Hillary’s Health Gives Trump Huge Opening

From Dick Morris.com (Sept. 15):

Hillary’s health now gives Donald Trump a second chance to make a good first impression — something as rare in politics as it is in life. Already polling is suggesting that Trump is surging in the wake of her collapse at the 9/11 ceremony. The New York Times/CBS has the race even among all voters and gives Trump a two point lead among likely voters. Rasmussen has The Donald two ahead. Reuters has it tied. LA Times/USC gives Trump a six point lead.

Animating the data is a sense that she may be far sicker than she is letting on. Check out this video by a Parkinson’s doctor correlating her episodes of fainting etc. with the more serious illness. Click here to view video.

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Already Trump has begun to fill the bill, triggering his surge over the past three weeks — prior to 9/11. His visit to flood-ravaged Louisiana, his meeting with the Mexican president, and his policy pronouncements on national security, the economy, immigration, and child care all projected a presidential image effectively.

In the meantime, consider this list, catalogued by WND.com, of Hillary’s health episodes:

• In 1998, while campaigning in New York, her right foot started swelling causing her pain. Bethesda Naval Hospital doctors diagnosed a large blood clot behind her right knee.
• In February, 2005, she fainted during a campaign speech and her aides had to catch her to break her fall. They blamed a gastrointestinal problem.
• On June 17, 2009, she fell and fractured her right elbow while walking to her car. The break required surgery.
• In 2009, Hillary also had a second blood clot that was diagnosed as “deep vein thrombosis,” dangerous because the clot could break lose and cause a pulmonary embolism.
• On January 12, 2011, Hillary tripped and fell boarding a plane.
• On December 15, 2012, Hillary had to cancel an overseas trip due to a stomach virus. While ill, she fainted and fell, sustaining a concussion. Husband Bill said that her injury “required six months of very serious work to get over.”
• On December 31, 2012, during a follow-up exam at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, doctors discovered another blood clot (her third) in a large vein along the side of her head between the brain and the skull.
• Throughout 2015 and 2016, Hillary has had prolonged coughing fits while giving speeches. She attributes it to seasonal allergies.
• On July 21 of this year, Hillary had what appeared to be a seizure while campaigning. Recorded on video, her head seemed to move uncontrollably for about ten seconds.
• On September 11th, at a memorial service, she had to leave the event while it was still in progress. She had to be propped up as she walked to her van and collapsed getting in, losing a shoe in the process. She revealed later that she had been diagnosed for pneumonia on September 9th but attended the event anyway.

We are entering unexplored territory here. We have never had a presidential candidate who had to pull out before the election. If Hillary resigns, the Democratic National Committee, two from each state, will choose her replacement. While Tim Kaine would get consideration — and Bernie would get none — Joe Biden is the likely choice. And he is harder to beat. Be careful what you wish for.  [read more]

Man, how is she still walking around? The bumper sticker than Dennis Miller made up on the O’Riley Factor-- “Kaine and Unable”--sure fits this situation. She’s unable to climb stairs without help, unable to enter vans without help, unable to tell the difference between classified and unclassified emails, unable to help four American citizens in an American embassy in Libya, unable to tell the truth, etc. I could go on but you get the point.

She is able to take donations from countries that oppress women and homosexuals and take money from big Wall Street donors though.

Yea, Joe Biden might be harder to beat if he replaces Hillary.

One of the Greatest Entrepreneurs in American History

From FEE.org:

In 1962, Ayn Rand gave a lecture titled “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business” (collected in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal), in which she identified two types of businessmen. Burton W. Folsom Jr. later called these “economic and political businessmen.” The first were self-made men who earned their wealth through hard work and free trade; the second were men with political connections who made their fortunes through privileges from the government.

James Jerome Hill, builder of the Great Northern Railroad, was the only 19th century railroad entrepreneur who received no federal subsidies to build his railroads. All other builders, such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, received aid. Perhaps more than any other American, Hill helped to transform the American Northwest by opening it to widespread settlement, farming, and commercial development. In the process, he became one of the wealthiest men of the Gilded Age, amassing a fortune estimated at $63 million.

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Early Career

After the [Civil] war, Hill became an agent for the First Division of the St. Paul & Pacific Railroad. At the time, the line used wood for fuel. Hill believed rightly that coal would be cheaper, so he made a contract with the company to supply it. He also formed a business with Chauncey W. Griggs, a Connecticut man in the wholesale grocery business. Together, they created Hill, Griggs & Company, a fuel, freighting, merchandising, and warehouse company.

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Hill purchased rails, rolling stock, and locomotives and hired laborers who laid more than a mile of track a day. In 1879, the tracks were connected at St. Vincent, Minnesota, to a Canadian Pacific branch from Fort Garry. Since the Canadian Pacific’s transcontinental route was not yet completed, all traffic through Fort Garry had to use Hill’s route. He received two million acres of land through the Minnesota Land Grant for completing the rail line on time. He also renamed his railroad the St. Paul, Minneapolis, & Manitoba. His timing was perfect since the area experienced two exceptional harvests that brought extra business. In addition, a major increase of immigrants from Norway and Sweden allowed Hill to sell homesteads from the land grant for $2.50 to $5.00 an acre.

Expanding the Line

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Only a year after purchasing the St. Paul & Pacific, Hill decided to extend his railroad to the Pacific. Many thought that he could never do it. Never before had someone tried to build a railroad without government land and grants. Railroads like the Union Pacific, Central Pacific, and Northern Pacific were all given millions of acres of government land to build their transcontinental routes. People thought that even if Hill could achieve his dream, he wouldn’t be able to compete with government-funded lines. His quest came to be known as “Hill’s Folly.”

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After speedy construction using 8,000 men and 3,300 teams of horses, the St. Paul, Minneapolis, & Manitoba reached Great Falls in October 1887. Hill connected it there with the Montana Central Railroad, which went on to Helena, bringing lots of new business. In 1890, he consolidated his railroad into the Great Northern Railroad Company.

Hill also encouraged settlement along the lines by letting immigrants travel halfway across the country for $10. In addition, he rented cheap freight cars to entire families. These strategies, rarely used by other railroads, encouraged even more business.

Views on Government

Hill was a great champion of free markets. He was particularly critical of tariffs, calling them “a great enemy of conservation” and pointing out that by prohibiting imports of such products as timber from other countries, the United States was accelerating the depletion of its own. Regarding the federal government’s ability to conserve resources, he once said, “The machine is too big and too distant, its operation is slow, cumbrous and costly.”

A 1910 speech to the National Conservation Congress in St. Paul summarizes Hill’s views on government. He remarked,

Shall we abandon everything to centralized authority, going the way of every lost and ruined government in the history of the world, or meet our personal duty by personal labor through the organs of local self-government, not yet wholly atrophied by disuse…? Shall we permit the continued increase of public expenditure and public debt until capital and credit have suffered in the same conflict that overthrew prosperous and happy nations in the past, or insist upon a return to honest and practical economy?

Hill once said, “The wealth of the country, its capital, its credit, must be saved from the predatory poor as well as the predatory rich, but above all from the predatory politician.”

A Classic Entrepreneur

In May 1916, Hill became ill with an infection that quickly spread. He went into a coma and died on May 29 at the age of 77. At 2:00 p.m. on May 31, the time of his funeral, every train and steamship of the Great Northern came to a stop for five minutes to honor him.

Hill exhibited the classic traits of a successful entrepreneur. He diligently studied all aspects of his businesses, such as which mode of transport was best for carrying track to be laid: caboose, handcar, horse, locomotive, or passenger coach. He did all the analyses of grades and curves himself and often argued with his engineers and track foremen, demanding changes that he felt necessary. He insisted on building strong bridges made with thick granite and on using the biggest locomotives and the best quality steel.

At the end of his life, a reporter asked Hill to explain the reason for his success. He replied simply that it was due to hard work. His hard work earned him the title “the Empire Builder,” and at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, he was named Minnesota’s greatest living citizen.

Hill was remarkable because he developed an area that most people thought never could be developed. His railroads made Minnesota and the Dakotas major destinations for huge waves of immigrants. In fact, Hill sent employees to Europe to show slides of western farming in efforts to urge Scotsmen, Englishmen, Norwegians, and Swedes to settle in the Pacific Northwest. As a result, more than six million acres of Montana were settled in two years. And because of Hill, the small town of Seattle, Washington, became a major international shipping port.

