11 Reasons Why ISIS Might Be More Dangerous Than al-Qaeda

From the Daily Signal.com (Aug. 28):

ISIS is not just the terror group de jour. They are a hugely successful movement with an apocalyptic, nihilistic philosophy. When they say “convert, join us, or die”, they not only mean it, but they follow through with horrific effect.

But let’s look deeper. What else makes them such a real security threat, to Iraq, to the region, to the world, and to the U.S.? Here are 11 reasons.

1. ISIS is more media sophisticated than al-Qaeda and excels in using social media as a tool of terrorism. The group’s twitter and YouTube postings in English show that the West is often their target audience.
2. ISIS is flush with cash. ISIS’ territorial control allows for consistent stream of funding, and they‘ve developed an extensive extortion racket, as well as selling electricity and exporting oil and gas.
3. Because of ISIS rise to prominence, many al-Qaeda-linked groups are now pledging allegiance to al-Baghdadi’s ISIS, including elements of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Ansar al-Dine (Tunisia) Boko Haram, and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), giving ISIS access to a global network of terrorists.
4. ISIS controls territory the size of Maryland in the heart of the arab world, which is important for a predominantly Arab revolutionary terrorist group. The al-Qaeda core group along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border controls no territory and is dependent on Afghan and Pakistani Islamist militants who act as hosts.
5. ISIS has evolved into a proto-state, with its own army, civil administration, judiciary and a sophisticated propaganda operation. Al-Qaeda core leaders are fugitives who are forced to live a clandestine existence under the constant threat of drone strikes or commando assaults.

[read more]

The author of the article might be right if you go by these stories:

The Blaze.com (Aug. 27): Prof’s Chilling Warning: Islamic State Will Carry Out ‘Mass Slaughter’ in the U.S. if Not Stopped Soon

The Blaze.com (Aug. 30): Islamic State Has ‘Increased Interest’ in Exploiting Southern U.S. Border for Attack: Local Law Enforcement Bulletin

The Blaze.com (Aug. 30): Journalists Got Their Hands on an Islamic State Computer. What They Found in the ‘Hidden Files’ Is Terrifying

I think Ollie North has the right strategy for dealing with the coach roaches as Mark R. Levin calls them. Go after their command, control and communications. The only problem, if you call it that, is that their CCC³ is in Syria.  But they have to be stopped.

As for the second headline this is why America needs to get its border under control. Not everyone coming from Mexico or other southern countries are benevolent to the US. 

Advice from Ben Carson, M. D.

THINK BIG – his recipe for success:

• Talent.
• Honesty – if you leave a clean and honest life, you don’t  have to worry about any skeletons in the closet.
• Insight – comes in part from listening to those people who have already been where you are trying to go.
• Nice – be nice to people. They’ll be nice to you. And you can get so much more done when people are being nice to you. You don’t have to compromise your standards or be politically correct.
  1. Take yourself [your ego] out of the equation.
  2. Try to look at the other person’s point of view.
  3. Just listen
  4. Put personal preference aside.
  5. Learn to love people.
  6. Do unto others…
• Knowledge – because with knowledge, wisdom, and understanding you can get all the gold, silver, rubies you want.
• Books.
• In-depth learning – learning for the sake of knowledge, and understanding as opposed to superficial learning.
• God

All of his points are great. My favorite is the Books point. Because I like to read.

PEERS- People Encouraging Errors, Rudeness, and Stupidity.

Ten Strategies for Improved Parenting:

1. Remember your own childhood. Remembering helps us emphasize. It can help us be more patient.
2. Let kids make the rules. He has found that when we let children have a voice in establishing expectations, we have a lot less trouble getting them to meet those expectations. He is not suggesting that children be in charge of the home.
3. Make certain your children experience consequences. Don’t always bail them out when they get themselves in trouble.
4. Parenting can be a group effort. He is not saying it takes a village to raise a kid, but a village can be of help.
5. Know your child.
6. Set high standards.
7. Make time together.
8. Talk is cheap…and invaluable. Let your kids express their feelings and thoughts openly. Listen to your kids.
9. Marry the right person.
10. Make parenting a true priority.

Just so you know, the doctor is married and has five children. Point 9 might be the hardest of his list to do.

Parents Lay the Foundation for Education for Your Kids:

1. Start rewarding and encouraging learning early in life—and don’t stop.
2. Do whatever you must to encourage reading.
3. Get involved in your children’s formal education—at home and at school.
4. Point your children to successful individuals who have been empowered by education.
5. Be an example yourself.

Good advice for parents. I concur completely. I want to add to his advice that grandparents, uncles and aunts can encourage reading too.

Source: The Big Picture. Getting Perspective on What’s Really Important in Life (1999) by Ben Carson, M. D. with Gregg Lewis.

The jihadi serial killer no one's talking about

From OneNewsNow.com (Aug. 22):

For two bloody months, an armed jihadist serial killer ran loose across the country. At least four innocent men died this spring and summer as acts of "vengeance" on behalf of aggrieved Muslims, the self-confessed murderer has now proclaimed. Have you heard about this horror? Probably not.

The usual suspects who decry hate crimes and gun violence haven't uttered a peep. Why? Like O.J.'s glove: If the narrative don't fit, you must acquit. The admitted killer will be cast as just another "lone wolf" whose familiar grievances and bloodthirsty Islamic invocations mean nothing.

I [Michelle Malkin] say: Enough with the whitewashing. Meet Ali Muhammad Brown. His homicidal Islamic terror spree took him from coast to coast. The 29-year-old career thug admitted to killing Leroy Henderson in Seattle in April; Ahmed Said and Dwone Anderson-Young in Seattle on June 1; and college student Brendan Tevlin, 19, in Essex County, New Jersey, on June 25. Tevlin was gunned down in his family Jeep on his way home from a friend's house. Ballistics and other evidence linked all the victims to Muhammad Brown. Police apprehended him last month hiding in an encampment near the Watchung Mountains of West Orange, New Jersey.

While he was on the run, he disguised himself in a Muslim keffiyeh. He carried a notebook with jihadist scribblings and advice on evading detection. I obtained the latest charging documents filed in Washington state, which detail the defiant domestic terrorist's motives. [read more]

I wonder if this guy had been a Christian you think the lame-stream-press would have reported this story? You bet. It would have been a front-page story. Or very close to a front-page story.

Facts about Common Core

Even American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten—a Common Core supporter—acknowledges that top-down nature in which the standards were imposed on the states. “The public wasn’t involved,” she said to reporters in late 2013. “Parents weren’t involved. The districts weren’t involved.”

James Milgram [Stanford professor emeritus] and Sandra Stotsky’s [prof. of education emerita at the Univ. of Arkansas] research report showed that students who don’t have arrive on a college campus with a solid foundation in precalculus have much less chance of successfully obtaining a college degree in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM). They said “Clearly, if this country [America] is seriously interested in 21st century mathematics and science, then there is even more reason to question Common Core’s mathematics standards.”

Even University of Arizona professor William McCallum, one of the lead writers of the math standards, admitted that they are not rigorous compared to other math-savvy countries.

A Reuters article explains how [standardized testing and data collecting from the tests] will supposedly work:

Does Johnny have trouble converting decimals to fractions? The database will have recorded that--and may have recorded as well that he finds textbooks boring, adores animation and plays baseball after school. Personalized learning software can use that data serve up a tailor-made math lesson, perhaps an animated game that uses baseball statistics to teach decimals.

Johnny’s teacher can watch his development on a “dashboard” that uses bright graphics to map each of her students’ progress on dozen, even hundreds of discrete skills. [read more]

A 2013 story from Smithsonian magazine explained how one New York company is proposing that we allow facial recognition software into the classroom:

Here’s how it would work. Using facial recognition software called EngageSense, computers would apply algorithms to what the cameras have recorded during a lecture of discussion to interpret how engaged the students have been. Were the kids’ eyes focused on the teacher? Or, were they looking everywhere but the front of the class? Were they smiling or frowning? Or did they just seem confused? Or bored? [read more]

One teacher interviewed for the story speculated that in five years this program will be used in classrooms all throughout the United States.

The Chicago Tribute also reports that students could soon be wearing “sensor bracelets” in the classroom to help track their engagement:

The biometric bracelets, produced by a Massachusetts startup company, Affectiva Inc., send a small current across the skin and then measure subtle changes in electrical charges as the sympathetic nervous system responds to stimuli. The wireless devices have been used in pilot tests to gauge consumers emotional response to advertising.

