Socialism as much more progressive than Soviet Communism.

……………………….

By the end of World War II, Mao Zedong had gained control of northern China. He had convinced impoverished peasants to fight against Chinese nationalists, promising redistributed land and lower taxes.

Mao’s forces swept to victory, and the nationalists fled to Taiwan. But the poor in China never saw the promised equality or redistribution of wealth. Rather, Mao oversaw the starvation and slaughter of 60 million Chinese.

By 1981, five years after Mao’s death, 85 percent of China’s population lived in abject poverty. Yet Chairman Mao’s image appears on hipster T-shirts and coffee cups around the world, even showing up on Obama’s Christmas tree as a White House Christmas ornament in 2009.

…………………………..

Unfortunately, communism eventually infected the Western Hemisphere, where another ruthless communist rose to power. Che Guevara, yet another Marxist revolutionary born to wealthy parents, was a ruthless, racist killer who seemed to have contempt for all those he pretended to care about. Like Mao, he is widely celebrated today by many on the American left as a hero of the worker and minorities.

According to the Black Book of Communism, during just the first year of Che’s revolution, firing squads executed 14,000 people. He sent thousands more, including homosexuals, to concentration camps. Che plotted the destruction of the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, the Washington Monument, as well as bombing Macy’s, Gimbels, Bloomingdale’s and Grand Central Station in New York City. In 1967, Che’s reign of terror finally ended, when he was executed by firing squad.

Despite the wake of oppression and death left by communism all over the world — 100 million peacetime deaths and millions more during revolutionary wars — many continue to glorify it to this day.  [read more]

Source: Communism Part II: The Scourge Spreads.

FEE.org articles:

• Communism's Legacy: Tyranny, Terror, and Torture
• How Communism Became the Disease It Tried to Cure

6 Cultural Reasons for Our Health Care Policy Mess

From FEE.org (Mar. 31):

1. The American middle class does not believe in saving up for health care expenses.
2. The American middle class does not believe in paying taxes in order to support people who are very poor or very sick. We are not Denmark.
3. Americans are not willing to say, “The proposed treatment for this problem is not worth the cost. The individual should accept lower-cost treatments and live (or perhaps not live) with the consequences.”
4. Americans, and especially health care providers, do not want to think of health care as a commodity.
5. Americans are not willing to give up being the “early adopters” of new treatments, which are often much more expensive when they first appear than when they have been available for many years.
6. Americans seem to be more willing to spend public money on medical services than on public health.

[read more]

Not only American’s are taught not to save for health care but not to save for retirement either. That’s what social security is for. It’s an entitlement. If Obamacare isn’t going to be replaced pretty soon it will be viewed as an entitlement too.

Basically, Big Gov is telling people us don’t plan for your future we’ll do that for you cause we are your Parents.

Communism Part 1: How It’s Marketed

When Karl Marx was born in Prussia (now part of Germany) in 1818, 94 percent of the world’s population lived in poverty. 84 percent lived in extreme poverty. Feudalism as an economic system left a lot to be desired, like food. The capitalist system, under the Constitution of the United States, changed all of that dramatically.

In one of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind, just 9.6 percent of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty today. Back in 1818, America was just 42 years old and still developing, but it was already becoming the envy of the world. The capitalist — or free market — system was beginning to take hold and pull this country’s citizens out of poverty. It offered new opportunities for millions of citizens and immigrants were beginning to flood its shores.

Europe was a different matter. Monarchy and feudalism was still embedded throughout much of the continent. But great change was taking hold. Industrialization was bringing scores of people from the country to the cities — which were quickly becoming overcrowded. This led to massive discontent.

Marx, who despised what he saw of capitalism, would take advantage of this discontent, becoming radicalized at an early age.

After receiving his doctorate in philosophy, Marx and his wife moved to Paris in 1843, where he would meet a man who would become his life-long friend and colleague — Friedrich Engels. The two had supposedly been drawn to the plight of the workers from their childhoods. They both believed profits generated by the companies that employed them were stolen from wages the workers should have received.

As the two fed off each other, they became more and more radical in their thinking, until they became all-out revolutionaries and were both expelled from France. They moved to Belgium and in 1848, began to work on a pamphlet to share their beliefs. Initially entitled A Communist Confession of Faith, the pamphlet — written mostly by Marx — was published as The Communist Manifesto.