James Jerome Hill has rightly earned a place as one of the greatest entrepreneurs in American history.  [read more]

He is certainly a rare businessman. Definitely not a crony capitalist. 

Abortion Part II: Margaret Sanger

The year, 1957. Mike Wallace interviewed 78-year-old Margaret Sanger, the founder of what eventually became Planned Parenthood, a group that now receives nearly half a billion dollars a year in taxpayer money to function as America’s largest abortion provider.

Near the beginning of the interview, Wallace sought to determine her motives for birth control. Even a young Mike Wallace seemed shocked by some of what he heard from Margaret Sanger that day, including her belief that “the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically, delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things, just marked when they’re born.”

Sadly, and strangely, Wallace never asked Margaret Sanger about the most controversial aspects of her character — her association with eugenics, and the ample evidence of her racism. In her autobiography, Margaret Sanger wrote about a speech she gave in 1926 at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Silver Lake, New Jersey. The Planned Parenthood founder bragged about the fact that afterward, she was invited by 12 other Klan chapters to speak at their events.

Because of Margaret Sanger’s vision, there are, in fact, disproportionately fewer blacks in America than any other race. Since 1973, legal abortion has killed more African-Americans than AIDS, cancer, diabetes, heart disease and violent crime combined. Every week, more blacks die in American abortion clinics than were killed in the entire Vietnam War. African-American Pastor Clenard Childress has said, “The most dangerous place for an African-American to be is in the womb of their African-American mother.”

In Sanger’s 1922 book, Women, Mortality, and Birth Control, she wrote, “We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social service backgrounds and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

In her magazine, Birth Control Review, Sanger wrote, “Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.”

If it sounds familiar, it should. It’s essentially the same policy advocated and carried out by Germany’s Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, whose sterilization policy Sanger openly praised. Most people associate eugenics with Hitler and the Nazis. And while the Nazis may have perfected the movement, they did not start it. It began in England and spread to the United States very early in the 20th century.

Margaret Sanger was, in fact, a racist and eugenicist who advocated for the, “extermination of the Negro population.”

Source: Abortion Part II: Margaret Sanger from Glenn Beck.com.

There is a part III and part IV of this series too.

Under Margaret Sanger’s system Beethoven would have been aborted. Because his father had syphilis and the mother had tuberculosis (TB). They already had four children. One was blind, one died, one was deaf and dumb, and the fourth had TB too.

When you kill an unborn child not only do you take away its future but also a possible contribution to society. The reader might ask what about Hitler or any murderer? If they were aborted there would have been no future victims. A baby is amoral until he/she gets old enough to know the difference between good and evil. Only God knows what possible futures a baby would have.  Mankind has no clue what a baby that grows up will do. Hitler was a fine arts student before he became an evil dictator.

Basically, Margaret Sanger and eugenicists like her were playing God.

Hillary’s Latest Lie: Makes Up Story About College Bullying

From Dick Morris.com (Sept. 11):

On Wednesday, Hillary Clinton told another whopper about her background — a blatant lie designed to make her look more human and vulnerable.

She related the story of taking the LSAT, the test to enter law school, and being harassed by men in the room also taking the test who claimed that she should not be taking their place in law school since they would lose their draft deferments.

She claims that “one of [the men] even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around. It was intense. It got very personal. But I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t afford to get distracted because I didn’t want to mess up the test. So I just kept looking down, hoping that the proctor would walk in the room.”

Good story, but a made up yarn.

Up until February 16, 1968, the young man in Hillary’s story would have had a case. Law students were exempt from the draft prior to that date. So any woman entering law school would, indeed, be taking the place of a man who could be drafted. 

BUT…the deferment for law school students (and most graduate students) ended in February, 1968. After that date, law school offered no protection at all from the draft. [read more]

Dick Morris goes on to say in Hillary’s book Living History she never mentioned the incident.

This isn’t the only case where she makes up incidents from her past. In Mr. Morris’ book Armageddon: How Trump Can Beat Hillary he talks about a story she made up during a speech about a “ethnic” high school goalie in a girl’s soccer game.  She claimed the goalie told her on a cold day when she was in high school that “I wish people like you would freeze.” The problem with the story is, back when Hillary was a high-school student high schools didn’t have organized girl sports like they do now. Dick Morris says she makes up stories because she doesn’t know how to relate to audiences so she fabricates stories just be relatable.

Then her campaign blames her coughing spells on allergies.  Now the public finds out she had pneumonia. Who knows for sure what she had. It could be bronchitis, tuberculosis,  congestive heart failure, etc. She and her staff has a problem with the truth.

When Socialism Works

From FEE.org:

Because of Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the presidency, many Americans are asking if “democratic socialism” is possible. Can there be a form of socialism that really includes the voices of all the people?

In a March 17 feature at FEE.org, economist Sandy Ikeda offered some strong reasons to doubt it (see “‘Democratic Socialism’ Is a Contradiction in Terms”). What Ikeda says is right, but notice what his argument does notimply: that democratic socialism will fail in all contexts. His critique addresses the application of democratic socialism to a large-scale heterogeneous group. But if we think about very small, more homogeneous groups, something like democratic socialism can work. Not only can it work; it largely does work within such small groups all throughout the modern liberal, capitalist order. In fact, the liberal order can be seen as the unplanned interaction of lots of little socialist institutions.

To see this point, we need a brief detour into the long history of humanity to explore an important distinction that F.A. Hayek makes in his later work: We humans spent most of our evolutionary past in small, kin-based groups of several dozen people. As a result, our brains evolved in ways that were adaptive for that environment. (See Mike Reid's "The Myth of Primitive Communism" on why communal property was also a cultural adaptation.)

In such an environment, which Hayek termed an “intimate” order, we know everyone we interact with personally. We know what they like and what they need. That intimacy enables us to make rough interpersonal utility comparisons in ways we can’t otherwise. It therefore enables us to be collectivist and altruistic. In other words, we can structure such groups with forms of socialism because of their small size, intimacy, and homogeneity.

These contrast with what Hayek called the “anonymous” order of a market-based commercial society. In the market, many of our dealings are with people we do not know personally. Think about how many people you interact with directly in market transactions where you know absolutely nothing about them. Do you know anything about the cashier at the grocery store? Now extend that out to the people you deal with over the phone or the Internet. And now extend that to the millions of people who contributed directly or indirectly to making your clothes, or that pencil you’re using. We rely on millions of anonymous others every single day.

Hayek advises us that anonymous social orders cannot be collectivist or altruistic or socialistic. There’s no way for any one person or group to acquire enough knowledge about everyone’s preferences or about how best to use existing resources to make the things others might want. This is the classic debate over the possibility of rational calculation under socialism. But both Hayek and Ludwig von Mises understood that the impossibility of socialism did not apply to small, intimate, homogeneous social units where those knowledge problems did not exist.

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So we should be careful when we say democratic socialism “can’t work.” What we should be saying is that it can’t work for a society of any size beyond the smallest and most intimate. As Hayek says, even the broad, extended, anonymous order of the great society will contain within it numerous small groups of deliberate organization. The key is ensuring that those groups can interact in ways that produce peace, prosperity, and social cooperation — and that goal requires a market. Pursuing such aims through democratic socialism will only produce conflict, poverty, and totalitarianism.  [read more]

Bernie Sanders and others like him would never get the point of the article because socialism is a religion to them. They have blind faith in it. But the article makes perfect sense. Socialism might work if the members of the society share not only the benefits but the costs. Even in a family setting that might not be the case.

Impossible People

A commentary by Eric Metaxas on Break Point.org:

In the opening scene of the 2001 film adaptation of “The Fellowship of the Ring,” Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel whispers hauntingly, “The world has changed. I can feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost; for none now live who remember it.”

Western Christians in 2016 can relate. Something has shifted. The world we inhabit seems to have become disenchanted, and so many of those around us have entered a state in some ways worse than atheism—a state of indifference toward God and the supernatural.

All of this has made evangelism and discipleship a lot more challenging. As sociologist Peter Berger wrote, we live in “a world without windows.” And for the inhabitants of windowless late modernity, questions about sin, salvation and ultimate meaning just don’t matter that much.