Gates [Foundation] officials hope the devices, known as Q Sensors, can become a common classroom tool, enabling teachers to see, in real time, which kids are tuned in and which are zoned out. [read more]

Source: Conform.

As Pink Floyd might say, Welcome to the Machine.

No technology in the classroom will make up for a incompetent teacher. If the students aren’t motivated, curious, or even passionate they probably won’t  learn. And if the teacher is just there for a paycheck—no passion for what he/she is teaching—the student’s won’t be passionate for learning either. The students will pick up on that.

Public Education Going Mad

In 2009, the University of Minnesota announced a “Teacher Education Redesign Initiative” to alter admissions standards for its school of education. The proposal, designed, by the “Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group,” declared that teacher candidates “will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity,  heteronormativity, and internalized oppression.”¹

The Task Group suggested that future teachers should:

• Fight for social justice even if it’s just in their classroom.²
• Understand resistance theory.
• Explain how institutional racism works in schools.

CREATE (Culturally Responsive Education for All: Training and Enhancement) Wisconsin is a state-sponsored initiative that ostensibly exists to help white teachers learn how to more effectively instruct minority students.³ The program costs taxpayers roughly $1 million per year.

Source: Conform. Exposing the Truth about Common Core and Public Education (2014) by Glenn Beck with Kyle Olson.

¹ Where does the Left come up with these terms? Hegemonic masculinity? (I looked it up. Hint: It’s anti-male and a subset of Marxist theory.)  Heteronormativity? What?! How did I ever get through school without knowing that term? I feel so cheated.

² I guess good old arithmetic, spelling, and grammar is passé. Come on, who does that anymore.

³ Here’s an idea: What about effectively instructing all students regardless of what group they are in. You know, treat them as individuals.

As for a closing to this madness here’s an interesting quote about education from Albert Einstein:

Knowledge is dead; the school, however, serves the living. It should develop in the young individuals those qualities and capabilities which are of value for the welfare of the commonwealth. But that does not mean that individuality should be destroyed and the individual become a mere tool of the community, like a bee or an ant. For a community of standardized individuals without personal originality and personal aims would be a poor community without possibilities for development. On the contrary, the aim must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals, who, however, see in the service of the community their highest life problem.

Deputizing America

From FEE.org (Aug. 18):

It’s an old Western movie trope. The harassed sheriff needs help against Desperado D. Blackhat and his gang of gunslingers. He goes into the saloon, finds the gambler who was once the most feared crack shot this side of the Pecos, and makes him his deputy. Together, they run Blackhat and his gang out of town. If you thought that type of quick-and-dirty deputizing died with the Wild West, think again.  Government is deputizing people all over the country to do its law-enforcement work. But unlike that gambler, they don’t get the chance to say no.

Take, for instance, FedEx. The delivery company has been indicted by federal prosecutors for not doing the Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA) job for it. The DEA alleges that FedEx knowingly shipped pharmaceuticals for online pharmacies that were based on invalid prescriptions, because it should have known “the principals, company names, shipping addresses and billing addresses that were initially connected to” a network of pharmacies closed down by the DEA in 2003. As a recent Wall Street Journal editorial summarized:

Translation: FedEx employees should have connected the dots. But if it's so easy, why didn't the DEA do it? The truth is that unmasking the bad guys would have required an extensive metadata analysis of customer data that is not FedEx's job.

The DEA also alleges that FedEx should have known its orders were based on fraudulent prescriptions from visiting the pharmacies’ facilities for inspection. That’s not something a shipping company is set up to do. It is something a law enforcement agency is set up to do, but the DEA didn’t do it. So by its indictment of FedEx, the feds are telling all other delivery firms that they are now forcibly deputized to do the DEA’s job in the War on Drugs. If they don’t play along, they need to show up in court.

Banking regulators have been playing a similar game. Under a campaign known as Operation Choke Point, they have been telling banks that if they don’t investigate their customers for “high-risk” activity, they will be subject to subpoenas and everything that implies. As a result, banks have simply been cutting off links to potentially risky customers on the simple basis of what business they are in. As Department of Justice documents show (which I document extensively in my recent report on the operation), the motivation for Choke Point was the feds’ lack of manpower to investigate the risky businesses themselves. So they deputized the banks to do their job for them. [read more]

Either the gov’t agencies are just plain lazy or they are abusing their power. Or both. Like the author of the article said if this practice is not put in check we might be all deputized. After all if a gov’t agency can do this to a business why not an individual? Welcome to the Collective.

Progressive Thought Throughout Time

Arne Naess (1912-2009):

• Mankind forms one part of a fragile ecosystem.
• Human action is causing irreparable damage to the ecosystem.
• Shallow ecology holds that current economic and social structures can be adapted to solve environmental problems.
• Deep ecology holds that profound social and political change is needed to avert an environmental crisis.

John Rawls (1921-2002):

• The key to a fairs society is a just social contract between the state and individuals.
• For a social contract to be just, the needs of all individuals party to it must be treated equally.
• To ensure equal treatment, social institutions must be just, they must be accessible to all and redistribute where necessary.
• Only just institutions can produce a fair society.
• Therefore, justice is the first virtue of social institutions.

Noam Chomsky (1928-present):

• Dominant institutions in society, such as the media and banks, are controlled by a wealthy minority.
• This minority runs the institutions in a way that favors its interests.
• Any attempts at reform lead to a drying up of investment, which ruins the economy.
• To keep the economy healthy, everyone, even the poor, must support a system that is run in the interests of the rich.
• Thus, everybody has to make sure that the rich folk are happy.

Robert Pape (1960-present): Suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation.

Source: The Politics Book.

Naess could have been a founder of the global warming movement. The middle Leftists are just class envy radicals which is most of the Left. I wonder if Chomsky includes Big Labor, and Big Gov’t in his count? Probably not.  As for Pape. What he said is just plain stupid. If he knew anything of Islam he would know that suicide terrorism is part of the religion. America didn’t occupy any country when Thomas Jefferson was president and yet the Islamists attacked our ships. Why? Because it said to do that in the Koran. Go back even further. You know why the Knights of Templar were formed? They were formed to protect the early Christians from being assaulted by the early Islamists during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And guess what? America wasn’t even a country back then.

The Founders of Islam

Muhammad (570 –632 CE)

• Islam is a peaceful religion and all Muslims wish to live in peace.
• But even believers in Islam need to defend themselves against invasion…
• …and attack the unbelievers who threaten their peace and religion.
• Therefore, fighting has been enjoined upon you while it is hateful to you.

Al-Farabi (c. 870-950):

• A model state, which does not yet exist, would ensure that its people live virtuously.
• To achieve this, it would need virtuous rulers.
• But people do not understand that true happiness comes from living a virtuous life.
• Instead they prefer to seek wealth and pleasure, and live in ignorant, perverted, or mistaken societies.
• Thus, the people refuse the rule of virtuous men.

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406):

• The unity of a political society comes from the community spirit.
• This is the basis for government and prevents injustice.
• As a society advances, social cohesion decreases and its government becomes lax…
• …exploiting its citizens for its own advantage, causing injustice.
• Eventually, another government emerges to take the place of the decadent regime.
• Therefore, government prevents injustice, other than such as it commits itself.

Abul Ala Maududi (1903-1979):

• Islam is not just a religion, it is a revolutionary program of life.
• Muslims must carry out its revolutionary program.
• Jihad is the revolutionary struggle that the Islamic party uses to achieve its goal.
• Thus, Islam’s purpose is an Islamic state, and the destruction of states that oppose this.

Source: The Politics Book.

The philosophy of Maududi is what I believe most Islamic fanatics follow. At least it appears that way.

TSA checkpoints have a terrifying 'backdoor'

From Komando.com (Aug. 9):

Two tools used by the TSA to protect flights and passengers have dangerous security flaws. Security researcher Billy Rios found the problems and shared the details at Black Hat last Wednesday. This is scary stuff because it could help terrorists sneak weapons onto planes.

The Morpho Detection Itemiser 3 trace-explosives and residue system and the Kronos 4500 time clock system both have major issues. Both come with default backdoor passwords from the manufacturers. That makes them vulnerable because if a hacker figures out the default password, it's no longer safe.

Rios says the Itemiser he tested also came with a backdoor password. Exploiting that,   he was able to alter the configuration of the Itemiser system, which could allow an attacker to prevent the system from detecting explosive residue, for example.

"Once you have access to the software, it's game over," he says.