In 1867, Marx wrote another handbook for communist thinkers, Das Kapital. It was published in his home country, Germany, and translated into many other languages. In it, Marx made the point that capitalism exploited workers, and property rights simply kept rich people rich and poor people poor. He went on to write two additional volumes, which were published after his death at the age of 64 in 1883, by Engels.

Marx never experienced the Communist Revolution he sought in his lifetime. But his ideas would be remembered in the minds of others for decades to come. One young Russian was heavily and immediately influenced by Marx’s writing — a 17-year-old boy named Vladimir Lenin.

Source: Communism Part I: How It’s Marketed.

From FEE.org:

• Marx the Man
• Marx’s Flight from Reality

Taxes lecture notes

A Tax Foundation study found that the current U.S. tax code is over one million words in length.

The Office of the Taxpayer Advocate estimated that between 2001 and 2010, the tax code was changed over 5,000 times.

The complexity of our tax code leads to cronyism, loopholes and confusion.

A tax on income discourages earning income.

Economist Knut Wicksell argued that taxes and expenditures should be linked.

Dr. Clark states that when tax policy is used to reshape society, the result is typically unintended consequences.

If elected leaders simplified the tax code, the burdensome costs of taxation would decrease.

Source: “Taxes” from Hillsdale College’s Public Policy from a Constitutional Viewpoint course.

IBM plans to build the first commercially available universal quantum computer

From Fox News.com (Mar. 6):

IBM has announced a major new initiative to make universal quantum computers available commercially. IBM Q will offer up the power of quantum computation via the IBM Cloud platform, a first for the industry, and potentially a major step forward for the field.

Quantum hardware has already been made available by the likes of D-Wave, but its hardware is limited in the kinds of computation it can achieve. IBM Q marks the first time that a universal quantum computer is being offered up. A universal quantum computer is capable of tackling problems that are too large for a conventional system, so IBM Q would have many applications beyond what's possible with current technology.

IBM is pledging that universal quantum computing systems will be made available to select industry partners over the coming years. The company expects to increase the capabilities of the hardware as time goes on.  [read more]

If IBM can build the quantum computer it’s a game changer—no, it’s revolutionary. The reader might want to refer to my blog entry “New Step Towards The Quantum Computer” for more information about quantum computers.

For full disclosure, I own some IBM stock.

Five Forgotten Champions of the Total State: John Ruskin

From FEE.org:

John Ruskin (1819-1900) is inexplicably revered to this day as an aesthete, artist, and champion of small crafts, whereas in truth he was an absolute hater of commercial capitalism, laissez faire liberalism, and the modern world. A hugely influential thinker of the Victorian period, he romanticized a mythic England from the past, in which art and good taste prevailed over commercial frenzy and wealth-making. “I was, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school,” he said. In his view, he completely agreed with his friend Thomas Carlyle that the forces unleashed by Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment generally had destroyed the artistic sensibilities of generations, and they needed to be recaptured through a strong planning state.

His most political book is Unto This Last (1862) which took aim at the division of labor itself. Riffing off the Parable of the Vineyards, he finds it outrageous that the vineyard owner himself was in a position to decide pay at all. The merchant, wrote Ruskin, "does not know when to die."

The entire book is a long and tedious screed against merchants for their lack of loyalty, their obedience to impersonal market forces, and absence of a moral reason for existence. The merchant, he said, is “the man who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.”

Like other critics of classical political economy (he compared it to “alchemy, astrology, witchcraft”), he denied that exchange alone could produce any value or profit. “It is only in labor there can be profit,” he declared. He had a particular beef with John Stuart Mill, and critiqued his price and wage theory, showing near-zero competence in economic theory at all. For Ruskin, economics was not a science but an aesthetic. He summed up his outlook on political economy as follows: “Government and cooperation are in all things the laws of life; anarchy and competition the laws of death.” It's no wonder that Ludwig von Mises said that Ruskin was "one of the gravediggers of British freedom, civilization and prosperity."

Source: Five Forgotten Champions of the Total State.

Terrorism Part IV: ISIS Success & Expansion

There are many vicious, bloodthirsty terrorist organizations operating today in the Middle East and Africa. But now, a decade and a half into the 21st century, even the dreaded al-Qaeda, which killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, has been somewhat supplanted in the minds of those in the West by a group called ISIS.

