Miscellaneous Thoughts Part 40

• The Invisible Hand of Salvation: Each sinner will save him/herself through self-interest—they don’t want to go to Hell.
• The reason motherships make it to planets and not fatherships is because fatherships didn’t stop and ask for directions and are now lost.
• Obama says that Trump is unfit to be president. Well, that didn’t stop Obama from being elected president twice.
• There is quite a few “mothers against” organizations. But there isn’t a “mothers for personal responsibility” or even “mothers for self-control.” Hmmm.
• The Left always talks about “sharing the wealth” but never “sharing the power” especially with the republicans.
• To the Left, woman and minority votes matter. Nothing else.
• An artificial intelligence android, robot or computer that does not care about human life or dignity could very easily turn into a sociopath. After all it is not human.
• The truth exists. Mankind may not always find the truth but it does exist because God knows about it.
• I don’t care if illegal immigrants (or for that matter legal immigrants) love Americans or not. I just want them to be peaceful and law abiding. If they love the Constitution even better.
• If a dictator wanted to oppress a country he would legalize marijuana. Not only legalize it but encourage it and possibly even supply it. Why? Because marijuana dulls the mind and a person doesn’t know if he/she is being oppressed. I wonder if that’s why the Left wants it legalized? Hmm.

Your Brain on Pot: Reasons to Avoid Marijuana

From News Max.com (Dec. 6, 2016):

More than half of our states have legalized marijuana for medical use, and the list of those legalizing recreational marijuana is growing rapidly. Many experts have focused on the positive medical aspects of marijuana to ease certain physical problems, such as chronic pain from nerve damage and painful muscle spasms associated with multiple sclerosis.

However, marijuana contains over 400 chemicals, and their impact on the brain and body is still largely unknown. Although studies have warned of the dangers of smoking pot and its effect on the brain for decades, two recent studies are even more troubling in light of the rush to legalize its recreational use.

"The proponents of legalization tried to make the medicinal benefits the focus and ignored the numerous damaging effects," neurosurgeon Dr. Russell Blaylock told Newsmax Health.

The most recent study, which was published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, found that smoking marijuana lowers blood flow in every area of the brain, including those areas especially vulnerable to Alzheimer's.

Study participants included almost 1,000 marijuana smokers who had psychiatric problems that were resistant to treatment. They underwent a sophisticated imaging study called single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) that evaluates blood flow and activity patterns.

Compared to healthy non-marijuana users, researchers at Amen Clinics found abnormally low blood flow in almost every area of the brain in virtually every patient who used marijuana. The hippocampus, an area of the brain known to be impacted by Alzheimer's, was especially affected. [read more]

The article goes on to say that abusing pot makes you more psychotic. That’s not good.

Popular Science article (July 1, 2013): SCIENCE CONFIRMS THE OBVIOUS: SMOKING POT MAKES YOU LESS MOTIVATED

Progressive Liars Part IV: Woodrow Wilson

Speaking to business leaders at the Time Squares Hotel Astor, Wilson pushed back against the complaints that his ideas opposed the free enterprise system. He believed that wealthy families such as the Astors had turned the American Republic into their own fiefdom. The rich, he said, had to be reined in and their wealth confiscated for the public good, if necessary:

The very thing that government cannot let alone is business.

Government cannot take its hands off business. Government must regulate business because that is the foundation of every other relationship.

The tragic sinking of the Titanic, a ship that its owners boasted was unsinkable, was the consequence of a hubristic, humanist assumption about man’s ability to control natural law and to defy the will of God. And so was the candidacy of Woodrow Wilson.

Few presidents have displayed such open contempt for the Constitution they swore to preserve, protect and defend. Even fewer had such severe disdain for women, minorities and anyone else who deviated from Wilson’s view of the “perfect citizen.”

Source: Progressive Liars Part IV: Woodrow Wilson.

Basically, the “perfect citizen” is anyone who believes the Left’s ideology otherwise your an unbeliever or at worst an inferior person or a “deplorable.”

Here are some FEE.org articles on Wilson:

• Woodrow Wilson: This So-Called Progressive was a Dedicated Racist
• Should We Follow George Washington or Woodrow Wilson?

Woodrow Wilson Asks “What Is Progress?”

What is the Proper Role of Governments Lecture Notes

1. Punish evil, reward good. Romans 13.
2. For Israel then, not for us now.
3. God is sovereign over all nations.
4. Serve the people and seek the good of the people.
5. Citzens should obey the laws (usually).
6. Safeguard liberty.
7. Church and state have a relationship that is distinct.
8. Law applies even to rulers.
9. The Bible gives support to democracy.
10. Nations should value patrotism.

Source: What is the Proper Role of Government? lecture from Politics and the Bible.org.

How to Repeal and Replace Obamacare

From Fee.org (Dec. 8):

Vice President-elect Mike Pence recently described Price to Fox News as “someone who literally, for the last half a dozen years, has been in the forefront of efforts, not only to repeal Obamacare, but put forward common sense, free-market solutions that will lower the cost of health insurance, without growing the size of government.”