So, how did we get here? And more importantly, what does being a Christian look like in this context? Os Guinness, who needs no introduction, says the only right response today is to become what he calls “Impossible People.” That’s the name of his latest book, appropriately subtitled, “Christian Courage, and the Struggle for the Soul of Civilization.” Folks, this book is a manifesto for our moment—a guide on how to live counter-culturally in what Os describes as our “cut-flower civilization.”

But what about the bizarre term “impossible people”? Where does that come from? Well, it was originally applied to eleventh-century Benedictine reformer, Peter Damian. Among other things, this “impossible man” spoke out against the practice of selling church positions for money as well as against widespread sexual sin among the clergy. His commitment to Jesus alone was so fierce that he won a reputation for being, as Os puts it, “unmanipulable, unbribable, and undeterrable.”

“Impossible people,” Os explains, “are different people. And different they are called to be or they will be irrelevant.” But that’s not easy in our cultural moment. We live in a civilization that has rejected its own foundations and embarked on a project to build what he calls a new, secular Babel. But it’s becoming ever clearer that this secular Utopia can’t hold together.

Why? Because the very belief in freedom that made Western liberal democracies uniquely successful is crumbling, replaced by the concept of consensus. As Os points out, the Christian doctrines of the Imago Dei, of Original Sin, and transcendent truth undergird our belief in freedom. Secular modernity lacks these foundational doctrines. Like a cut flower, it can maintain its beauty only so long without its roots. Soon it will wilt, and ultimately die.

“Impossible people” are here precisely to arrest this decline—to frustrate the secular project by consciously living out a belief in a supernatural reality beyond our windowless world.  [read more]

The “unmanipulable, unbriable, and undeterrable” should be conservatives’ manifesto too especially when it comes to saving this America and defending the Constitution like Ted Cruz did in the senate. Hillary Clinton doesn’t have the first two traits. Not sure about the last one.  Donald Trump probably has the second. The first I am worried about—he wants to be loved. The last I am not sure about for him either.

If a person can’t be an “impossible person” then maybe he/she can be a loving resistance fighter.  Both kinds of people are very similiar.

Haven’t read the book but it sounds interesting.

Bastiat, Socialism, and the Blank Slate

From FEE.org:

“It is evident,” the French economist and parliamentarian Frédéric Bastiat wrote a century and a half ago, “that the socialists set out in quest of an artificial social order only because they deemed the natural order to be either bad or inadequate; and they deemed it bad or inadequate only because they felt that men’s interests are fundamentally antagonistic, for otherwise they would not have recourse to coercion. It is not necessary to force into harmony things that are inherently harmonious.”¹

Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek made a similar point: “Much of the opposition to a system of freedom under general laws arises from the inability to conceive of an effective coordination of human activities without deliberate organization by commanding intelligence. One of the achievements of economic theory has been to explain how such a mutual adjustment of the spontaneous activities of individuals is brought about by the market, provided that there is a known delimitation of the sphere of control of each individual.”²

Bastiat spoke of a “natural harmony” between men, a “natural and wise order that operates without our knowledge.”³ Again this is similar to Hayek’s observation, drawn from the Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Ferguson, that social order is the result of “human action but not of human design.”

Bastiat argued that his views were based on reality and not on some ideological view of how man ought to be. The major difference between economists—by which he meant liberal market economists—and socialists was: “The economists observe man, the laws of his nature and the social relations that derive from these laws. The socialists conjure up a society out of their imagination and then conceive of a human heart to fit this society.”⁴

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Dream-making helps explain a striking feature on the left—while advocating love and peace it promotes hatred and war. Bastiat said that while collectivists “have a kind of sentimental love for humanity in their hearts, hate flows from their lips. Each of them reserves all his love for the society that he has dreamed up; but the natural society in which it is our lot to live cannot be destroyed soon enough to suit them, so that from its ruins may rise the New Jerusalem.”⁶ Aldous Huxley made the same point when he noted that “faith in the bigger and better future is one of the most potent enemies to present liberty: for rulers feel themselves justified in imposing the most monstrous tyranny on their subjects for the sake of the wholly imaginary fruits which these tyrannies are expected to bear some time in the distant future.”⁷

This conflict between Bastiat and the socialists couldn’t be more stark. For him, man was born with specific needs. Nature endowed him with certain faculties, and only by the application of such faculties is man able to sustain himself. For the socialist, man is merely, as Steven Pinker titles his new book, a “blank slate,” which can be written on as the planners wish in order to achieve the New Jerusalem. Pinker notes that Marx and Engels “were adamant that human nature has no enduring properties. It consists only in the interactions of groups of people with their material environments in a historical period, and constantly changes as people change their environment and are simultaneously changed by it. The mind therefore has no innate structure but emerges from the dialectical process of history and social interaction.”⁸

Mao Zedong wrote: “A blank sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.”⁹ Soviet writer Maxim Gorky said that to Lenin the working classes are “what minerals are to the metallurgist.”¹⁰

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Robert Owen, the man many credit with coining the term “socialism,” was clearly an advocate of remaking humanity to create utopia. “Any general character, from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened, may be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of the proper means; which means are, to a great extent, at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of men.” This utopia, Owen said, “could be attained only [through] the scientific arrangement of the people.”¹⁴

Owen believed in the blank slate. For him no human being “is responsible for his will and his own actions.” Instead “his whole character—physical, mental and moral,—is formed independently of himself.”¹⁵ This led Owen to conclude that “it is futile to call individuals to account for their behavior. Instead, society should recognize its power to shape each of its members into a person of high character.”¹⁶ If Owen were allowed to “scientifically” arrange people, “There will be no cruelty in man’s nature, the animal creation will also become different in character.” The result would be a “terrestrial paradise . . . in which harmony will pervade all that will exist upon earth.”¹⁷  [read more]

The Left never will get human nature. They will always want to change human nature and create a utopia. And because of these two delusional impulses, peoples’ lives will always be miserable.

9/11 Anniversary: 10 Lessons Learned From the 15-Year ‘Long War’

Commentary from Steven Bucci on The Daily Signal.com:

Having been in the Pentagon on 9/11, it does not seem as if it was 15 years ago that our lives and national trajectory were changed so much.

For those who have been in the middle of it all, the time has gone swiftly. To many others, it is ancient history. Some interns at The Heritage Foundation were only as young as 4 and 5 years old on that chaotic day. That said, what lessons could we learn from the trial of the Long War? Here are 10 worth considering.

1. Every nation is vulnerable, and democracies are even more so.
2. America is resilient.
3. Terrorism is a much longer-term foe than any nation-state opponent.
4. America must maximize both security and civil liberties.
5. Every American must know their principles. The American people as a whole must be engaged, and therefore must know what they believe. This is not an “Inside the Beltway” issue, but one for all Americans.
6. You don’t always get to pick your foe, or when you will fight them.
7. The “baddest” and best military in the world (and America has it) can still have trouble defeating an asymmetric foe. [America’s] military follows the laws of war, and asymmetric opponents do not. It does not mean we should change, but it must be recognized that a small, ideo logically driven foe can sometimes be tough to eradicate. That is not failure, it’s reality.
8. America’s leaders need to lead. America’s system is not quick or easy, but it is the best system of government in the world. Stop playing games, and do your jobs.
9. America’s youth is still superlative. The number of young people in government and around the country in business who have character, a fine work ethic, and a willingness to sacrifice are more than a critical mass to keep America moving forward. They “get it,” and are ready to take the baton. America’s future is bright.
10. Lastly, America is not perfect, but its people, and frankly the rest of the world, do believe it is exceptional, and expect it to act the part. Americans are not better than everyone else, but our country has been called to play a role that flows from the principles that the Founding Fathers built into the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. America is exceptional, and it must lead.

It has been a long, difficult 15 years. It has been a time of sacrifice and struggle that no American asked for, or wanted. There are lessons to be learned, and if they are heeded, America’s time is not over. [read more]

Good lessons to learn and so true. Hope the next president learns these lessons.

Abortion Part I: The Founders’ Views

While there is no specific language in the Constitution regarding abortion, the Founders did leave behind their beliefs on the topic. For that insight, we turn to author and historian David Barton.