ISIS stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or ISIL, which stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. To them, the Levant also includes Israel, a very important distinction. They are by far the most well-funded terror group in the history of mankind, with an annual revenue between $2-$3 billion. That would put ISIS ahead of the GDP of 31 nations on earth.

No one had ever heard the name ISIS or ISIL before 2011. ISIS began its rise in 2011, as American troops were leaving Iraq. For U.S. soldiers, the war in Iraq had come to an end. For Iraqis, the country was still extremely volatile. Yet, President Barack Obama celebrated the withdrawal and touted the now “self-governing” Iraqi government.

The very day of the announcement, the leader of Iraq — Prime Minister al-Maliki — received a message that some of his vice president’s Sunni bodyguards might be planning an uprising. He arrested the six vice presidential bodyguards the next day. The attacks on Sunnis only escalated from that time on.

Massive Sunni protests began to spring up. Although al-Qaeda had indeed been crushed by the U.S. military, the few surviving radicals banded together with the surviving members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, attacking Shia Muslims and Christians by the score.

The new leader of this emerging Islamic State — Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — sent some of these hardened terrorists to Syria to recruit and fire up the Sunni population. It worked.

Al-Baghdadi vision was much larger than simply attacking targets and killing people. He declared a caliphate, attacking and holding territory without recognizing borders. As far as he was concerned, all territory in the Middle East was now a part of this new Islamic State.

With no one to stop them, ISIL ushered in a reign of terror in northern Iraq, overrunning towns and villages and offering Christians three choices: convert to Islam, pay a tax amounting to all of their yearly income — or die. ISIL found vicious new ways to execute those who opposed them. Technologically savvy, they also distributed high production videos of their heinous crimes.

ISIL now controls an area larger than Great Britain. The vast majority of their revenue comes from oil wells seized in Iraq and Syria. Former CIA director Michael Morel once explained that the U.S. didn’t destroy ISIL’s main source of revenue because they “didn’t want to do environmental damage and . . . destroy that infrastructure.”

Men and women are being burned alive, drowned, executed and crucified in the name of radical Islam. Yet for the Obama administration, protecting the environment took precedence.

Source: Terrorism Part IV: ISIS Success & Expansion.

Islamic State thug news:

• Mar. 23: UK Prime Minister Defiant as ISIS Claims Responsibility for London Attack
• Mar. 16: Afghan officials: Islamic State kills 3 Shiite elders
• Mar. 15: Ex-Army Col.: 'Way Overdue' to Allow CIA to Drone-Strike ISIS
• Feb. 17: Car bomb in Baghdad claimed by Islamic State kills 59

Health reform: The road ahead

Commentary by Newt Gingrich on Fox News.com (Mar. 28):

Friday's decision to pull the House Republican health reform bill was not the end of health reform. In fact, it may have been the best step toward actually achieving real health care reform -- if congressional leaders learn from the experience.

The Republican congressional leadership erred because they decided to repeal and replace ObamaCare within the traditions of the pre-Trump legislative swamp.

By default, they accepted the fake scores of the Congressional Budget Office. By allowing the scores to exist, they let Democrats and the media quote "the non-partisan CBO" to their disadvantage.

Leadership applied the absurd limitations of Senate reconciliation rules to a House bill, even though it was guaranteed to frustrate their conservative members.

They established a deadline for failure – which we know is detrimental to large legislative achievements. Ronald Reagan took eight months to pass a tax cut, which was giving away money. We took 18 months to pass welfare reform, which had the support of 92 percent of Americans. Obama took eight months to pass ObamaCare – even while he promised it would cure all our health care ills.

……………….

History has taught us: America doesn’t like political health care. There is a deep imperative for Congress to think through bipartisan health care reform.

The House and Senate GOP leadership can learn a lot of lessons from this failed experiment – if they are willing to.

THE ROAD AHEAD

There are a set of principles for successful conservative reforms. President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used them in the 1980s. We followed them in creating the "Contract with America" in 1994, reforming welfare in 1996 and passing the balanced budget in 1997.

As Thatcher said: "First you win the argument, then you win the vote." The best short book on her fight to reform Britain, Claire Berlinski's "There is no Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters," makes clear the moral, human arguments Thatcher used to dismantle socialism in Britain.

