The Truth About Border Walls’ Effectiveness

From The Daily Signal.com (Feb. 10):

Schumer and his House counterpart, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., are entitled to their opinions about Trump’s proposed border wall, but they aren’t entitled to their own facts.

In their rebuttal to the president’s Jan. 9 nationally televised address outlining the need for a border barrier and his request for $5.7 billion in funding for them, both described the proposed wall as “ineffective”—Pelosi once and Schumer twice.

In her rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, 2018 Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams didn’t echo Schumer and Pelosi’s “ineffective” claim, but she advanced an argument that was equally fallacious.

……………

Walls along four Customs and Border Protection sectors—El Paso; San Diego, California; and Tucson and Yuma, Arizona—have reduced illegal immigration “by at least 90 percent,” according to the Republican National Committee’s Borderfacts.com page.

Byron York of the Washington Examiner recently cited figures from the Center for Immigration Studies showing that before construction of border barriers in Yuma, the Border Patrol apprehended 138,438 illegal immigrants in 2005, compared with 26,244 last year. While not 90 percent, that’s still a dramatic drop.

The comparable before-and-after figures for the San Diego sector, according to the Border Patrol, were more than 565,581 in 1992 and 26,086 in 2017—a 95 percent reduction.

Meanwhile, USA Today reported last May that “[s]ince the start of Europe’s migrant crisis in 2015, at least 800 miles of fences have been erected by Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Macedonia, Slovenia, and others.”

Do Schumer and Pelosi know something all these other countries don’t? Not according to Hungary, which said that fencing on its border with Serbia helped reduce illegal immigration by nearly 100 percent since 2015, according to the USA Today report.

Israel’s fencing along its borders with the Gaza Strip and West Bank, as well as with Egypt and Jordan, has likewise all but eliminated illegal immigration and terrorist attacks. (The Jewish state announced Feb. 3 that it was beginning construction of an additional 40 miles of 20-foot-high, state-of-the-art fencing.) [read more]

The only walls the Dems like are the ones around their homes. They use those to keep out the irredeemable deplorables or if the reader prefers the “common man.”

Worried About Privacy? Worry More About Your Data

From News Max.com (Feb. 4):

Facebook isn't some Big Brother or HAL 9000 listening to your every conversation like you probably fear, tech experts say.

Actually, they warn, it's far worse.

"Privacy as we normally think of it doesn't matter," Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, told NBC News. "What these companies are doing is building little models, little avatars, little voodoo dolls of you. Your doll sits in the cloud, and they'll throw 100,000 videos at it to see what’s effective to get you to stick around, or what ad with what messaging is uniquely good at getting you to do something."

Though it may seem like Facebook and other social media sites are listening to your conversations about, say, your car problems, then try to sell you a new car, in reality they've simply built such a perfect simulation of who you are it literally knows what you'll do or think before you do it, says Raskin.

"Imagine it's a stick figure at first, and as you use the system, it's collecting fingernail scraps and bits of hair," he said. "What do you care that you lost a fingernail scrap? But they’re putting it together into a model of you."

Facebook, Raskin notes, "has one of these models for one out of every four humans on earth. Every country, culture, behavior type, socio-economic background.” [read more]

Creepy.

Failing Forward

Characteristics:

• Taking Responsibility
• Learning from Each Mistake
• Knowing Failure Is a Part of Progress
• Maintaining a Positive Attitude
• Challenging Outdated Assumptions
• Taking New Risks
• Believing Something Didn't Work
• Persevering

No enterprise can exist for itself alone. It ministers to some great need, it performs some great service, not for itself, but for others; or failing therein it ceases to be profitable and ceases to exist. – Calvin Coolidge

Seven abilities needed to fail forward:

1. Achievers reject rejection.
2. Achievers see failure as temporary.
3. Achievers see failures as isolated incidents.
4. Achievers keep expectations realistic.
5. Achievers focus on strengths.
6. Achievers very approaches to achievement.
7. Achievers bounce back.

The benefits of adversity:

1. Adversity creates resilience.
2. Adversity develops maturity.
3. Adversity pushes the envelope of accepted performance.
4. Adversity provides greater opportunities.
5. Adversity prompts innovation.
6. Adversity recaps unexpected benefits.
7. Adversity motivates.