After America separated from Great Britain and the Founding Fathers made their own brand-new and unique government, they still preserved and protected the legal position against abortion. This fact is made clear by founding father James Wilson. James Wilson was one of only six Founders who signed both the declaration and the Constitution. He was the second most active member at the Constitutional Convention, and he was placed as an original justice on the US Supreme Court by President George Washington.

Wilson began America’s first organized legal training, and he authored our first legal textbook for students in which he told law students, quote, with consistency, beautiful, and undeviating, human life, from its commencement to its close, is protected by the common law. In the contemplations of law, life begins when the infant is first able to stir in the womb by the law that life is protected, end quote.

American law was clear. As soon as it was known that there was life in the womb, at that point, that life was protected by law for the purpose of government was to protect all unalienable rights, including that of life. In the Founders’ day, they recognized that there was a right to life in the womb, so soon as James Wilson said, quote, the infant is first able to stir. That is, when movement can be felt inside and, thus, they knew for sure that there was indeed life within. But with today’s technology, it is now possible to know with a certainty that life is within the womb for only a few days after conception.

Regardless, whenever it is known that life was within, according to the documents penned by our Founding Fathers, at that point, unborn life was to be protected under the law.

In the late 1700s, America’s attitude on life stood out compared to the rest of the world. Because our Founders believed the things that they did about God and nature, there was a difference between the law here and elsewhere around the world. Across much of secular Europe, it was wrongly believed that parents — not God — gave life to their children. So under the law of those countries, parents had the right to take their child’s life. After all, they believed they had given it. But Americans knew that the life of a child came not from parents, but from God. Parents, therefore, had no right to deprive an unborn child of its life.

A signer of the declaration, John Witherspoon acknowledged, “Some nations have given parents the power of life and death over their children. But here in America, we have denied the power of life and death to parents.”

It may well be that America’s Founding Fathers didn’t specifically address the abortion issue because they couldn’t conceive of a people that would destroy the lives of 55 million unborn babies in a 43-year period of time. [read more]

Let’s see. A fetus has his/her own DNA. That’s been proven scientifically. So, that makes it human. Otherwise how would you classify a fetus? All I have to say is: Fetuses matter.

Ominous Signs for Turkish Christians

Commentary from Break Point.org by John Stonestreet (Aug. 8):

In once-secular Turkey, Christians have become targets of Muslim persecution. Here’s what you need to know.

For nearly the last hundred years, Turkey, straddling Europe and Asia, has walked a precipitous path. Turning its back on the brutal Ottoman Empire of its past, the nation of 80 million people had attempted to combine its dominant Muslim culture with a more Western-oriented secularism—allowing a measure of political and religious freedom not common in most other Muslim-majority states.

Well, it seems as if Turkey is now on its way to falling into an intolerant form of Islam—if it hasn’t already. How do I know this? By listening to the country’s beleaguered Christian minority, which has dwindled from 22 percent of the population to a microscopic 0.2 percent just over the last century.

……………………..

All [Turkey’s coup aftermath] of that is bad enough, but we are seeing something else in Turkey common in Muslim-dominant cultures when chaos breaks out: Christians become convenient targets. London’s Express newspaper reports that hardline Sunni Muslims, whipped into a frenzy by imams calling on them to take to the streets, targeted a small, Protestant church in a shopfront in Matalya. Shouting “Allahu Akbar,” the mob smashed the church’s windows, although no one was hurt.

“The attack on the church was light,” the pastor told the Express. “But it’s significant that it was the only shopfront attack in those three days. We were the only targets.” In one Black Sea city another group smashed the windows of the Santa Maria Church, breaking down its door with hammers. And the Turkish government has confiscated churches in the city of Diyarbakir.

Nine out of ten Turks believe that to be a Turk is to be a Muslim, so non-Muslims are automatically suspect. Such suspicion has led to violence against Christians even before the latest attacks. The Expressnotes, “In 2007, three Christian employees of a publishing house for Bibles in Malatya were attacked. After being tortured, their hands and feet were tied and their throats cut by five Muslim assailants.” [read more]

Yea, it’s sounding like Turkey is turning into Germany when Hitler was in power. It’s too bad.

Hillary Clinton: A Portrait of Power and Corruption

A commentary from FEE.org by Joey Clark:

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, a decaying painting is locked away to decay in its attic mausoleum as a symbol of a beautiful boy’s tarnished soul. By way of contrast, the embodiment of America’s ruling class now lives and breathes in the public persona of one person, Hillary Clinton.

………………….

Many Americans agree there is something about the shadow and shade of Hillary’s portrait that leaves more questions than answers, a “touch of cruelty” seeping through the cracks in her carefully crafted façade.

In a word, many Americans find her “mendacious,” and the revelations regarding the appearance of the Clinton State Department’s “pay-to-play” scheme – delivering special access and favors to Clinton Foundation donors – is only the latest episode in a long series of scandals besmirching her trustworthiness.

………………..

The Bargain

Hillary Clinton strikes me at once as a Faustian figure, but rather than making a deal with the devil for eternal youth or unlimited knowledge, she has asked for state power.

Spurred by her idealism to serve the poor and underprivileged, this victim of her own privilege has engaged in a bargain time immemorial: give me the power of the state to kill and steal and coerce other people with impunity, and I will use this power to bring social justice to the land. Like most before her who have made this pact, the promise of power consumes and corrupts her noble goals.

…………………

The Radical Turned Establishment Figure

In 1969, Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis, titled “There Is Only the Fight,” on the work of that now infamous radical, Saul Alinsky. Alinsky seems to have played the same role for young Hillary Rodham that Lord Henry Wotton played for young Dorian Gray – the enchanting snake in the Garden of Eden. At the beginning of his own book, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky quotes himself:

Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.

That said, Hillary diverges with her role model Alinsky in her thesis on one crucial point. Rather than rebelling against the establishment to win her own kingdom, she would become the establishment. [read more]

Hillary Clinton got interested in Alinsky because of a radical Leftist youth minister by the name of Don Jones she met when she was a teenager. Dick Morris has said that Hillary follows advice of advisors exclusively. Well, this Jones person could be called an advisor. He got her into Alinsky methods and idealogy.

6 Facts Highlight Why We Need to Rebuild Our Military

Commentary from Justin Johnson on The Daily Signal.com (May 17):

The U.S. military seems to be breaking. Senior military leaders have made dire statements before Congress, and story after story is revealing the potentially deadly challenges facing our men and women in uniform.

As Congress considers the annual defense authorization bill, here are six clear, real-world examples of why Congress needs to use the defense bill to start rebuilding the U.S. military.

1. The Marine Corps is pulling parts off of museum planes to keep their F-18s flying.
2. Only one-third of Army brigades are ready for combat.
3. The Air Force is cannibalizing parts from some F-16’s to keep other F-16’s flying and is pulling parts off museum planes to keep their B-1 bombers flying.
4. The Navy keeps extending deployments of its ships, but still doesn’t have enough to meet demand.
5. Serious crashes of Marine Corps planes and helicopters are nearly double the 10-year average.
6. The Air Force’s B-52 bombers are an average of 53 years old.

These six facts show the consequences of cutting the national defense budget by 25 percent over the last five years. [read more]

Pretty bad. Of all the spending the gov’t does, keeping the military in fighting order is the most important. Hopefully, if Donald Trump becomes president he can “make the military great again.” Hillary probably won’t.

The Political Illusion

A commentary by Chuck Colson on Break Point.org:

Politicians have been promising to fix the deficit for years. In 1976 both presidential candidates made promises to balance the books. But today the debt is bigger than ever, and growing.

And it's finally beginning to dawn on people that government is not able to deliver on a lot of its promises.

For most of us, that's a hard lesson to learn. We instinctively turn to government to solve our social problems. It's a habit reinforced from the time we're young.

Listen to these quotations from the Teachers' Edition of a fifth-grade social studies textbook.

"Today, when people lose their jobs," the textbook says, "they can get some money from the government." A few pages later the book says, "Today, families who do not have enough money for food can get money from the government." And a few pages later we read, "Today families who cannot afford to pay their rent can get help from the government."

The message is obvious: Government is the solution to every social need.

And here's a quotation that sums it all up. It's from a junior high civics textbook, explaining why the national government has grown so large. The book says that over time, "People were no longer content to live as their forefathers had lived. They wanted richer, fuller lives. They wanted the government to help make their lives rich and full."

What is this book teaching kids? That government can make our lives "rich and full."