If hackers crack the password, they could change the machines to stop detecting bomb residue. Morpho says the TSA now uses an upgraded Inemiser DX, but Rios said it could still have backdoor password problems.  [read more]

Yea, that is kind of unnerving. Backdoor passwords are used for testing purposes. The password in this case either needs to be changed to a long random password or removed all together.

The Terror Business

From FEE.org (Aug. 7):

Headed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who holds a Ph.D. from the Islamic University in Baghdad, IS is run like a firm. Similar to traditional firms, IS issues what The Economist refers to as a corporate report, a document detailing IS's attacks throughout the past year. Within IS, the “group’s leaders had been meticulously chosen,” and the management even keeps a detailed accounting of the group's war effort. “They had itemized everything,” according to The Guardian’s source. IS also provides services that the Iraqi government struggled to provide effectively: It directs traffic, fights crime, and issues receipts for taxes collected.

Many who understand how markets and incentives promote prosperity through bottom-up entrepreneurship fail to apply the same logic of incentives and decentralized actors to foreign affairs. Destructive entrepreneurship is a decentralized process of searching for opportunities—which is exactly how IS formed. As an intelligence official speaking to The Guardian put it, “There was no state actor at all behind them, which we had long known. They don't need one.”  [read more]

So, IS is run like an organized crime syndicate. I wonder if they have a code of silence too like the mob. Both employ similar terroristic tactics. But the motives are different. The mob killed purely for money. IS kills for religion or ideology. 

From The Blaze.com (Aug. 8): Militant Websites: Islamic State Leader to Declare ‘Jihad Against America’  What else is new.

Also, from The Blaze.com (Aug. 8): “[W]e will raise the flag of Allah in the White House.”

Collectivistic Thought Throughout Time

Legalism (280 – 233 BCE). Chinese thinkers such as Shang Yang (390-338 BCE), Shen Dao (c. 350-275 BCE), and Shen Buhai (died 337 BCE) advocated a much more authoritian approach to government, which became known as Legalism. The only way that people could be controlled, the Legalists argued, was by a system that emphasized the well-being of the state over the rights of the individual, with strict laws to punish undesirable behavior.

Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872):

• The pursuit of individual rights is insufficient for the social good…
• …because not everyone is able to exercise their rights.
• …because the pursuit of individual interests leads to greed and conflict.
• Individual rights should be subsumed under the duty to one’s country.
• Therefore, say not I, but we.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865):  Property is theft.

Karl Marx (1818-1883):

• Capitalism and private property make labor into a commodity.
• This alienates workers from what they produce, from their work, from their human identity, and from their fellow humans.
• Communism abolishes private property and brings the end of alienation.
• Thus, communism is the riddle of history solved.

Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932):

• Socialists  expected capitalism to produce poverty.
• Yet capitalism has increased the wealth of workers.
• Capitalism has proved to be a stable secure system.
• This means that workers accept capitalism.
• We have to take working men as they are.
• Therefore, socialists should argue for piecemeal reforms under capitalism.

Beatrice Webb (1858-1943): Argued for a welfare state that would provide protection against unemployment and illness. She and her husband argued that social problems could be solved by benevolent planners, administering society in the best interests of all.

Rosa Luxemberg (1871-1919):

• Inequality and oppression exist in a capitalist society.
• The oppressed workers do not need external leaders…
• …since they will rise up spontaneously to throw off their oppressors.
• Thus, the mass strike results from social conditions with historical inevitability.

Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944):

• The law and the will of the nation take precedence over individual will.
• All human and spiritual values lie within the state.
• All individual action serves to preserve and expand the state.
• Thus, the fascists conception of the state is all-embracing.

Joseph Stalin (1878 – 1953):

• The wealthy farmers are an exploitative class.
• They control others because they control food production.
• They resist collectivization.
• They are the carriers of capitalism.
• Therefore, the wealthy farmers must be deprived of the sources of their existence.

Mao Zedong (1893-1976):

• China is an agrarian rather than an industrial society.
• Therefore peasants are China’s proletariat class.
• Peasants have no power against armed capitalist exploiters.
• In order to get rid of the gun, it is necessary to take up the gun.
• Thus, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Source: The Politics Book.

Eduard Bernstein thoughts are interesting. First, he acknowledges that capitalism is stable and actually does help workers. Then later on he says capitalism should be gradually changed. Well, if it is stable and beneficial why change it at all? Answer: socialism = religion or if you prefer socialism = dogma. It doesn’t matter if socialism works or not—it is a matter of belief.

Joseph Stalin’s attitude toward the wealthy farmers is not much different than Hitler’s attitude toward the Jews who he considered wealthy and who he thought were controlling the economy. Both scapegoated groups died in the end.

Conservative Thought Throughout Time

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804):

• Happiness is gained and felt in different ways by different people.
• This means that it cannot be used to generate fixed principles that are equally applicable to everyone.
• Since laws must be agreed as applicable to all and reflections of the common will…
• …no generally valid principles of legislation can be based on happiness.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797):

• Government is a human invention to oversee human needs in society.
• But some human needs and desires conflict with those of other people.
• Government must judge between conflicting wants to produce the fairest outcome.
• Therefore, the individual’s passions must be subjected to the government’s laws.

August Comte (1798-1857): The tendency to attack “the family” is a symptom of social chaos. The family is the true social unit. It is on the basis of families that society is constructed.A

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859):

• Socialism ignores the highest human virtues.
• Socialism undermines private property.
• Socialism stifles the individual.
• Thus, socialism is a new system of serfdom.

Winston Churchill (1874-1965):

• An appeaser believes he is not powerful enough to defeat a tyrant.
• Therefore he makes concessions in order to avoid going to war.
• His concessions make him weaker and the tyrant stronger.

Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990):

• Parliamentary institutions grew out of the practical are of governing.
• Rationalist positions is based on ideology and abstract notions.
• They have existed for generations and govern based on experience and history.
• Rationalist politics engages in destruction and the creation of a new order.
• Thus, parliamentary government and rationalist politics do not belong to the same system.

Source: The Politics Book.

You might say the philosopher Immanuel Kant was a conservative? I don’t know that for sure. But his idea about happiness is correct. It is defined differently among individuals. The state cannot define it for everyone. That is why in the Declaration of Independence it says “the pursuit of happiness” and not the “guarantee of happiness.” It is ultimately up to everyone to pursue their own happiness.

Newt Gingrich in his 2013 book Breakout made an interesting comment about Winston Churchill. He said while Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty he invented the tank after realizing that the combination of the internal combustion engine and treads could be a solution to the problems of trench warfare. No one in the army had thought of this.

Here are more conservative thinkers that are not in The Politics Book:

• “The Ten Cannots” by William John Henry Boetcker (1873–1962)
• “But—I'm a Conservative!”  by Peter Viereck (1916 – 2006)
• “The Essence of Conservatism” by Russell Kirk (1918–1994).  In this article he talks about his canons of conservatism.

Political Thought in Age of Reason

Francisco de Vitoria:

• All humans share the same nature.
• They therefore have the same rights.
• No people has dominion over another because…
• …in the beginning everything was common to all.

Jean Bodin:

• Competing power and structures lead to civil war and chaos…
• …so there must be a single sovereign answerable only to God.
• For a sovereign’s power to be absolute, it must be perpetual and not granted by others or limited in time.
• Therefore, sovereignty is the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth.

Johannes Althusius:

• Humans associate in groups at different levels, families, organizations, cities, provinces, and states.
• The purpose of the state is to protect members of its associations and their communications.
• Elected state representatives must reflect the many views of these differing associations.
• Thus, politics is the art of associating men.

Hugo Grotus:

• Life and property are natural rights of all individuals.
• People have the power to claim these rights.
• The state has no legitimate power to take these liberties away.
• Therefore, liberty is the power we have over ourselves.

Thomas Hobbes:

• Left ungoverned, men will terrorize each other in a state of nature…
• …in which individuals will stop at nothing to ensure their own self-preservation or self-promotion.
• In the state of nature, the condition of man is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.
• To avert a descent into the state of nature, men must enter into a social contract submitting to the authority and protection of a sovereign.
• The sovereign must be an absolute ruler, with indivisible and unlimited power, to prevent factional strife and chaos.
• If a sovereign fails in their duty, the social contract is broken and individuals may take action, leading back to a state of nature.

John Locke:

• Humans are rational, independent agents with natural rights.
• They join political society to be protected by the rule of law.
• Thus, the end of law should be to preserve and enlarge freedom.

Montesquieu:

• A government’s administration duties should be split between three powers…
• …an executive branch, responsible for enforcing the laws of a state.
• …a legislative branch, responsible for passing and amending the laws of a state.
• …a judicial branch, responsible for interpreting the laws of a state.
• Therefore, since these power are separate from and dependent on one another, the influence of any one power cannot exceed that of the other two.