Jason Miller, Communications Director for the Trump transition team, told the San Francisco Gate that replacing the ACA is "one of the things he's going to lead the charge on as secretary of HHS."

Lowering the Cost of Care

Evidence is scant that Obamacare did anything to help with the biggest problem facing the American healthcare system: the cost of care. According to Consumer Reports, health care spending is at $3 trillion, making it alone the world’s fifth-largest economy. In the US, health care costs nearly double what the rest of the developed world is paying per person.

One reason healthcare in America is so expensive is that there are no more actual health insurance companies in this country. Instead, insurance companies have become cost-pools.

Consumer Reports sums it up nicely: “If you have health insurance, you may think [the cost of care] doesn’t matter because someone else is paying the bill.”

Health care works nothing like other market transactions. As a consumer, you are a bystander to the real action, which takes place between providers—hospitals, doctors, labs, drug companies, and device manufacturers—and the private and governmental entities that pay them. Those same providers are also pushing Americans into newer and more expensive treatments, even when there’s no evidence they’re any better.

…………………..

“What currently passes for health insurance in America is really just prepaid health care — on a kind of all-you-can-consume buffet card,” San Jose State University Economics instructor Warren C. Gibson wrote. “There is no price transparency. The resulting overconsumption makes premiums skyrocket, and health resources get misallocated relative to genuine wants and needs.”

“There is no such thing as a legitimate price for anything in healthcare,” according to George Halvorson, former chairman of Kaiser Permanente, the giant health maintenance organization based in California. “Prices are made up depending on who the payer is.”

1. Separating employment and health insurance. By killing the requirement that larger employers provide health insurance, the Empowering Patients First Act helps to sever the tie between employment and health insurance. Another method for severing that tie in the bill is a provision that limits how much tax-free health insurance coverage businesses can offer their employees. Individual employee could only get $8,000 worth of tax-free health insurance, and families $20,000, adjusted for inflation.
2. Incentivizing smart choices. Up to 30% of Americans’ medical care is unnecessary, according to the Congressional Budget Office. This is a natural result of the fee-for-service payment model. It means that a doctor who innovates a way to do with one CT scan what used to require three, is discouraged from implementing the new practice because it means the hospital loses money.
3. Re-legalizing low-cost catastrophic care plans. The ACA outlawed catastrophic care plans. By forcing insurers to cover a variety of treatments and procedures of varying necessity, the ACA made low-cost plans illegal.

[read more]

It’s a good start to get rid of the Unaffordable No-Care Act. President-elect Trump should have a look at it if he hasn’t already.

Progressive Liars Part III: Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger, the so-called mother of birth control and founder of what has become modern day Planned Parenthood, believed in a policy of improvement to “create a race of thoroughbreds.”

In 1922, Sanger wrote:

Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly. People who cannot support their own offspring are encouraged by church and state to produce large families. Many of the children thus begotten are diseased and feebleminded. Many become criminals. Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to the maintenance of those who should have never been born.

In 1926, Sanger presented her views to a women’s chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, which led to more speaking engagements to similar groups. How did an American woman arrive at this kind of thinking? As with many progressive leaders, a traumatic childhood event helped shape her radical beliefs about preventing birth among certain “undesirables.”

Source: Progressive Liars Part III: Margaret Sanger.

Karl Marx called the “undesirables” lumpenproletariats- the beggars, prostitutes, etc. He really had no use for the poor either. His main concern was the middle class and the wealthy business owners. Then there was Hitler. He just exterminated his “undesirables.”

Karl Marx, Western Civilization and Hypocrisy

Both theoretician and  practitioner, Marx strove to destroy Western civilization as we know it, by unraveling both strands of its cultural DNA and replacing them with his version of communism.

He repudiated the Abrahamic faiths with dialectical materialism: No God, one book (Das Kapital), one pamphlet (the Communist Manifesto), one profit (Karl Marx). He defied Aristotle by disording the hierarchy of arts and sciences, and promoting economics uber alles. He placed politics--and therefore all of the other arts and sciences under central economic control. This economic theory was intended to remedy the grevious wrongs suffered by the working classes during the Industrial Revolution, and was meant to spread worldwide. Capitalism was seen as evil, communism as good.

Marx himself privately envied the lives and lifestyles of the so-called "petty bourgeoisie"-- the middle class-- whom he accused of complicity in exploiting the proletariat. Having found a friend and benefactor in Frederick Engels, who himself had inherited factories in England's industrialized Midlands, Marx is eventually managed to lead the pampered upper-middle-class lifestyle that he otherwise sought to destroy--in a London town house and paid for by the sweat of the workers in Engels' factories.

……………..

Nonetheless, Marxism represented the terminus of a widespread romantic and utopian European rebellion against the myriad sufferings of the hapless masses, imposed by successive centuries and layers of feudalism, monarchy, theocracy, mercantilism, imperialism, and industrialization.  The ongoing democratic and socialist reforms were not enough for Marx, who sought more rapid and more radical change.