Characteristics of Don’t-Dare-Miss-It People:

1. They find opportunities.
2. They finish their responsibilities.
3. They feed on impossibilities.
4. They fan the flame of enthusiasm.
5. They face their inadequacies.
6. They figure out why others failed.
7. They finance the cost into their lifestyle.
8. They find pleasure in the goal.
9. They fear futility, not failure.
10. They finish before they rest.
11. They follow leaders.
12. They force change.
13. They fish for solutions.
14. They fulfill their commitments.
15. They finalize their decisions.

Steps to Failing Forward:

1. Realize there is one major difference between average people and achieving people.
2. Learn a new definition of failure.
3. Remove the "you” from failure.
4. Take action and reduce your fear.
5. Changing your response to failure by accepting responsibility.
6. Don’t let the failure from outside get inside you.
7. Say good-bye to yesterday.
8. Change yourself, and your world changes.
9. Get over yourself and start giving yourself.
10. Find the benefit in every bad experience.
11. If at first you do succeed, try something harder.
12. Learn from bad experience and make it a good experience.
13. Work on the weakness the weakens you.
14. Understand there is not much difference between failure and success.
15. Get up, get over it, get going.

Source: Failing Forward. Turning Mistakes into Stepping Stones for Success (2000) by John C. Maxwell.

Artificial intelligence is learning not to be so literal

From Science News.org (Feb. 5):

HONOLULU — Artificial intelligence is starting to learn how to read between the lines.

AI systems are generally good at responding to direct statements, like “Siri, tell me the weather” or “Alexa, play ‘Despacito’.” But machines can’t yet make small talk the way humans do, says Yejin Choi, a natural language processing researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle. When it comes to conversational nuances like tone and idioms, AI still struggles to understand humans’ intent.

To help machines participate in more humanlike conversation, researchers are teaching AI to understand the meanings of words beyond their strict dictionary definitions. At the recent AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, one group unveiled a system that gauges what a person really means when speaking, and another presented an AI that distinguishes between literal and figurative phrases in writing.

One key conversation skill is picking up on subtext. Someone’s facial expression or intonation can significantly change the implication of their words, says Louis-Philippe Morency, an artificial intelligence researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Describing a movie as “sick” with a grimace conveys something totally different than calling it “sick” with an excited tone and raised eyebrows.

Morency and colleagues designed an artificial intelligence system that watched YouTube clips to learn how nonverbal cues, like facial expressions and voice pitch, can affect the meaning of spoken words. [read more]

More AI news:

• Is Skynet a reality? As Trump signs executive order on artificial intelligence, tech giants warn of danger
• This AI is so good at writing that its creators won't let you use it
• At this fast food drive through, the person taking your order might not be a person at all
• Report: Home Assistants with ‘Moral AI’ Could Call Police on Owners
• Why a data scientist warns against always trusting AI’s scientific discoveries
• Creepy AI will reportedly spot shoplifters before they steal

Bees Can Solve Math Problems That Would Stump the Average Toddler

From Live Science.com (Feb. 6):

Bees don't just buzz around and make honey; they also do math problems in their free time that would stump the average 4-year-old.

Last year, a group of researchers in Australia reported that bees understand the concept of "zero." Now, a new study by the same group suggests that the insects can also do basic addition and subtraction. The team reported its findings today (Feb. 6) in the journal Science Advances.

A couple of decades ago, scientists thought that such higher-level processing was limited to human and some other primate brains. But then, researchers looked a bit closer, finding that dolphins could understand what zero meant and that Alex the parrot (and even some spiders) could do basic arithmetic.

The findings called into question the "position that there's something special about the human brain," said the new study's senior author, Adrian Dyer, an associate professor at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. [read more]

That’s pretty cool. But can bees solve differential equations or understand tax law? I don’t think so.

CS Lewis on Equality

The demand for equality has two sources; one of than is among the noblest, the other is the basest, of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play. But the other source is the hatred of superiority....

Equality (outside mathematics) is a purely social conception. It applies to man as a political and economic animal. It has no place in the world of the mind. Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many.... Virtue is not democratic; she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men. Truth is not democratic; she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives favours. Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demand for equality into these higher spheres. Ethical,  or aesthetic democracy is death.