This goes far beyond the traditional philosophy of limited government, in which the state is given only certain specified tasks, such as operating a police force and regulating traffic.

Modern societies have fallen prey to what political writer Jacques Ellul calls "the political illusion": the idea that government is actually capable of creating the good life, the good society.

It's a modern form of idolatry, which treats the state as a god.

But like all idols, the state inevitably disappoints those who worship at its shrine. A government that can't even manage the simple accounting task of balancing its budget is certainly not capable of making people's lives "rich and full."

And it was never meant to.

Biblically speaking, government is simply one of the many social structures ordained by God, each with a specific task to do. The job of the state is to promote justice and restrain evil. The hope that it can do more than that--that it can make people happy or fulfilled--is doomed to failure and disappointment.

There's only one way to make life "rich and full"--not by turning to government but by turning to God. The kingdoms of this world rise and fall, but the Kingdom of God will rule in human hearts for eternity.  [read more]

Yea, what’s in those textbooks above is pure subliminal brainwashing. Just the way Karl Marx would have liked it. And as for treating gov’t as God—that’s a Marxist idea too. Capitalism according to Marx is the major cause of crime. Thus, no capitalism no crime. One problem though. In the old Soviet Union (which was supposed to be a utopia) they had a serial killer. Go figure. Kind of blows that theory to bits.

Notes from the Defeating Jihad book

The Seven Swords of Jihad:

1. empire building;
2. the suppression of apostate subjects;
3. the revolution against “false” Muslim leaders;
4. the anti-colonial struggle and “purification” of the religion;
5. countering Western influence and jahiliyya;[1]
6. guerrilla warfare against secular invaders; and finally
7. the direct targeting of civilians in terrorist attacks.

4 Reasons why ISIS is more dangerous than Al Qaeda:

1. It is its own self-generated, fully fledged, trans-national insurgency. Al Qaeda, in all the theaters where it existed in the last 14 years, was a parasitic terrorist organization that attached itself to indigenous insurgencies, whether it was Al-Shabaab in Somalia or whether it was the Taliban in Afghanistan, it did not generate its own mass base of mobilization as a true Maoist insurgency should, or one that follows Mao’s rule-book for mobilization. ISIS is different.
2. It is completely open source, it is the richest threat group of its type in human history.
3. As CG Cleveland has used the adjective, staggering, and I completely agree, the recruiting capacity of ISIS is mind boggling. You just heard in our presentation that we have figures that in historic perspective we have never seen before. Nineteen thousand foreign fighters in nine months.
4. Unfortunately, it has no peer competitor.

Three momentous events mark 1979 as the year in which modern jihad, having evolved over the course of the century, emerged as a global movement: the establishment of a theocratic regime in Iran, the siege of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. While the conditions for an Islamist explosion had existed for a long time, these events were the spark.

Three part strategy to beat the jihadists:

1. We have to get politics, and particularly political correctness, out of the threat assessment. We have to talk truthfully about our enemy, exactly the same way we did during World War II, when facing the Nazis, and during the Cold War, when President Reagan rightfully called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”
2. We have to empower our Muslim allies in the Middle East who are most at threat from groups such as ISIS, and which, in the final analysis, have to be the face of a victory against Islamist extremism and terrorism. This includes the Jordanians and especially the government of President Fatah al-Sisi, a brave Muslim who has been rejected by this administration.
3. Finally, this war will not be won by killing jihadis in large numbers. The use of force is only a part of the solution. Ultimately we will win when the ideology of global jihadism is no longer attractive to young men and women from Orlando to Brussels, from Paris to San Bernardino. That can only be done through a strategic-level counter-propaganda campaign driven by the White House, in exactly the same way that we did during the Cold War.

For political leaders:

1. The politically motivated censorship of analysis, training and education must end. The White House must scrap the rules of what can and cannot be used by analysts, war fighters and FBI agents about the jihadist threat.
2. Washington must resist the continuous lobbying and subversive tactics such groups as CAIR and Muslim Public Affairs Council. These groups use the same tactics of the Muslim Brotherhood.
3. A complete reappraisal of US policy toward theocratic regime in Iran. Unless Iranian mullahs stops saying “death to America” and conditions for Iranians improve, sanctions should increase and the regime should be isolated.

Concrete measures to defeat ISIS and Al Queda:

1. Reinstate and expand the federal human intelligence counter-terrorism methods pioneered by the New York police department after 9/11.
2. Build a curriculum on the enemy threat doctrine of global jihadism that all local, state and federal law enforcement officers and analysts must be trained in. And fund such training through the DHS. Do the same for the joint military education system used across the defense department with short courses for all ranks and grades and long courses at academies and war colleges.
3. The department of defense and the intelligence community must hire subject matter experts on Islam and jihadist ideology to inform threat analyse and advise theater commanders including theater special operation commands.
4. The policy elite and the defense department should once and for all reject counter insurgency operations as an option to defeat jihadism.
5. Return our special forces to their original missions of direct action. Targeted killing of enemy leaders and foreign internal defense. Embed our soldiers and marines in the national units of Iraq, Egypt, Jordan and the UAE. Right down to the brigade level or lower so as to provide the central core around which an international force can move out to destroy ISIS and the like with the front-line fighters being our Sunni allies; not Amercan service men.
6. Initiate a stragic counter messaging campaign from the White House itself, modeled on the active measure working group of the Cold War. Use this new interagency publicly by identifying jihadi propaganda and the extent of the lies from the groups like ISIS starting with their professing to be fighting for Islam against the infidel while killing more Muslims that anyother target group.
7. Provide large scale technical and financial support to our partners best suited to continue this campaign in theater especially the Jordian and Egyptian governments.
8. Iniate a covert psychological warfare campaign to support Muslim reformers across the Middle East, Asia and North Africa in their ideological war to delegitimize the message of holy war against the infidel and bolster modern interpretations of Islam.

Source: Defeating Jihad. The Winnable War (2016) by Dr. Sebastian Gorka.

Good detailed ideas in this book. Hillary probably won’t implement these ideas because she will just continue Obama’s stupid program.

Dr. Gorka says the Soviet Union is in many ways similar to the Islamic State and other Islamic terrorist organizations. Both have an extreme oppressive idealogy in that they want to spread over the world because they feel that’s what the world needs for its own good. Both force people to join them. Communism has its true believers just like the Jihadists do. The only difference is Communism is athestic while Jihadism is Islamic. So, to defeat Jihadism you have to defeat it like America defeated Communism in the old Soviet Union.

The Points of Proof for Life: Scientific

From Human Coalition.org (May 12):

In 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court made abortion on demand legal in all fifty states, science was lagging behind what pro-life individuals already knew to be true: life begins at conception and should be protected at all stages.

Since that infamous ruling, science has made great strides to validate our position. In 2016, the scientific evidence for life seems hardly in dispute…except for those who are ideologically blinded by the pro-abortion agenda.

So what is this evidence?

• A child in the womb has individual and unique Chromosomes. At the moment of conception, the zygote—the fertilized ovum—retains full personhood and does so throughout the gestation period: forty-six chromosomes, a carrier of similar DNA to his or her parents, and the same genetic makeup inside the womb that he or she will have outside the womb.
• Seven Characteristics of Life: Also from the moment of conception, pre-born babies possess the seven characteristics that define life: responsiveness to the environment, growth and change, the ability to reproduce, a regulated metabolism and oxygen flow, maintaining homeostasis (the ability to regulate internal bodily functions in response to external changes), composed of cells, and the capacity to pass traits onto offspring—in this case, human offspring.

You may have once heard the commonly cited quote: If a single living cell was found on a distant planet, scientists would exclaim that we have found life elsewhere in the universe. So why then is a single living cell in the womb of a pregnant woman not considered life?

According to the father of modern genetics, it undoubtedly is! He writes, “After fertilization has taken place, a new human being has come into being. It is no longer a matter of taste or opinion . . . it is plain experimental evidence.”  [read more]

The other points of proof are: the biblical argument, the philosphical argument, and the sociological argument. All of which are on the webpage.

Philosophy and Science

Commentary by Eric Metaxas on Break Point.org:

Socrates said that wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing. If that’s true, a few of our brightest scientists need some enlightenment.