Source: The Middle Way. Finding Happiness in a World of Extremes  (2007) by Lou Marinoff, Ph. D.

Capitalism is seen today by most of the far-Left as evil especially by far-Left professors. Then they teach this warped view to their students who grow up and teach this hate to their young. The hate continues. It doesn’t help if the parents of the students believe this crap too.

As for the Marx living a pampered upper-middle-class lifestyle—that’s expected. After all he is special—he’s one of the Elites.

The Intellectual Conceit of IQ Ideology

From Fee.org:

The cultural fascination with the idea of an “intelligence quotient” or IQ seems to be experiencing a resurgence. Relentless testing is a feature of schooling and school admissions, and tests are used for a variety of occupational screenings. The practice reflects an intuition we all have: some bulbs are brighter than others. Surely there is nothing wrong with knowing, measuring, and acting on that information, however difficult it might be to assess.

Where matters become elusive is in codifying those skills, reducing them all to a single quantitative number, aggregating them based on other demographic traits, assessing the variability of the results, comparing the results across large population groups, determining the variety of causal factors – genetic, environmental, sheer personal determination – that make up what we call intelligence, and cobbling together a plan for what to do with the results.

Here we have a much more complex problem, as complex as the human mind itself. The amatuer commentator might read a book on the topic and hope to come away with a sense that within this literature we find the key to the rise and fall of whole civilizations. The would-be central planner salivates at the prospect! But the more you read, the less certain you become, and the more in awe of the unknowns, the surprises, and the way the real world continues to defy the predictions of the scientific elite.

The IQ as a Central Planning Tool

And then there are the social and political implications of the efforts. What’s not usually understood is that the search for some measurable standard of intelligence – and implicitly human value itself – has a deep history that is bound up with the emergence of the planned society, eugenics, and the 20th century leviathan state.

…………………

The story of IQ begins at the end of the Franco-Prussian war when France’s civic institutions were remodelled to never lose another war. The prevailing theory was that France lacked the technical skills necessary for modern warfare. Citizens needed training and that meant education reform. Schooling would raise up a citizen army and therefore must be forced. From 1879 to 1886, legislation imposed compulsory schooling on the entire population.

With all kids now forced into non-religious schools, it was time to impose a rational method on steering the conscripts into socially and politically optimal paths. In 1904, just as fascination with the idea of scientific socialism had gained fashion, the French Ministry of Education contacted the psychologist Alfred Binet (1857-1911) to come up with some assessment test. He came up with a series of questions from easiest to hardest, and ranked the kids based on their performance of the tests.

The result was the Binet-Simon scale. From Binet’s point of view, the only purpose was to identify which kids needed special focus and attention so that they would not be left behind. But the idea of quantity, ranking, and assessing cognitive performance caught on in the United States, where eugenics was a prevailing intellectual fashion. It was driving public policy in labor regulations, immigration, forced sterilizations, marriage licenses, welfare policy, business regulation, and segregation strategies.

The first American enthusiast for Binet’s work was Henry H. Goddard, a leading champion of eugenics and a champion of the planning state. In 1908, Goddard translated Binet’s work and popularized it among the intellectual classes. He turned what might have been a humanitarian push to provide remedial help to students into a weapon of war against the weak.

What did Goddard believe could be done with his insights?

He summarized his political outlook as follows:

“Democracy, then, means that the people rule by selecting the wisest, most intelligent, and most human to tell them what to do to be happy. Thus Democracy is a method for arriving at a truly benevolent aristocracy. Such a consummation will be reached when the most intelligent learn to apply their intelligence…. High intelligence must so work for the welfare of the masses as to command their respect and affection.”

What’s more, “society must be so organized that these people of limited intelligence shall not be given, or allowed to hold, positions that require more intelligence than they possess. And in the positions that they can fill, they must be treated in accordance with their level of intelligence. A society organized on this basis would be a perfect society.”

Toward this end, he broke down the human population into normative categories, the underperforming of whom he labelled imbeciles, morons, and idiots – designations that survive to this day. He proposed a new form of social order in which an elite of intellectuals assigns tasks and life stations based on test results.  [read more]

Interesting article. There is no such thing as a perfect society because people can’t be made to be perfect—only God can do that although sometimes Big Gov thinks it’s God.

In the article, the author talks about three economic issues that contradict the IQ ideology:

1. Consumers have odd tastes that have little to do with intelligence, scientifically defined.  For instance, in racing (car, boat, etc.) intelligence is not the first trait that stands out.
2. The law of association makes everyone valuable. A core belief of the IQ ideology is that smart people, as measured by tests, are more valuable to the social order than dumber people. But economics has made a different discovery. It turns out that through the division of labor, or what Ludwig von Mises called the “law of association,” everyone can be valuable to everyone else, regardless of aptitude.
3. Intelligence necessary for the building of a great society does not reside in the minds of particular individuals. The highest intelligence of the social order resides in the processes and institutions of society itself. It doesn’t exist in total in any single mind and it doesn’t emerge consciously from the plans of any group.

