What Was Lost

Yet another felony that everyone will be guilty of

2011-09-15T08:20:00.001-07:00

Should Faking a Name on Facebook Be a Felony?

This new expansion and re-interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act would make felons of us all. This is the point.

Laws don't write themselves. Politicians don't draft legislation because they are bored. Every bill has a purpose behind it, even if that purpose is not obvious.

When everyone is a criminal because it is impossible to live without violating the law, enforcement becomes a political exercise. This law, and other laws that criminalize the trivial, allows agents of the state to selectively target people they or their masters don't like.

A free society is one in which it is safe to be unpopular. This is never more true than when it is the government that dislikes you. When the government has the power to arbitrarily charge virtually anyone with a felony, that society is not free. A nation in which citizens cower silently before the state and its agents, keep their heads down and walk briskly, hoping they will not be noticed - is not free.

Any government that is the enemy of the people and the usurper of their rights is a criminal enterprise.

Bachman listens to a lunatic and makes a fool of herself in the process

2011-09-14T18:06:00.000-07:00

Bachmann: Gardasil causes “mental retardation”

Bachman:

There’s a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine. She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine.

Here we go again with the neo-luddite vaccination made my kid a weirdo nonsense. This is what happens when superstition masquerades as reason.

I suspect the woman making the initial claim to Bachman was being dishonest in the first place. There is a contingent of people who fear these vaccines because the disease they protect against is sexually transmitted. Rather than rationally fearing the disease itself, they fear that which inoculates against it. Why? Because even more than cancer and death, they fear that their daughters will have sex. Something that protects against cancer and death transmitted through sex, is irrationally seen as something that promotes sex, which is anathema to them.

But they cannot make that argument because normal people are not persuaded by it. No normal person sees something that protects a 12 year old girl from contagious cervical cancer as an incitement for her to go party like a co-ed on girls gone wild.

So instead they latch on to anything they can come up with, no matter how ridiculous. They freak out and get emotional, at which point they get stupid. Those who listen to them end up looking stupid as well.

Something to think about on the anniversary of evil

2011-09-11T20:49:00.000-07:00

A passage from Lee Harris’s Civilization And Its Enemies.

Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.
…
They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.

They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn’t done enough for — yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part — something that we could correct. And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.

The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason — it is his reason, and not ours.

Government

2011-09-07T17:11:00.000-07:00

The legitimate role of government is to regulate interactions between individuals and legal entities where the nature of the interaction is not already agreed upon by the entities in question, and to enforce valid contractual agreements between individuals that were freely entered into.

Everything else is extraneous.

Tea Partiers are racists, and other lies from the credentialed left

2011-09-04T13:58:00.001-07:00

Academics dub tea partyers devout, racist

Consider the source

95% of Political Science faculty are self proclaimed liberal Democrats.

The problem isn't that they are wrong. The problem is that they are LYING.

It is extremely easy to create push polls to generate the responses that you want to hear. It isn't necessary to lie about the answer when you are asking a dishonest question. Normally reviewers would call you out for this, but not when those reviewers are religiously motivated to agree with your findings. These are also conference papers, which means that they have either not been reviewed, or were rejected by the journals they were submitted to. If the research was truly sound, they'd be published in a respected journal.

This is a case of credentialed sophists getting together and agreeing on a set of lies and misrepresentations that are then presented to the public as valid findings. It is also an example of why the humanities are considered a joke. Few people go into political science for legitimate reasons anymore. Those who do virtually never go on to pursue an academic career in the field. The discipline is today almost entirely made up of far left ideologues. Some academics in the humanities are more honest than others, but virtually none of them are conservatives.

But that's ok because the only people who believe them are others such as themselves. The Daily Kos echo chamber eats this stuff up, but mainstream Americans are unimpressed. When the ideas and principles that the tea parties believe in are presented to the public honestly, the vast majority of Americans agree with them. On election day the voters are going to pull the lever for the Tea Party because they agree with what we believe in even when they don't know it.

Leftists are in trouble because their ideas are bad. The Tea Party represents the rejection of these bad ideas in favor of better ones. I should know because I am the Tea Party. They accuse us of racism because they have no valid arguments to make. If they did, we would be hearing them. They can't argue against the things we actually stand for, the things we actually believe, because our ideas are unassailable. To attack us based on what we actually believe would only succeed in promoting our ideas. So instead they lie about us and call us names.

They hate us because we are right, because we are the living embodiment of their own failure to know and live with the truth.

http://www.tempeteaparty.org

Quote for the day

2011-09-01T15:11:00.001-07:00

"The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency.

It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president.

The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America . Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince.

The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president."

-Author Unknown

Return of the Ghost Dancers

2011-09-01T14:47:00.000-07:00

Wolffe: Opposition To Obama Speech Possibly Based On Skin Color

The gratuitous use of the race card has exceeded the bounds of mere cliche and entered the realm of self-parody.

Do they actually think anyone is listening anymore, let alone taking them seriously?

This kind of nonsense used to make me angry because of how insulting it was, not only to conservatives and libertarians, but to the intelligence of anyone unlucky enough to hear it.

But now it's gone so far beyond pale that they aren't insulting people like me anymore, but making fools of themselves instead.

I almost miss the days when leftists actually pretended to have valid arguments to make. I miss their intricate sophistries because at least those arguments had a patina of legitimacy to them. This crap is such obvious nonsense it isn't even worth taking the time to debunk as only a total fool would listen to it.

I'm reminded of the Ghost Dancer movement among American Indians in the late 19th century. Defeated and broken, some groups devolved into a cult based on circle dancing whose adherents believed would bring back the buffalo and end the expansion of the United States. I don't know what kind of things the Indians chanted, but the chant from the left seems to be "Racism Racism Racism!"

It isn't going to work for them any better than it did for the Indians.

A union flunky speaks

2011-08-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

This was originally a response to a reader comment that can be found here:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/27/census-data-shows-people-are-moving-from-blue-to-red-states.html#comments

The comment itself, from Bob Dobolina:

if the red states are so awesome then why are their "free market" systems not just blown up their economies? I mean if their lower taxes, pro business and family values then they should be just crushing it right? Last I checked that's not the case. The only one that wins out in those states is the companies that are there. Sure as hell isn't the people that work there. it is a fact that red states are welfare states. The are subsidized by the blue states. If their awesome systems really work and are so good then why are welfare states just that?

Republican foundations of lower taxes, pro business and family values are a good idea but in reality they are failed policies. Like supply side economics. Never worked no matter how many times the right pushes it. It's like a broken record. Cut taxes and regulations and the country will be awesome. Well, it's been going on for 30 years and look what we've got. It's no coincidence that the decline of manufacturing mirrors the decline in unions? Our country was made great on the backs of labor. But conservatives hate labor. The major things we now take for granted were originally created by the sweat and blood of labor. 5 day work week, vacations, sick time, etc.....

Over the last 30 years we've seen republicans main foundations front and center. And if they are so good then our country should be the crown jewel of the world and the stock market should be over 20k. Kill unions, ease regulations and massively low taxes. But check it out, during that time the rich and companies have seen triple digit increases in profits and pay. The regular folks that make those companies run have see what for gains over that time?

Zero gains for the working man. Didn't even follow inflation.

If these basic foundations they say are their core beliefs should be just blowing up our economy. Should be unparalleled prosperity. they've had their way for 30 years and if it works then we should be in a better place now. But no. They're like snake oil salesman. peddling these ideals that sound great but in practice the only benefits they have are for the rich. Record profits and oceans of cash but are those making their way to the regular folks? Nope. Businesses have employees over a barrel. They can pay them anything they want and show them the door if they don't like it. High unemployment is the best time for companies because they can pretty much do whatever they want and people are just happy to have a job.

Welfare states are red states. Pro business isn't pro worker. there is a difference. But hey, screw the regular people right? If job creators are happy then republicans are happy. Just sad that blue collar workers carry water for people that care zero about them and their families. My blue state dollars are paying for these people that scream self reliance. What a joke. Talk about how the poor are a bunch of slackers with their hands out. Maybe they should put their and in their own pockets when it comes to red state handouts.

My response:

There is so much wrong with what you've written that I don't even know where to begin. So I'll begin in the middle, then probably shower and go to work.

The decline in manufacturing does mirror the decline in union membership, but not because the latter caused the former.

Correlation does not mean causation.

Besides which, only fools choose to be serfs. That is what union workers generally are. They're unable to make a living on their own because they lack the skills and talents necessary to be independently employable. So they bind themselves together into a group and try to extract as much money as they can for their menial, but necessary, work. I don't hold them in contempt for this as such a development is inevitable. The capital investment most manufacturing requires means that firms can't easily chase the labor market. They set up shop somewhere, and once established cannot instantly move elsewhere just because the people there will work for less.

But even so this does eventually happen, just not as quickly. Instead of moving existing plants, they expand into these other labor markets and then close the previous plant as it becomes less profitable instead of refurbishing or retooling it when manufacturing processes change. Unions are created to prevent workers from having to compete with each other, but eventually they do, in this case with people in other nations who are willing to work for what would be less here in America, but is actually a good wage over there due to the difference in cost of living.

There are several consequences of this.

First, the unit cost of production goes down, making that company more profitable and therefore more competitive. Such companies generally lower the prices offered to consumers. Other firms must then follow suit and find ways to lower their own production costs, or risk failure. So they relocate as well, or go out of business.

Second these lowered consumer prices means that our money goes further. We can afford to buy more with less money (adjusted for inflation).

Third, the wages that are being paid to the workers overseas makes those workers more able to purchase goods and services from us, improving the economies of both nations.

The only people who lose are those whose reluctance or inability to compete in the labor market is what led them into union work in the first place. When you can't get a good paying job based on your own competence and merit, jobs that require neither are your only escape.

The lesson is to stay in school and to sharpen and hone your skills and abilities so that you are able to support yourself in a field based on individual accomplishment. Doctors, lawyers and engineers belong to professional associations, not unions. There is a reason for this.

Obama can't do the right thing

2011-08-29T08:14:00.000-07:00

Why Obama Can't Support A Real Jobs Program

Obama can't do the right thing because it runs counter to what he and other leftists in the Democratic party see as their core mission: do destroy America while pretending to save it and blaming others for the obvious damage they are doing.

Socialism defined

2011-08-25T15:11:00.000-07:00

Socialism: Stealing from Peter to buy votes from Paul.

A leftist tells us what he really thinks

2011-08-24T19:36:00.001-07:00

I recently bought a copy of The Secret Knowledge by David Mamet. I've not read very much of this book yet, but I like what I'm reading so far. Mamet's prose is terse and could use the help of a good editor in places, but the content of what he says is profound. But this post isn't a review of this book, but a comment on something a reviewer calling himself Ben Bochner wrote on Amazon. Bochner's post was in response to another poster's critique of Bochner's negative review of the book itself, which can be found here.

Here is what Bochner had to say to the other poster:

Be careful, Mr. Wolf - you're not on Fox News now, your nonsense will not go unchallenged. The majority of Americans are buying into what Mamet is saying? The whole reason the Republican Party is in such trouble is because it only appeals to white people. A political party cannot muster a majority anymore in this country by only appealing to white people. The Republican Party is going the way of The Whigs - and Fox News ain't far behind.

When I first read this I didn't really know how to respond to it. Even now I find myself wondering whether Bochner actually realized what he was saying.