A truly democratic education--one which will preserve democracy--must be, in its own field, ruthlessly aristocratic, shamelessly 'high-brow'.... Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.
--‘Notes on the Way', Time and Tide (29 April 1944)

Here Are 3 Cyber Takeaways From the Recent Report on Global Threats

From The Daily Signal.com (Jan. 31):

The United States is facing a wave of new threats from abroad. Unlike in previous decades, some of the most serious of these threats are cyber-related.

On Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats released the intelligence community’s annual Worldwide Threat Assessment, which identifies and evaluates these various threats to the nation.

Here are three key cyber-related takeaways from the report.

1. China and Russia have unprecedented power to target our infrastructure and population.

America’s global rivals, especially China and Russia, are aggressively challenging us economically, socially, and politically—and they’re doing so effectively. Just consider these conclusions from the report:

• “[T]he innovations that drive military and economic competitiveness will increasingly originate outside of the United States as the overall U.S. lead in science and technology shrinks.”
• “We assess that China’s intelligence services will exploit the openness of American society, especially academia and the scientific community … .”
• “Moscow is now staging cyber-attack assets to allow it to disrupt or damage U.S. civilian and military infrastructure during a crisis and poses a significant cyber influence threat … .”
• “China has the ability to launch cyber-attacks that cause localized, temporary disruptive effects on critical infrastructure—such as disruption of a natural gas pipeline for days to weeks—in the United States.
• “U.S. adversaries and strategic competitors almost certainly will use online influence operations to try to weaken democratic institutions, undermine U.S. alliances and partnerships, and shape policy outcomes … .”

Note especially that Russia and China are not simply trying to establish the capability to attack our critical infrastructure and to influence our population. The intelligence community states they can undertake those attacks today.

2. Economic health and competitiveness are critical to national security.

The director of national intelligence’s assessment clearly explains that the technology sector is a key battleground in this strategic competition.

• [T]he U.S. economy will be challenged by slower global economic growth and growing threats to U.S. economic competitiveness.”
• “China will continue to use legal, political, and economic levers—such as the lure of Chinese markets—to shape the information environment.”
• “[F]oreign actors [will] increase their efforts to acquire top talent, companies, data, and intellectual property via licit and illicit means.”

Bottom line: The American private sector is now a decisive actor, capability, and battleground in the modern national security context.

3. The age of cyberwarfare is here, and the scale of the threat is outstripping our ability to defend.

In addition to the statements about Russia and China’s current capabilities mentioned above, the Worldwide Threat Assessment reports the following:

• “China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea increasingly use cyber operations to threaten both minds and machines in an expanding number of ways—to steal information, to influence our citizens, or to disrupt critical infrastructure.”
• “For years, they have conducted cyber espionage to collect intelligence and targeted our critical infrastructure to hold it at risk. They are now becoming more adept at using social media to alter how we think, behave, and decide.”
• “As we connect and integrate billions of new digital devices into our lives and business processes, adversaries and strategic competitors almost certainly will gain greater insight into and access to our protected information.”

Having served as an intelligence officer for more than 15 years, I can attest that our intelligence community is not prone to hyperbole. They understand very well that their words and analysis shape life-and-death decisions as well as billion-dollar budgets.  [read more]

Under Trump, US Economic Freedom Rises Significantly

From The Daily Signal.com (Jan. 25):

The U.S. economy is roaring like no other time in recent memory. The job market is hot, unemployment is down to record lows, and small business optimism is soaring.

But this newfound dynamism didn’t come from nowhere. It required a package of market and consumer-friendly reforms passed by Congress and adopted by the Trump administration. These reforms have boosted economic freedom.

According to The Heritage Foundation’s 2019 Index of Economic Freedom, America’s economic freedom has seen a dramatic boost—from 18th place in the world to 12th place in the span of just one year. America’s score ticked up by more than a full point from last year, reaching the highest level in eight years.

The annual index—now celebrating its 25th year—provides an overall snapshot of almost every country’s level of economic freedom. It takes into account a variety of factors, like taxation, regulation, and trade. It is relevant to our job prospects and the prices we pay for goods and services, not to mention what kind of appliances and cars we can choose and buy.  [read more]

Nice to know. Will the lame-stream-press report this? Probably not.