Ben Franklin:

• The health of a nation depends on the virtue of its citizens.
• Aristocrats are conservative and unproductive.
• Independent entrepreneurs are useful, industrious, and thrifty.
• Thus, independent entrepreneurs make good citizens.

Source: The Politics Book.

Except for Hobbes and Bodin all are good ideas. What Bobin wants is a monarchy. But unless the ruler has direct contact with God and prove his communication there is no way to prove what God is instructing him to do. As for Hobbes his idea won’t work because if everyone is a beast then what’s to prevent the ruler from being a beast? I mean he’s a person too. So, the sovereign will eventually fail in his duty.

Like I stated before, Locke and Montesquieu were widely read by the Founders. That’s where we got the Constitution. Especially, Montesquieu.

And then there is Benjamin Franklin. My favorite Founder. You gotta love him.

Medieval Political Thought

Barons of King John:

• Free men have a right to liberty protected by law.
• A despotic monarch can exploit his subjects and punish them arbitrarily.
• A monarch’s power should be limited by the law of the land.
• Thus, no free man shall be imprisoned, except by the law of the land.

Thomas Aquinas:

• External law is divine, and comes directly from God. The eternal law rules the entire universe.
• Natural law is made clear to us through our God-given gift of reason. It guides our moral and ethical behavior.
• Thus, human laws on crime and punishment must be based on reason, so that they relate to the values we deduce from natural law.

Niccolo Machiavelli:

• The well-being of the state is the responsibility of the ruler…
• …and should be achieved by any means possible including deception and intrigue.
• The ruler’s own morality is less important than the good of the state…
• …and he will be judged on the results rather than the means he has used.
• Therefore, a prudent ruler cannot, and must not, honor his word.

Source: The Politics Book.

Machiavelli also thought that people are like sheep in that they can be manipulated by harnessing the weaker traits of humanity such as credulity, instinct for self-preservation, lack of individuality, and fickleness. Machiavelli advised rulers not to be deceptive in their private life, but only in their public political life. Well, I would think to pull that off you would have to be a border line sociopath. Otherwise, a ruler would eventually have a spiritual breakdown. It’s true that a leader is responsible for the well-being of a state, but  Machiavelli’s advice is I believe twisted.

Miscellaneous Thoughts Part 33

• If corporations aren’t people then neither are labor unions.
• I think it would be confusing if you were schizophrenic medium. You never know for sure if you were talking to spirits or not.
• Overregulations is a war on the small businessman.
• To make a student learn a subject make it interesting, or fun, or forbid the student from learning it.
• Voter-id laws are a war on the dead and illegal voter.
• Liberty is the enemy of socialism, communism, fascism, and progressivism.
• If you have a life advisor you can blame him on any bad choices you make.
• Next time a Leftist blames Bush on the Iraq war someone should say, “What difference, at this point, does it make?!”
• Power is the food (drug?) for the progressives.
• I am old school. I prefer email to texting.

Ancient Political Thought

Confucianism:

• A leader should be a “superior man.”
• Less than perfect people can be changed by an example of sincere goodness.
• This superior man possesses the qualities of virtue, faithfulness, and sincerity, which he shows in rituals and ceremonies.
• The superior man therefore sets a good example for his people.
• Therefore, if a leader’s desire is for good, the people will be good.

Mohism:

• Only virtuous capable people should be given positions of authority.
• Virtue and ability do not necessarily come from adherence to tradition or belonging to a noble family. 
• Virtue and ability can be learned through study.
• Therefore, plans for the country are only to be shared with the learned.

Aristotle:

• People come together to form households to form villages, and villages form cities.
• The purpose of our lives is to lead a “good life.”
• We have developed ways of organizing these city-states in order to live a “good life.”
• Living in a society organized by reason such as a city-state, is what makes us human.
• Anybody who lives outside the city-state is either a beast or a god.
• Thus, man is by nature a political animal.

Source: The Politics Book. Big Ideas Simply Explained (2013) by DK Publishing.

Not bad philosophy. The current administration could learn from the first two political thoughts. Especially the virtue and sincerity parts.

The founder of Mohism said if a leader is unrighteous these disasters would happen to a country:

1. Neglect of the country's defense, yet there is much lavished on the palace.
2. When pressured by foreigners, neighboring countries are not willing to help.
3. The people are engaged in unconstructive work while useless fools are rewarded.
4. Law and regulations became too heavy such that there is repressive fear and people only look after their own good.
5. The ruler lives in a mistaken illusion of his own ability and his country's strength.
6. Trusted people are not loyal while loyal people are not trusted.
7. Lack of food. Ministers are not able to carry out their work. Punishment fails to bring fear and reward fails to bring happiness.

Well, it is a good thing none of those disasters are happening in America. Emperor President Obama being a righteous and honorable leader. Hey, wait a second… Doesn’t the country have most of those points? Hmm…

Canvas Fingerprinting

From Komando.com (July 22):

There's a scary new method of tracking people's behavior online. It's called "canvas fingerprinting" and it's fascinating but frightening technology.

Typically, sites and advertisers know what sites you click on and when by installing what are known as "tracking cookies" on your computer whenever you visit a site.

Here's how it works:

In HTML 5 - the standard computer code for most modern websites - every site can be programmed with a "canvas" that you can draw pictures on. This canvas doesn't have to be visible and can't currently be blocked by the usual methods.

Sites that track  you with canvas fingerprinting use the canvas to capture an image of your browser. Every browser on each individual computer is unique, just like a fingerprint. This tracking tool follows that fingerprint around the Web. [read more]

Yea, it is kind of unnerving. Some of the websites that use this technology are: The Blaze.com (kind of surprised by this), NOAA.gov, usnews.com, dailykos.com, aarp.org, whitehouse.gov (no surprise there), ssa.gov, dhs.gov  etc. You can go to the “secure homes” website to search for a specific website.  There are in total 5,619 sites that use the software. That’s quite a few.

If you wondering the NSA.gov and CIA.gov website doesn’t use the technology for some reason.  At least they are not listed on the website anyway. 48 gov’t websites use canvas fingerprinting including cities, states and foreign countries.

The AddThis.com website  and another company created the software. That’s why it is on a lot of website. To be transparent, I use the AddThis widget on my blog but don’t see any of the analytics.

According to Wikapedia.com, AddThis only uses the data from the tests for internal research.

Early Champions of Liberty

The chief purpose in the establishment of states and constitutional orders was that individual property rights might be secured…It is the peculiar function of state and city to guarantee to every man the free and undisturbed control of his own property.  -- Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC)

And unnatural, irrational, sinful, wicked, unjust, devilish, and tyrannical it is, for any man whatsoever — spiritual or temporal, clergyman or layman — to appropriate and assume unto himself a power, authority and jurisdiction to rule, govern or reign over any sort of men in the world without their free consent; and whosoever doth it — whether clergyman or any other whatsoever — do thereby as much as in them lies endeavor to appropriate and assume unto themselves the office and sovereignty of God (who alone doth, and is to rule by His will and pleasure), and to be like their creator, which was the sin of the devils', who, not being content with their first station but would be like God; for which sin they were thrown down into hell,…   --  John Lilburne (1614 - 1657)

Where there is no property there is no injustice. – John Locke (1632 - 1704)

The price of liberty is constant vigilance. –- Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826)

Those who expect to reap the blessings of liberty must undergo the fatigues of supporting it. – Thomas Paine (1737 - 1809)

Let women share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated. --  Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 - 1779)

The accursed system of slavery! To sustain that system, there is general willingness to destroy liberty of speech and of the press, and to mob or murder all who oppose it. – William Lloyd Garrison (1805 - 1879)

All taxes, levied upon a man’s property for the support of government, without his consent, are mere robbery; a violation of his natural right to property.  -- Lysander Spooner (1808 - 1887)

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand (1905 – 1982)

These guys (and gals) don’t know the meaning of the word “politically correct.” You can’t say they are not outspoken. Hat tip to Jim Powell’s 2000 book The Triumph of Liberty : A 2,000-year History, Told Through the Lives of Freedom's Greatest Champions for the list of names. These names (and there are many others) come out of the first section.

Cicero was admired by John Locke. Cicero was killed by Marc Anthony (not directly—he ordered some thugs to do it) for criticizing  him. Both John Locke and Cicero were read and studied by the Founding Fathers.