There is so much wrong with what he wrote that I don't even know where to begin. Bochner seems to believe that a person's political philosophy is not a function of the ideas they believe in, but their skin color. Stop and think about that for a moment. Is that not the most absurd and insulting thing he could possibly say?

He seems to believe, in all seriousness, that racial distinctions are not merely skin deep, but signify profound differences in the way human beings think, feel, and experience the world around them. In other words, the composition of their soul.

He seems to think that "white" people possess certain emotional and intellectual traits that make the Republican party attractive to them. Meanwhile other people who are not white, possess other traits that make this party unattractive to them.

The man is a fucking nut.

I'd call him a racist except to do so would drag out a very old and tired cliche that has been used to tell far too many lies and obscure far too many truths.

So I'll just say that he's crazy and ignorant and bigoted and leave it at that.

Huntman pisses off the dingbats while trying to pander to the leftards

2011-08-21T22:59:00.000-07:00

Jon Huntsman: Call me crazy but I believe in evolution and global warming

I find it pathetically sad that someone even has to say that they believe in evolution. It's like saying that you believe in electrons, or hydrogen. No one should have to come out and proclaim to the world that they believe in any of these things because the existence of each has been proven not just beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond the shadow of a doubt. Either these things exist, or everything we know is wrong.

Despite what some people want so desperately to believe because their sense of self hinges upon it, the world was not created in 6 days roughly 6,000 years ago. The universe is billions of years old and the timeline for life on earth goes back almost 4 billion years. This isn't what it says in the bible because the bible is the collected and codified writings of Jews and Christians living in antiquity. Genesis is the Hebrew creation myth put into writing. Any relationship it has with physical reality or cosmological history is purely coincidental. The parts of the bible that deal with people and human nature are where the good stuff is to be found.

Does this mean that there is no God? Anyone who makes that argument is lying since the question of the existence of the Judeo-Christian God or any God or Gods cannot be falsified based on the flaws found in a creation myth. But of course that won't stop some Christian-hating pseudo-atheists from trying. As an irreligious person with no axe to grind nor converts proselytize to, I have no animosity towards people who are religious, but I do find people who pretend to be non-believers when they are actually motivated by malice and bigotry towards Christians to be odious in the extreme. Unable to come out and just say that they hate Christians, they instead pretend to find fault with the tenets of that faith, a faith that they would be disinterested in if they were truly not religious. A faith that they would judge by the effect it has on its believers. The value of religion is not in its empirical validity, but in its efficacy. A particular religion's mythologies may have no basis in fact, but if they inspire otherwise wretched human beings to become better people, I don't have a problem with that.

An atheist isn't someone who doesn't believe in god, but someone who hates it that you do. They're emotionally immature losers who cannot see beyond their own arrogance.

As for Global warming, it appears to be a leftist scam, a manufactured imaginary crisis cooked up to justify policies that they once tried to use other arguments to support. Arguments that failed. Arguments that were bald faced lies and evil agendas wrapped up in sophistry. These arguments went by many names and euphemisms, but the most clear and definite name for them was Communism.

Global Warming is nothing but Marxism through other means.

A quote from Robert Heinlein

2011-08-20T14:40:00.001-07:00

"Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort."

I think he was absolutely right. One of the core criteria for being a leftist is the desire to control other people, ostensibly for their own good or for the good of the many, but in reality for the good of the few - those who exercise control. Such it was with the Nomenklatura of the Soviet Union and so it is with the Friends Of Obama. This of course is tyranny. There are non-leftists who are also motivated to control others. They subscribe to other ideologies, some of which are seemingly opposed to Marxism and its analogues. Devout muslims come to mind. But while the end goals of their tyranny may differ, their desire to lord themselves over others does not.

HIV, Smallpox and the incurable epidemic of human stupidity

2011-08-16T17:45:00.000-07:00

Pathogens May Change, but the Fear Is the Same

The problem with a disease like HIV is not that it is fatal, but that it takes so long to kill its victims. HIV is extraordinarily difficult to contract. It is not airborne. You can't get it from drinking bad water. You can't get it from casual contact. To be infected requires the exchange of bodily fluids, blood and sexual fluids in particular.

This is why, of all diseases, AIDS is the one most closely linked to pathological behavior.

A 2007 study by Columbia University scientists found that almost 60 percent of gay American men who knew they were infected and were still having unprotected anal sex did not mention it to all their casual partners.

I submit that the primary reason these men were infected in the first place was because they were having unprotected anal sex with casual partners. If they had pursued a monogamous relationship with another man who was also monogamous, then they would be no more likely to contract HIV than anyone else. Promiscuity, not homosexuality is the problem.

If the symptoms of AIDS appeared in a week, and the disease was fatal in three, then this would not matter. The epidemic would literally burn itself out. But because it takes so damned long to kill the idiots who go out and get infected with it, they are free to go out and infect countless others, achieving a geometric progression that is limited only by the fact that male homosexuals make up less than 3% of the population, and they don't all know one another. IV drug users are the other group who spread this disease around, but they too are also a small population, and not all of them are going around trading needles like baseball cards.

Sexual promiscuity is self-destructive, even without fatal diseases like HIV going around. People who go out and stick their dick into every Tom and Harry are mentally ill.

The reason why normal, monogamous, drug-free (but I repeat myself) heterosexuals are almost never infected with HIV is precisely because we are monogamous and drug free. There are promiscuous heterosexuals in this world, but they are the exception rather than the rule, just as IV drug users are the exception. Gay men, on the other hand, are almost rabidly promiscuous as a general rule.

Normal people don't catch diseases whose vectors depend upon abnormal and self-destructive behaviors.

This is a big part of why I'm so unimpressed with whining gay activists who complain incessantly about how they are discriminated against. Of course they are. Junkies get the same treatment and for the same reason, they do things that are damaging to themselves and put others at risk, and most people take exception to that.

The left has succeeded in fooling so many into seeing discrimination as a bad thing, when it is not. Discrimination is not a bad thing at all. It is a fundamental expression of moral judgment. People discriminate against those who choose to do things that are wrong. This is valid discrimination. Of course there is also invalid discrimination, such as refusing to give a qualified candidate a job because of what that person looks like, or what they have between their legs, or any other number of qualities and characteristics that have no moral significance, have nothing to do with the job at hand, and which they have no control over anyway. The thing is, the left would have you believe that all discrimination, all discernment, is of the invalid kind. Once again, they lie.

As long as male homosexuals continue to be the most promiscuous group on the face of the earth, then people like me will continue to shun them. I don't care that they are sexually attracted to members of their own sex. It is of no concern to me. I don't understand it, but then I don't need to understand it. Freedom means freedom, it doesn't mean the right to do only those things that other people understand. Provided a choice or a pattern of behavior causes no harm to me or to the world, I don't have a reason to care what someone does. Unfortunately for gay men, spreading diseases like AIDS does cause harm to the world I live in and I take particular exception to the patterns of behavior that cause that harm.

Gay men need to embrace monogamy. Until they do, I will forever ostracize them. As the article above mentions, "gay men should stop defining their struggle for equal rights chiefly as the right to have promiscuous sex."

A quote from Rush Limbaugh

2011-08-08T18:05:00.001-07:00

"We've had a AAA credit rating since 1917. The Great Depression, we had a AAA credit rating. World War II, we had a AAA credit rating, and we lose it now, and for what? For what great purpose did we lose it? Except an ideological hatred of American capitalism and a love of class warfare, what did we lose our AAA rating for? A naked effort to get still more and more money to buy votes. A never-ending quest for power, that's why we lost our AAA credit rating."

Obama

2011-08-08T00:51:00.000-07:00

You could say that Obama is a bad president, but the truth is that he isn't even a president at all. He's an empty suit. Even a bad leader actually LEADS. He, as another commenter noted elsewhere, operates in one of two modes: arrogance or petulance. The American people were fooled by the Marxist Socialist Media into voting for someone whose presence in the office of president is worse than having no president at all.

With the election of Obama, the left thought that they had the American people fooled into subscribing to political and economic ideas that have been proven demonstrably false by the history of the 20th century. 50 million dead, and countless millions more living in pain and misery. Those are the wages of Obama's ideas. Those ideas are incompatible with freedom. Those ideas are incompatible with the truth.

Nothing will change unless we make it change.

Canada!

2011-08-03T00:56:00.001-07:00

(This was originally posted as a comment here)

Canada, unlike other nations of the world, is defined not by what it is, but by what it is desperately trying not to be: The United States.

Canadians generally resent us. We meanwhile, generally don't think about Canadians or their country at all. We don't hate them, we just don't notice them. How can we when they don't really do much to make themselves known?

Other than the Mackenzie brothers and the Red Green Show, definitively Canadian cultural content never seems to make its way down here. I don't know why because lots of Americans love British TV shows. Why are there no Canadian shows of note? Lots of Canadian actors show up in American films and TV shows, with Elisha Cuthbert being my personal favorite, but when they do they're playing American characters, not Canadians. Why?

The Shipping News, set in Canada and supposedly about Canadians, used an American, two Brits, and an Australian as actors to portray the main characters.

For all these reasons and more, Canada is one of those places that you don't really think about unless and until something comes up that gives you a reason to, and then its like "Oh yeah, there's this whole country up there isn't there?"

Thought for today

2011-08-01T23:47:00.003-07:00

Marxism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be prosperous.

(With apologies to H. L. Mencken)

Drugs...again

2011-07-11T08:12:00.001-07:00

Yet another call to legalize drugs

To me the problem with the drug war is not the drugs themselves or their effect on users. The problem is that our efforts to prevent losers from losing by consuming drugs empowers petit fascists to send death squads into homes with no warning under the guise of a "no knock" warrant. No drug is as great a danger to society as our police forces let off their leash.

Luckily there is a long term solution to this problem: selective breeding.

Legalize everything. Sell everything in state-run stores. But to each and every drug add a substance that, if consumed over a period of time, causes permanent and irreversible sterility in both men and women.

The real problem with drugs is not that they ruin lives and often kill their users, but that they don't work quickly enough to remove the trash from our gene pool before they reproduce.

Civilization trumps natural selection, especially in places like the US where losers aren't just likely to survive, but even more likely to breed than winners in many cases.

Allow drugs, as a self-selecting process, to remove the idiots and losers from our gene pool so that, even if they don't die with a needle in their arm, they won't be making any little losers and idiots to cause us grief in the future and expand the welfare roles as vassals for the Democrats.

Let the drugs themselves eliminate the types of people who are likely to use them. Let drugs become the synthetic alternative to natural selection that our gene pool and society so desperately need.

Behold the crazy

2011-07-09T10:07:00.000-07:00

When Women Confuse Being Asked Out With Being Raped At Knifepoint In An Elevator

This is what happens when mental illness is rationalized as a political philosophy. Anyone who has read the Unabomber manifesto knows what I'm talking about. Intelligence and sanity are not mutually inclusive.

Women are not victims. Women are not oppressed. The equality that pseudo-feminists claim to want has existed in the US for decades now, and men couldn't be happier. The world presented in shows like Mad Men seems like such a bizarre anachronism because it is. The only thing stopping a woman from achieving anything she desires is herself. No man is standing in her way. No men want to stand in her way. Why would we? We're too busy doing our own thing, pursuing our own happiness, and living our own lives. Lives that don't revolve around women.

