Nov 22, 2016 | Politics
Photo: by Don Irvine Photos
Walter Hudson has a fantastic op-ed -- Fellow Republicans, Don't Sell Your Souls for Bannon and the Alt-Right | PJ Media: -- on Steve Bannon -- the former head of Breitbart News who served as Trump's campaign CEO, and has been named the Trump administration's chief strategist and senior advisor -- and his relationship with the white nationalist, anti-individual rights movememt that calls itself the "alt-right."1. The problem with Bannon is not his personal views, but his role in disseminating abhorrent views[...] The problem with Steve Bannon is not his personal views, for which there seems to be little evidence of anything egregious.The problem with Steve Bannon is the role he has played in proliferating the abhorrent views of others. While in charge of Breitbart News, Bannon transformed it into a haven for the alt-right. While Bannon may not be racist, antisemitic, or white nationalist himself, the alt-right plainly is. It's their defining characteristic, and they'll be the first ones to tell you so.
2. Coiner of the term "alt-right" admits Trump and Breitbart and Bannon are NOT part of alt-rightThe man who coined the term "alt-right" is Richard Spencer. He holds a distinction as the movement's most prominent thought leader. As president of the National Policy Institute, an alt-right think tank, Spencer spoke at a celebration in Washington D.C. over the weekend attended by his fellow white nationalists. From Politico:[...] “I would say Steve Bannon’s comment that [Breitbart is] a platform of the alt-right is probably something I could agree with, say 90 percent, just in the sense that it’s clearly moved away from the conservative movement,” Spencer said. “It was pro-Trump, it was also a site that tons of people on the alt-right [go] to get their news from, they share [it]. I don’t think Breitbart is really ideologically alt-right, no, but it’s interesting and very hopeful for me that Bannon is at least open to these things.”
3. Trump (and Bannon) should distance himself from those who identify with ethnic identity and not America's founding principles[...] As that same son of a black father and a white mother, my existence proves offensive to the alt-right. According to them, I have no worth whatsoever. Neither do my children.[...] Trump should go out of his way to condemn the alt-right. He should make clear that their objectively racist, white nationalist views have no place in his administration or in the Republican Party. That declaration should be echoed by a repentant Bannon, or Bannon should be fired. It must be abundantly clear that American greatness is defined by our founding principles and not ethnic identity.
Well said.Nov 11, 2016 | Culture
Asra Q. Nomani, has written an interesting perspective in The Washington Post on how "... a 51-year-old, a Muslim, an immigrant woman 'of color' — am one of those silent voters for Donald Trump. And I’m not a “bigot,” “racist,” “chauvinist” or “white supremacist,” as Trump voters are being called, nor part of some “whitelash.”Writes Nomani:
Days before the election, a journalist from India emailed me, asking: What are your thoughts being a Muslim in “Trump’s America”?I wrote that as a child of India, arriving in the United States at the age of 4 in the summer of 1969, I have absolutely no fears about being a Muslim in a “Trump America.” The checks and balances in America and our rich history of social justice and civil rights will never allow the fear-mongering that has been attached to candidate Trump’s rhetoric to come to fruition.What worried me the most were my concerns about the influence of theocratic Muslim dictatorships, including Qatar and Saudi Arabia, in a Hillary Clinton America. These dictatorships are no shining examples of progressive society with their failure to offer fundamental human rights and pathways to citizenship to immigrants from India, refugees from Syria and the entire class of de facto slaves that live in those dictatorships.We have to stand up with moral courage against not just hate against Muslims, but hate by Muslims, so that everyone can live with sukhun, or peace of mind, I finished in my reflections to the journalist in India. [I’m a Muslim, a woman and an immigrant. I voted for Trump.]