The popular “Existential Comics” Twitter page appeals to a segment of the population most of us avoid at dinner parties. It’s humor at its most esoteric. But Existential Comics recently posted a real zinger that cuts scientific hubris down to size.

A scientists asks why philosophy matters. The philosopher counters and asks “Why does science matter?” The scientist thinks for a moment before replying that science matters because… And here, the philosopher interrupts him and says, “You’re doing philosophy.”

It would be funnier if so many scientists today didn’t share this ill-informed attitude toward philosophy. New Atheist rock star and Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins tweeted on Darwin Day that philosophers’ failure to anticipate Darwin was “a severe indictment of philosophy.” And theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking recently declared “philosophy is dead.”

Bill Nye “the Science Guy” took on the subject last month in a Big Think video on YouTube. A philosophy student contacted Nye to ask whether he, like so many atheist scientists, considers philosophy a “meaningless topic.”

………………………

These kinds of charges, writes Olivia Goldhill at “Quartz,” show that Nye buys into the common caricature that “philosophy is about asking pointlessly ‘deep’ questions, plucking an answer out of thin air, and then drinking some pinot noir and writing a florid essay.”

Far from it! As Existential Comics cleverly hinted, not only is philosophy not dead, but without it, science itself is impossible. Philosophy tells us not only why we do science—it gives us the assumptions that undergird the scientific method.

Ned Hall, a philosophy chair at Harvard, explains that science as we know it involves “unstated but fairly substantial assumptions about the simplicity and elegance of the natural world.”

In other words, the scientific process of observation, hypothesis, experiments, theories, and predictions requires us to assume that nature is orderly and predictable. Just because the sun has risen every day since the dawn of civilization doesn’t mean it will rise tomorrow without a human sacrifice—just ask the Aztecs! Modern inferences like the laws of gravity, optics, and Newtonian physics only make sense if you assume an orderly and consistent universe—the kind of universe the Judeo-Christian Bible says we have.

As historian Rodney Stark argues in his terrific book, “The Victory of Reason,” Christianity gave birth to modern science by laying this philosophical groundwork. That is to say, the Christian worldview, alone in the history of mankind, made the right claims about reality necessary for empirical science to develop and flourish.   [read more]

I agree that philosphy matters. Science is just finding the truth in the universe. Philosphy asks what happens if a particular truth is discovered and should it be discovered at all. Science leads to technology which affects people. So, we should be asking how that technology affects people.

For example, should driverless cars be completely without control of the “driver?” What if there is a bug in the software or a hardware glitch and the car is moving toward an embankment or cliff? Or what if the car “decides” to avoid hitting a squirrel, it moves toward a tree or another car? These are philosophical questions. I put the word driver in quotes, by the way, because if cars are steering themselves then basically there are really no human drivers anymore.

Then there is human cloning. I could go on.

Interesting essay.

Rigged Against Trump: Presidential Debate Commission

From Dick Morris.com:

The decision of the Presidential Debate Commission to hold two of the general election debates on nights that conflict with high profile NFL games — and their refusal to reconsider the scheduling — raises the question of pro-Hillary/anti-Trump bias on the Commission.

By deliberately setting the debate dates opposite highly popular football games, the Commission seems to be angling to cut the viewership of white males, a key voting groups generally supporting Trump, in a bid to reduce their interest in the election.

While theoretically bi-partisan, the Commission is currently dominated by high profile Hillary supporters and Republicans who oppose Donald Trump — elite insiders. So, in sum, it about as anti-Trump as a commission can get.

And the Commission also chooses the moderators for the debates. Look for a Hillary-friendly choice.

Take a look at some of the “non-partisan” members:

The two co-chairmen are Mike McCurry, Bill Clinton’s press secretary and Frank Fahrenkopf, who held the same post under Reagan. Sounds fair? Look closer. Fahrenkopf is 90 years old and well past his prime. His co-chair? Mike McCurry, 62, who remains a vigorous defender of the Clintons working especially hard to ward off negative stories. [read more]

Yea, it doesn’t look good for Trump but then what do you expect. Morris goes on to say that former President Jimmy Carter, a Democratic National Chairman and a long-time aide of Ted Kennedy, and Jim Lehrer, a noted but also liberal news commentator among others.

Trump says he doesn’t want conservative Mary Katharine Ham moderating debates because she “says only bad things” about him. He doesn’t know her though. Well, she, being a conservative, probably doesn’t say anything nice about Hillary either for that matter. I’ve seen her on the O’Reilly Factor and maybe Hannity and she seems nice. I think she would treat him fairly. Ham said she has had at least two nice interactions with Trump personally, once where he introduced himself, and the Republican debate she moderated in New Hampshire, which turned out fairly well for Trump. She did say during the Republican debate that “jabs are Donald Trump’s entire brand.” And “the only way to rattle the real-estate mogul and reveal the shallow nature of his policy ideas.” Maybe that is what Donald Trump is referring too. But that isn’t a personal attack so much. That’s an opinion. And he did throw jabs during, before, and after those debates. As long as she isn’t intentionally lying about him he should grow a thicker skin. Politics can be rough for a republican candidate especially by the drive-by-media and doesn’t get any easier even if you are president. Just look at how the press treated President George W. Bush and President Reagan when they were in office. They called Reagan a cowboy and Bush much worse. It’s what the press does. Sadly, nothing’s going to change that.

Was Jesus a Socialist?

Commentary by Lawrence W. Reed from FEE.org:

On June 16, 1992, London's Daily Telegraph reported this astonishingly bold remark by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: "Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind."^{1
……………………………}
You don't have to be a Christian to appreciate the errors in the Gorbachev canard. You can be a person of any faith or no faith at all. You just have to appreciate facts, history, and logic. You can even be a socialist — but one with open eyes — and realize that Jesus wasn't in your camp.
In a modern political, economic, and social context, socialism isn't voluntary like the Girl Scouts. Its central characteristic is the concentration of power to forcibly achieve one or more (or usually all) of these purposes: central planning of the economy, government ownership of property, and the redistribution of wealth. No amount of "we do it all for you" or "it's for your own good" or "we're helping people" rhetoric can erase that.
…………………..
So was Jesus really a socialist? More to the main focus of this essay, did he call for the state to redistribute income to either punish the rich or to help the poor?
I first heard "Jesus was a socialist" and "Jesus was a redistributionist" some forty years ago. I was puzzled. I had always understood Jesus's message to be that the most important decision a person would make in his earthly lifetime was to accept or reject him as savior. That decision was clearly to be a very personal one — an individual and voluntary choice. He constantly stressed inner, spiritual renewal as far more critical to well-being than material things. I wondered, "How could the same Jesus advocate the use of force to take stuff from some and give it to others?" I just couldn't imagine him supporting a fine or a jail sentence for people who don't want to fork over their money for food-stamp programs.
………………………
The fact is, one can scour the Scriptures with a fine-tooth comb and find nary a word from Jesus that endorses the forcible redistribution of wealth by political authorities. None, period.
"But didn't Jesus say he came to uphold the law?" you ask. Yes, in Matthew 5:17–20 he declares, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them."³ In Luke 24:44, he clarifies this when he says, "Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms." He was not saying, "Whatever laws the government passes, I'm all for." He was speaking specifically of the Mosaic law (primarily the Ten Commandments) and the prophecies of his own coming.
……………………….
In Luke 12:13–15, Jesus is confronted with a redistribution request. A man with a grievance approaches him and demands, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me." Jesus replies thusly: "Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you? Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions" (emphasis added). Wow! He could have equalized the wealth between two men with a wave of his hand, but he chose to denounce envy instead. [read more]

Interesting essay. Socialists and the Left are always trying to twist and make socialism and Christianity the same thing by using code words like “collective salvation.” Socialism and Christianity are nothing alike and ministers and preachers who use Left’s terms like “social justice” are doing a disservice to Jesus’ teachings.
If anything, Jesus is more closer to what a conservative is.

Bryan Fischer on OneNewsNow.com also wrote an interesting commentary called "No, Jesus was not a socialist."