1. Communicate with the American people and convince them this will provide a much better future than the current system.
2. The key is to focus on health and health care, not on financing.
3. Health is the largest sector of the American economy and the most complex.
4. As the health reform plan evolves, it has to be described in very detailed question-and-answer systems online, so people can understand how it affects them, health professionals can understand how they will be impacted, the news media can understand it, and the elected officials can explain and defend it.
5. It should be possible to outline the entire new system in a series of very clear charts, so everyone can understand the goals and the directions before being asked to support the transition process. People both have to understand the long-term values-based goals and the policy changes, which will be bridges to achieve these goals.
6. Properly developed, a dynamic, innovative, science-based American health system will be the largest job creator, the largest sector of high-paying jobs, and the biggest earner of foreign exchange in the country.
7. Following a disciplined road map like this is hard work and requires more patience and more discipline than the inside Washington game. 

[read more]

A good idea not just for the healthcare bill but for any major piece of legislation. The House didn’t get a chance to read the bill and to debate it. It was more-or-less accept it or not accept it-- not to improve on it. Hannity is right Congress needs to get together and to debate and hash out a better bill. The bill should contain all the elements that President Trump campaigned on: Buying health insurance across state lines, and health saving accounts among others.

Five Forgotten Champions of the Total State: Johann Fichte

From FEE.org:

Johann Fichte (1762-1814) was the philosophical founder of German idealism, writing and teaching a generation before George Friedrich Hegel, and the first of a long line of obscurantist philosophers whose ideas somehow land with one solid political application: build a huge state led by one heroic dictator. It was he, and not Hegel, who first posited a meta-narrative of historical waves that could be characterized as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

In politics, he was a huge fan of Napoleon, but found himself devastated by the crushing victory of France over German territories, which motivated his “Addresses to the German Nation” (1808), the most influential lecture series on education to appear in the modern world. Here was the first complete outline of what German nationalism should look like.

The new education system should have “an absolutely new system of German national education, such as has never existed in any other nation.” The purpose is to educate a “new race of men” with a system that “must first be applied by Germans to Germans.” Its goal is to inculcate “the true and all-powerful love of fatherland, the conception of our people as an eternal people and as the security for our own eternity.”

Part of the point is to train for work so that “no article of food, clothing, etc., and, so far as this is possible, no tool is to be used, which is not produced and made” inside Germany. In other words: autarky. Germany should aspire to be “a closed commercial State” that rejects “our idolatrous veneration of coined metals.”

His template for what became fascist (right-Hegelian) thought is entirely predictable: statism, nationalism, loathing of the merchant class, and protectionism, spiced up with the inevitable doses of misogyny ("active citizenship, civic freedom and even property rights should be withheld from women, whose calling was to subject themselves utterly to the authority of their fathers and husbands”) and anti-Semitism (granting rights to Jews requires we "cut off all their heads in one night, and to set new ones on their shoulders, which should contain not a single Jewish idea”).

Source: Five Forgotten Champions of the Total State.

4 Questions to Ask When Debating Inequality

Commentary from Steven Horowitz on FEE.org:

The change in the presidency is not going to reduce the amount of time and energy people will be spending debating the question of rising inequality. In fact, I would expect to see such debates become even more frequent and more intense.

I have written a number of articles, and given many talks, on the issues surrounding the claim that inequality is getting worse. Those contain a whole variety of data (most of which can be found in this piece and this one) suggesting that most of the claims about rising income inequality are wrong, overstated, or ignore other evidence.

However, what I want to do in this piece is focus more on the questions that need to be asked in such debates. Specifically, I want to raise four questions that should be at the center of discussions of inequality.

Question One: Are we talking about inequality or poverty?

So often these two issues get confused in discussions about inequality. Those concerned about inequality frequently start talking about how bad things are for the poor. One explanation for this is that they are assuming that rising inequality must mean that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. More specifically, some seem to think the poor are poorer because the rich are richer. That is, they assume that economies are zero-sum so that if some are richer, those riches must have come from the poor.

……………………

Question Two: Are we talking about income, wealth, or consumption inequality?

Those concerned about inequality often slide between income and wealth in these discussions. Even this well-known viral video does so. It starts by presenting data on wealth, but at several places along the way, including one extended discussion of a graphic, it refers to people’s salaries. That’s income, not wealth.