Nov 10, 2016 | Politics
Writes John Lott Jr. in the The Washington Post:
Since at least 1950, every single one of Europe’s public mass shootings has occurred in a place where general citizens are banned from carrying guns. In America, there have been four exceptions to that rule.In late 2013, the secretary general of Interpol — essentially a global version of the FBI — proposed two ways of preventing mass shootings: “One is to say we want an armed citizenry; you can see the reason for that. Another is to say the enclaves [should be] so secure that in order to get into the soft target, you’re going to have to pass through extraordinary security.”But Noble warned, “You can’t have armed police forces everywhere.” He also suggested that it is essentially impossible to stop killers from getting weapons into these “secure” areas. He concluded by posing the question, “Is an armed citizenry more necessary now than it was in the past, with an evolving threat of terrorism?” The answer is an emphatic yes. [It’s already too late for gun control to work]
Nov 9, 2016 | Culture
Every poll except the IBD/TIPP one predicted a Clinton victory. From Why Hillary Clinton Lost: An Election Post-Mortem:
1. Eight years of President Obama operating dictatorially by executive order and edict
[Obama] signed ObamaCare into law without bothering to get even one Republican vote. He almost entirely ignored GOP input on the Dodd-Frank bill that he signed into law -- and it's now blamed by many prominent economists for the worst recovery since the Great Depression.Even after losing control of Congress in 2012, Obama chose not to work with Republicans, despite his comments to the contrary. Instead, he issued edicts, executive orders that enabled him to act in some cases like a petty dictator without consulting Congress at all.
2. Hillary went from a centrist position against Bernie Sanders in the primaries to the Left in the general election
The typical pattern for a Democratic candidate in a presidential election is to run to the left in the primaries, then move toward the center in the main campaign. Hillary reversed that -- and alienated millions of potential voters by doing so.She talked about tax hikes, about a war on coal and other forms of cheap energy, about a complete government takeover of health care, about further regulating the financial system, and about making the top 1% "pay their fair share." She promised to hit the American industrial economy hard with new rules to halt the hypothetical evils of climate change.
3. She was the darling of the media the his held in contempt by the average America.
...recent polls [show] that the media is now the most loathed national institution in American civic life. The media are perceived as filled with people who have contempt for average people, along with a profound liberal bias.
4. A history of corruption and scandal
... the Clinton email scandal, the Clinton Family Foundation scandal, and the weird goings-on with former Congressman Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Hillary Clinton's top aide, Huma Abedin, who was found to have thousands of official emails from Hillary's server on his own unprotected computer.
5. Women voters did not fully support Hillary
What was interesting was how it broke down. Men overwhelmingly supported Trump, 46% to 38% for Hillary. But even women, supposedly Hillary's most ardent base voters, supported her by just 48% to 44% for Trump. She never really closed the deal.
Read the full article: Why Hillary Clinton Lost: An Election Post-Mortem.
Nov 9, 2016 | Politics
Writes Alexander Marriott:"Hyperbole is exploding on the internet, good God people sound and look silly. We don't elect dictators. We have a Constitution, time we dust it off and start using it to make sure our elected officials stick to their limited jobs. Maybe Democrats will realize this is precisely why limited government is so important, to prevent ambitious demagogues from abusing power. The more we all stand up to the next President to protect individual rights in all spheres of human activity, then the abysmal election will have a positive result."
Well said Professor Marriott!Sep 23, 2016 | Culture
"In this book, we will reveal how and why the calamitous clash of civilizations between the Romans and the Jews brought into existence a new religion. For the first time, we will present astonishing new evidence proving beyond any reasonable doubt that the Roman government, in direct response to this bitter clash of cultures, created the religion known today as 'Christianity.'"Although we will in the course of this book agree with nearly all of the accepted factual conclusions of historians who have covered the subject of Christianity’s origins, we will require no conspiracy-theory-like leaps of faith or logic to establish what we are suggesting—quite the opposite. The theory presented reconciles all of the seemingly contradictory evidence of Christianity’s origins for the first time with none of the convolutions employed by scholars and historians for centuries." -- James S. Valliant and C.W. Fahy, Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity
Exhaustively annotated and illustrated, this explosive work of history unearths clues that finally demonstrate the truth about one of the world’s great religions: that it was born out of the conflict between the Romans and messianic Jews who fought a bitter war with each other during the 1st Century.The Romans employed a tactic they routinely used to conquer and absorb other nations: they grafted their imperial rule onto the religion of the conquered.After 30 years of research, authors James S. Valliant and C.W. Fahy present irrefutable archaeological and textual evidence that proves Christianity was created by Roman Caesars in this book that breaks new ground in Christian scholarship and is destined to change the way the world looks at ancient religions forever.Inherited from a long-past era of tyranny, war and deliberate religious fraud, could Christianity have been created for an entirely different purpose than we have been lead to believe?Praised by scholars like Dead Sea Scrolls translator Robert Eisenman (James the Brother of Jesus), this exhaustive synthesis of historical detective work integrates all of the ancient sources about the earliest Christians and reveals new archaeological evidence for the first time. And, despite the fable presented in current bestsellers like Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus, the evidence presented in Creating Christ is irrefutable: Christianity was invented by Roman Emperors.Order Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented ChristianitySep 20, 2016 | Business, Politics