I'm especially disgusted at her suggestion that self-proclaimed feminists have worked so hard to free women living under islamofascist rule in Muslim nations. They threw those women under the bus long ago. Why? Because they are Gramscian marxists pretending to be advocates for women. They threw American women under the bus to protect Bill Clinton in the 90's and Muslim women under the bus to demonize George W. Bush soon after that. They've lost all credibility with anyone who is paying the least bit of attention. It is one thing to be honest, but wrong. These people are despicable liars.

I'm sick and tired of encountering people who are my equals and having them tell me how oppressed they are when they enjoy all the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities that I do, only they fail to take advantage of them. I have no sympathy.

I do my very best to avoid such people. Crazy people make me very uncomfortable, in no small part because it is difficult to communicate with them. You say one thing and they hear another (or maliciously misinterpret your words to that effect) and you spend all your time just trying to find a way to get a message across without it being garbled by their own delusions and dishonesty. So I just avoid them as there is no point.

Update:

One of the posters to the blog above had this to say:

Be more understanding people. This is the closest SkepChick has come to being a victim of anything or anyone in her entire life, a life predicated around her sense of victimhood.

I couldn't agree more.

Yet another reason to get rid of the Department of Education.

2011-07-05T08:31:00.000-07:00

Notre Dame to Clarify Sexual-Harassment Policies in Settlement With Education Department

Reading this article, I was struck by the absurdity of a rape victim complaining to a university that she had been assaulted by one of its students. Call the police. File a report with the people whose job it is to do something about it. Don't call the school board when an armed robber steals your cash register. Call the police.

It is easy to assume incompetence here. That someone called the university instead of the police because they were emotionally distraught and didn't know any better, or that the university felt compelled to assume responsibility for this case because its employees were incompetent or deluded. But perhaps that is not what happened here. If the girl claiming to have been assaulted did not have a case, that is to say she only had her own word to offer up as evidence, then I would not be a bit surprised if she knew this. The laws that define sexual assault as a crime specifically state that the word of the accuser alone is insufficient evidence to secure a conviction. Additional evidence is required. Why? Because justice is about the pursuit of truth. When one person has the ability to see another convicted of a heinous crime by merely accusing them of it, the result is a criminal justice system corrupted into a tool for private tyranny, the very thing it was created to prevent.

So I'm not surprised that other entities who are not so constrained are being hooked in to the issue and forced to assume responsibility for determining the truth of accusations under a compromised standard of evidence.

This is insanity acting in the service of evil, and there is no reason why the American taxpayers should be subsidizing it.

Lies, damned lies, and liberalism

2011-06-18T18:39:00.000-07:00

Here is a great video that debunks some of the economic lies that the left tries to peddle.

The truth about the economy, the critique

2011-06-03T17:26:00.000-07:00

Federal Court Lifts Ban on Public Prayer at Texas High School Graduation

The parents of a graduating student attempted to argue that for him to encounter others expressing their religious beliefs would cause him "irreparable harm."

Their argument is wholly without merit. It cannot even be called specious for it lacks even the appearance of being plausible. Even THEY know that their argument is nonsense.

So why are they filing this suit?

Because they hail from the faction of the left who want the expression of religious belief to be seen as a form of obscenity.

They want to destroy religious faith in America by making it seem shameful.

These people are evil.

Death by Government

2011-05-25T16:05:00.000-07:00

Marine veteran murdered by SWAT team in Tucson

I have no words for this. I only have anger and hatred and the desire to see those responsible for this massacre put to death in the most brutal and bloodiest fashion. I don't just want them dead, I want them to suffer unimaginably, and to beg and pray for an end to their suffering long before the mercy of death is delivered. I want them to know what hell is like before they get there.

Cases like this one prove the wisdom of our founders when they crafted the 2nd Amendment. Resistance of tyranny is a lot more effective when that resistance is armed.

Welcome to Indiana, where all your rights are belong to us

2011-05-24T00:32:00.000-07:00

Indiana Attorney General seeks reconsideration of fourth amendment ruling

Didn't we fight a war over this sort of thing a couple hundred years ago?

Agents of the state do NOT have the authority to violate the law, and that is especially true of those agents whose jobs involve the use of deadly force. A home invasion by police officers acting in violation of the law is morally and factually indistinguishable from an invasion by a gang of armed criminals - and should be responded to in like terms: the overwhelming use of deadly force.

This is perhaps the best case for why the 2nd amendment exists. You cannot rely on government to protect your rights. Government is the largest single threat to our rights. Only armed citizens, ready and able to stand in defense of our own liberty, can safely secure it.

The maw of Maher spews again

2011-05-14T14:21:00.000-07:00

Bill Maher: If You Celebrated Bin Laden’s Death, You’re Not Really A Christian

Maher is, in typical modern communist fashion, using Alinsky:

Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules.

Of course Maher, as a communist atheist of Jewish descent, is about as much of an authority on Christianity as I am on Buddhism. But that doesn't matter because rule 4 isn't about holding your opponents accountable to their own standards, but about continuously twisting and maliciously misinterpreting those standards so as to make them impossible to live up to.

Christianity is not a suicide cult. Nowhere in the bible does it say that the followers of Christ should prostrate themselves before their mortal enemies and pray for a quick death. But that doesn't matter because people like Maher will pretend that it does, and if that doesn't work they'll pretend something else about Christianity, continually looking to move the goal posts around. Why? Because they're evil lying bastards.

Everything you need to know about Maher can be summed up by this event. Osama, a profoundly evil man, has been removed from circulation. A man who was not just the enemy of the United States, but of the entire world, including those who foolishly supported him. His death is a cause for celebration because the world is truly a better place without him in it.

But what does Maher do? He utilizes this wonderful occasion to take pot shots at people he doesn't like for reasons that he cannot honestly state.

Maher is possessed of wit and humor, but all that means is that he's a talented hack instead of a talentless one. He uses his talent to tell lies and attack people who are far more worthy of praise, proving once again that evil is not merely the absence of good.

The "debate" over waterboarding continues even now...

2011-05-04T10:20:00.000-07:00

"Waterboarding Was Effective in Tracking Down Bin Laden Narrative" Pressed by Don Rumsfeld and One Other Guy

The left isn't opposed to torture, they just don't like seeing their friends on the receiving end of the stick. Islamofascists hate America. Leftists also hate America. So naturally leftists tend to like Islamofascists. Hatred makes strange bedfellows.

Make no mistake, if it were a conservative or libertarian American (or especially an Israeli) being subjected to actual torture, complete with blow torches and eye spoons, as opposed to the faux torture of waterboarding, the leftists would literally jizz in their pants over it.

If leftists were genuinely concerned about torture then you'd see them screaming loudest when Islamofascists cut people's heads off, but they are strangely silent about that, except of course when they use such events as an excuse to (once again) blame America.

The greatest threat we face is not Islamofascist terrorism. Terrorists are like stubbing your toe, painful and annoying, but not life threatening. Our greatest threat is that the left will succeed in destroying us from within.

I say this not as a partisan libertarian, but as someone who looks at their ideas and is appalled by what I see. Socialism/Communism/Whatever-euphemism-they-use-today, is evil, full stop, for reasons that should require no explanation. Post-modernism is an attempt to deny the existence of truth itself by people who are on the wrong side of it. Does this mean that they are always wrong about absolutely everything? No, but it does mean that when they find the truth it is either an accident, or a small truth used to promote a much larger lie.

Conservatives and libertarians are not perfect. No one has a monopoly on the truth. But the ideas behind these two philosophies are so much closer to the truth, and are the result of an honest pursuit of truth. Someone who is seeking the truth for virtuous reasons will always come out ahead of someone who is looking to subvert the truth because they are motivated by evil.

2011-04-27T16:10:00.000-07:00

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science

This article is very interesting, not least of all for the way that the author's own biases and motivated-reasoning shine through. What is most obvious after reading it is that he's a typical leftist, but one who doesn't fall for the nonsense about vaccines causing autism.

He affixes the label of "science" to those ideas that he subscribes to. In some cases this is accurate, but in many others it is wishful thinking on his part. It is, as he himself says in the article, a case of science being "whatever (he) wanted it to be."

There are some truths in this world that can be discovered. Water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. The speed of light is a constant independent of viewpoint. But then there are other things that aren't so easy to figure out, and not all of our (honest) attempts at doing so can be called science.

The reason is that science is not just a bunch of people with degrees getting together and agreeing on something they think sounds nifty. Science is a process, whereby possible explanations for observed phenomena, known as hypotheses, are mercilessly and repeatedly tested with an eye towards proving them false. Ideas that repeatedly withstand our efforts to falsify them, eventually become scientific theories, especially if they correctly predict future phenomena before those phenomena are observed. But these theories, far from being the final word on something, are merely a best guess, a provisional answer, always subject to amendment and potential falsification.

The reason this is important is that ideas that cannot be tested and potentially falsified have no place in science. These ideas may be interesting, and they may even be true. But without a way to test them in such a way that they can be falsified, they have no value as scientific explanations. Science isn't based on verifying ideas as true, but on finding ideas that resist all our efforts to prove them false.

Much of what the author casually refers to as science isn't science. If it can't be tested and falsified, it isn't science. But then this isn't surprising since much of what many people call science isn't science. Entire fields get called sciences that really don't deserve that distinction precisely because their research findings cannot be falsified. This is especially troubling for fields that tend to be ideologically partisan in one way or another. Peer review breaks down when everyone in the peerage is motivated for the answers to come out in a certain way. This effect is limited in the hard sciences. No matter what you do, you can't make water at sea level boil at 50 celsius. But for fields like sociology, groupthink can consistently produce extremely questionable results.

But even so, there is something of value to be learned from this article. Once you put aside the obvious biases of the author, the fundamental truth remains that we do not truly see the world as it is, we see the world as we are.

Obama, the misunderstood genius?

2011-04-27T08:05:00.000-07:00

Is Obama too smart for his own good?

Even the smartest person in the world will be hobbled when the information and ideas they are attempting to work with are false. Obama isn't stupid, but he is a leftist. He believes in things that aren't true. These false beliefs inspire him to make decisions that, like virtually all other leftism derived choices, lead to poor outcomes.

These three academics, almost certainly leftists themselves, display one of the most common traits found among leftists: the desire to force reality to conform to what they want to believe instead of the other way around. They have these ideas you see, and they think these ideas are just SO wonderful that there MUST be SOME way to make them come true. Reality says otherwise, but they're not listening. Most of them will go to their graves wishing and hoping and believing that their wonderful notions could somehow be made real if the "right" people were in charge, or if people weren't so stupid, or any number of other excuses and justifications for why the world isn't how they think it should be. The whole "Obama is just too smart" idea is just another rationalization, and from people who should, if their training in psychology and behavior means anything at all, know better.

Who needs moonies when you've got birthers?

2011-04-26T01:08:00.000-07:00

CNN investigation: Obama 'birther' claims have no merit

He was born in Hawaii people, get over it. Birthers are the political equivalent of creationists. Conspiracy theory nutters whose incessant wishcasting is a harmful distraction that gives ammo to those who want to portray conservatives and libertarians as ignorant and superstitious buffoons. Instead of pretending he is from Gondwanaland, how about focusing on his ideological beliefs and the destructive policies they inspire?

I'm getting a bit sick and tired of having to make excuses on this issue for people who are old enough and smart enough to know better.

In fact, I have a new policy that I intend to follow: NO MORE CRAZY.

No more crazy bullshit. No more making nice with people whose nonsense is making me look bad because I get associated with them. No more giving people the benefit of the doubt when they say something ridiculous. No more attempting to reason with people who are seemingly incapable of logical thought and every bit as emotionally attached to ridiculous ideas and conclusions as any incurable leftist.