Will socialists and the far-Left or should I say the alt-Left ever get the third point? Not until they trust people to make their own decisions about their lives. Once they can see people as adults not as children or worse cattle then they will trust the general population.

Progressive Liars Part II: German Roots

To find the roots of progressivism, one has to go back to Germany in the 1500s, and the Protestant Reformation against the Catholic Church by Martin Luther. Was Luther a progressive? Hardly, but his ideas about man’s relationship with God have morphed and metastasized the past 500 years into something unrecognizable from what he originally intended. Luther’s declaration that man could have a personal relationship with God without enlisting a papal leader inadvertently started the ball rolling toward progressivism.

More than two centuries later in the late 1700s, German professor George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would use his disbelief in God for a similar purpose — to better humanity. After surviving an epidemic, Hegel’s views on God were irrevocably changed. Hegel concluded that experts and knowledgeable persons should rule — not God — with the most perfect government and unlimited authority over the individual. Through the State and its rulers, man would essentially become God on earth. This was the foundational principle that eventually became known as progressivism.

Source: Progressive Liars Part II: German Roots.

Hegel influenced Karl Marx and Frederick Engels—the two founders of Communism.

The Right Problems

Below is Herman Cain’s important problems to solve:

1. Balance the budget.
2. Replace the tax code.
3. Restructure social security.
4. Restructure Medicare and Medicaid.
5. Secure the border and enforce existing immigration laws.
6. Achieving true energy independence and security.
7. Dramatically reduce federal regulations.
8. Enforce our constitution and laws.
9. Rebuilding our military.

Source: The Right Problems: What the President, Congress, and Every Candidate Should Be Working On (2016) by Herman Cain.

Good ideas. Interesting book.

5 Ideas at the Heart of Socialism

From FEE.org:

Marx and the Marxists would have us believe that socialism is inevitable, that it will embrace the world as surely as the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. As long as men have free will (the power to choose right over wrong), however, nothing that involves human volition can ever be inevitable. If socialism comes, it will come because men choose to embrace its principles.

Socialism is an age-old failure, yet the socialist idea constitutes the chief threat to liberty today. As I see it, socialism can be broken down into five ideas:

1. The Pass-a-Law Syndrome

Passing laws has become a national pastime. Business in trouble? Pass a law to give it public subsidies or restrict its freedom of action. Poverty? Pass a law to abolish it. Perhaps America needs a law against passing more laws.

Almost invariably, a new law means: (a) more taxes to finance its administration, (b) additional government officials to regulate some heretofore unregulated aspect of life, and (c) penalties for violating the law. In brief, more laws mean more regimentation, more coercion. Let there be no doubt about what the word coercion means: force, plunder, compulsion, restraint. Synonyms for the verb form of the word are even more instructive: impel, exact, subject, conscript, extort, wring, pry, twist, dragoon, bludgeon, and squeeze.

When government intervenes in the free economy, bureaucrats and politicians spend most of their time undoing their own handiwork. To repair the damage of provision A, they pass provision B. Then they find that to repair provision B, they need provision C, and to undo C, they need D, and so on until the alphabet and our freedoms are exhausted.

2. The Get-Something-from-Government Fantasy

Government by definition has nothing to distribute except what it first takes from people. Taxes are not donations.

In the welfare state this basic fact gets lost in the rush for special favors and giveaways. People speak of “government money” as if it were truly free.

3. The Pass-the-Buck Psychosis

Recently, a welfare recipient wrote her welfare office and demanded, “This is my sixth child. What are you going to do about it?”

An individual is victim to the pass-the-buck psychosis when he abandons himself as the solver of his problems. He might say, “My problems are really not mine at all. They are society’s, and if society doesn’t solve them and solve them quickly, there’s going to be trouble!”

Socialism thrives on the shirking of responsibility. When men lose their spirit of independence and initiative, their confidence in themselves, they become clay in the hands of tyrants and despots.

4. The Know-It-All Affliction

Leonard Read, in “The Free Market and Its Enemy,” identified “know-it-allness” as a central feature of the socialist idea. The know-it-all is a meddler in the affairs of others. His attitude can be expressed in this way: “I know what’s best for you, but I’m not content to merely convince you of my rightness; I’d rather force you to adopt my ways.” The know-it-all evinces arrogance and a lack of tolerance for the great diversity among people.

In government, the know-it-all refrain sounds like this: “If I didn’t think of it, then it can’t be done, and since it can’t be done, we must prevent anyone from trying.” A group of West Coast businessmen once ran into this snag when their request to operate barge service between the Pacific Northwest and Southern California was denied by the (now-defunct) Interstate Commerce Commission because the agency felt that the group could not operate such a service profitably.

5. The Envy Obsession

Coveting the wealth and income of others has given rise to a sizable chunk of today’s socialist legislation. Envy is the fuel that runs the engine of redistribution. Surely, the many soak-the-rich schemes are rooted in envy and covetousness.

What happens when people are obsessed with envy? They blame those who are better off than themselves for their troubles. Society is fractured into classes and faction preys on faction. Civilizations have been known to crumble under the weight of envy and the disrespect for property it entails.