Wealth refers to the sum of our assets minus liabilities. It’s a stock. Income is a net change in our wealth in a particular period, such as when we get paid. It’s a flow. One can have high wealth, but low income, such as an older person living off savings but with a fully paid-for home. Conversely, one can have high income and low financial wealth if one has a large salary but spends it all immediately on consumption goods. The data and other issues are different depending on whether we’re talking about wealth or income. Be clear which it is.

Consumption inequality is yet a third possibility. Here we are talking about the differences between what the rich and the poor can consume.

…………………

Question Three: What about income mobility?

Those concerned about inequality often argue as if the rich who are getting richer and the poor who are getting poorer are the same people year to year. They see the claims that the top 20 percent of income earners have a greater share of national income than 30 years ago and that the bottom 20 percent have less, and they seem to think that means those who were rich are richer and those who were poor are poorer.

But this ignores the question of income mobility. Those static comparisons of two years decades apart are static portrayals of a dynamic process. What those comparisons actually say is that “those who were rich in year x got y% of national income and the different set of people who were rich in year x + 25 got z% of national income.” In other words, which households and people comprise “the rich” changes year to year, as is also true of those in bottom 20 percent.

………………………

Question Four: What exactly are the problems caused by inequality?

If you’ve clarified what everyone thinks about the first three questions, it’s worth asking exactly something like: if poverty is falling, and poor people have a decent chance to get out of poverty, what specifically is wrong with (rising) inequality?

In my experience, one common answer to this question is that even if the poor are getting richer, the even greater increase in the wealth of the rich gives them unfair access to the political process. The super-rich will turn their economic power into political power, often in ways that will redistribute resources to themselves and their friends.

That, of course, is a legitimate concern, but notice that the conversation has subtly shifted from inequality per se to the problems of cronyism and a state with enough power to engage in such redistributions. There are plenty of ways to attack cronyism and to reduce the ability of the rich to turn wealth into political power that are not about forcible redistribution away from the rich or other policy questions that arise from inequality.  [read more]

Good questions to clarify the issue.

Terrorism Part III: Al-Shabaab

Al-Shabaab is a Somalian-based, radical terrorist cell with ties to al-Qaeda in the Middle East and possibly Boko Haram in Nigeria. They believe in violent Islamic militancy and boast a troop strength of between 7,000 to 9,000 militants.

In 2006, Al-Shabaab gained control over Somalia’s capital city Mogadishu, raising the fear in Ethiopia that the group’s violence would spill over into their country. So, in December 2006, the Ethiopian military launched an offensive into Mogadishu and successfully drove Al-Shabaab out of the city. Ethiopia’s action inflamed the group, and Al-Shabaab attacked Ethiopia’s forces in central and southern Somalia, taking control of those areas. Al-Shabaab’s goal was to topple the Somalian government and replace it with Islamic rule and Sharia law.

One of Shabaab’s most infamous attacks took place in 2013 in Nairobi Kenya’s most upscale mall, which was owned at the time by Israelis. A group of Al-Shabaab terrorists stormed the mall, shooting patrons on a Saturday afternoon. At times, they asked their victims if they were Muslim. If the response was no, they were shot. In all, 67 innocent people died and 175 were wounded.

Strangely, Al-Shabaab’s radical brand of Islamic extremism has proven appealing to certain Americans. Al-Shabaab recently used a spokesman for one of their propaganda videos who sounded suspiciously American. At the end of his rhetoric, to accentuate his point, he used a clip of Donald Trump. [read more]

al-Shabaab news:

• Aug. 22, 2016: Somalia Suicide Bombings Killing 20 Claimed by al Shabaab
• July 1, 2016: Al Shabaab claims responsibility for deadly attack on Somalia hotel
• Feb. 26, 2016: Somali president: Al Shabaab attack killed nearly 200 Kenyan soldiers
• Feb. 14, 2016: Al Shabaab claims responsibility for plane explosion killing bomber
• May 15, 2015: Al-Shabaab Fighters Capture 2 Towns in Somalia
• Dec. 2, 2014: Kenya Quarry Attack by Somalia's al-Shabaab Kills 36

The Six Mysterious Elves of the Commercial Marketplace

From FEE.org:

One reason that the Brothers Grimm fairy tales have such appeal — more so than the folklore that came before — is that they deal with a world that is familiar to us, a world that was just being invented in the early 19th century, when these stories were first printed and circulated. They deal with people, scenes and events that affect what we call the middle class today, or the bourgeoisie.