There are some conservatives whose conservative nature didn't come from careful contemplation, but because someone spoon fed them (mostly right) answers when they were little. And while they are able to regurgitate those mostly right answers on a regular basis, they remain as incapable of finding the truth for themselves today as they were back then, leaving them vulnerable to manipulation by cranks and nutters.

It is a dark sign that this kind of nonsense has gotten this much traction. What use is a conservative/libertarian resurgence when irrational fantasies of Obama being born in some faraway land are the what it gets spent to promote?

Hawaii says he was born there. That means, short of real evidence that there has been some sort of fraud, that HE WAS FUCKING BORN THERE.

The language police are at it again.

2011-04-22T23:50:00.000-07:00

Obama Asks High Court to Let Regulators Crack Down on F-Bombs

Obama is pandering to the plurality of people in this country who suffer from the neurotic fear of arbitrary words. He does this because he is a politician. A Republican in his shoes would do the very same thing. If he does not make at least a nominal effort to chase after those who utter "dirty words" on TV, his challengers in the next election will call him to task for it and pretend that he is "anti-family" or some other such nonsense intended to manipulate the nitwits who live in fear of the Anglo Saxon root of the English language.

To illustrate the arbitrary nature of obscenity, in Paris the term "tabernac" is used as an expletive. What does tabernac mean in French? It refers to a tabernacle. Yes, that's right, as in church. And there, just as here, there are nitwits who will get their panties in a twist if they hear the word, especially if kids are in earshot.

I guess it really is true that hell is other people.

A follow up....

2011-04-22T09:19:00.001-07:00

This is a follow up to my last post, also posted as a response to this article:

What made you a conservative?

I mentioned in a previous posting that I self-identified as a "liberal" when I was a teenager, in large part because I had no idea that the term itself had been corrupted by Marxists and their fellow travellers. I thought a liberal, no joke, was someone like Thomas Jefferson. In truth someone like him IS what the term originally referred to. It wasn't until I was in my early 20's that I started to realize that the people who called themselves "liberals" had nothing to do with my understanding of the term, and could in fact be more accurately described as ANTI liberal.

Something else that I was confused about as a youngster was the political philosophy behind people like hippies. I was born in 1972, and lived in a socially conservative upper middle class suburb of Nashville and in an equally well to do area in northern Virginia, so actual hippies were not something I ever saw, at least not in their 60's regalia. But I did get to hear near-historical descriptions of the cover stories and propaganda that they created to describe their ideas. Based on this, and without knowing anything, I assumed that their philosophy was libertarian in nature. I know that sounds absurd today, but that is because we are wise not only to their lies, but the way that they twist language to promote those lies.

This goes back to something I mentioned before but didn't fully explain. There are many people who think they are leftists, but really aren't. They are "leftists" by default because that is what they have been spoon fed. The euphemistic language that the left uses to promote its nonsense can, when you don't know what they are REALLY saying, be interpreted in a completely innocuous way. The left uses terms to refer to the antonym of what that term actually means, with "liberal" being the most obvious example. This is a key part of their deception and why their lies are so insidious. Someone, particularly a young person, who is unfamiliar with the twisted meanings the left dishonestly imbues into words, can parrot their nonsense and think that they are saying something VERY different from what cognizant leftists actually mean when they says those things. The left hides its lies by lying about the meanings of the words it uses. This allows them to say one thing and really mean another. Of course people do get wise to their deception, at which point they choose NEW words to lie about, and attempt to re-invent themselves as something else. A perpetually emerging "New Left" will claim to believe in different ideas than their predecessors, when in fact Marxism is what ALL of them have always believed in and always will, they just abuse different parts of the dictionary to hide that fact.

This is why so many young people seem to be leftists. It isn't that they're actually leftists in terms of their character, but that they haven't lived and experienced enough to realize the way that leftists abuse language itself to tell their lies.

It isn't that people tend to become more "conservative" as they grow older, but that they realize that the things they have always known and understood in their heart are more accurately described as conservative or libertarian."

A response to a question on Ace of Spaces

2011-04-22T02:57:00.000-07:00

What made you a conservative?

I've never been a leftist, at least not really. Oh, when I was a teenager and didn't know ANYTHING about politics I used to call myself a liberal. Why? Because at that time I thought the word referred to someone like Thomas Jefferson, not Karl Marx. Like I said, I didn't know anything about politics, or at least not contemporary politics, only historical politics.

I was exposed to quite a bit of MTV which had an awful lot of leftist nonsense baked right into it. But rather than swallow the nonsense whole and be corrupted by it, I worked to try and fit it into what I understood to be reality, not realizing that the people on TV weren't just wrong, but were deliberately lying. When we are young we don't see the world as it is, but as WE are, and what I perceived in the leftist nonsense on MTV and from other sources was not the message they were trying to trick me into believing, but a reflection of myself and my own innate values, which are not those of the left.

I think that there are a lot of people who are leftists by default simply because they live in a microcosm where leftist nonsense is so pervasive that it is all they know. Since these people are not leftists by nature, I suspect that the leftist nonsense they have been steeped in is something they're trying to make sense of in much the same way I did. A lot of them go around using the preferred terminology of the left, but meaning something quite different when they do.

The reason is that the left works to corrupt language. They don't just use words to lie, they lie about the words they use to lie. Lies within lies using terms that are themselves dishonestly re-defined in order to sow confusion. They do this in order to cover up their evil intentions and to trick people into agreeing to things without understanding what it is they're signing off on.

The term "liberal" itself is the perfect example of this. Once upon a time that term referred to someone who might now be called a libertarian. But the left began using it to refer to their Marxist nonsense to the point that its true original meaning was all but lost. Only when we use the word in a compound term like Liberal Democracy is its original sense still used.

Another example is the word "equality." The left loves to toss this one around, almost as much as they do "justice." A normal person would interpret this words as a reference to a person's civil and political rights: freedom of speech, the 5th amendment, etc, etc, all of which are fundamental rights that can be guaranteed to all. But that isn't what a leftist means. When a leftist talks about "equality," they're imagining a world where failure is to be somehow magically prevented, and success punished, despite the fact that success and failure are almost always a manifestation of the character and abilities of the person in question. People who make wise choices get what they want from life to make them happy. People who make foolish choices don't. Rinse and repeat over hundreds of thousands of individual choices by millions of individuals and you soon wind up with a normal distribution. This outcome is inevitable because people are different from each other and some people make better choices than others. Nothing can be done about this. To try is foolish and ultimately destructive.

But leftists want to pretend that this is the result of systematic oppression or a conspiracy theory of some kind, which is pure insanity.

This is just one example of course, there are countless more that can be made.

My conclusion about the true-believing leftists, the Noam Chomsky set, is that they are either evil or crazy. They're smart enough to know that what they are promoting is both untrue and inherently harmful, but they do it anyway. Only someone who is malicious or insane would do that.

Does that mean that "conservatives" are angels? Certainly not. But the flaws and faults to be found in conservative ideas are of the sort that are normal when people of limited wisdom attempt to make sense of things. We have imperfect ideas because we are imperfect beings. But unlike the vile totalitarian notions that the left subscribes to, our ideas are an honest attempt to know and live with the truth.

But to answer the original question, if you want to understand the left from the standpoint of someone who got off the crazy train, read Radical Son by David Horowitz, a recovered red diaper baby whose parents were low-level Soviet operatives and committed Marxists. He grew up and became a somewhat well known member of the "New Left" Marxists back in the 60's. But as time went by, his own experiences in life eventually overwhelmed his indoctrination and he the scales fell from his eyes. Today he's a well-known conservative pundit.

He grew up with the crazy in its purest form, tried to make sense of it, tried to make it work and to conform with reality, and eventually gave up because it just doesn't. 2+2 does not equal 5 and never will. A less honest person might not have done so well.

Richard Epstein knocks another one out of the park

2011-04-20T12:27:00.000-07:00

http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/75711

There is absolutely nothing I could possibly add to this article that would improve or clarify its content.

Richard Epstein is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at Hoover. He is also the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University. His areas of expertise include constitutional law, intellectual property, and property rights. His most recent books are The Case Against the Employee Free Choice Act (Hoover Press, 2009) and Supreme Neglect: How to Revive the Constitutional Protection for Private Property (Oxford Press, 2008).

Stuck on stupid

2011-04-18T08:18:00.000-07:00

Another post from a Marxist who just doesn't get it.

An enlightened ruling class?

Ruling class....

That term right there is where his entire argument falls to pieces. The ruling class in America is and always has been the middle class, and even then only in the sense that it is we who define the morality of our nation, we who have the most say in the nature of the LAWS that govern our nation.

From there his argument goes even further afield from reality. He talks about prosperity broadly shared. Well I think that is a great idea. To achieve this, how about we set up a free market economy with low barriers to entry in the context of a politically stable nation? What...? We already have that, and it's working?

Yet again we have someone who believes the concept of human rights in terms of freedom from something. Freedom from poverty, from hunger, from cold, etc, etc, etc. Such human rights are a fallacy because they cannot be achieved for those who will not achieve them for themselves without violating the rights of others. The only rights that can be freely given to any person are those rights which do not compromise the rights of others. When a right has a price tag attached to it, a resource requirement, then someone has to pay that bill, and forcing someone else to bear that burden is a violation of their rights. Socialism is involuntary servitude, slavery, and is morally reprehensible in addition to being a direct violation of the 13th amendment.

This guy is just another indoctrinated Marxist whose ideas about sociology and economics have about as much validity as phrenology does for the fields of psychology and criminology.

Marxism is a pass/fail IQ test and this guy is stuck on stupid.

Obama isn't the disease, but the symptom

2011-04-15T09:11:00.000-07:00

Let's Get Alinsky on Obama With Respect to Third World

It isn't just Obama.

It isn't just Reid or Pelosi or any of the other poster-leftists.

It is the millions of Americans who have been fooled into believing the deceptions of the left, or who are part and parcel of that deception themselves. In other words, the people who voted for him and others of his ilk and who agree with their policies.

Our nation is afflicted not merely with a bad president or some bad politicians, but with millions of men and women who are consumed by EVIL.

There is a book by M. Scott Peck called People of the Lie that describes this quite well. He doesn't talk about leftists in the book per-se, or politics for that matter, but his description of human evil fits them so well it is spooky:

1. The evil hide their motives with lies.

Bad people with bad ideas hiding behind screens of continuous deception are precisely what the left is.

2. Evil people want to appear to be good.

I don't even have to comment on that one....

3. When confronted by evil, the wisest and most secure adult will usually experience confusion.

This is why leftists are so hard to figure out. Trying to deal with them is an exercise in frustration and futility. Offer them something that is objectively good, that helps to achieve their STATED aims, and they'll reject it. Offer it enough and point out all the reasons it is good and they'll attack you and call you names. Only when you realize that their stated aims are the opposite of their actual agenda do their actions begin to make sense.

4. Evil seeks to discourage others to think for themselves (fosters dependency).

This is the one that I think is most telling. It is possible to believe that other things the left does are good, or at least intended to be good. A non-leftist could look at the left and assume that they are trying to do good, could be fooled by them. But what they work to do that cannot be construed as positive or well intentioned are their efforts to trap people in poverty and make them dependent upon the state. Next comes their creation of imaginary thought-crimes and speech-crimes in the form of Political Correctness. The truth isn't afraid of dissent, only people who peddle lies.