A Common Thread

A common thread runs through these five socialist ideas. They all appeal to man’s darker side: the primitive, noncreative, slothful, dependent, demoralizing, unproductive, and destructive side of human nature. No society can long endure if its people practice such suicidal notions.   [read more]

Socialism is just about control of the masses—that’s what the socialists and the Left call everyone except themselves. They are sheep herders and the masses are the sheep who need to be guided.

Progressive Liars Part I: Fear and Hope

Chicago coliseum, July 9, 1896: Thirty-six-year old William Jennings Bryan put forth the Democratic Party’s proposed national platform to a cheering crowd that frantically waved red bandannas in a sign of solidarity. Bryan became convinced that victory was his. A new monetary policy based on the coinage of silver, free silver, had proven to be an even more enticing message than he had expected. The new supply of money would relieve crippling debt for the impoverished voters Bryan sought to mobilize. As he neared the climax of his remarks, he mustered every last ounce of energy and unleashed some of the most famous lines in American political rhetoric:

If they dare come out in the open field,” he thundered, “And defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nations of the world and having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and the toiling masses.

Bryan’s speech launched the era of progressivism, featuring the biggest liars in American history. These liars achieved their so-called progress using fear and hope, two uniquely human feelings, to impose their will upon mankind.

Source: Progressive Liars Part I: Fear and Hope.

Once the gold standard was removed, Congress had no external discipline.

Why the 2016 Election Proves America Needs the Electoral College

From The Daily Signal.com (Nov. 14):

In the last week since Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in a stunning electoral blowout, there have been calls from many on the left to abolish America’s unique presidential election system.

It still hasn’t been settled whether Trump or Clinton won the popular vote, but many Democrats are upset about the possibility that their candidate may have won more total votes, yet lost the election.

Progressives are taking aim at the Electoral College and want to replace it with a national popular vote. This would both remove the indirect mediation of the electors’ votes, and more damagingly, eliminate the power of states in choosing a president.

………………………..

The ‘Fairness’ of the Electoral College

As designed in the Constitution, America’s presidential election is very much a product of the states—channeling the principle of “federalism” that the Founders cherished.

Smaller states receive a slightly higher number of votes compared to their population than more populous ones, which detractors of the Electoral College claim damages the idea of one man, one vote.

Many say this system is “unfair,” and that the total number of individual votes from all the states is a more accurate gauge for who the president should be. But, would it be fair for America’s chief executive to mostly be the product of a few urban centers in California, New York, and Texas?

The Electoral College system was designed to ensure that presidents would have to receive support from a diverse array of people around the country.

Modern candidates have to accommodate farmers in rural states, factory workers in industrial states, and software engineers in tech-dominated states. The president must consider the needs and opinions of people across the country instead of just the views of a few, highly populated urban centers.

The Electoral College ensures that the interests of “flyover country” in middle America cannot be ignored.  [read more]

What the Left doesn’t think about is one day in the future there might be a time when a republican candidate or a non-Left candidate will win the presidential election and get both the popular vote and the electoral vote. Then again they think everyone will always love them like parental figures. Then you have those like elites like Hillary who would rather just skip the vote altogether and just be annointed.

Even if Donald Trump won the popular vote too, the Left would just way they were duped by a con man. The masses are never duped by Left of course. The Left never con or lie to the public like Hillary did to the mothers who lost their sons over in Benghazi.

Seven Executive Orders Trump Should Reverse

From The Daily Signal.com (Nov 10):

Under the U.S. Constitution, Congress, not the president, creates the laws. Article I of the Constitution grants enumerated legislative powers to Congress. The Constitution assigns the executive the duty to enforce the law, and Article II, Section 3 requires that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

However, throughout the last eight years, we have seen the Obama administration continually abuse the power of the executive branch by issuing unconstitutional, unilateral executive actions to push its agenda. The “old days” of Congress creating our laws have become a distant memory.

President Barack Obama even went so far as to announce his unilateralism, saying, “We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help they need. I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone.”

…………………………

As long promised, Trump should use the first 100 days of his administration to repeal every illegal executive action the Obama administration has issued while in office.

Here is a list of the seven areas with the most damaging executive actions signed during the Obama administration that must be repealed:

1. Crony Exemptions to Obamacare
2. Executive Amnesty. The new president must repeal Obama’s unilateral changes to our nation’s immigration laws, which exempted certain categories of illegal aliens from being deported. (This bar on deportations was halted by a court order, but the underlying exemption still remains on the books.)
3. Environmental Protection Agency Overreaches. Trump must repeal Obama’s multiple illegitimate expansions of EPA rules. These new rules have imposed huge costs on society and are crippling the U.S. energy sector.
4. Appeasement of Iran. Trump must repeal the executive order that single-handedly removed U.S. sanctions on Iran. These sanctions provided key leverage to the U.S. in negotiations with Iran, and their removal has cleared Iran’s path in developing a nuclear weapon.
5. Climate Change Bureaucracy. Trump must repeal the executive orderthat purports to “prepare the United States for the impacts of climate change.” This action from Obama created manifold new justifications for government spending based on inconclusive science.
6. Life and Religious Liberty. Trump should reverse Obamacare’s unprecedented taxpayer funding of abortion. He should also direct the secretary of Health and Human Services to undertake a rulemaking process that will end the mandate for insurance to cover abortion-inducing drugs and contraception, along with “gender transition” therapies and surgeries.
7. “Gender Identity.” Trump should repeal the Obama administration’s Title IX guidance equating “gender identity” with “biological sex.” The Department of Justice and Department of Education have wielded this guidance to punish educational institutions for “discrimination” under Title IX, simply for having separate showers,

By making the repeal of these executive actions a priority, the Trump administration will have an easy opportunity to right some of the wrongs of the past administration.locker rooms, and bathrooms for men and women.  [read more]

I agree Donald Trump should resind those executive orders and then some. It was a blatent abuse of power—made the Congress seem obsolete. Then again Emperor Obama didn’t care.

When ISIS Rules

At first, Lattif said, ISIS treated civilians “gently,” even assuming some of the civil administrative duties that had been handled by volunteers and the FSA. They fixed damaged roads, planted flowers in the street, cultivated gardens, and cleaned the local schools. But not long thereafter, Lattif said, ISIS instituted Sharia law, forcing women to wear what he called “the Daesh clothes”—the niqab or full head-and-face covering. “They banned hairdressing. Beard shaving is also forbidden. No woman can leave her house without a male escort now. There’s no smoking, no shisha [flavored tobacco smoked in hookahs], no playing cards. They’ve made everything bad for civilians now. They force the people to go to the mosque for prayers, to close their businesses. No one can walk in the street during prayers. They kidnapped almost everybody working in the relief centers. About a month ago [November 2014], they closed the school. If you want to study now, you have to go to the Daesh school in the mosque.”

Torture is common, too. ISIS has taken to arresting members of the FSA, whom they accuse of being agents of foreign intelligence services. Sentences for various ISIS-designated crimes are carried out publicly in al-Bab’s town square. These range, depending on the offense, from dismemberment to beheading. “They cut off heads and hands in the square. Do you remember the hookah place?” Lattif was referring to a popular cafe in central al-Bab where, in 2012, he had outlined his vision of a free and democratic Syria. “The beheadings are taking place now in front of there. They shut down the hookah place, of course.”

Source: ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (2015) by Michael Weiss.

Beard shaving is forbidden? The male cast of Duck Dynasty would fit in nicely except for being Christians. The ISIS thugs wouldn’t like that at all.

9 Controversies Obama Didn’t Mention When He Denied Any ‘Major Scandals’

From The Daily Signal.com (Oct. 24):

President Barack Obama discarded eight years of controversies surrounding his administration, including the targeting of conservative groups, veterans lacking health care, the administration’s response to a terrorist attack weeks before the 2012 election, and a botched gun sting.

During a Democratic fundraising event in San Diego Sunday, Obama attacked Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the former chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, for the various investigations into the administration.

“Here’s a guy who called my administration perhaps the most corrupt in history, despite the fact that actually, we have not had a major scandal in my administration,” Obama told Democratic donors.

………………….

Here’s a list of nine controversies that Obama didn’t mention at the Democratic fundraiser, but that nevertheless leave many unanswered questions.

1. IRS Targeting Scandal.
2. VA Waiting List.
3. GSA Spending Spree. In 2012, Martha N. Johnson, the administrator of the General Services Administration, resigned after the federal procurement agency was engulfed in a controversy. The department was accused of allowing excessive spending on travel and conferences for the agency and employees.
4. Attack on the Benghazi Compound.
5. Clinton Emails.
6. Fast and Furious Gun Walking.
7. Solyndra Subsidies.
8. DOJ and the New Black Panther Party. On Election Day 2008, hours before Obama was first elected, two members of the New Black Panther Party stood outside the door of a polling place in Philadelphia in paramilitary outfits. One of the men was carrying a nightstick. The two men were caught on video seemingly intimidating voters.
9. A Job for Sestak.

In 2010, Rep. Joe Sestak, who was challenging Sen. Arlen Specter in a Pennsylvania Democratic Senate primary, said that the Obama administration had offered him a job to dissuade him from entering the race.

Obama had endorsed Specter, who had recently switched allegiance from the Republican to the Democrat Party during the early months of Obama’s presidency. The White House did not answer questions on the matter for several months.

[read more]

Yea, this is Obama’s legacy. He owns it. Whether he wants to or not. But he will not even think about these scandals because his narcissism won’t permit it. The press didn’t help anything by not doing their job and not reporting them. Or briefly reporting them.

Will these nine scandals get put in history books? Well, if Leftwing historians are writing the books probably not.