The Stirring Elocution of Frederick Douglass

From FEE.org:

At the age of 29 in 1847, he [Frederick Douglass] delivered an address in Syracuse, New York, titled “Love of God, Love of Man, Love of Country” in which he outlined a central point of many speeches to come:

There is no conceivable reason why all colored people should not be treated according to the merits of each individual. It is not only the plain duty, but also the interest of us all, to have every colored man take the place for which he is best fitted by education, character, ability, manners, and culture. If others insist on keeping him in any lower and poorer place*, it is not only his injury, but our universal loss. Yet which of our white congregations would take a colored pastor? How many of our New England villages would like to have colored postmasters, or doctors, or lawyers, or teachers in the public schools? A very slight difference in complexion suffices to keep a young man from getting a place as policeman, or fireman, or conductor, even on the horse cars. The trades-unions are closed against him, and so are many of our stores; while those which admit him are obliged to refuse him promotion on account of the unwillingness of white men to serve under him.

…………….

This was a man who could speak with conviction about the importance of character because he possessed it in abundance himself. He understood that slavery was a blot on the character of the country, evidence that a moral renaissance was required. “The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous,” he said. Slavery was an equal opportunity curse because it would sooner or later come back to bite even those who seemed to benefit from it: “No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”  [read more]

*Like the Left today.

These robots can follow how-to diagrams

From Science News.org (Jan. 16):

Robots imbued with a certain kind of common sense may soon be able to follow instructional diagrams to build things.

When studying pictures for assembling IKEA furniture or LEGO villages, humans are naturally good at inferring how to get from A to B. Robots, on the other hand, normally have to be painstakingly programmed with exact instructions for how to move. “Even when you try to teach robots by demonstration, they’re just repeating the exact same motions you show them, not the concept underlying them,” says Dileep George, an artificial intelligence and neuroscience researcher at the San Francisco company Vicarious AI.

George and colleagues have now designed a robot operating system that can understand the basic ideas conveyed in schematic instructions and translate those ideas into action. These common sense robots, described online January 16 in Science Robotics, could work on a wider variety of tasks under different conditions than machines restricted to explicitly coded instructions or physical demonstrations.

The new robotic system learned more than 500 general concepts, such as “stack green objects on the right” and “arrange objects in a circle,” by studying before and after images for each type of action. When given a new set of instructions with a before-and-after diagram, the fully trained system considers all the concepts it has learned, and chooses and executes the maneuvers that will help it reach its goal. [read more]

Other articles on robots:

• A new AI training program helps robots own their ignorance
• Scientists invent 'self-aware' robot that operates ON ITS OWN and able to REPAIR ITSELF

A rare kind of black hole may be wandering around our Milky Way

From Fox News.com (Jan. 18):

Scientists think that they've spotted a rare, Jupiter-size black hole casually strolling through the Milky Way galaxy.

Of course, scientists can't see any black holes directly — but new research tracking a celestial cloud structure saw strange behavior that may have been caused by just such an invisible object. That data came courtesy of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a set of 66 telescopes scattered across the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.

"When I checked the ALMA data for the first time, I was really excited because the observed gas showed obvious orbital motions, which strongly suggest an invisible massive object lurking," lead author Shunya Takekawa, a physicist at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, told New Scientist.

Takekawa and his colleagues were using ALMA to study two gas clouds, which the team nicknamed Balloon and Stream for their shapes, during a two-day period in May 2018. During that time, they watched the gas moving strangely, seeming to spin around a center.

That movement allowed the team to calculate that 30,000 times the mass of our sun was packed into an object the size of Jupiter at the center of the movement. Those characteristics, combined with the lack of light coming from the location, suggest that the culprit is medium size for a black hole.  [read more]

I hope the black hole doesn’t enter our solar system. That would not be good at all.

Herbert Marcuse: The Philosopher Behind the Ideology of the Anti-Fascists

From FEE.org:

Marcuse Is of No Use

Herbert Marcuse was a German-American philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist.

Born in Berlin in 1898, he was drafted into the German Army in 1916 at age 18 and later participated in the Spartacist uprising. Following the war, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg, where he would continue to study (and write a paper with Martin Heidegger on Hegel) before arriving at the Institute of Social Research in 1933.