So instead of looking to Obama as the problem, look at him and understand that he's merely the symptom and that the real culprits are other Americans who work each day to destroy our nation and darken our futures.

5. To oppose evil we must have an ongoing dedication to reality at all cost.

Not all leftists are bad on an individual level. Many are merely hoodwinked. They believe they are good people doing good things, not understanding that their entire worldview is essentially a destructive lie. They can be helped. They can be persuaded. They can be rescued. Other people, your Noam Chomsky types, the people who craft the lies of the left themselves, cannot be helped but must be fought and resisted at every turn.

Heinlein quote for today

2011-04-14T23:40:00.000-07:00

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. -- Robert A Heinlein

A thought for today

2011-04-14T13:52:00.001-07:00

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." - John Stuart Mill

The blame game - round 9,533,783

2011-04-14T08:26:00.001-07:00

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/04/028815.php

The only thing worse than a Republican is a Democrat. Neither can be solely blamed for the mess we are in because BOTH parties engaged in breakneck deficit spending over multiple decades. In terms of fiscal issues, the only thing that really distinguishes them is a relatively small difference in the RATE they spent at. That each party sought to spend on different things for different reasons is kind of irrelevant because neither had any workable idea about how their schemes would ultimately be paid for.

The truth is that BOTH political parties, as they currently exist, are the enemies not only of the young, but of the nation as a whole. The current Republican party TALKS a better game than the Dems (whose feverish notions can best be described as Mansonesque), but when push came to shove they failed to reduce spending.

Without a constitutional requirement for a balanced budget this will simply continue. Our political parties are not comprised of aliens from another world, but are representative slices of factions within our own nation. They are us. We are the ones who created this mess by refusing to hold our elected officials accountable for the money they were spending.

When the government spends more money than the public has paid in taxes, everyone loses. Borrowing against the future guarantees a future of POVERTY as the wealth of the nation is confiscated to pay off debts created in the past.

Ninth circuit rules against the rule of law itself

2011-04-12T08:53:00.000-07:00

Ninth Circuit upholds invalidation of Arizona's SB1070

So in other words the ninth circuit has ruled to overturn RULE OF LAW itself.

Welcome to the 21st century, where laws, as the stated policies of the state, no longer define the actual policies of the state. Rule of law has been replaced by rule of men.

When a government does not even follow its own rules, then why should I? The legitimacy of law comes from its nature as a law, a written standard that applies to everyone equally, including those in positions of power. Sentator so and so doesn't get to ignore the law. Officer so and so doesn't get to ignore it. Neither do their friends, relatives, or political cronies.

In all seriousness, this is what illegitimacy in government looks like. People vote for one thing, or vote to elect legislators who pass a law that requires one thing, and individuals within the government implement policies that contradict it. Now they've dropped all pretence by attempting to coerce the governments at the state level into accepting their illegal and contradictory policies in preference over that written law.

To say that this is unconstitutional doesn't even come close to describing how heinous it is. Unconstitutional laws passed by congress are still laws passed by congress. There is still some weight of law behind them, even if they are ultimately found to be constitutionally invalid. In this new paradigm there is no weight of law, nothing more than the whims of bureaucrats and apparatchiks. Written law ceases to have any meaning except perhaps as a vehicle for grandstanding and pandering by politicians.

When the will of the people is thwarted by the will of government agents, that is tyranny.

The left now blaming "vitriolic" public discourse for the actions of a madman.

2011-01-08T22:25:00.000-08:00

Political assassinations have no place in a free society. Political and social revolutions, if they come at all, come from the soap box and the ballot box, not the ammo box. An attack on a duly elected member of congress is an attack on us all because it is an attack on the constitution and the free society that it makes possible. This man will be held accountable. Here in Arizona we have the death penalty, and he will surely receive it. It is unfortunate that he can only be executed once.

No one instructed this man to murder. To blame Fox News or other conservative outlets for his actions makes about as much sense as blaming Quake and D&D for the actions of the Columbine shooters, or Ramparts and The Nation for the actions of Kathy Soliah and others of her ilk.

Even if we were to momentarily entertain the ludicrous assertion that political speech causes violence, it must be noted that 300 million Americans are continually exposed to conservative arguments, ideas and sentiments, and yet only only man has acted to murder an elected official from the Democratic party. Making a cause and effect argument on that basis is not merely weak, it is dishonest.

Using a crisis to dishonestly demonize (and thereby silence) those with whom you disagree is a tactic that smacks of desperation and impotence. Those with strong and valid arguments to make don't need to resort to such measures. Those who seek to know and live with the truth do not fear ideas with which they disagree or seek to silence their expression. The truth is not found by obscuring disagreeable ideas or by twisting those ideas into misshapen caricatures in the hope they will be disregarded. The truth is born in the crucible of open debate where all ideas are honestly represented. When someone has to lie in order to "win" an argument, they are wrong. Worse than that, they have forsaken the honest pursuit of truth, which is man's fundamental task upon this earth.

Strong ideas stand on their own. They do not need to be shielded from competition, but are in fact strengthened by it. Neither are strong ideas undermined when those who champion them are slandered. So go ahead and blame Fox News and other conservative voices for the actions of this murderer. Doing so may score you points with those who share your political sentiments, but it will do nothing to convince anyone who does not. If you want to convince median voters to support your ideas, you will have to come up with persuasive arguments.

Attempting to connect this tragedy to Sarah Palin is especially peculiar. Why is the left so fixated on her? What makes her so special? Yeah, I'd like to do naughty things with her, but beyond that she's nothing to write home about. Her political career ended when she resigned as the governor of Alaska. She is unlikely to be elected to any other comparable office, let alone the presidency. Her value is as a political commentator, and she is only as successful in this as her words and deeds resonate with the public. In other words, she succeeds or fails in this role on the strength of her arguments. Attacking her for her NON-association with a political assassin and terrorist isn't going to convince anyone of anything except that you dislike her enough to paint her with any brush that is convenient regardless of how absurd it is.

The original Moonbat strikes again

2011-01-05T23:12:00.000-08:00

http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2011/01/new-crisis-detected.html

This man is evil. It does not surprise me that he exists, fools and scoundrels are not hard to find. What I do find shocking is that anyone, let alone a major newspaper, would actually PAY him to pontificate to the masses.

This is what the Guardian thinks is journalism?

There is one common impulse among leftists that most clearly defines them. They believe that human beings are created equal.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

We are, in any just society, provided equal rights and equal protection under the law. But that does not mean that we are endowed by our creator with the same capacities or the same character. Some people are smarter than others. Some people are stronger than others. Some are better looking. Some are inherently wiser for their age, and some are just plain lucky. The inevitable result of these differences is that some people have greater success in life than others. This is not a tragedy. It is not a moral failing in need of intervention. It is precisely as things should be. In fact, no other outcome is possible. You can muck about with the rules of society to artificially favor the dysfunctional all you please. The more capable will still find a way to win, and the less a way to lose. Meanwhile the freedom and equal rights that define a just society will be sacrificed, with misery and tyranny the inevitable result.

There are a few of course who, through inherited wealth, have had an easier time in some ways than others who have had to struggle. But such advantages are principally financial. Having money is great, but it will only get you those things that money can buy. True achievement comes from within and earns for the achiever the true riches that life has to offer. It must also be remembered that one person receiving a windfall through an inheritance does nothing to prevent others from achieving their own goals. The Kennedy family has millions, but whether they have that money, or don't, does nothing to change anyone else's situation. No one is made to fail because someone else was handed free money.

In England, as in any society that is even reasonably free and just, successful people are able to purchase more spacious homes if they choose. George Monbiot would have you believe that this is somehow wrong. It all goes back to this leftist's belief that human beings deserve an equal LIFE, as opposed to equal rights. This is impossible. Fortune favors the competent. It favors the virtuous. It favors the industrious.

This is why the left is evil. They wish to sacrifice our rights and freedoms to ensure that no one has it any better than anyone else. There is only one place where all are equal, and that is the grave. Till then some people are going to be better at the game of life than others.

Not all education is created equal.

2010-12-23T09:56:00.000-08:00

The Great College Degree Scam

How many have degrees in subjects that are of no use to anyone?

A degree in early childhood development MAY be of use to someone raising a child, depending upon whether or not the knowledge they gained from their studies is accurate and honest, as opposed to political radicalism couched in academic terms. But it will not prepare them for an intellectually challenging career in a field requiring mastery of difficult concepts. They are only marginally more employable than someone with only a high school diploma, as this study has found.

When someone goes off to college and pursues what might best be called a recreational degree, they are doing themselves a greater disservice than they would by simply not going to college at all.

They are wasting time pursuing education that will not benefit them. The opportunity cost is considerable.

They are wasting money, often a great deal of money, borrowed at interest that they will have a hard time repaying in the menial position their "education" will guarantee them.

They are reducing the likelihood that they will ever actually attain a degree that will be of use to them. Whereas someone who went into the workforce out of high school might return to school in their twenties and get a real degree, someone who has earned a worthless degree will likely spend the rest of their life trying to get a return on that unwise investment.

There was a news story a few months ago about a woman who could not understand how her degree in women's studies, obtained at a cost of $100,000 in student loans, resulted in her working at Starbucks with no hope for anything better. I honestly don't know what she thought was going to happen, but somewhere along the line she got the idea in her head that there would be a meaningful career in her future. If she were a fluke that would be one thing, but cases like hers are all too common. Academic departments are flat out lying to their students about the value of the education they are receiving, especially departments whose justifications for even existing are sketchy at best.

I have a friend who pursued at Ph.D in Political Science because he had been assured that there were jobs to be had. In truth a Poli-Sci professor in a tenure track position will be lucky to earn 50k a year. Full professors don't make much more than that. Because the field is dying, placements are hard to come by in the first place. Meanwhile the starting salary for most Business professors is about 120k a year, with full professors in many disciplines clearing over 200k. Business schools are flourishing. What did he do when he discovered all that? He switched to marketing and is now at UGA making over 140k a year as an assistant professor.

A college education isn't a college education. It has no value except to the degree to which it prepares someone for what comes after: life, and especially a career. There is no magic pixie dust that gets rubbed on someone just because they came to campus and took a series of general studies courses that ultimately resulted in a degree of some sort. There is no "experience" to be had from this that would make a person better somehow. The days when someone could just "go to college" and somehow wind up with a good job are long gone. No one is impressed by a bachelor's degree in sociology. That and a hair-cut will get you a job as a bank teller.

Meanwhile there are degree programs that are worth pursuing, and virtually everyone knows what they are. Business, engineering, hard sciences, medicine, law. Fields that, even if you don't find a job doing what you studied directly, require a mastery of difficult concepts and the ability to apply them. Something an art history degree simply doesn't provide.

Abortion as a counterintuitive social virtue.

2010-12-11T09:31:00.001-08:00

There has been talk of late about states with Republican majorities using that political power to ban abortions. I think this is a mistake. This is a partisan issue that will only seek to alienate people who might otherwise support them.

There are a good many people who are in favor of smaller government, lower taxes, and a society where busybodies from the state aren't sticking their nose in everyone's business. But when this is tied to a platform of outlawing abortion, you lose a whole lot of people who have nowhere to go but into the arms of the left. It doesn't have to be this way.