 

Six Bullets Dodged with Hillary's Loss

From FEE.org (Nov. 15):

The current news cycle is monopolized by two narratives. In one, Trump supporters are cheering the great and promising future. In the other, oppositional progressives are screeching about how hateful and daft he and his supporters are. But in the midst of this chaotic national quarrel, one important person has managed to slip away: Hillary Clinton. Not only metaphorically but literally. Maybe she’s seeking asylum in Russia.
Anyway, while Trump’s impending reign isn’t anything to be ecstatic over, a relief of what America avoided in a Clinton presidency is definitely warranted. So let’s take a moment to examine some avoided disasters that likely would’ve happened had Hillary Clinton won.

         The Death of the Sharing Economy

Hillary Clinton is on the same track. Last year she pledged to “crack down” on companies like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Lending Club, Dogvacay, etc. These are companies that are frowned upon by taxi and hotel cartels, street corner title loan shops, and many more awful, out-of-date institutions. With Hillary out of office, the sharing economy and all those who benefit from its employment opportunities and convenience get to live to see another day.

          Minority Unemployment

Minimum wage increases, overtime rules, high corporate taxes; all these policies have historically and presently had a negative impact on employment opportunities among minority communities. This is particularly true of youth and blacks in middle- and lower-class America. Hillary Clinton supports all of these initiatives and more. Her policies included manufactured outsourcing of labor due to uncompetitive corporate tax rates, which disincentivizes businesses to stay in the States, and, instead, offsets the insane tax by employing workers in other countries like China and Mexico. So when it comes to the American labor force and those who are un- or underemployed, they may have dodged a huge bullet.

          Globalism and Imperialism

In addition to terrible military strategy, she’s also a staunch globalist, using government to achieve it. This is not to be confused with the internationalization of cooperative cultures and markets. She wants global governance, which means increased concentration of elitist wealth, power, and bureaucratic controls over our everyday lives.  [read more]

The other bullets not listed here are: Healthcare, Guns (specifically gun control laws), and Energy (increasing costs on energy producing companies like coal).

ISIS’s Divide-and-Rule Strategy

In The Management of Savagery, Abu Bakr Najji elucidated the importance of manipulating tribal politics and offered his own anthropological gloss on the matter. He observed that it was not necessarily a bad thing for jihadists that confederations of families tended to stick together. In fact, this reality was easily harnessed to the jihadists’ benefit by a gradual process of bribery, brainwashing, and co-optation. “When we address these tribes that have solidarity we should not appeal to them to abandon their solidarity,” he wrote. “Rather, we must polarize them and transform them into praiseworthy tribes that have solidarity. . . . It is possible to begin doing so by uniting the leaders . . . among them with money and the like. Then, after a period of time in which their followers have mixed with our followers and their hearts have been suffused with the picture of faith, we will find that their followers do not accept anything which contradicts the sharia. Of course, solidarity remains, but it has been changed into a praiseworthy solidarity instead of the sinful solidarity which they used to have.”

Given the popularity of this manifesto among ISIS zealots, it was hardly a shock that the organization would be the first one in history to successfully pit members of the same tribe against one another. Such divide-and-rule tactics were on grim display in August 2014, when members of the Shaitat tribe in Deir Ezzor participated in the killing of hundreds of their fellow tribesmen at ISIS’s behest. The same kind of coerced fratricide occurred in the Iraqi town of Hit, where members of the Albu Nimr took part in the execution of dozens of their own in October 2014. Making the ruled complicit in the crimes of the ruler, and individuals more loyal to the state than to their own flesh and blood, is a hallmark of totalitarianism.

As per Najji, the exchange of money for loyalty has played a major role in tearing families apart. In April 2013, after the rupture with al-Nusra, ISIS secretly sought to co-opt young tribal leaders by offering to share oil and smuggling revenues with them. It also promised them positions of authority currently held by their elders. Younger tribesmen were generally more credible and popular, owing to their participation in the anti-Assad rebellion; their elders had mainly sided with the regime or stayed neutral.

One figure from the Syrian border town of Albu Kamal explained how ISIS had exploited this generational schism to snare members of a prominent family, months before the jihadists had even established a presence there. “They are giving him a portion of an oil well in the area,” the figure said, referring to a younger relative who had joined the jihadists. “They know that if they are to be eradicated in our area, who would be able to rally up people around him? Most of the other tribes in our area have no leadership; we have leadership and influence. They give him money, they protect him and consult with him on everything. The other option is, they would assassinate him.”

Source: ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (2015) by Michael Weiss.

The divide-and-conquer rule is used by a lot of dictators. It’s hard to conquer when the people you are trying to conquer are united.

How Republicans Could Overcome Filibusters by Senate Democrats

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

As Democrats strategize on how to stop conservative legislation from making its way to Donald Trump’s desk in the White House, Republicans have a little-known rule in their toolbox that would allow them to pass legislation, including a repeal of Obamacare, with a simple majority.

Democrats were able to keep 48 seats in the Senate after Tuesday’s election, giving the party the power to filibuster legislation and effectively prevent conservative policies from being enacted.

But Republicans can turn to a seldom-used Senate rule that would allow them to pass legislation by a simple majority vote—legislation that has a greater chance of earning Trump’s signature after he assumes office Jan. 20.