While at the Institute of Social Research—better known today as the Frankfurt School—Marcuse would publish several works on Marx that would abandon the Marxist focus on labor and class struggle and develop the controversial philosophy of critical theory.

Critical theory is defined as “a philosophical approach to culture, and especially to literature, that seeks to confront the social, historical, and ideological forces and structures that produce and constrain it.”

This might sound benign, but in practice, critical theory is the shallow analysis of politics, history, art, and society through the lens of power dynamics. It places the world into a box of oppressor vs. oppressed and insists that those who are oppressed are “good” and those who are oppressors are “evil.”

………………..

Critical Theory in Practice

Marcuse applies this theory in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance”—a true example of doublespeak—wherein he argues that free speech and tolerance are only beneficial when they exist in conditions of absolute equality. When there are power differentials at play, which there most certainly always will be, then free speech and tolerance are only beneficial to the already powerful.

He calls tolerance in conditions of inequality “repressive” and argues that it inhibits the political agenda and suppresses the less powerful.

To account for this, Marcuse calls for a “liberating tolerance” that represses the strong and empowers the weak. He explained that a liberating tolerance “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”

The problem is that if you view the world through the obfuscated lens of conflict, then you see little other than power dynamics, and the only way to restore power imbalances is to use force. This essentially means that the weak (“the Left”) can do no wrong because they are virtuous, and the powerful (“the Right”) are oppressive no matter what they do, due to their perceived position of dominance. [read more]

Thousands of stars, including the sun, will turn into huge crystals

From CNet.com:

Eventually, the sun will cool off and become a giant crystal floating through space. It's not a bizarre science fiction plot, but the takeaway of new scientific research published this week in the journal Nature.

You may have heard that billions of years down the road the sun will swell to a ravenous red giant star that will eventually swallow Earth. But long after our planet has been ended, the sun will shrink to a cool white dwarf star and then slowly solidify into a massive white crystal, the study says.

That's a lot of bling wasted on the empty vacuum of space.

"All white dwarfs will crystallize at some point in their evolution, although more massive white dwarfs go through the process sooner," Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay from the University of Warwick's Department of Physics in the UK explained in a statement.

"This means that billions of white dwarfs in our galaxy have already completed the process and are essentially crystal spheres in the sky. The sun itself will become a crystal white dwarf in about 10 billion years." [read more]

Cool. I knew about the sun swelling into a red giant star but not turning into a crystal. Glad I won’t be around when the sun swells.

The Ironies of Illegal Immigration

From The Daily Signal.com (Jan. 10):

Estimates suggest that there are 11 million to 13 million Mexican citizens currently living in the United States illegally. Millions more emigrated previously and are now U.S. citizens.

A recent poll revealed that one-third of Mexicans (34 percent) would like to emigrate to the United States. With Mexico having a population of about 130 million, that amounts to some 44 million would-be immigrants.

Such massive potential emigration into the United States makes no sense.

First, Mexico is a naturally rich country. It ranks 19th in the world in proven oil reserves and is currently the 12th-largest oil producer. Mexico certainly has significantly more natural advantages than do far wealthier per capita Singapore, Taiwan, or Chile.

…………………

Second, popular progressive narratives in both Mexico and the United States cite America for all sorts of pathologies, past and present. The United States is often damned for prior colonialism and imperialism, as well as current racism and xenophobia.

Why, then, would millions of people south of the border leave their own homeland and potentially risk their lives to encounter a strange culture and language, to live in such a purportedly inhospitable place, and to adopt an antithetical system based on supposedly toxic European and Protestant traditions?

The answers to these two paradoxes are as obvious as they are politically incorrect and therefore seldom voiced. Life in Mexico is relatively poor, dangerous, and often unfree. In contrast, the United States is rich, generous, and secure.

……………….

More importantly, millions of Mexican citizens recognize (at least privately) that the United States is not the bogeyman of mostly elite critiques. Instead, it is one of the world’s rare multiracial, equal-opportunity societies. It is generous with its entitlements even to those who cross its border illegally, and far more meritocratic than most of the world’s highly tribal societies.

Maybe that is why millions of impoverished people from Mexico have left their homes in expectation that they will be treated far better as foreign, non-English speakers in a strange land than they will at home by their own government.

Indeed, if the U.S. treated immigrants in the fashion that Mexico does, then Mexican citizens would probably never emigrate to the U.S.