This was the world that serves as the backdrop to the tales of the Brothers Grimm.

A great example of this is the very short story called “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” A cobbler and his wife worked very hard at their craft, making shoes all day. But leather was expensive, and no matter how hard they worked, they could not put their business in the black. They were selling some shoes, but they couldn’t make enough fast enough. They were getting poorer, rather than richer.

One night, the shoemaker left his cut leather out on a table and went to bed. The next morning, a fantastic pair of shoes made out of that leather awaited him. The craftsmanship was impeccable. They were of the finest style. He was able to charge a very high price to a customer who was very impressed by them. This same series of events repeated themselves again the next day and the next.

Some months later, the shoemaker and his wife were financially secure and part of the rising middle class. All their financial worries were gone, and they were comfortable and happy.

At this point, the shoemaker said to his wife: “I should like to sit up and watch tonight, that we may see who it is that comes and does my work for me.” The wife agreed, and they stayed up to watch what was happening in the night.

Why Did It Take So Long?

Now, to be sure, this turn of events strikes me as rather strange. One might think that curiosity would have caused them to examine this long before. Why didn’t they stay up after the second or third time that leather had become shoes? Why did they wait so long to investigate the cause of their prosperity?

In any case, they did stay up and look, and they found two naked elves there working away, turning scraps of leather into fine shoes. The wife thoughtfully decided to return the favor and make them tiny little clothes. When the elves found the clothes, they put them on and ran away with great delight. They never returned, but the story assures us that this was just fine because the shoe business stayed in the black. The shoemaker and his wife lived a long and prosperous life.

Poverty to Wealth

We can see in this one story an archetype of what was then a new type of middle-class success story in the framework of a commercial society. The couple went from poverty to wealth in relatively short order. This came about not because of favors from the king or the discovery of gold, much less from stealing or piracy, but purely by virtue of work and commerce, combined with the assistance of some benefactors in the night whose favors they never sought, but nonetheless came to deeply appreciate.

Apply this story in our times: We are all in the position of poor shoemakers with benefactors. In a state of nature, we would be struggling for survival as most all of humanity did from the beginning of recorded history until the late Middle Ages, when the first lights of capitalism as we know it began to appear on the horizon. Over the next several hundred years, and especially during the 19th century, life itself was transformed. The state of nature was vanquished, and the world completely re-made in the service of human well-being.

As William Bernstein summarizes the situation: “Beginning about A.D. 100, there had been improvement in human well-being, but it was so slow and unreliable that it was not noticeable during the average person’s 25-year life span. Then, not long after 1820, prosperity began flowing in an ever-increasing torrent; with each successive generation, the life of the son became observably more comfortable, informed and predictable than that of the father.”

We were born into a world of amazing prosperity that our generation did not create. We have the expectation of living to old age, but this is completely new in the sweep of history, an expectation we can only have had since about 1950. The shift in population reflects that dramatic change, too. There were most probably 250 million people alive 2,000 years ago, and it took until 1800 for the 1 billion mark to be reached. One hundred and twenty years later, that was doubled. Three billion people lived on the planet by 1960, and there are 7 billion today. Charting this out, you gain a picture of a world of stagnation and stasis from the beginning of recorded history until the Industrial Revolution, when life as we know it today was first experienced by humankind.

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Hostility to the Magic of Markets

Actually, the situation is worse than that. Many are openly hostile to the institutions and ideas that have given rise to our age of plenty. We’ve all seen the protests on television in which mobs of iPhone-carrying young people are raising their fists in anger against commercial society, capitalism and capital accumulation and demand just the type of controls, expropriation and regimentation that are guaranteed to drive us back in time to the restoration of castes, poverty and shortened lives. They are plotting to kill the elves.

In the fairy tale, there are only two elves. In the real world, scholars have discerned that there are actually six, and they go by the following names…

First, there is private property, without which there can be no control of the world around us. It would not be necessary if there were a superabundance of all things, but the reality of scarcity means that exclusive ownership is the first condition that permits us to improve the world. Collective ownership is a meaningless phrase as it pertains to scarce resources.