Abortion is an issue that most people feel very strongly about, one way or the other, and the only way to reach those whose beliefs are different is through communication. The desire to save the lives of the unborn is admirable, but attempting to hijack the state and use its monopoly on force to achieve that goal is not. People are not made more virtuous through tyranny. Abortion opponents should work on using the soap box to persuade, not the ballot box to coerce.

Abortion is also good for society. Let me explain why. The value of abortion comes from its long-term effect upon the quality of our gene pool.

Lets say you have two women. Woman A is a responsible and conscientious. She generally makes good choices in life, and learns from her mistakes so they are not repeated. She doesn't sleep around. If she does have sex, it is with someone she loves, and she always takes care to use effective contraceptives until such time as she chooses to start a family. If she does become pregnant unintentionally, she either finds a way to make motherhood part of the plan for her life, or at the very least works to ensure that her child is adopted by a loving family.

Woman B is irresponsible. She engages in self destructive and self-limiting behaviors. She does not understand how the choices she makes affects herself and others. She is incapable of learning from experience. She seeks to blame other people for her own mistakes, or at the very least throw the consequences of those mistakes onto others instead of shouldering them herself. If she becomes pregnant, she pushes the consequences of that choice onto her unborn child in the form of an abortion, or onto her family who then have to raise that child, or onto the taxpayers who now have to subsidize her dysfunction through the dole.

Which woman do YOU want to see passing her genes on to the next generation?

The left makes a great deal of noise about abortion in terms of a woman's right to choose. This is an interesting argument. It is dishonest in that it pretends a pregnancy is something that simply happens spontaneously. A pregnancy is not a cold. It isn't something you catch because someone standing in line behind you at Starbucks sneezed. Pregnancy is the result of a deliberate act that requires a deliberate choice: the choice to have sex. Abortion (as birth control) isn't about a woman's right to choose, but about a woman pushing the consequences for the choice she already made onto someone else, in this case her unborn child.

Freedom is power. With power comes responsibility. Women have the power to sleep with just about anyone they choose, any other consenting adult. Worthwhile women accept responsibility for the choices they make. Women who aren't so worthwhile attempt to avoid that responsibility. Which woman is going to make a good parent? Which woman is going to raise a child to be a productive and responsible member of society? Which woman is more likely to be a conservative or libertarian and produce a child who will be the same, both genetically and by virtue of upbringing?

In most cases something that allows people to shirk their responsibilities would be a bad thing, but in the case of abortion it helps keep losers from breeding, which makes it a net positive. Let conservative and libertarian women have kids. Let leftists and their victims among the underclass have none. Rinse and repeat until such time as the latter are rare and the former ubiquitous.

"Diversity" explained.

2010-11-22T08:23:00.001-08:00

"Diversity" is a scam, a hoax. It is part and parcel of an ideology that some refer to as Cultural Marxism.

"Diversity" is not a call for tolerance and acceptance of other people and other cultures, but rather an effort to destroy our nation as a whole by sowing discord among the many cultures that our nation is comprised of, and especially by casting the majority culture as an imaginary oppressor of all the rest. Where Economic Marxism pretends that the productive and successful are the oppressors of the idle and the failed, Cultural Marxism seeks to convince members of minority cultures that they are somehow being victimized by the majority culture. Divide and conquer is the name if the game.

Most minority cultures within the US were transplanted here from other places where they are the majority. If we were truly an oppressive nation, then these cultures would not even exist here in the first place. The existence, and acceptance, of home grown minority cultures like the Amish further disproves the lie that we are oppressors. You have to be pretty heinous in your values before we take exception to you. The Mormons were driven to Utah not because they were different, but because they were polygamists. As soon as they dropped that nonsense they were, more or less, accepted. Other fringe groups that evolved during the 19th century, such as the Shakers, were left in peace where they emerged, and some retain their unique identities to this day.

The culture of America is the result of ideas, values and traditions that have been contributed by countless individuals representing a multitude of cultures. We are not the British. We are Americans. Our roots reach back to England to be sure, but also to other nations. Ireland, Italy, Germany, France, Russia, Poland, and too many other places to mention by name, not to mention all of the native tribes that were conquered whose contributions (genetic if not always cultural) are quite significant.

The US is fairly unique in that the children and grandchildren of emigrants are as fully American as anyone else. They speak english and are a full member of mainstream culture, even if they also share in the culture of their parents and more distant ancestors. In many countries minority transplant cultures persist in a state of mutually imposed exclusion for generations, even to the point of being unable to speak the common language, or speaking it only poorly. Here in America the best ideas and values from emigrant cultures are made a part of the larger culture. At the same time, a person's identity as part of an distinct sub-culture does not diminish nor conflict with their identity as an American. This is part of what makes our nation so great.

An Italian from Little Italy in NYC is an American. A farmer from the midwest is an American. They don't have a great deal in common, but what they do share is profound: the idea of America. The idea of a country founded on liberty and individual empowerment, where anyone is free to fulfill their potential and the government is a servant instead of a master. It is easy to overlook these shared ideas because they are so ubiquitous, but to do so would be a mistake. No where else on earth have so many people of so many different cultures been brought together and forged into a nation.

But the left would have you believe that none of this is true. This is just another of their lies. They work to destroy us from within by setting us against one another. They work to create animosity where a sense of community would otherwise flourish.

Don't be fooled by them.

Colleges and Universities have an unhealthy preoccupation with the ethnicity of their students.

2010-11-18T03:47:00.000-08:00

Minorities in College---Good News, But...

If our institutions of higher education have a duty to equalize Black and Latino achievement with that of whites...

No, they do not. Institutions of higher education have the duty to provide quality education to all students without regard for their racial or ethnic background. This is especially true of public universities which are bound by the 14th amendment.

There is no reason why individuals from a particular racial or ethnic group MUST be less successful than individuals from other groups. Do American's of German ancestry outperform Americans whose ancestors came from Britain? Certainly not that I've ever seen or heard. The reason is that, by and large, the values and culture of these two groups are the same.

Character is destiny, and the character of a nation or a community is defined through its values and its culture. When these are good, then the individuals of this community are able to more fully realize their potential. But when these are bad, the members of the community are held back by them, and lead limited and stunted lives.

This is what must change, and no one in higher education is in a position to make this happen. The parents and teachers and cultural leaders, and most of all the students, from these blighted communities are the only ones who can improve things for themselves. They are the only ones who can redefine what it means to be a member of that community to include achievement and success.

The only thing a university can do, is work to provide the same opportunities to all. Equality of outcome is neither possible nor equitable. It leads to tribal warfare and tyranny. Equality of opportunity is the only promise of equality that can be actually be kept.

Obesity as yet another marxist canard

2010-11-08T23:49:00.000-08:00

http://althouse.blogspot.com/2010/04/marc-ambinder-would-like-you-to.html

The left sees all problems through the lens of imaginary disability and incapacitation. No one is responsible for their own choices. All consequences are foisted upon us by someone or something else. This is one of the fundamental reasons why they get so many things wrong. From erroneous premises flow erroneous conclusions, which then lead to destructive policies.

Obesity isn't something that is done to a person, but something that they choose. It is a continuous choice that person makes about what they are going to be. Every moment of every day they choose to be obese. This choice is actualized through the actions that they take which create and perpetuate that obesity. They eat too much. They eat the wrong sorts of foods. They fail to educate themselves about what kinds of foods they should be eating and in what quantities. They lead a sedentary lifestyle instead of seeking out opportunities for physical activity and exertion. They fail to educate themselves about the kinds of activities that would produce positive health and fitness benefits. In short, they fail to take responsibility for their physical selves.

Now in fairness this does not apply to all obese people. There are some people whose own genetics and metabolism make maintaining a healthy weight very difficult despite good faith efforts that would give any other person the physique of a personal trainer. There is no fault to be found with such a person. But these people are also the exception. Most obese people aren't victims of their DNA. I'm not particularly thin myself, but I don't blame some other person for this and I don't blame "society." The responsibility is mine alone, and responsibility, unlike its cousin blame, is an empowering attribute. That which you are responsible for is that which you can change.

Yet here comes some leftist who, in true leftist form, attempts to find yet another area of a person's life where they should not be expected to take responsibility, where the state needs to take control. That is sick, evil, and wrong.

Teaching someone that the color of their skin or the derivation of their surname disempowers them from taking charge of their own life, their own happiness, their own well being, and their own future, is probably the most egregious form of bigotry I know of.

At least the Klan hoodlums are honest enough to admit that they hate you. The left pretends that they are your friend and then proceeds to demonstrate that friendship by attempting to infantalize you, to make you weak and dependent upon them. With friends like that, who needs mass murderers?

Children learning to swear at an earlier age

2010-09-23T23:40:00.000-07:00

Oh $#*!, I'm 3! Kids Learning to Swear Earlier

I honestly do believe that this is a good thing. All my life I've believed that selective speech restrictions on the young are a form of bullying by adults, made all the more insulting by the arbitrary nature of the prohibited words. Why should young people be prohibited from using terms that older people use on a regular basis? Just because they are "not old enough?" While there are things that younger people should be held back from doing, such as driving a car, speaking their mind freely is not one of them, and that includes the freedom to choose the words they wish to use. If there is to be a restriction on speech, it should be uniform for everyone and more importantly based upon real necessity, not a Pavlovian aversion to certain words instilled during childhood. Yelling "fire!" in a crowded theatre is not the same thing as saying "shit." No one should have the right to do the former, and no one should be prohibited from doing the latter.

In France the word "tabernac" is profane. What does this word refer to in English? A tabernacle. Yes, as in church. In fact much profanity in French is derived from religious terms that would be completely inoffensive to any English speaker. The prohibited terms are arbitrary.

In the English speaking world, words that refer to parts of the body, bodily functions, or things excreted by the body are considered profane. Meanwhile other terms that have the exact same definitions are curiously not viewed as being rude. Once again, the prohibited terms are arbitrary.

When children are punished for using certain words that adults use freely without rebuke, it teaches them that their rights as human beings are subject to being capriciously abridged by people in positions of power. It teaches them that power alone determines what decisions are made in society. In other words it undermines democracy and teaches an unhealthy respect for tyranny.

Fire-breathing bartenders arrested, face 45 years

2010-08-18T10:30:00.000-07:00

Perform a bar trick for the amusement of your customers, go to jail for half a century

I used to live down the street from this place, which was called Foot Anakin's back in the 80's when I was there.

I think this case is a good example of how our criminal justice system has gone off the rails. Nowadays just about anything you do can be construed as a felony, and prosecutors are quick to charge people with anything they can think of in relation to an incident. Multiple gratuitous charges stemming from a single event are a violation of double jeopardy in my opinion. Combine this with mandatory minimum sentencing rules and you wind up with a system that is a much greater threat to society than the REAL criminals it is nominally supposed to be protecting us from. A burglar will steal your TV or maybe your car, the criminal justice system will steal your life.

But there is a way out for these guys, and that is the most pernicious part of this whole mess. If they plead out to a lesser charge, the prosecutors get to claim a win, and they get a slap on the wrist. Why is this a problem? Because it destroys the principles of due process and trial by jury. Once upon a time when a person was charged with a crime, the prosecution had to prove their case in court before a jury of that person's peers. Not anymore. Today most people are so terrified of spending the rest of their lives in prison something that should rightly be called a misdemeanor that they simply plead guilty to anything the prosecution offers that will save them from that terrible fate. The prosecutors get to claim a "win," that they are "tough on crime," and their conviction stats are improved. Citizens who do not cave, and who do demand their day in court, are punished for it if they lose. If these guys actually fight these bogus charges, you can rest assured that the prosecutors will press to make these charges stick, and the sentences that will imposed really will be 45 years in prison (or worse) if these guys lose.