In sum, illegal immigration is both logical and nonsensical. [read more]

Interesting article.

Ex-political consultant Dick Morris has an interesting take on the building the wall. He says if America builds a wall between Mexico and us then that would force the Mexico gov’t to solve its own problems. Otherwise Mexican gov’t wants people to immigrate to America—less people to worry about. I don’t know. He might be right.

How Public Schools Suffer from the Tragedy of the Commons

From FEE.org:

Ownership by All

The idea of public schooling means they are open to the public, and in this way, we might truly call them public. But in a more realistic sense, the “public” in public school means they are owned by everyone and no one. For instance, if local public schools are supported in part by local taxation, then anyone who pays taxes in that district owns part of the school, in a sense. They don’t literally own a brick or a classroom, but in a republic, taxpayers are supposed to have a say in the things they pay for, or in this example, their local public school. In this way, your average public school is owned by everyone in that community. When we factor in the reality that a large part of funding for public education comes from the federal and state levels (as opposed to the local level only), then every taxpayer in an entire state and/or country “owns” the schools. These ISD’s are in reality not so independent after all.

Despite being collectively owned in theory, they are in reality owned by no one, which is another interpretation of the word “public.” This, of course, is the tragedy of the commons: When something is collectively owned, it is simultaneously owned by everyone and no one. Going back to our public school example, would an average tax-paying parent have substantial influence when it came to routine decisions about curriculum, course offerings, athletics, school lunches, etc.? After all, they own part of the school, at least in theory, so it stands to reason they would have a say in making decisions. But this isn’t how it works.

Because schools are “publicly” owned, they can’t possibly cater to the individual desires of each family. Susie’s mom wants a soccer team, Johnny’s dad wants increased funding for the band, and the elderly couple down the road just wants their property taxes to quit increasing. Just as a matter of practicality, publicly-owned services like schools cannot function in the same way that private schools do.

Why Markets Work Better

Although we can’t be certain of anything in this era of media saturation, I doubt whether we would ever see a story debating the legality of teaching Bible literacy courses in a private school. Private schools are funded by the parents of the students (not the abstract “community”), and just like a shopper who chooses Target over Tom Thumb, parents make a willful decision to send their child to a private school where they presumably know what product they are getting. Because an identifiable group of parents pays for the school, they have a substantially increased level of influence within the school. This isn’t to say that every parent will get what he or she wants simply because they write the check, but just as private businesses are subject to market tests of profit and loss, a private school must react promptly to the desires of its patrons if it wishes to stay in business.  [read more]

It’s too bad that today’s Leftists don’t know or understand the tragedy of the commons principle.

When Bill Clinton Tackled Me

From Dick Morris on Dick Morris.com (Jan. 8):

In May of 1990, I was meeting with my client Governor Bill Clinton in the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion when he totally lost it. He ran after me as I stormed out of the building and tackled me from behind, drew his fist back and started to punch me. Hillary screamed and held Bill’s arm back. Then she walked me around the grounds of the Mansion trying to calm me down. “Dick, Dick, she said. Don’t leave. Bill needs you. He’s just upset. Don’t go. He only does this to people he loves.”

………………

Bill decided to run for Governor in 1990 and faced only nominal opposition in the Democratic Primary. But people were so tired of him that he began to lose ground to his challenger and it looked like he might lose the election.

I gave him the bad news at a private meeting in May of 1990 and he exploded in anger, cursing and yelling at me. He even accused me of “throwing” the election to help my new Republican friends (I had become a Republican in the interim).

I stormed out of the Governor’s Mansion saying, over my shoulder as I left “OK! I quit! Now I’ll be a fifty state Republican. Go lose this election on your own.”

That’s when I heard his hoof beats behind me and he came up and tackled me. It was why our relationship cooled. He remained my client but no longer my friend.  [read more]

Dick Morris also mentioned this episode briefly in his 2016 book Armageddon: How Trump Can Beat Hillary.

Another article about the Clintons by Dick Morris: “How the Clintons Made Money from Huawei”

Russian church head: Smartphones could precede Antichrist

From AP News.com (Jan. 8):

MOSCOW (AP) — The head of the Russian Orthodox Church says the data-gathering capacity of devices such as smartphones risks bringing humanity closer to the arrival of the Antichrist.