From UN deletes tweet calling free market an "urgent threat" - UN Watch:
GENEVA, Sept. 5, 2016 — The UN human rights office deleted a bizarre statement on Twitter, published on its account with 1.5 million followers, in which it slammed “free market fundamentalism” as an “urgent threat,” after the head of a watchdog group questioned the tweet.Though the UN tweet from Friday had garnered more than 160 retweets and likes, the world body removed it under criticism from Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based UN Watch.“This was a loony tweet, and it calls into question the judgment of the UN’s top human rights office,” said Neuer. “While millions of people are suffering from genocide, sexual slavery and starvation, it is far from clear why the UN would instead focus its attention on unidentifiable ‘urgent threats,’ let alone on economic subjects about which it has neither competence nor expertise,” said Neuer.“Tellingly, the same UN human rights office has failed to issue a single tweet about this past month’s dire human rights crisis in Venezuela, where millions face mass hunger in part due to attacks on the free market in the failed economic policies of the late president Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro, which included arbitrary seizure of businesses and private property.”“If the UN did not have a strict policy of ignoring its own guaranteed human right to private property, established in Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, then perhaps Venezuelan mothers would not be struggling to find food for their children.”“Virulent anti-capitalism was a policy of the defunct Soviet Union, but it should not be embraced by the UN body which is supposed to be focused on human rights emergencies.”
Perhaps the Tweet should have asked is anti-free market fundamentalism -- the belief in the infallibility of socialist, anti free market economic policies -- an urgent threat to economic and political freedom?
Sep 19, 2016 | Philosophy
From Do Your Friends Actually Like You? - The New York Times:
...Because time is limited, so, too, is the number of friends you can have, according to the work of the British evolutionary psychologist Robin I.M. Dunbar. He describes layers of friendship, where the topmost layer consists of only one or two people, say a spouse and best friend with whom you are most intimate and interact daily. The next layer can accommodate at most four people for whom you have great affinity, affection and concern and who require weekly attention to maintain. Out from there, the tiers contain more casual friends with whom you invest less time and tend to have a less profound and more tenuous connection. Without consistent contact, they easily fall into the realm of acquaintance. You may be friendly with them but they aren’t friends.But friendship requires the vulnerability of caring as well as revealing things about yourself that don’t match the polished image in your Facebook profile or Instagram feed, said Mr. Nehamas at Princeton. Trusting that your bond will continue, and might even be strengthened, despite your shortcomings and inevitable misfortunes, he said, is a risk many aren’t willing to take.[...]
So it’s worth identifying who among the many people you encounter in your life are truly friends. Who makes time for you? Whose company enlivens, enriches and maybe even humbles you? Whom would you miss? Who would miss you? While there is no easy or agreed upon definition, what friendships have in common is that they shape us and create other dimensions through which to see the world. This can be for better or worse depending on whom we choose as friends. As the saying goes, “Show me your friends and I will show you who you are.”
Sep 14, 2016 | Business, Politics
Absolutely chilling.From Obama's opposition to freedom of speech (Citizen's United, campus speech codes, ); freedom to contract (forcing private businesses to pay for contraception, sterilization and ("morning-after") abortion against their will and become an unwilling agent of the welfare state); freedom of expression (speech codes); denying the freedom of association and peaceful "free exercise of religion" (from "live and let live" to "bake me a cake, or else."); assault on due process; restrictions on guns for self-defense; the expansion of executive power by executive order at the expense of individual rights is absolutely chilling.Recommended Read: The Obama legacy: An assault on the Bill of Rights | Washington Examiner
Sep 14, 2016 | Education
From the website of the VanDamme Academy:
"The proper goal of education is to foster the conceptual development of the child—to instill in him the knowledge and cognitive powers needed for mature life. It involves taking the whole of human knowledge, selecting that which is essential to the child’s conceptual development, presenting it in a way that allows the student to clearly grasp both the material itself and its value to his life, and thereby supplying him with both crucial knowledge and the rational thinking skills that will enable him to acquire real knowledge ever after. This is a truly progressive education—and parents and students should settle for nothing less." -- Lisa VanDamme
Check out their curriculum. Pretty incredible.