A lot of libertarians claim Ayn Rand as their own. But she always said she wasn’t one. She had her own philosophy—objectivism. Matter of fact, she criticized the libertarian philosophy. She also said, to be fair, she wasn’t a conservative either. But she definitely wasn’t a Leftist. The Left was criticized most by her. She was a strong supporter and advocator for the free-market system. What’s interesting is even though she was an atheist she still respected Christianity. The fanatical atheistic fascists who want to remove God from the dollar bill should take a lesson from her.

Mind Blowing Optical Illusion

Hackers hit American power grid

From Komando.com (July 1):

Symantec, the company that makes Norton Anti-Virus software, announced some very scary news yesterday about the security of the energy sector. The company said that a hacker group is targeting the worldwide energy industry, and the U.S. is a main target.

The hacker group is called Dragonfly and it's using malware to access and control computers at energy companies in the U.S. and Europe. Its two main malware tools are Backdoor.Odrea and Trojan.Karagany.

Big companies aren't the only ones at risk. Malware attacks are on the rise across the board.

Karagany is capable of uploading stolen data, downloading new files, and     running executable files on an infected computer. It is also capable of running additional plugins, such as tools for collecting passwords, taking screenshots, and cataloging documents on infected computers.

Right now, it seems like the group is using its access for spying purposes, but it could cause actual damage to energy supplies and delivery if it wanted to. [read more]

Scary. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to let companies and even individuals make and sell their own electricity to others. In other words, decentralize the power grid. Right now, individuals cannot legally make and sell power to others. The big power companies won’t like it but at least the whole grid won’t have to come down.

10 Values of Branch Banking and Trust Company

1. Reality- Take things as they are. Not what you want or wish them to be.
2. Reason- an "active mind"---a mind committed to learning from experience, profiting from mistakes, and being free from evasion.
3. Independent Thinking- "the most important psychological decision you can make, to be responsible for yourself." Says, John Allison, former CEO of the bank who is also responsible for the values.
4. Productivity- For Allison, BB&T is looking for high performers who have "a gut level commitment to getting the job done."
5. Honesty- With BB&T it's an obsession with ethical conduct 24/7, complete transparency---not even a white lie, and no exceptions [my emphasis] for the bosses at the top of the pyramid.
6. Integrity- always doing the right thing, always acting consistently with one's philosophy, no matter what.
7. Justice. Justice, as Allison puts it, "means you're going to award superior performance and deal with nonperformance."
8. Pride. Allison puts it, pride is "the greatest of all virtues, because to have it you had to have all the others."
9. Self-Esteem. In the BB&T philosophy, pride is what you earn by living your values, and self-esteem is what you earn by doing excellent work.
10. Teamwork.

Source: I Am John Galt (2011) by Donald Luskin.

Good values to have in any business not just banks. Too bad the federal gov’t can’t some of these values. I would be satisfied with values 1), 2), 5) (especially the no exception part) & 6).

As a side note, in 2008 because of TARP Allison was forced to give substantial control of the bank to the U.S. government. Not because the bank was failing, but because it was succeeding. BB&T had made no subprime mortgage loans. It had 30,000 employees and over $150 billion in assets, making it the 12th largest U.S. bank.

My analysis is this: The gov’t thought even though it wasn’t failing it could fail in the near future. And we, the Fed, can’t allow that. After all it was too big too allow to fail. What this shows is a lack of trust the gov’t has in the free-market system. And yet Washington wants the citizens to completely trust them. Well, trust has to be earned.

The Radical Cool

Greg Gutfeld in his book Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War On You defines what it is to be what he calls “radical cool:”

• Honesty
• Fidelity on principle. It’s somebody who sticks to his guns, and is considered brave, in the course of daily events.
• Unpredictability that starts to make sense once you realize the person has a code. Remember when you first met someone and though, “Wow, this person is odd. Why is he doing that?” Then over time, you find that his behavior isn’t erratic at all, that there is an internal consistency embedded in his behavior that explains every tic.
• Persuasive correctness. It is one thing to be right, but it takes a real character to be right and explain why in simple, straightforward terms.

Those traits fit me to a T. For the most part. I say with all humbleness. Ha! Anyway, those are good traits to have.

Clichés of Progressivism

The following comes from FEE.org:

1. Income Inequality Arises From Market Forces and Requires Government Intervention
2. Because We’re Running Out of Resources, Government Must Manage Them
3. Equality Serves the Common Good
4. The More Complex the Society, the More Government Control We Need
5. Warren Buffett's Federal Tax Rate Is Less than His Secretary’s
6. Capitalism Fosters Greed and Government Policy Must Temper It
7. The Free Market Ignores the Poor
8. The Economy Needs More Planning–Central Planning, That Is
9. Human Rights Are More Important Than Property Rights
10. “I Have a Right!”

FEE keeps adding to the list. There is currently 11 clichés altogether.  The list pretty much sums up the Left’s philosophy.

Class War in the Time of Robin Hood

From FEE.org (June 16):

Only those who are particularly wary of an apparently left-wing message in the legend take exception. Socialists, of course, make the most of Robin Hood as a hero of the underclass and a medieval precursor to modern Marxist class theory.

Because Robin Hood is a centuries-old folk hero and not a historical figure, each generation has been able to reinterpret the legend to fit its agenda. It was only in the nineteenth century, for example, that Robin Hood amended his modus operandi to include giving to the poor. But if we look to the era in which his legend first "became genuinely popular," according to historian Simon Schama, we’ll see that the classes in conflict don’t neatly fit the Marxist theory. They do, however, fit the older, now mostly forgotten libertarian class theory of French and American classical liberals.

The Black Death reached English shores in 1348, killing almost half the population by 1350. The survivors were, of course, devastated. Not only had they lost their friends and families; they lost any sense of order in the world. The Middle Ages were marked by a belief in permanence and predictability. For the commoners who made up more than 90 percent of the English population, the details of one’s life would have resembled those of one’s grandparents and could be expected to be the same for one’s grandchildren. Then everything changed.

The population became drastically smaller—especially among working people—but there was just as much gold, as many acres of farmland, and as many buildings and other artifacts of pre-plague England. There was, in short, the same amount of wealth in pre- and post-plague England, and only half as many people to possess it.

With fewer peasants to till the soil, landlords had to compete to attract the surviving labor. After many generations on the same few acres of land, healthy field workers were suddenly uprooting and moving to wherever they found the best opportunity. Market forces made the lives of working people immeasurably better—and the nobles who lost the bidding wars for their services didn't like it.

As happens in every era of dramatic change, the economic has-beens appealed to the coercive power of the State to return conditions to a comfortable status quo ante.

The Statute of Labourers (1351) made it illegal for peasants to accept wages that were higher than pre-plague levels. Meanwhile, food prices skyrocketed, as we should expect from a doubling of the supply of money relative to food supply.

The poor, forced to endure hunger and shortages, could see ever more clearly that the source of their suffering was not just bad weather or pestilence; it was a political class growing rich from peasant labor. [read more]

And so the producers or if you wish the Common Class revolted. What? You meant the peasants revolted right? Well, not exactly. Yes, there was some peasants revolting but it was mainly merchants and lawyers. They also got screwed by the statute.

The Left will read the above and say, See the Rich oppressed the Poor like always. It was the Ruling Class (the landlords) who made it hard on the peasants by putting pressure on the State to make the Statute. Crony capitalism anyone? Yea, even back then. Before capitalism was even a word. The State had the choice not make the maximum wage law. So, basically all the people revolting or protesting back then were an early form of TEA partiers.

One other thing. Robin Hood robbed from the corrupt oppressive government not from rich. This is another fact the Marxists have twisted to suit their needs.

7 Articles of Impeachment to Take Obama Down

From Godfather Politics.com (June 13):

Barack Obama has committed numerous crimes since assuming the presidency. Many of them have been high crimes, felonies and a number of them of been misdemeanors. In all likelihood, one could make a list of several dozen crimes that would be worthy of his impeachment, but what ones would be best to topple the Traitor-in-Chief?

Andrew C. McCarthy has laid out what he believes are the 7 crimes most worthy of Obama’s impeachment and removal from office. McCarthy is a former Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He is the man who prosecuted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He also contributed to the prosecution of the terrorists who bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

McCarthy has released a new book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment, in which he spells out what those seven crimes worthy of impeachment are. In his interview below with WND Radio, McCarthy discusses his articles of impeachment which are:

1. “The President’s Willful Refusal to Execute the Laws Faithfully and Usurpation of the Legislative Authority of Congress”
2. “Usurping the Constitutional Authority and Prerogatives of Congress”
3. “Dereliction of duty as Commander-in-Chief”
4. “Fraud perpetrated against the American people”
5. “Obama’s illegal immigration policies”
6. “Justice Department’s alleged failure to execute the laws faithfully”
7. “Undermining the constitutional rights of the American people”

[read more]

Yea, McCarthy presents a pretty good case. But will Congress act? Probably not. As for the 7th article, the whole Obama administration is a fraud.