In an interview shown Monday on state TV, Patriarch Kirill said the church does not oppose technological progress but is concerned that “someone can know exactly where you are, know exactly what you are interested in, know exactly what you are afraid of” and that such information could be used for centralized control of the world.

“Control from one point is a foreshadowing of the coming of Antichrist, if we talk about the Christian view. Antichrist is the person who will be at the head of the world wide web that controls the entire human race,” he said. [source]

Interesting. He could be right. Not only the Antichrist could use the technology but AI overloads could as well. Or maybe the Antichrist and the AI overloads could join forces. Who knows.

Rights and Non-Rights: A Simple Way to Distinguish the Two

Commentary from Lawrence W. Reed on FEE.org:

“Rights” are in the news these days perhaps as much as they were in George Mason’s time. As a score of politicians prepares to announce their 2020 campaigns for President of the United States, we can expect “rights” to be in the news every day, as they are promised to us one after another. “You have a right” to this or that and “If elected, I’ll make sure you get it” will soon be monotonous refrains.

America is a nation founded on the notion of rights. Our independence was declared in 1776 on a foundation of “unalienable” rights granted to us not by mortal authorities but by the Creator himself. Our ancestors rebelled against the British because they believed that such rights as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” were being thwarted by oppressors in London. Our founding documents were put forth specifically for the purposes of securing and protecting rights. Battles both intellectual and physical were fought in the ensuing decades to ensure that rights remained a priority of government or were extended to people not originally included.

……………….

I’ve given this subject some thought over the years and feel confident in providing the reader with a couple of lists to consider. The first one itemizes what I personally think you have a right to; the second is a partial roster of things I personally think you don’t have a right to (and I readily grant that you have every right to disagree with me).

You have a right to:

1. Your life (unless compromised by taking or attempting to take that of another person without a self-defense justification);
2. Your thoughts;
3. Your speech (which is really a verbal or written expression of #2) so long as you don’t steal it from another without permission or credit;
4. Material property you were freely given, that you created yourself, or that you freely traded for;
5. Raise and educate your children as you see fit;
6. Live in peace and freedom so long as you do not threaten the peace and freedom of others.

You do not have a right to:

1. High-speed broadband Internet access;
2. Cheeseburgers, cheap wine (or even expensive wine, for that matter), or an iPhone;
3. Somebody else’s house, car, boat, income, business, or bank account;
4. The labor of another person you’ve not freely contracted with (you can’t enslave somebody, in other words);
5. Medical care from a witch doctor or a skilled surgeon or anybody in between;
6. Taxpayer-funded (i.e., coercively-appropriated) child daycare, college education, contraceptives, colonoscopies, or sports stadiums;
7. Anything that’s not yours, even though you really want it and think you’re entitled to it;
8. Conscript other people’s children into schools you think they should attend;
9. Free stuff in general, unless the rightful owner chooses to offer it;
10. Anything a politician flattered you with by claiming you have a right to it.

Of course, gray areas and reasonable qualifications exist. For example, while I believe you do have a right to raise and educate your own children as you see fit, abuse and neglect are not defensible. But let’s keep our eyes on the big picture, the broad principles here.

Positive vs. Negative Rights

Now, look at those two lists again, carefully. How does the nature of the first list contrast with the nature of the second?

Answer: In the case of the first list, nothing is required of other people except that they leave you alone. For you to have a right to something in the second list, however, requires that other people be compelled to provide that something to you. That’s a monumental difference!

The first list comprises what are often called both “natural rights” and “negative rights”—natural because they derive from our essential nature as unique, sensate individuals and negative because they don’t impose obligations on others beyond a commitment to not violate them. The items in the second are called “positive rights” because others must give them to you or be coerced into doing so if they decline.  [read more]

The Left would disagree with the 2nd list saying they are rights. The Bill of Rights is basically the first list.

The Left Will Make 2019 a Dark Year

From The Daily Signal.com (Jan. 2):

2019 will be a dark year in America.

Thanks to the left’s control of the House of Representatives and the news media, Americans will be kept in a fevered state throughout 2019—with innumerable hearings, exposes, criminal investigations, and possible indictments of those around the president and the president himself.