Sep 14, 2016 | Education, Politics
Writes Heather MacDonald on The lies told by the Black Lives Matter movement | New York Post:
The facts are these: Last year, the police shot 990 people, the vast majority armed or violently resisting arrest, according to the Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings. Whites made up 49.9 percent of those victims, blacks 26 percent. That proportion of black victims is lower than what the black violent crime rate would predict. Blacks constituted 62 percent of all robbery defendants in America’s 75 largest counties in 2009, 57 percent of all murder defendants and 45 percent of all assault defendants, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, even though blacks comprise only 15 percent of the population in those counties.In New York City, where blacks make up 23 percent of the city’s population, blacks commit three-quarters of all shootings and 70 percent of all robberies, according to victims and witnesses in their reports to the NYPD. Whites, by contrast, commit less than 2 percent of all shootings and 4 percent of all robberies, though they are nearly 34 percent of the city’s population. In Chicago, 80 percent of all known murder suspects in 2015 were black, as were 80 percent of all known nonfatal shooting suspects, though they’re a little less than a third of the population. Whites made up 0.9 percent of known murder suspects in Chicago in 2015 and 1.4 percent of known nonfatal shooting suspects, though they are about a third of the city’s residents.Gang shootings occur almost exclusively in minority areas. Police use of force is most likely in confrontations with violent and resisting criminals, and those confrontations happen disproportionately in minority communities.
So if "Black Lives Matter" really cared about innocent black lives they would call for more policing in high crime minority communities. Instead BLMers do the opposite attacking the police as such, making the police a target.
Gun-related murders of officers are up 52 percent this year through Aug. 30 compared to last year. The cop assassinations are only a more extreme version of the Black Lives Matter-inspired hatred that officers working in urban areas encounter on a daily basis. Officers are routinely surrounded by hostile, jeering crowds when they try to conduct a street investigation or make an arrest. Resistance to arrest is up, officers report.
The result of "Black Lives Matter" making policing more difficult is that they are doing "less of those discretionary activities in high-crime minority communities." Leading to...
Violent crime is rising in cities with large black populations. Homicides in 2015 rose anywhere from 54 percent in Washington, DC, to 90 percent in Cleveland. In the nation’s 56 largest cities, homicides rose 17 percent in 2015, a nearly unprecedented one-year spike. In the first half of 2016, homicides in 51 large cities were up another 15 percent compared to the same period last year.The carnage has continued this year. In Chicago alone, at least 15 children under the age of 12 have been shot in the first seven months of 2016, including a 3-year-old boy who is now paralyzed for life following a Father’s Day drive-by shooting. While the world knows Michael Brown, whose fatal police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., spurred Black Lives Matter, few people outside these children’s immediate communities know their names. Black Lives Matter activists have organized no protests to stigmatize their assailants.
This is because the so-called "Black Lives Matter" movement is not concerned about ALL Black lives, but only the less than 1% of Blacks (perhaps) illegitimately killed by the police. Some Black lives apparently are of more importance than others.Yes, there are bad cops out there -- and policing is in need of reform -- but on the whole the police are a force for good. To lump all cops together as bad, as the BLM narrative implies, does a great disservice to the heroic individuals who risk their lives every day to keep us safe.
For the past two decades, the country has been talking about phantom police racism in order to avoid talking about a more uncomfortable truth: black crime. But in the era of data-driven law enforcement, policing is simply a function of crime. The best way to lower police-civilian contacts in inner-city neighborhoods would be for children to be raised by their mother and their father in order to radically lower the crime rate there.