A Teacher Reveals Why He Helped Write Common Core

From The Blaze.com (May 22):

A teacher who claims he helped write the controversial Common Core State Standards informed a stunned audience at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics on Monday night that he decided to get involved because he is a “white male” who has been “given a lot of privilege that I didn’t earn.”

Dr. David Pook, identified as a professor at Granite State College and chair of the history department at the Derryfield School in Manchester, New Hampshire, had just been introduced at the event when he delved into his ties to Common Core.

“The reason why I helped write the standards and the reason why I am here today is that as a white male in society I am given a lot of privilege that I didn’t earn,” he said.

In new video flagged by Campus Reform, the audience can be heard gasping and laughing, seemingly surprised by the comment. [read more]

This is another example of a Leftist espousing the “white privilege” mantra. I think this is the newest fad among the Left. Author Shelby Steele calls this “white guilt.” Which I think is more apt.

The professor says that all kids “equal opportunity to learn how to read” . True, but when the Left gets involved there is hardly any opportunity. The students just become more confused and more bored.

GOP Senate Victory Is Key

From Dick Morris.com (May 27):

Why, some Republicans are asking, should the GOP focus on winning the Senate this year? What will it achieve as long as Barack Obama is still president? We won't get 67 votes to override his vetoes, or even 60 votes to overcome filibusters. Why bother?

There are a number of strong reasons why winning the Senate is worth working for.

• If Republicans control the Senate, they can block the confirmation of judges who will allow Obama's power overreach.
• The president does not have a line-item veto, so control of both Houses could empower Republicans to put in budget lines that restrict Obama's favorite programs.
• Republicans would also be able to stop obnoxious treaties from being ratified.

[read more]

The key here is that the republicans have to be conservative. They can back down on any of those points. It would be nice if they could repeal the Unaffordable No-Care Act aka Obamacare instead of just weakening it, but I’ll take what I can get. But that would require a president, preferably a conservative republican president, that wouldn’t veto the repeal.

The obnoxious treaties Dick Morris is talking about are Arms Trade Treaty and the Law of the Sea treaty which both restrict America’s liberty.

A 5th Grade Teacher Comments on Common Core

The following are excerpts from a Blaze.com interview (May 22) done with Brad McQueen, a 5th grade teacher from Arizona who after working on the development/review of rubrics and questions on the PARCC/Common Core test grew disgusted with what he was seeing and decided to speak out about it, ultimately self-publishing a book titled “The Cult of Common Core.” Below are his comments:

Working on the CCore test was a very different experience and had 50 more shades of bureaucracy. My Common Core handlers weren’t interested in my questions about where the standards came from, who wrote them, who wrote the test questions, etc. If they did attempt an answer they usually parroted the phrase “Teachers were involved.” Something didn’t feel right.

My turning point came when in answer to questions I had about a student writing sample, my Common Core handler blurted out, “We don’t ever care what the kids’ opinions are. If they write what they think or put forth their opinion then they will fail the test.”

I have always taught my students to think for themselves. They are to study multiple views on a given topic, then take their own position and support it with evidence. “That is the old way of writing,” my Common Core handler sighed. “We want students to repeat the opinions of the ‘experts’ that we expose them to on the test. This is the ‘new’ way of writing with the Common Core.”

After a week of work I was convinced of the correctness of my feelings and my research about the Common Core. During this visit I worked with Pearson and ETS on the questions they created for the test. Again we were just window dressing so that they could check the box that “teachers were involved.”

The Common Core is much bigger than just a set of standards, a test, or a data gathering machine. Like a virus, the Common Core tricks its victims into lowering their guard by pretending to be something it is not. But the Common Core isn’t just a mindless infection of our society; rather it is an intentional takeover of our education delivery system and therefore a takeover of our children’s minds. It is a one-size-fits-all, homogenized, centrally controlled education delivery system steeped in Progressive ideology. It is antithetical to everything that makes our country exceptional. This cult is relentlessly pulling our children under its control, with a seemingly endless supply of money, and uses intimidation to silence its opponents.

The Common Core standards are not more rigorous, they are just different. They supposedly only prescribe what is to be learned in K-12 math, reading, and writing. The Thomas Fordham Institute conducted a study in 2010 that compared the Common Core Standards with each of our country’s state standards. They found that 13 states’ standards were at par or better than the new Common Core standards.

The Common Core group confuses “more rigorous” with “more complicated.” In math they boast about how their standards teach less math concepts at each grade level than before, but they teach them deeper. A kid can’t just know that 12-9=3, they have to demonstrate their knowledge of this concept by showing it 5 different ways visually. Many of these ridiculous math problems are posted daily online for the world to see by bewildered parents of equally bewildered children.

That sounds like indoctrination than learning. Why does a child need to show five different ways visually for a simple subtraction problem? It doesn’t make sense.

What this is is a war on school children. How’s that for a meme.

Nine Things That are Common Among Serial Killers

1. They do not have motives for their murders.
2. They have no personality structures and do not fit into the usual theories of development espoused by people like Freud or Kohut.
3. They are not psychopaths because psychopaths can have the ability to control what they do, think, and feel.
4. They are not mentally retarded; most of them have an above-average intelligence.
5. They are not psychologically complete human beings, even though they can mimic and play roles.
6. They have not all been sexually abused, nor have they all been physically abused.
7. They are addicted to killings and they cannot control their actions.
8. Serial murder is not a phenomenon only of Western society. It happens around the world.
9. Serial murder is not a new phenomenon. It probably began with the most primitive of societies thousands of years ago.

Source: My Life Among Serial Killers. Inside the Minds of the World’s Most Notorious Murders (2004) by Helen Morrison, M. D. and Harold Goldberg

Point 8 is interesting. The old Soviet Union had a serial killer. Keep in mind USSR back then was one of the most controlled society. They were supposed to represent a socialistic utopia. And then there was Jack the Ripper.

I believe most serial killers don’t use guns to commit murder. Why? Because most serial killers are hands on. They want to watch their victims die. And they want to cause a lot of pain. It’s hard to do that with a gun.

As I was reading this book, simultaneously I was reading the novel Kiss The Girls by James Patterson. If you don’t know it’s a novel about two serial killers that became “buddies.” If you can believe that.

Obama’s Creative New Way of Describing the Obamacare Mandate

From The Blaze.com (May 23):

President Barack Obama told a fundraising crowd in his hometown of Chicago that Obamacare, known mostly for the individual mandate, is simply a free-market tool “to encourage people to buy insurance.”

“Encourage” is an interesting characterization of what both Republicans and Democrats consistently called a “mandate” during the debate over the Affordable Care Act, and during the legal fight that went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 2012 that the mandate was constitutional as a tax. The law also contains subsidies for lower income Americans to purchase health insurance, which would be a carrot for some to buy insurance, and a stick for all who didn’t.

Although the health law relies on penalties to get people to buy private insurance plans, the Merriam-Webster definition of “encourage” is “to make (someone) more determined, hopeful, or confident,” “to make (something) more appealing or more likely to happen,” or “to make (someone) more likely to do something : to tell or advise (someone) to do something.” [read more]

Yea, that’s an interesting way to put it. More like doublespeak. For one thing, Obamacare is not the free-market. You do not have the option not to buy health insurance. That’s like saying being fined or going to jail is a way to encourage people to pay their taxes.

U.S. utility's control system was hacked, says Homeland Security

From Reuters.com (May 20):

A sophisticated hacking group recently attacked a U.S. public utility and compromised its control system network, but there was no evidence that the utility's operations were affected, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

DHS did not identify the utility in a report that was issued this week by the agency's Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, or ICS-CERT.

"While unauthorized access was identified, ICS-CERT was able to work with the affected entity to put in place mitigation strategies and ensure the security of their control systems before there was any impact to operations," a DHS official told Reuters on Tuesday.

Such cyber attacks are rarely disclosed by ICS-CERT, which typically keeps details about its investigations secret to encourage businesses to share information with the government. Companies are often reluctant to go public about attacks to avoid potentially negative publicity. [read more]

This is scary. A hacker could possibly shut down a power grid. Although EMP attack would be easier. I wonder who the hacking group was. China? N. Korea? Iran? A domestic group? If it is foreign more than likely China. They have been known to hack into businesses and gov’t agencies.