Sometimes a Question is Better than an Answer

Commentary by John Stonestreet on Break Point.org:

Ever left speechless on these tough conversations about social issues? Ever think afterwards, why didn’t I say that? Well, here are six questions for your conversational toolkit.
Last week, at a gathering of strategists on some tough cultural issues, a very good point was made: Sometimes the right question at the right time is the best way to have a conversation with someone with whom you fundamentally disagree.
I couldn’t agree more, especially when the topic is something like same-sex marriage, religious freedom, or bathrooms at Target—when you know that to have an opinion counter to the new cultural orthodoxy is to be thought of as hateful or intolerant.
………………..
Here are six questions I’ve found extremely helpful to create the sort of dialogue we should desire about issues of faith and culture.

1. What do you mean by that? The battle of ideas is always the battle over the definition of words. Thus, it’s vital in any conversation to clarify the terms being used.
2. How do you know that is true? Too often, assertions are mistaken for arguments. There’s a vast difference between the two. An assertion is a definitive statement made about the nature of reality. An argument is presented to back up an assertion. By asking “how do you know that’s true?” you’ll move the conversation beyond two people merely asserting what they believe to why those assertions should be taken seriously.
3. Where did you get this information? Once arguments are offered, it’s important to ensure the arguments are valid. For example, news reports love to shout that same-sex parents are better parents than straight couples—a talking point that’s based on very limited studies, while other studies suggest the exact opposite.
4. How did you come to this conclusion? Behind the person you are talking with and his/her convictions, is a story, a personal story. If you know that story, it may make more sense why they don’t find your views plausible. Plus, it’ll help you remember the person you’re talking with is a real, image-of-God bearing person.
5. What if you’re wrong?
6. What if you’re right?

[read more]

Good questions not just for faith and culture but about any topic that deals with culture.

Origins of the Islamic State and How to Defeat the Group

From Rand.org (May 19):

Drawing from more than 140 recently declassified documents from the predecessors of the Islamic State, a new RAND Corporation study shows that the group has been operating for years with remarkable continuity in its philosophy, methods and goals, including the long-standing aspiration for creating a caliphate.

The documents show that the leadership consciously designed the organization not just to fight, but also to build a state governed by the laws dictated by its strict Islamist ideology.

“The lessons from examining the group's history are useful for setting expectations about the strengths and vulnerabilities of the Islamic State and its ability to combat its opponents,” said Patrick Johnston, the lead author of the report and a political scientist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. “Understanding the origins of the Islamic State can help lead to a coordinated and effective campaign against it. It also can explain how the Islamic State may be able to survive such an effort and sustain itself in the future, albeit perhaps at a lower level of threat.”

……………….

The group paid its personnel low wages that would draw true believers rather than opportunists, trained and allocated its membership with an eye toward group effectiveness, raised revenues locally through diversified sources and was able to maintain itself, albeit at much reduced strength, in the face of an aggressive counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategy put in place by its opponents.

“Its own records show that the group was rational in its administration, adaptive in its actions, careful about spending and diversified in revenue raising,” said Howard J. Shatz, a co-author of the report and a senior economist at RAND. “This made it — and continues to make it — a formidable enemy.”

The RAND report recommends that any counter-personnel strategy should strive to eliminate layers of high-level and mid-level managers from the Islamic State. Capitalizing on any fissures within the group can speed its decline, as can degrading its revenues and therefore its ability to make payments.

…………………….

“Targeting the Islamic State's training camps and its flow of skilled terrorists returning to their home counties could be a new approach to reducing the group's ability to strike abroad, especially if it is combined with the current campaign to eliminate their revenue sources and bulk cash holdings,” said Benjamin Bahney, a co-author of the report and a RAND policy analyst.   [read more]

Interesting. So, the Islamic State’s thugs are like the mob? Sounds like it to me. The mob I believe was efficient too. Both are evil. The only difference is one was about money, the other is about ideology. The Rand Organization has several reasearch articles on the Islamic State.

PragerU.com has an informative video called What ISIS Wants. It also talks about how the Islamic thugs got their beginning and about their ideology.

7 Habits of Highly Effective Libertarians

From FEE.org:

What can be done to sustain the passion for liberty throughout a lifetime? Here are my [Jeffrey A. Tucker] suggestions for seven habits to foster a lifelong attachment to liberty and to live a life that makes the best possible contribution to human well-being.

1. Oppose oppression but love liberty even more.
   1. You realize that there is such a thing as a state that is distinct from society at large, a fact that massive swaths of the social sciences (not to mention mainstream media) try to cover up.
   2. There is the new awareness that the state is distinct from every other institution in society because it uses aggressive force to achieve its aims.
   3. The state actually does not achieve the aims it promises. Rather, it violates rights, undermines economic achievement, fosters dependency, and serves a ruling class rather than the public at large.
2. Read broadly and be confident in your ideas.
3. Look beyond politics.
4. See everyone as an ideological friend.
5. Don’t have all the answers.
6. Hack your life. Once you realize that we are living under a central plan for your life and property, you can start to get creative about finding alternatives. You can use technologies to find a new approach to education. You can find better paths toward personal success. You can better manage your finances without the personal debt encouraged by the policies of the Federal Reserve. You can hack your appliances in ways that make them operate better than the regulations allow.
7. Be joyful.

[read more]

Good advice even for conservatives.

A Question for Minimum Wage Advocates

An essay by Donald J. Boudreaux (May 27, 2015) from FEE.org:

I state, however, here and again my conclusion: Legislating minimum wages – that is, enacting a policy of caging people who insist on entering voluntarily into employment contracts on terms that political elites find objectionable – is no more attractive or justified or likely to succeed at helping low-skilled workers if the particular caging policy in question is enacted locally than if it is enacted nationally or globally.

In this short post, I ask a simple question of all advocates of minimum wages: If enforcement of minimum-wage policies were carried out in practice by policing low-skilled workers rather than employers – if these policies were enforced by police officers monitoring workers and fining those workers who agreed to work at hourly wages below the legislated minimum – would you still support minimum wages?

Would you be good with police officers arresting those workers who, preferring to remain employed at sub-minimum wages rather than risk losing their current jobs (or risking having do endure worsened employment conditions), refuse to abide by the wage terms dictated by the legislature?

Would you think it an acceptable price to pay for your minimum-wage policy that armed police officers confine in cages low-skilled workers whose only offense is their persistence at taking jobs at wages below those dictated by the government?

If a minimum-wage policy is both economically justified and morally acceptable, you should have no problem with this manner of enforcement. [read more]

Good questions. The Left would say “no we wouldn’t be enforce minimum-wage polices on the workers because they are the ones being taken advantage of by the employers. The employers have all the power. They are coercing the poor worker into working for low wages.” This animosity toward the employers is why the Left has no problem about salary ceilings toward businesses.

The problem is the Left never gets that if a person wants to work for a low-age or even no wage temporarily (like an apprentice situation—on-the-job training before you get an actual wage) that’s between him and his employer. Both are adults who can make a contract. But if a person wants to work voluntary without pay for a non-profit—that’s okay. Then again  non-profits aren’t evil to the Left like the profit-oriented businesses are. It’s the word “profit” that drives the Left crazy as if they aren’t already there.

‘Radical Islam’ Does Matter in Identifying Enemy, Experts Say

From The Daily Signal.com (June 16):

Using the phrase “radical Islam” to describe the Islamic State or other jihadist groups will not win the war, but is nonetheless relevant in identifying the ideology—not the religion—that America is fighting, experts said.

“I don’t believe the phrase “Islamist extremism” or “Islamist terrorism” is some sort of incantation that’s going to fix everything,” Walter Lohman, director of the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation, said in an email to The Daily Signal.

“In fact, I don’t even think it’s the most important thing in this whole issue set. What’s most important are the policies that we pursue and the action that we take to defeat it, whatever you want to call it. But it does matter because we—Muslims, as much as other Americans—are engaged in a war of ideas as well as a war on terrorism.”

……………….

Lohman, who last December hosted a forum, “Muslim Voices Against the Islamic State and Islamist Extremism,” said the point is to understand the ideology.

“Islamism is a political ideology and it has to be taken on,” Lohman continued in the email. “If we physically dissuade terrorists from hurting people, we still have to stop Islamists from coercing people into their way of thinking by other means. Actually identifying the ideology is key to that, and unfortunately, that ideology is cast in religious terms. It’s like a Muslim civil society leader in Indonesia told me one time talking about the much more serious threat in her own country, ‘What difference does it make whether they are terrorists or not. They (Islamists) all want the same thing.’”  [read more]

I agree with Lohman. To solve a problem, you have to first define what the problem is. Just like during WWII FDR had no problem using the term Nazi. Using the term didn’t mean all Germans were Nazis only those Germans fighting for Hitler. The Isamists thugs know who they are and the peaceful Muslims who don’t support them know who they are too.