This is not justice, this is tyranny.

A free society is not one in which prosecutors deprive the judge and jury of their rightful place under due process. When prosecutors abuse their position to declare someone convicted of a crime by fiat, they are no longer public servants but criminals themselves.

Get the government out of the marriage business

2010-08-07T00:22:00.000-07:00

Time for a divorce

This is what I've been saying for over a year now.

I was married once. I'm now divorced. The state was not involved when I got married, and it wasn't involved when I got divorced. This was not by design, but it is how things turned out. Some people will tell me that I wasn't "really" married at all because I didn't get permission from the government. But why should my (now ex) wife and I, as adults, need to ask the state for permission in the first place? How is it the business of government to decide who is married and who is not? Why is the state even informed of the change in status?

This brings me to the very point that this article makes so well. Why is the state involved in defining marriage? Worse yet, why does it assume the role of permission-giver, without whose assent a marriage is not "real"? Does that make any sort of sense in a free society?

Let the role of the state be limited to the enforcement of valid contracts between consenting adults, and let the adults in question define their relationship in whatever terms they choose.

Some lies hurt more than others

2010-08-04T16:00:00.000-07:00

I saw a bumper on HBO recently. I honestly don't know exactly what show was being promoted, but it featured a black woman reciting a poem in which she explicitly named the Tea Party movement as part of the oppression of black people.

It is one thing when leftists spread lies about us being racists. Leftists telling hateful lies is something that happens every day. It is quite another to see someone buying into those lies and repeating them.

It honestly made me sad and I felt sorry for this woman. If she believes the lies about the Tea Party movement, then what other destructive lies has she bought into? How is her life being damaged by those lies, her potential destroyed? What possibilities are there for her that will never be realized because she has come to believe that America itself is her enemy?

Mosque at ground zero and the hypocrisy of faux conservatives

2010-08-04T13:53:00.001-07:00

If muslims want to buy property near ground zero and build a mosque then that is their fundamental right as free human beings. It is also their right under the 1st amendment.

If there are other people who don't like this, then the answer is to pony up more money for that same piece of land than the muslims are willing to spend to secure it. If the muslims won't sell....too bad. Crying to the government to "protect" us from the free use of private property is both stupid and wrong.

I'd heard a great deal of fussing about this business for a long time, and I'd always assumed that some government entity was involved in the building of this mosque. Now I find out that this is the work of private citizens using private property. The fair-weather conservatives who would deny them that right should be ashamed of themselves. Rights aren't just for people we like. They are for everyone.

Public Tax Meeting

2010-08-03T11:24:00.000-07:00

(Blatantly stolen from here)

We Voted On It

John JJ Richman was making breakfast when he heard the crowd outside. They seemed just shy of hostile. He opened his door to see about 65 townspeople, out of a town of 100. Two spokesmen were standing on the porch.

John: Good morning. Why are you all here?

Rob: There are things that need changing, and you are the one to help us.

John: (Distracted by the milling crowd)

Rob: The town could use improvement. Renovating the school, hiring more police, fixing up the football field, and a summer splash fountain for the children. For the little children! (Rob was shaking a bit.)

John: Well, if you put it like that, I can contribute $1000. (He scans the crowd) Make that $2000.

Rob: Not enough. We want you to pay for it all, along with the other 4 rich guys in town. You are earning $250,000 and paying $80,000 in tax. We think $105,000 in tax is only fair, (his eyes flash) or maybe a bit more. That leaves you with $145,000, which is more than fair. You live in the town and will benefit from the improvements.

John: That's a big bite. Why should just 5 out of the 100 fund the whole town? As a single man, that $80,000 in 2008 payroll and income taxes is 32% of my earnings, isn't that enough? Maybe the whole town should contribute.

Rob: We contribute what we can. We have less money than you. Some of us work for you, and you don't pay enough. We should all be more equal. You have the money and we need it.

John: I already personally pay 20% of the town's expenses. The 5 rich guys in town together pay 60%. The 25 well off families pay 86%. Isn't that enough?

Rob: We are not into philosophy. We want money. You have money.

John: Well, I don't agree with you. Where do you get the authority to just take what you want from me?

Rob: I'm the mayor, and at my election two years ago a referendum passed by 65 to 35 about fixing potholes. I think you argued at the time that there was already enough money to fix them. It seems you were always stingy.

In that referendum, Section 3, Paragraph 2.a says: "The town shall have the authority to levy taxes to an aggregate amount strictly limited to a total of $20,000 to fix the potholes in the town's streets and thoroughfares (note 1)."

Note 1 says: "And in emergencies, for things other than potholes, and possibly a bit more".

(The crowd laughs and slaps each other on the back)

John: This is unfair. You want me to pay more without paying anything more yourself.

Rob: Actually, we are lowering our own taxes. We deserve it, and you don't. We don't understand how you get your money. Some sort of luck or black magic. It probably should be ours. Somehow you took it when we weren't looking. We are leaving you more than enough. You should be happy.

John: I don't have the extra money on me.

Rob: We'll bill you. We are not barbarians.

(The crowd looks disappointed)

John: It seems I can't do anything about this. You understand that I won't be expanding my business within the town. I'm feeling a bit upset. I may go fishing.

Rob: Fishing is good. We'll see you there.

We may be back in a month about money for another Stimulus Package. We want to improve the town economy by giving each of us 65 a stimulus check of $1000. Those new TV's look sweet.

John: Is that all?

Rob: (Turns toward the crowd without answering) OK boys, next stop is 13 Orchard Lane, there is more work to do.

Fox news must be racist, cause black people don't watch it much

2010-07-31T08:14:00.001-07:00

NYT blogger who complains about Fox News' viewership demographic suffers from the same problem.

How is it "racism" on the part of a network when members of a particular ethnic group don't tune in? I'm sure that Hee-Haw was not high on the list of BET fans, but does that make Roy Clark the head of the KKK?

These people don't seem to know what racism actually is. It has devolved into this catch-all describe-all term that they bandy about and throw at everything they don't like but cannot find honest fault with.

Are you left handed? Racism.

Are you right handed? Racism.

Did you eat your peas? Racism.

2+2=4. Must be racism cause none of those numbers are black.

I'm engaging in a bit of hyperbole here, but not by much.

Leftists have always been wrong (most of the time), but now they're going off the rails into the realm of full-blown crazy. With each passing day their desperation grows while their grasp of reality falters. They seem to think that they'll be able to convince people that conservatives and libertarians are wrong simply by calling us names.

Ad hominem attacks are the last retreat of the intellectually bankrupt.

Besides, why should news channels or newspapers or blogs be judged based upon the skin color of the people who consume them? Shouldn't these sources of information and commentary be judged on the basis of whether they provide factual reporting and insightful analysis?

Truth and reason are color blind. Something is very wrong when a news outlet is judging itself by the skin color of its patrons instead of the quality of its reporting.

Lies, lies and more lies

2010-07-29T08:38:00.000-07:00

Yes, elite colleges are biased against poor whites

(Ya gotta click and read from the link before this post will make sense).

It seems to me that the entire response from Espenshade is dishonest. Success in groups such as 4-H indicates that a person is likely to be grounded in reality and possess a level of maturity that might be lacking in their peers.

It is precisely this that makes such applicants undesirable from the standpoint of these universities. A student who knows who they are and has some idea of how the world works will be resistant to indoctrination and also undermine the university's efforts to indoctrinate others.

To describe these groups as merely "career oriented" and then claim that success within one might indicate someone is unserious about their education is completely dishonest. It takes independent initiative and diligence to succeed in such groups, which are precisely the qualities necessary to succeed in any endeavour, including academically. Show me a student who is intrinsically motivated to work harder, who does not give up in the face of hardship, and I'll show you a student who will succeed.

This is also perhaps part of why such students are not desired by these universities. When individual character, effort, and merit are on full display, it is difficult to convince someone that their fate is bound by the color of their skin or the contents of their family's bank account.

Also lets not forget that the ONLY reason why anyone with a clue pursues higher education is to have a better career. That better career might not pay more than another they would have had otherwise, but it is a career that they prefer and for which education is a prerequisite. To complain about students being "career oriented" patently insane. That's like GM complaining about its potential customers being "car oriented." Cars are what GM sells, and career enhancing education is what universities sell. Students don't go to college to bask in the pontifications of tenured radicals, they go to learn what they need to know to pursue the career they desire.

Academics lie when they pretend the classes they teach that do not directly contribute to a person's career are somehow valuable. Predictably those academics with the least useful subjects to teach are the ones who most vocally cry for the value of these useless subjects for making a person "well rounded" or contributing to the "college experience." They're useless liars. Luckily for us they're also the least well paid of all academics.

Rodney King, part 2,353,345

2010-07-28T06:49:00.000-07:00

Taking photos in public places is not a crime

http://www.aclu-md.org/aPress/Press2010/Graber_Factsheet.pdf

This is the lesson that law enforcement learned from the Rodney King episode: Attack those who would hold you accountable for complying with the law you are sworn to uphold.

Police fear video cameras because they cannot be impugned.

Normally cops are able to get away with murder, sometimes quite literally. They can conspire to lie and make up pretty much any story they like as long as it is even marginally consistent with the known facts of the case. When push comes to shove it is the word of several police officers against someone accused of a crime. Who are the judge, the jury and the public, going to believe?

But when those cops are videotaped, their ability to spin-doctor what happened in order to bury the accused and/or cover up their own wrongdoing is extremely limited.

They especially fear being taped without their knowledge and having that evidence show up AFTER they've perjured themselves or filed false reports.

It is for this very reason that the right to videotape police conduct, especially surreptitiously, should be protected by law. It is at least as fundamental a right as free speech or the right to keep and bear arms. When agents of the state are empowered to detain and incarcerate private citizens for violations of the law, those citizens have the right to an impartial observer to ensure that those agents are conducting themselves in accordance with the law and with respect for the truth.

There was another case not too long ago where a teenage hoodlum used an MP3 device to record his own interrogation at the hands of the police. One of the cops he dealt with later lied on the stand about what took place during that interrogation, only to be destroyed by the truth.

Now the teen in question was a criminal. He was guilty of the charge, but because the police lied those charges were thrown out. Furthermore the police who perjured themselves destroyed their careers and opened themselves up to criminal charges of their own.

A good cop who does his job honestly and tells the truth has nothing to fear from the truth. Only dirty cops who look to shortcut the due process of the accused, or who are criminals in their own right, fear having their official actions recorded.

Harvard engages in creative accounting

2010-07-22T12:56:00.000-07:00

Harvard Kennedy School Revokes Degree Awarded to Russian Spy

I find it interesting that Harvard thinks it can "revoke" a degree.

This guy lied about his identity. He was a Russian spy sent here to gather intelligence to be used against us by a foreign power. He was not a good man.

However, an education is not a piece of paper. Harvard cannot deprive him of the education he received while he was here. The most that the university can do is pretend that he didn't receive it, which is itself a lie.

To put it another way imagine this: A man goes to a car dealership and buys a car. He pays cash. Later it is discovered that the money he used was stolen and the identity he used was false. The police have no idea who he was and there is no way to recover the car. It is gone and will never be seen again.

Does the dealership still possess that car, or does the man who bought it under fraudulent terms possess it? Would it be rational or true for that dealership to "revoke" that car on paper and pretend that it is still in their inventory?