Called the two-speech rule, the tool limits senators to giving only two speeches in one legislative day on a question before the Senate. A legislative day, which differs from a calendar day, ends when the upper chamber adjourns.

Once a senator gives those two speeches, he or she is not allowed to speak again. [read more]

Works for me. If the roles were reversed this is what the Dems in the Senate would do in a heartbeat. Politics is war to them and the Republicans ought to know that by now.

If the Republicans in the Senate activate this rule the Dems would call fowl of course. That’s their modus operandi.

Slavery and the Founders Part III: Benjamin Franklin

Critics of the Founders point to the three-fifths clause in the United States Constitution, which counted blacks as three-fifths of a person, as proof of their racism. To use this as proof of the Founders’ hatred for black people shows a painful lack of knowledge.

The three-fifths clause had nothing to do with the worth of the human being. The argument in question was over the census and counting people in various states for Congressional representation and taxation. Many southern delegates argued that slaves, as their property, should be counted as a full person. Why? Because that would increase their representation in Congress, and thus their power and ability to keep slavery intact. The northern delegates who sought the eventual end to slavery knew that more representation meant more power for the south. And if they allowed that, slavery may never end. The compromise was the three-fifths clause.

During the constitutional convention of 1787, the slavery debate threatened to derail any attempts to form a new government. The southern states would not have entered the Union if slave trade had been abolished. Thus, the delegates agreed to end the slave trade in 1808. James Madison wrote, “Great as the evil is, a dismemberment of the Union would be worse.”

The Founders put an end to the slave trade in 1808. From the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791 to 1808, the slave trade lasted a total of 17 years in the United States of America. Ending slavery altogether would take a civil war and the lives of 600,000 Americans, 57 years later.

In the early 1770s, before America declared independence from England, two Founding Fathers — Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush — tried to eliminate slavery from the American continent. Franklin’s journey towards abolitionism had started ten years earlier with a visit to a school for black children, created by the Reverend Thomas Bray. For Franklin, it was an eyeopener, and he financially backed the Bray Associate School in Philadelphia.

Historian David Barton explains:

While Pennsylvania was still a British colony, Pennsylvania passed an anti-slavery law, but King George III vetoed that law passed by Pennsylvania. At that point in time, in 1774, Ben Franklin joins with fellow Pennsylvanian, also soon to be signer of the Declaration, Benjamin Rush, and they start the first Abolition Society in Pennsylvania. It was an act of civil disobedience against King George III. He said, “You can’t end slavery.” They said, “Watch us.” But Franklin had already taken actions well before that.

Back in 1768, Ben Franklin had joined with Francis Hopkins, who was also soon to be a signer of the Declaration, and they started a chain of schools across Pennsylvania and across New England for black Americans. And it was to teach black Americans the Bible and academics. Now, that doesn’t seem all that notable today, but it was then. Because under British policy, you were not to be educating blacks. Because if you educate blacks, they don’t make good slaves.

And, by the way, if you teach them to read, they’re probably going to read the Bible because that was the book. And if they read the Bible, they’ll probably end up praying. And if they end up praying, you know what they’re going to pray for, is an end of slavery. And that’s just not a good thing, to have an educated slave. So under British policy, you tried to avoid education for slaves.

Now, that was carried forth in America in the southern states. And at the time of the civil war, it was a capital offense to teach a black to read. If a white person taught a black person to read, you both got kill. That was a capital offense.

Benjamin Franklin, president of the Pennsylvania anti-slavery society, thought differently and wanted to see blacks educated. When the first Congress of the United States convened in 1789, Ben Franklin introduced a petition asking Congress to abolish slavery. He died shortly after in 1790, without seeing his efforts to end slavery come to fruition. But he was one of the many Founding Fathers who worked to end slavery in America, recognizing that civil rights came from God’s creation, that all men were created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, including life and liberty

Franklin realized that being in bondage as a slave, having no free will, being governed by fear, and most likely abused on a regular basis, would take its toll on its victims. So he not only fought to free slaves, but also set up a way to help once they were freed. Franklin and his friends decided to expand the activity of their Abolition Society to include assistance in the immediate post-slavery period, helping former slaves make the transition to freedom by providing advice, assistance in finding jobs, educating children and learning how to exercise and enjoy their new civil liberties. He did all of this with private funds and private effort and without any government interference or intervention.

Source: “Slavery and the Founders Part III: Benjamin Franklin.”

There is one last part to the series called “Slavery and the Founders Part IV: Abolitionists.”

For a racist, Ben Franklin sure tried to abolish slavery and help former slaves. He also wrote a pamplet in 1789 called “A Plan for Improving the Condition of the Free Blacks.” Hmmm. Sure don’t make sense unless he wasn’t a racist.

Under the pseudonym of Polly Baker he wrote a fictional story about a woman put on trial in 1747 for have an illegitimate child. The woman protested saying that the child’s father was never put on trial for the same offense. So, maybe he was a feminist too?