13 Gun Owners Share Why They Carry a Firearm

From The Blaze.com (May 15):

Why do you carry a gun?

Gun owners are regularly presented with this particular question — and some are now speaking out. Using popular smartphone application Whisper, many Second Amendment enthusiasts have turned  to the social network to explain to others why they carry a firearm.

Whisper guarantees its users absolute privacy and, as a result, many of the resulting confessions are powerful and raw.

1. Protect My Family
2. For Equality*
3. Because Evil Exists
4. I’ll Never Be a Victim*
5. To Protect My Kids
6. For When Police Aren’t There. The average police response time is 10 min. Average time of interaction between criminal and victim—90 seconds. This is why I own a gun.
7. So I Will Never Be a Victim*
8. For Security*
9. To Protect My Home
10. So I Can Help Others
11. Independence
12. For My Personal Safety
13. To Fend Off Evil

[read more]

Just so you know, the reasons given with an asterisk were said by women. So, if you are for strong gun-control laws, you’re helping in the war against women.

Michelle Obama Would Like Students to Monitor Family Members for Racial Insensitivity

From The Blaze.com (May 19):

First lady Michelle Obama is encouraging students to monitor their older relatives, friends and co-workers for any racially insensitive comments they might make, and to challenge those comments whenever they’re made.

The first lady spoke on Friday to graduating high school students in Topeka, Kansas, and in remarks released over the weekend, Obama said students need to police family and friends because federal laws can only go so far in stopping racism.

“[O]ur laws may no longer separate us based on our skin color, but nothing in the Constitution says we have to eat together in the lunchroom, or live together in the same neighborhoods,” she said. “There’s no court case against believing in stereotypes or thinking that certain kinds of hateful jokes or comments are funny.”

To address these limitations in the law, Obama asked students to take steps to “drag my generation and your grandparents’ generation along with you” in the fight against racism.

“Maybe that starts simply in your own family, when grandpa tells that off-colored joke at Thanksgiving, or you’ve got an aunt [that] talks about ‘those people,’” she said. “Well, you can politely inform them that they’re talking about your friends. [read more]

Michelle Obama adds, “And if you want to monitor your family comments about small government, low taxes, less regulation, and gun-rights. You can do that too. Welcome to the Collective. And have a nice day.” (Okay, I’m joking. She never said that. But probably thought it anyway.)

Obama and their progressive fellows just want fight against conservatism and Constitutionalism. But we’ll leave the Islamist alone.

Price for Nevada dad to see state's school files on his kids: $10G

From Fox News.com (May 13):

Nevada dad John Eppolito got a bad case of sticker shock when he asked state education officials to see the permanent records of his four children.

He was told it would cost $10,194.

A Lake Tahoe-area real estate agent by trade and a fierce opponent of Common Core, Eppolito was concerned about Nevada's recent decision to join a multi-state consortium that shares students’ data. He wanted to know exactly what information had been compiled on his school-age kids. But state officials told him he would have to pay fees and the cost of programming and running a custom report.

“The problem is that I can’t stop them from collecting the data,” Eppolito told FoxNews.com. “I just wanted to know what it [collected data] was. It almost seems impossible. Certainly $10,000 is enough reason to prevent a parent from getting the data.”

Nevada has spent an estimated $10 million in its seven-year-old System of Accountability Information in Nevada, known as SAIN. Data from county school systems is uploaded nightly to a state database, and, under the new arrangement, potentially shared with other counties and states. But Eppolito wonders why the state is collecting data that parents can't even view. [read more]

If this is happening in Nevada it is probably happening in other states that have Common Core.

The dad doesn’t get it. He can’t see the records on kids because the state doesn’t see the kids as his kids but kids that belong to the State. And any data gathered from his kids belongs to them as well.  Welcome to the Collective. That’s what the progressives in the state believe anyway.

Along the same lines, here are some Common Core grammar lessons:

He [Obama] makes sure the country’s laws are fair.

Government officials’ commands must be obeyed by all.

An individual wants are less important than the nation’s well-being.

The mean republicans in Congress are against the Great Leader’s sacred mission for the country.

Okay, I made up the last line. But then again you never know. Learning has been morphed into propaganda. Exactly what Karl Marx always intended.

Your Phone’s ‘Tilt’ Sensor Allows People to Track You

From The Blaze.com (May 9):

Never mind what you actually text or say on the phone — now even the way you tap, hold and move it can be tracked.

A U.S. research team revealed your smartphone and tablet’s “tilt” and “swipe” motion sensor data — which cannot be blocked — can be used to track your movements and even determine your passwords.

Smartphone accelerometers — the gadget that helps your phone determine which way is up or down and how the screen should be oriented — emit a unique data “fingerprint” that can allow your phone to be tracked. Even if all other privacy settings are locked down, the phone still shares this data with hungry apps or hackers, according to the MIT Technology Review.

Tiny hardware imperfections in smartphone and tablet accelerometers lead to these unique “fingerprints” within the data they produce, Romit Roy Choudhury revealed. The University of Illinois associate professor investigated the phenomenon with colleagues at the University of South Carolina.

“There has been a lot of work to catch the leakage of ID information from phones,” Choudhury reveals in their paper. “We are now saying that accelerometer data going out of the phone can be treated as an ID.” [read more]

Interesting, but kind of scary too. So, turning off your phone’s GPS will do no good?  Huh.

Saturated fat does not cause heart disease

From Wall Street Journal.com (May 6):

"Saturated fat does not cause heart disease"—or so concluded a big study published in March in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. How could this be? The very cornerstone of dietary advice for generations has been that the saturated fats in butter, cheese and red meat should be avoided because they clog our arteries. For many diet-conscious Americans, it is simply second nature to opt for chicken over sirloin, canola oil over butter.

The new study's conclusion shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with modern nutritional science, however. The fact is, there has never been solid evidence for the idea that these fats cause disease. We only believe this to be the case because nutrition policy has been derailed over the past half-century by a mixture of personal ambition, bad science, politics and bias.

Our distrust of saturated fat can be traced back to the 1950s, to a man named Ancel Benjamin Keys, a scientist at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Keys was formidably persuasive and, through sheer force of will, rose to the top of the nutrition world—even gracing the cover of Time magazine—for relentlessly championing the idea that saturated fats raise cholesterol and, as a result, cause heart attacks.

Critics have pointed out that Dr. Keys violated several basic scientific norms in his study. For one, he didn't choose countries randomly but instead selected only those likely to prove his beliefs, including Yugoslavia, Finland and Italy. Excluded were France, land of the famously healthy omelet eater, as well as other countries where people consumed a lot of fat yet didn't suffer from high rates of heart disease, such as Switzerland, Sweden and West Germany. The study's star subjects—upon whom much of our current understanding of the Mediterranean diet is based—were peasants from Crete, islanders who tilled their fields well into old age and who appeared to eat very little meat or cheese. [read more]

Along the same lines, 60 Minutes had a show a couple of Sundays back that strongly suggested that the elderly people that were overweight (but not obese) lived longer than those who were underweight.

When science gets corrupted by ideology and money that does a disserve to science generally. The public starts to question the results science puts out. It starts to lose the trust people put in it. And science should be about finding the truth or at least objective facts. The public should not take any hypothesis or theory that science produces  anyway. Science like all social systems, it is imperfect. It can be wrong.

So, go and enjoy that T-bone steak and don’t feel guilty.

Hillary Clinton’s Thoughts on Gun Ownership

From The Blaze.com (May 7):

Staking out a position to the left of other potential Democratic opponents in 2016, Hillary Clinton said a culture where “anybody can have a gun” will lead to a country with “no rule of law and no self-control.”

The former secretary of state, New York senator and first lady spoke at the National Council for Behavioral Health conference Tuesday in Oxen Hill, Md., near Washington.

“I think again we’re way out of balance,” Clinton said of the Second Amendment debate, according to the Associated Press. “I think that we’ve got to rein in what has become an almost article of faith that anybody can have a gun anywhere, anytime. And I don’t believe that is in the best interest of the vast majority of people. And I think you can say that and still support the right of people to own guns.” [read more]

Anybody? Well, as far as I know if you have a felony record or are mentally imbalanced you can’t have a gun. Does “anybody” include her and her husband’s bodyguards I wonder?  Or is it the elite that should own guns and no-one else.