Obama and the Left have no problem calling republicans extremists or automatically grouping mass shooters as “radical right extremists” if they believe they are not Muslim. Then again Muslims are a minority so they are protected from the Left’s classification.  Heck, during the Dem presidential primary debate the moderator asked Hillary, Sanders, and the other guy whose name escapes me, if Republicans were the enemy. Not, mind you, an adversary (like in a sport) but an enemy. All three said yes. Well, the Left think politics is war. So, I guess that makes sense in a sort of warped way.

Congressman Says His Constituents ‘Shouldn’t Have to Carry a Gun’ — However, Congress ‘Deserves’ and ‘Needs’ to Be Protected by Them

From The Blaze.com (June 23):

Tuesday night, Congressman Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) was speaking with a reporter from the Daily Caller about a recently exposed scandal involving some members of the NYPD selling access to concealed carry permits when he laughingly stated that his constituents “just shouldn’t have to carry a gun.”
When asked about the armed security protecting him and the rest of the members of Congress, he answered, “I think we deserve, need to be protected down here.” [read more]

I wonder if Hillary Clinton and Obama think the same way too? Of course. They believe as most of the Left believe they are special because they are the Elites. The peons or if you prefer “the masses” don’t need protection. Rangel is just being honest about his beliefs.

Side note: On this day in 2006 I posted my first entry.

20,642 New Regulations Added in the Obama Presidency

From The Daily Signal.com (May 23):

The tide of red tape that threatens to drown U.S. consumers and businesses surged yet again in 2015, according to a Heritage Foundation study we released on Monday.

More than $22 billion per year in new regulatory costs were imposed on Americans last year, pushing the total burden for the Obama years to exceed $100 billion annually.

………………………

The consequences of this rampant rulemaking are widespread:

• Restricted access to credit under the hundreds of rules unleashed by the Dodd–Frank financial regulation statute.
• Fewer health care choices and higher medical costs from the Affordable Care Act.
• Reduced Internet investment and innovation under the network neutrality rules dictated by the Federal Communications Commission.

These are just a few of the 2,353 regulations of 2015—and there have been 20,642 since Obama took office in 2009.

………………………..

There are already more than 2,000 proposed or final rules in the pipeline—including 144 that are expected to cost $100 million a year or more. These include yet more energy-efficiency mandates for home and commercial appliances, additional food-labeling requirements, stricter fuel economy standards for vehicles, and more stringent limits on consumer access to credit.  [read more]

Wow! Over 20 thousand regulations! No wonder the economy is stalling. If the secretary of the status quo (Hillary Clinton) becomes POTUS she won’t stop those additional regulations. Talk about strangulating businesses.

What Will Happen if Hillary Clinton Becomes President

Below is what I think Hillary Clinton will do if she becomes president in no particular order:

1. Hillary Clinton will veto any bill that removes Obamacare. This is a given.
2. She will appoint a very left-wing person to the Supreme Court. Another given.
3. She will get us into another war. Dick Morris says this.
4. She will try to get an illegal immigrant amnesty bill passed. A given.
5. She will move the server with classified emails to her bedroom closet or somewhere else. Okay, this is a joke.
6. More terrorist attacks will occur because the evil crazy Islamists will sneak across the border. See 4.
7. Sanctuary cities will continue because she will veto any bill that contains anything stopping sanctuary cities.
8. Kate’s Law will be vetoed.
9. More illegal immigrant crimes will happen because of 4, 7, and 8.
10. Hillary Clinton will use her power as a president to go after her political “opponents” or people with “Never Hillary” bumper stickers. Or conservative talk show hosts who criticize Hillary. Or conservative bloggers who criticize her. Dick Morris. I added the “Never Hillary”,  the “talk show” part and the “blogger” part.
11. She will lie to the American people like she did to the mother of Sean Smith, the diplomat that died in Libya.
12. She will try to put even more restrictions on guns.  A given.
13. Saudi Arabia and other countries will call in favors from her because of all the money given to the corrupt Clinton Foundation.
14. Wall Street will will be rewarded from the donations it gave.
15. She will be blackmailed by China, Russia and any other countries that hacked her email and servers.
16. There is high chance that America will be bombed by Iran if she becomes president. Why? Because Iran being an Islamist state treats women as second class citizens. And a women in power makes America look even weaker to them and to the Islamic State thugs. After they bomb America Iran will bomb Israel because Israel is “little Satan.”
17. The republicans in Congress won’t stop Hillary’s agenda because they don’t want to appear disrepecting the first woman president. So, impeachment is off the table if she ignores the Constitution. Sad to say, another given.
18. More blood in the White House will spill from things thrown at Bill by Hillary.
19. Hillary kills Bill by poisioning him. The FBI director says she didn’t intend to kill Bill. She got arsenic mixed up with sugar. Okay, this is another joke.
20. The lame-stream-press will circle the wagons around the secretary of the status quo. A given.
21. Hillary will get a new broom because the old one is getting worn out from all the sweeping she does. What? If you are thinking anything else shame on you!
22. Hillary will implement a “fair share surcharge” on multi-millionaires and billionaires and fight for measures like the Buffett Rule to ensure the wealthiest Americans do not pay a lower tax rate than hardworking middle-class families. From her website.
23. She will charge an “exit tax” for companies leaving the U.S. to settle up on their untaxed foreign earnings. Again from her website.
24. Make debt free college available to all Americans. Her website. So, the colleges are not going to charge intuition and for books? Or is the federal gov’t going to pay off the debt for the students? So, the national debt goes up and up.
25. Overturn Citizens United. Her website. This is about freedom of speech not campaign finance reform. I agree with the Citizens United verdict. The McCain–Feingold Act is stupid anyway.
26. Impose a tax on high-frequency trading. From her web site. Now, that is funny! See 14. Now, Bernie Sanders would have done this.

This is not a complete list.

Miscellaneous Thoughts Part 39

• There's a reason why it's called groupthink and not teamthink-- coaches or good leaders acknowledges member's skills and knowledge to accomplish a goal.
• Superdelegates sends a signal to the voters that we don’t trust you to make the right decision.
• Government creates private sector jobs. Everytime new regulations come out or a new regulatary agency appears a business gets created to help make other businesses compliant with the new regulations.
• If the GOP is going to have open primaries they should only allow independents,  Conservative Party members, Constitution Party members, libertarians, etc. People who are conservative by nature. Yes, I know this isn’t purely open but close enough.
• You can’t change the status quo if you are part of the status quo because you benefit from the status quo. It takes someone completely outside the status quo to change it.
• A politician can be a conservative problem solver. When you hold positions of power you either believe gov’t is the answer to most problems or you put your trust in the people to solve their own problems.
• The only wars the Left wants to win are political ones.
• Hillary Clintons slogan is: Fighting for us. My question is who is the “us?” Wall Street? Women and minorities? Americans? Illegal aliens? Her and Bill? Kind of vague. It would be a better and personal if the slogan said “Fighting for you.”
• All lives matter. – God.
• Don’t anyone put a server with classified information in your bathroom. Only Hillary Clinton can do that.

New Study Shows Marijuana Can Alter DNA, Create Mutations

From News Max.com (May 24):

Smoking marijuana can change users' DNA — and the mutations are then passed on to their children, new research shows.

In the study published in the journal Mutation Research – Fundamental and Molecular Mechanisms of Mutagenesis, researchers assert they've been able to show for the first time how marijuana can be linked to serious illnesses and the implications for future generations, the International Business Times in Australia reports.

"Through our research we found that cancers and illnesses were likely caused by cell mutations resulting from cannabis properties having a chemical interaction with a person's DNA," researcher Stuart Reece of the University of Western Australia said in a news release, the IBT Australia reports. [read more]

So, smoking marijana causes mutations? Hmmm. I wonder if this is how the zombie apocalypse gets started. Or maybe turning people into Abbies (human genetic abhorations) like in the TV series Wayward Pines.

In other marijana news:

• July 22: Colorado Town’s Water May Be Tainted With Marijuana Chemical.