If BLMers don't trust the agents of the state as policeman, why do they trust the agents state as a surrogate parent given the dismal results of the anti-capitalist "progressive" welfare state (and the breaking up of the family unit it promotes)?Comments philosopher Andrew Bernstein on the matter:
It's not the cops that pose a danger to innocent black men, women, and children--it's the thugs.Why does the Left perpetuate the vicious canard of trigger-happy, racist cops to the detriment of policing and, therefore, of innocent black lives?Because if we looked closely at the terrifyingly high rate of violent crime in many black urban neighborhoods--vastly higher than it was just 60 years ago--we would be led to recognition of its cause: The welfare state targeting of blacks, leading to astronomic illegitimacy rates, many children raised by a mother on welfare and no father in the home, scads of unsupervised children, despair, drug addiction, drug trafficking, and the off-the-charts rate of violent crime that accompanies drug trafficking. Blacks are still victimized by racist white Americans--by semi-socialist intellectuals and by Democratic Party leaders, who care not a whit about the carnage in many black communities because it is a step toward fulfilling their "dream" of a paternalistic, semi-socialist America. Full socialism--National Socialism and Communism--murders tens of millions of innocent victims. Semi-socialism murders only tens of thousands--and to racist U.S. leftists, "only" blacks, whose lives do not matter. In truth, black lives matter because all human lives matter. But if black lives truly mattered to the Left, it would advocate three political principles:
- A full phase-out of the U.S. welfare state
- End the politcal-legal war on drugs and transform this "war" into a moral-philosophic-educational one
- Definitively abolish all minimum wage laws and permit wage rates to fall to market levels, where all low-skilled teenagers could be hired and productively employed.
In brief, if black lives mattered--if all human lives matter--they would support individual rights and capitalism.
Sep 5, 2016 | Politics
"A Cure for Swelling Drug Prices: Competition" (WSJ) explains how the FDA limits competition by delaying approval for sale of drugs approved as safe in other countries:
If the U.S. allowed the sale of drugs that regulators in other advanced countries have already approved, it would expose would-be monopolists to many more potential competitors.
....High prices should be a magnet for new suppliers. But first, generic manufacturers must prove to the Food and Drug Administration that their drug has the same quality, strength, purity and stability as the branded drug. That can be costly and time-consuming. The FDA has faced a growing volume of applications. More than 3,000 filed before October 2014 still await approval; the typical lag between application and approval is four years, according to the Generic Pharmaceutical Association, a trade group.
....[I]n Europe, EpiPen competes with several devices at a fraction of its U.S. list price of $608.61 per pair. Denmark’s ALK-Abello, which specializes in allergy therapies, sells the Jext pen for $34 to $67 throughout Europe, and is interested in selling it in the U.S. “Our decision will be determined by what it takes to obtain FDA approval,” says a spokesman.
....The FDA has long insisted, for safety reasons, that it approve all drugs regardless of whether they have been approved overseas. [...] Ken Kaitin, a professor of medicine at Tufts University who has studied drug regulation around the world, says there is “absolutely no evidence” the U.S. drug supply is safer than in Britain, Canada or Europe.Related:
Aug 24, 2016 | Politics
Russia Wants Bulgarians to Stop Vandalizing Soviet Monuments
Russia is demanding that Bulgaria try harder to prevent vandalism of Soviet monuments, after yet another monument to Soviet troops in Sofia was spray-painted, ITAR-Tass reported. The Russian Embassy in Bulgaria has issued a note demanding that its former Soviet-era ally clean up the monument in Sofia's Lozenets district, identify and punish those responsible, and take "exhaustive measures" to prevent similar attacks in the future, the news agency reported Monday. The monument was spray-painted on the eve of the Bulgarian Socialist Party's celebration of its 123rd anniversary, the Sofia-based Novinite news agency reported.
h/t disinfo
Aug 21, 2016 | Education
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUPFVnoJydsYaron Brook from the Ayn Rand Institute says no, and Paul Vaaler from the University of Minnesota says yes in a 2015 debate hosted by the Snider Center for Enterprise and Markets at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business.
Perhaps the Tweet should have asked is anti-free market fundamentalism -- the belief in the infallibility of socialist, anti free market economic policies -- an urgent threat to economic and political freedom?