If a country becomes chaotic because of no rule of law and no-self control it isn’t the gun’s fault. That’s because there isn’t any morality or self-control in the country anymore. You know like the Congress not able to control their spending. You could just as well substitute the word “knife” for “gun” or any other weapon and get the same meaning.

Bus-Sized Asteroid Makes Close Pass by Earth

From Blaze.com (May 5):

A bus-sized asteroid passed by the Earth at a distance closer than the moon Saturday — but the more disconcerting part is how little warning astronomers had of the event.

Scientists learned of the 25-foot asteroid named 2014 HL129 just three days before it came within 186,000 miles of Earth.

The asteroid was spotted by astronomers with the Mt. Lemmon Survey, located in the Catalina Mountains of Arizona.

Though Saturday’s event was only a close shave, incidents like the 65-foot-wide meteor that crashed in Russia in February 2013 — which went undetected until it was too late — are why NASA and other government space agencies around the world are working to better predict these giant space rocks that can have catastrophic consequences. [read more]

Darn, that dark matter! See my April 30 article if you don’t know what I am talking about.

I hope NASA can find time in their Muslim outreach program to better predict asteroids and other flying objects in space. You know to do actual space science.

Hackers Can Mess With Traffic Lights to Jam Roads and Reroute Cars

From Wired.com (April 30):

The hacker in the Italian Job did it spectacularly. So did the fire sale team in Live Free or Die Hard. But can hackers really hijack traffic lights to cause gridlock and redirect cars?

According to one researcher, parts of the vehicle traffic control system installed at major arteries in U.S. cities and the nation’s capital are so poorly secured they can be manipulated to snarl traffic or force cars onto different streets.

The hack doesn’t target the traffic lights directly but rather sensors embedded in streets that feed data to traffic control systems, says Cesar Cerrudo, an Argentinian security researcher with IoActive who examined the systems and plans to present his findings at the upcoming Infiltrate conference in Florida.

The vulnerable controllers–Sensys Networks VDS240 wireless vehicle detection systems–are installed in 40 U.S. cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Washington, DC, as well as in nine other countries. [read more]

That’s kind of scary. I guess you can just about hack anything anymore.

Source: U.S. Knew Weapons and Aid Were Going to Al Qaeda-Linked Militants in Libya

From Blaze.com (April 28):

A U.S. businesswoman and paid CIA and FBI informant in Libya who said she was a good friend of Ambassador Christopher Stevens’ told TheBlaze the Obama administration knew that weapons and aid were ending up in the hands of Al Qaeda-affiliated militants in the country before the deadly Benghazi attacks.

The informant, going by the pseudonym “Annie” to protect her identity, said she met with Stevens on numerous occasions during her time in Libya and gathered information for the CIA and FBI on rebel leaders and terrorist organizations operating inside the country.

Annie told TheBlaze TV’s For the Record that there was “a disconnect between senior elected officials [and] Obama” as to the reality on the ground in Libya. The rebels were nothing more than terrorists backed by members of the Muslim Brotherhood; the fact that the administration was “very aggressive in promoting support for the rebels” was perplexing, she said.

In an example of that “disconnect,” the State Department received multiple warnings not to hire the British security firm tasked with protecting the U.S. ambassador in Libya, just as anti-U.S. sentiment within rebel factions became an imminent danger known to Obama administration officials who did little to protect Americans working in the region, TheBlaze has learned. [read more]

So, now the Administration is now arming our enemies? Nice, real nice. As far as I know Al Qaeda is still our enemy. They still want to do America harm. And the Obama admin. is arming them. Either the admin. is stupid or the admin. doesn’t care about this nation. Possibly, both.

Dark matter 'slingshot' could send lethal asteroids crashing into Earth

From Fox News.com (April 29):

Dark matter could sling lethal meteors at Earth, potentially causing mass extinctions like the cataclysm that ended the Age of Dinosaurs, Harvard scientists say.

Physicists think the mysterious, invisible substance called dark matter makes up five-sixths of all matter in the universe. It was first detected by the strength of its gravitational pull, which apparently helps keep the Milky Way and other galaxies from spinning apart, given the speeds at which they whirl.

Scientists have recently suggested that a thin, dense disk of dark matter about 35 light-years thick lies along the central plane of the Milky Way, cutting through the galaxy's disk of stars. The sun travels in an up-and-down, wavy motion through this plane while orbiting the center of the galaxy.

Researchers suggest this disk of clouds and clumps made of dark matter might disturb the orbits of comets in the outer solar system, hurling them inward. This could lead to catastrophic asteroid impacts on Earth, of the kind that likely ended the Age of Dinosaurs, said theoretical physicists Lisa Randall and Matthew Reece at Harvard University. [read more]

And climate change scientists are worried about the earth getting hotter in the far future. I don’t know I think scientists should be worried about something that could really happen. Like asteroids hitting the earth.

Excerpts from Virginia Declaration of Rights

Section 1. That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

Section 2. That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the People; that magistrates are their trustees and servants, and at all times amenable to them.

Section 3. That Government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation, or community;—of all the various modes and forms of Government that is best which is capable of producing the greatest degree of happiness and safety, and is most effectually secured against the danger of mal-administration;—and that, whenever any Government shall be found inadequate or contrary to these purposes, a majority of the community hath an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right, to reform, alter, or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal.

Section 4. That no man, or set of men, are entitled to exclusive or separate emoluments and privileges from the community, but in consideration of public services; which, not being descendible, neither ought the offices of Magistrate, Legislator, or Judge, to be hereditary.

Section 15. That no free Government, or the blessing of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.

Section 16. That Religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and, therefore, all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity, towards each other.

This document was written by George Mason in June 12, 1776. It predates the Declaration of Independence by a month. All of it is good. Section 15 is my favorite because it basically talks about self-control. You can read the whole document at Constitution Reader.com.

Liberty and Small Government in Tao te Ching

From FEE.org (April 22):

“When the Master governs,” wrote Lao Tzu, “the people/are hardly aware that he exists.” This passage, like many in the ancient Chinese wisdom poem Tao te Ching (pronounced dow deh jing), expresses the paradoxical view of passivity as the most effective political power:

If you want to be a great leader,
you must learn to follow the Tao.
Stop trying to control.
Let go of fixed plans and concepts,
and the world will govern itself.
 
The more prohibitions you have,
the less virtuous people will be.
The more weapons you have,
the less secure people will be.
The more subsidies you have,
the less self-reliant people will be.
 
Therefore the Master says:
I let go of the law,
and people become honest.
I let go of economics,
and people become prosperous.
I let go of religion,
and people become serene.
I let go of all desire for the common good,
and the good becomes common as grass.

[read more]

Interesting. I didn’t know conservatism was that old. The Tao te Ching goes continues:

When the government is too intrusive,
people lose their spirit.
 
Act for the people’s benefit.
Trust them; leave them alone.

Yea, that definitely isn’t happening in China now.

EPA human test subjects not always told about lethal risks of studies

From FoxNews.com (April 2):

The Environmental Protection Agency has been testing the impact of pollutants on human subjects without always telling them about the risks of heavy exposure -- risks that include cancer, and even death.

The findings were included in a newly released EPA inspector general report, which urged the agency to overhaul its guidelines to make sure test subjects understand all the risks before signing up.

"[E]vidence suggests that at least some human study subjects would like to know if a study involves risk of death, even if the risk is very small," the report said.

The EPA is authorized under federal law to perform human testing, as part of its ongoing effort to regulate potentially harmful pollutants. The agency has spent millions of dollars on this research. [read more]

Where is the lame-stream-press reporting this? If a private organization like a corporation had been doing this it would been broadcasted in every newspaper and on the TV. But since the “benevolent” gov’t is doing it is okay. Nothing to see here. Move on, please. Just the gov’t protecting the people by exposing other people to potentially harmful pollutants. Figure that one out. I guess you could call it a sacrifice to the collective.

If this had been animals being exposed the animal rights nuts would have had a stroke. Well, maybe not. Since, Big Gov is their god. Who knows.

I don’t know but this is close to what the Nazi’s did. I believe Hitler authorized his henchmen to perform experiments on people too.

The Truth about the Minimum Wage video

So, true.

Source: The Truth about the Minimum Wage by Fee.org.

Politicians want to raise the minimum wage for two reasons: To show they “care” and to get votes. Well, raising the minimum wage only helps those who are working—temporarily and not those looking for work. Just like rent control only helps those who are already renting.

Politicians and those who support raising the minimum wage just don’t understand side effects or if you will “what will happen in the future if I support this bill.” Economist Thomas Sowell calls this type of short-term thinking “stage-one thinking.”