Second, there is exchange. So long as it is voluntary, all exchange takes place with the expectation of mutual benefit. Exchange is a step beyond gift giving because the lives of both parties are made better off by the acquisition of something new. Exchange is what makes possible the formation of exchange ratios and, in a money economy, the development of the balance sheet for calculation profit and loss. The is the foundation of economic rationality.  [read more]

The other elves are division of labor, risk-taking entrepreneurship, capital accumulation (this to the Left is a sin), and desire for a better life and the belief that it can happen if we take the right steps.

Terrorism Part II: Boko Haram

When Americans think of terrorists, they nearly always think of al-Qaeda or ISIS. But there is a group of bloodthirsty terrorists headquartered in Nigeria that have killed far more than either of those organizations: Boko Haram, which means “western education is forbidden.”

Boko Haram was founded in 2000 to overthrow the Nigerian government and usher in an Islamic state. The group frequently uses bombings, assassinations and kidnappings, with female victims being sold into sex slavery.

In 2009, Boko Haram carried out a series of attacks on police stations and other government buildings. This led to shoot-outs in the streets where hundreds of Boko Haram supporters were killed, and thousands of residents fled the city. Nigeria’s security forces eventually seized the group’s headquarters, capturing its fighters and killing their leader Mohammed Yusuf. His body was shown on state television, and the security forces declared Boko Haram finished.

However, Boko Haram simply regrouped under a new leader, Abubakar Shekau, and stepped up their insurgency. In tactics and results, the menace from Boko Haram has actually worsened. They have used children as suicide bombers, often drugging them against their will to act as explosives. One in five suicide attacks are done by children. According to UNICEF, 1.3 million children have been forced from their homes across four separate countries: Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria.  [read more]

Boko Haram news:

• Mar. 15, 2017: Cameroon: 5,000 people freed from Boko Haram since January
• Feb. 22, 2017: Boko Haram suicide bomber kills 1 in northern Cameroon
• Jan. 20, 2017: Boko Haram attacks refugee camp in Nigeria
• Jan. 1, 2017: Nigeria Finds Chibok Girl Kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014
• Dec. 31, 2016: Boko Haram Leader Urges Fighters: Kill, Slaughter and Abduct

Trump’s ‘Skinny’ Budget Paves Way for a Leaner Government

From The Daily Signal.com (Mar. 16):

President Donald Trump’s long-awaited skinny budget is finally here.

This slim budget reprioritizes defense spending and reverses eight years of Obama-era shifts in spending from a core constitutional priority toward the president’s domestic pet projects. Federal agencies, beware: The era of fiscal profligacy may be coming to an end, and quickly.

Trump’s first budget plays a key role in the congressional budget process. This skinny budget is only part one. It focuses on the one-third of the budget for which Congress appropriates funding every year, called “discretionary” spending.

The president will reportedly issue his first full budget in May. In addition to discretionary spending, the full budget will include mandatory spending (the so-called entitlement programs) as well as a tax plan and other policy proposals.

Cuts to discretionary spending are critical to reducing the size and scope of the government and enhancing individual and economic freedom. They also make an important down payment toward the federal deficit and debt.

Trump’s proposal would cut nondefense programs in most agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency (31 percent), the Department of State (29 percent), and the Department of Agriculture (21 percent).

Instead of across-the-board reductions such as the ones included in the 2011 Budget Control Act, the president’s proposal includes smart cuts to “drain the swamp” by weaning special interests from feeding unfairly from the federal trough.

……………………..

Overall, Trump’s budget proposes to cut nondefense discretionary programs by $15 billion in fiscal year 2017 and by $54 billion in fiscal year 2018. The proposal also aims to increase defense spending by $25 billion in fiscal year 2017 and $54 billion in fiscal year 2018.

It is encouraging that the proposal would fully offset any increase in next year’s defense spending with cuts to domestic programs. Worrisome, however, is that this year’s defense boost would only be partially offset, increasing discretionary spending in fiscal year 2017 by $10 billion.

Trump should set a positive precedent this year by offsetting any new spending with spending cuts elsewhere.  [read more]

Good for the President! Of course, the Left will call him a “Meany” for these cuts because they “believe” he is going to make people starve, etc. What else is new. Keep on cutting Mr. President!  Hopefully the republicans in Congress will get on board with the needed cuts.