Truth will not be the point. Defamation will. Anything that might muddy the president, no matter how spurious, no matter how thin the evidence, will be pursued with gusto. The media will drop “bombshell” after “bombshell.” If lives and careers are ruined, so much the better; no one should be associating with this president anyway, as far as the left is concerned.

The Robert Mueller investigation into alleged “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Russian government—which has led to guilty pleas and imprisonment of people around President Donald Trump for offenses having nothing to do with such collusion—is a preview of what lies ahead.

The goal of the left to weaken, disable, and impeach the president is the heart of its mission to undo the 2016 presidential election. If the Republicans had done anything comparable during the Obama administration, the Democrats and the media would not only have charged Republicans with racism—as they labeled all criticism of Barack Obama—they would have howled “fascism.”

And, for once, they wouldn’t have been far from the truth. The misuse of government institutions for political ends is indeed a fascist tactic. But because most media serve as the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, there will be no protest from the media, only support.

……………………

….the Democratic Party and the media will do to American political life what it has done to the arts; the universities; the high schools; the Boy Scouts; race relations; religion; the happiness of so many women (misled by feminism regarding marriage and career); the moral fabric of American life (morality reduced to feelings); late-night television; mainstream Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism; pro football; and the sexual innocence of the young: It will poison it.

From the French Revolution to this day, the two great aims of the left have been promising utopia to the malcontented and accumulating as much power as possible. All moral values are subservient to these goals.

After all, what could be more important than “social justice” (the left’s term for everything it advocates); “equality” (of result); women’s liberation from the “sexist oppression” of the “patriarchy”; combatting “white privilege”; fighting the “rape culture” that pervades campuses; saving life on planet Earth from the “existential threat” to it; “resistance” to the “authoritarian,” “fascist,” “white supremacist,” “racist” Trump administration; supplanting national identities and institutions with a “world citizen” identity and international institutions; and undoing the most fundamental built-in identity of the human race, that of male and female, in the name of transgender rights? [read more]

Yea, the author pretty much nailed the prediction.

Just Because We Can Create Genetically Modified Babies Doesn’t Mean We Should

From The Daily Signal.com (Dec. 17):

Two remarkable things took place last month in the world of biotechnology: A Chinese doctor claimed to have created two genetically modified human embryos who were successfully nurtured to birth, and the worldwide scientific community roundly rejected this experiment as a violation of ethics.

In turn, the Chinese government condemned the doctor and called for an immediate investigation.

At issue is a developing biotechnology known as CRISPR-Cas9 that allows scientists to genetically edit cells. The technique holds potential to treat a variety of genetic disorders such as cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease, as well as even more complex conditions such as cancers and heart disease. Indeed, the doctor says he genetically modified the two children in question (back in their embryonic stage) to make them resistant to HIV.

As promising as that sounds, the deployment of gene-editing to human embryos is rife with ethical questions: concerns about experimentation on minors, human embryo destruction, the creation of life in a lab, “designer babies,” the boundary between therapy and “enhancement,” and interventions in the genome that will be passed on to future generations.

In other words, genetically modified human embryos raise new versions of old bioethical problems, as well as some new ones.

First, countless embryonic human beings were killed in the process that led to the live birth of these two genetically modified children. Like all so-called “assisted reproductive technologies,” many more embryos are created than are implanted and subsequently delivered. The remaining embryonic human beings are either frozen in perpetuity or destroyed. This research poses an immediate threat to the right to life of the unborn.

……………….

We should also care about the dignity of life in its very origins. There is a great danger in creating children in the laboratory, a process that treats human subjects as if objects of technological mastery. That will have profound moral and cultural implications as the science progresses: Societies can come to view human life—all life, modified or not—as something that can easily be toyed with and discarded.

……………….

There’s also the specter of a kind of “brave new world” genetic arms race. Imagine John Edwards’ “Two Americas,” but between the genetic haves and the genetic have-nots. An America where the wealthy (and morally unscrupulous) design super-babies, while everyone else remains “unenhanced.”

As the philosopher Leon Kass has explained, “As bad as it might be to destroy a creature made in God’s image, it might be very much worse to be creating them after images of one’s own.”  [read more]

Hitler and a lot of early progressives liked the idea of eugenics—perfecting the species however they defined what “perfection” is.