That is pretty much what Harvard is doing here. A difference of opinion about where a car is physically located is easily resolved by referring to objective reality. That car is either still on the lot, or it isn't. There is no ambiguity there. The same is true here as well. Either this man completed the course work necessary to earn his degree, or he didn't. That question is easily answered by referring to his academic records and the evaluations of his instructors. If he completed his coursework satisfactorily, then he has that degree. Harvard cannot deprive him of the insight, understanding, and enlightenment that he now has as a result of completing that degree program. If these intellectual enhancements were never received as part of earning that degree, if the only value to that degree is that Harvard now claims you as one of its graduates, then that degree is already worthless except as something to pad one's resume and Harvard is nothing but a diploma mill.

But I for one do not believe that the degree he earned amounted to nothing but fluff and busywork. I believe that earning a master's degree in public administration requires a student to actually learn and master real knowledge. If this is true, then for them to say that they have "revoked" his degree is a misrepresentation of the truth equal to the one he perpetrated by pretending to be someone else while earning it.

The honest thing for Harvard to do, if it wishes to disassociate itself from this man, is to simply state that they are doing precisely that. Divorce him. Disown him. Disclaim him. But don't pretend that his degree is non-existent because that simply isn't true. Harvard lessens itself by publishing that fiction.

Goebbels Lives!

2010-07-21T08:22:00.000-07:00

Leftist journalist calls for government to shut down Fox News

“I am genuinely scared” of Fox, wrote Guardian columnist Daniel Davies, because it “shows you that a genuinely shameless and unethical media organisation *cannot* be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation, and nor can it be successfully cold-shouldered or ostracised. In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework.”

This is genuinely fascinating.

Think about what he is saying here for a moment. He is calling for government control over the press.

Wow.... just wow....

When I read statements like his, and this is not the first time I've seen such sentiments, I'm always reminded of something that Joseph Goebbels said:

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

When someone has the truth on their side, they do not fear those who disagree with them. They respond to challenges and criticism with the truth. (And few are in a better position to make their voices heard than journalists.) Only someone who is committed to lies is fearful of disagreement. It is this sort of person who seeks to silence their opposition, not with the truth, but with brute force.

Everything you need know about this man and people like him can be summed up by his own words. He fears an open marketplace of ideas because he knows that his own beliefs will be rejected. He doesn't want to know and follow the truth. He wants control. He became a journalist in order to control what other people think, and he is now upset that his ability to do this is draining away.

Victor Davis Hanson does it again

2010-07-20T07:32:00.000-07:00

Pity the postmodern "elite"

I’ve long said that civilization trumps natural selection. I’d like to now add that persistent affluence reverses it.

These people are as they are precisely because they have not had to deal with reality. They are victims of our nation’s economic and material success. They receive all of the benefits that affluence bestows, without ever having to manifest any of the virtues that made that affluence possible in the first place.

Our nation is DOOMED because our culture has decayed from within. Character is destiny, and the character of a nation is its culture.

It won’t matter who gets elected this fall, or in 2012, because both the voters and the candidates will be cut from a fraying and substandard cloth that grows thinner each day.

If you’ve ever wondered how great civilizations decline and perish, take a look around. You’ve got a front row seat.

The truth about the NAACP

2010-07-16T12:05:00.000-07:00

"I've looked into the heart of the NAACP and I know that at its core, the NAACP is founded on a platform of hatred towards people who write with their left hand.

I officially call upon the NAACP and all people of good will to repudiate the handist element and activities within the NAACP.

It's time for the NAACP to be responsible members of this democracy and make sure they don't tolerate bigots or bigotry among their members."

Sound silly and a little out of touch with reality?

Well no more so than the NAACP joining the chorus of leftards accusing the Tea Party of racism.

Think about the word racism for a minute. With the way that it is tossed about and the quickness with which the left uses it as a gratuitous accusation, does it really mean anything anymore?

Think for a moment about the definition of the term. Now look at all of the people and groups and situations where someone is being accused of it. Does that definition in any way fit the way the term is actually used in practice?

Racism, at least according to the uncorrupted definition of that word, is a social ill that is at an all time low. Show me someone who hates other human beings because of their ethnic background and I'll show you an ex-con with an 8th grade education and a room temperature IQ living in a trailer park. Decent human beings don't look for someone to dump on so that they can feel better about themselves. Decent human beings see people as individuals and judge them accordingly, not as members of some tribal group to be judged en masse. When leftists harp on and on about racism without any grounds for that accusation, I do have to believe that it is a case of psychological projection. So much of what they scream about is precisely what they do, to the point that their own accusations can be used as a pretty good indicator for what their own crimes are.

The Tea Party that I'm a part of is comprised of decent human beings. To accuse us of something as sordid and ignorant as racism pathetically absurd. Even more absurd than my accusing the NAACP of hating people who are left-handed.

Why would they do this? Because we represent ideas and principles that they do not agree with but cannot refute nor publicly deny. So instead they resort to ad-hominem attacks against us, which is the last refuge of the intellectually bankrupt. It would be truly fascinating to hear what they say about us in private amongst themselves.

Competition in education as a solution to the iron cage of school bureaucracies

2010-07-16T05:01:00.000-07:00

This was originally posted to a forum on Amazon.com of all places:

Teacher's comment questioning the qualifications of homeschoolers

Public schoolteachers believe that we should be FORCED to purchase their services. They believe that they should have a monopoly on the education of the young, one backed up by the force of law. This sense of entitlement is truly breathtaking. Contrast this with professionals whose paycheck is contingent on the quality of their services.

When the state has a monopoly on the means of production we call it communism. Our public schools are a case study for why communism doesn't work. Communism doesn't just have economic effects, it destroys the virtue of the people who are subjected to it. Public schools are such a horror precisely because of this.

The only real solution is to take the government out of the business of delivering education. Public he roads are maintained by private firms under contract with the state. The same should be done with education. Only instead of some government bureaucrat deciding which school gets the money, the parents of each individual child should decide. Make schools compete for students and for the state funding that each student represents.

Effective teachers who care about their students welcome this idea. They have nothing to fear from increased competition. In fact they have everything to gain from it as this would make their own competence an asset rather than a liability. Political intrigue, which public schools are notorious for, is the pastime of those whose position isn't based on on performance. Tie continued employment and promotion to objective standards of achievement instead of political wrangling and that intrigue will evaporate.

Bad teachers naturally don't like this idea. They want to nurse from the teat of the public treasury, secure in the knowledge that they can never be dislodged, no matter how useless or even destructive they are. They are what is known as a parasite, and should be treated as such.

Remember this the next time someone tries to feed you the standard sob story about how teachers are so underpaid and under-appreciated. More money is not what they need. Accountability that only the free market can create is what they need.

Oakland circles the bowl

2010-07-13T10:10:00.000-07:00

Suffer these crimes in Oakland? Don't call the cops.

Here is a partial list of the crimes that the Oakland police department will no longer trouble itself with:

burglary
theft
embezzlement
grand theft
grand theft:dog
identity theft
false information to peace officer
required to register as sex or arson offender
dump waste or offensive matter
discard appliance with lock
loud music
possess forged notes
pass fictitious check
obtain money by false voucher
fraudulent use of access cards
stolen license plate
embezzlement by an employee (over $ 400)
extortion
attempted extortion
false personification of other
injure telephone/ power line
interfere with power line
unauthorized cable tv connection
vandalism

It looks to me like child molesters and firebugs have found themselves their very own Sanctuary City.

Given the efforts by the usual suspects in California to deprive citizens of their 2nd amendment rights, I suspect that crimes like burglary will increase dramatically.

They just don't get it.

2010-07-09T10:23:00.000-07:00

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/07/08/ann-coulter-vs-bill-kristol-beginnings-of-a-conservative-schis/

The left loves to latch on to disagreements among conservatives and pretend that civil war is on the horizon.

Ha!

But that isn't the reason I'm posting about this article. I'm doing so because it keeps talking about something it calls "the war in Afghanistan."

Once again the left just doesn't get it.

The war in Afghanistan is not the war in Afghanistan.

The war is global because our enemies are global. A religious ideology of hatred knows no national boundaries.

There is no way to "win in Afghanistan" in any meaningful sense because Afghanistan is merely one of many battlefields.

Places like the UK, Holland, and Michigan are where the real battles will be fought, and it won't be with bullets and bombs, but with babies. Demographics is destiny.

Naturally we should deprive our enemies of Afghanistan as a base of operations and a source of cannon fodder and suicide bombers, but we should not confuse our ability to do this with some sort of cosmic "victory."

Victory will come when our enemies are dead.

Murrow to Goebbels to the dustbin

2010-07-09T09:54:00.000-07:00

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/07/08/beyond-the-killing-fields-why-journalism-is-in-a-state-of-ch/

He doesn't get it I'm afraid.

The craft of "credible, serious journalism is in a state of chaos" because journalists are no longer credible.

Money is not a the heart of the issue. Honesty is.

Journalism, once based on the ideals and ethic of Murrow, now follows a different school: that of Goebbels.

The media does one of two things. It seeks to distract the public with "news" stories about celebrity gossip. When it does cover real news, every word is an attempt at manipulation. Stories that cannot be spin doctored are ignored.

This isn't a matter of bias, but of simple honesty.

Like all propagandists, the media lies even when it tells the truth.

Naturally, the public is increasingly looking for news and analysis from other sources.

In Nazi Germany, people simply stopped reading newspapers because all of them contained the very same propaganda.

In America, people are disregarding "liberal" papers and magazines for the very same reason.

Infantacide by any other name

2010-06-26T02:39:00.000-07:00

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19089-24week-fetuses-cannot-feel-pain.html

While reading this article, I couldn't help but think about execution by lethal injection. The article describes the use of painkillers on unborn children, including their use to relieve the pain of being aborted.

Think about that for a moment.

Isn't this same issue one of the main reasons why lethal injection systems start off with a heavy pain killer and sedative before delivering the lethal cocktail that causes death?

The article cites research that suggests the unborn cannot feel pain early in the gestational process, but that doesn't stop me from being completely unnerved by the notion of a doctor administering a painkiller to an unborn child so that it won't feel the pain of dismemberment.

The older I get and the more I think about it the more opposed I am to abortion as a form of birth control. When I was a kid I saw all the propaganda on MTV that made abortion sound like some kind of civil rights issue when nothing could be further from the truth.

Time and time again you will hear about a woman's right to choose. What does that mean though? Really, what does that mean? Unless a woman is raped, she made a choice when she decided to have sex. All choices have consequences. One of the potential consequences of sex is pregnancy. If a woman doesn't want to become pregnant then she should refrain from having sex, a simple fact that the left does everything it can to ignore

The left doesn't promote personal responsibility and understanding the consequences of one's choices when it comes to sex. The left promotes sexual promiscuity and the abdication of personal responsibility over one's sexual choices, all in the name of "sexual liberation."

Well that is just plain bunk.

Freedom does not mean making bad choices and then shifting the consequences off onto someone else. It means the power to assume complete responsibility over something.

Freedom of speech prohibits the state from assuming responsibility for what someone says. It prohibits the state from attempting to control what someone says. It also prohibits the state from punishing someone for what they have said. It does not mean that people who say stupid things are to be held in equal esteem as people who say things that are wise. The consequence of saying stupid things is that people are going to doubt your intelligence, if not your sanity. Freedom of speech does not mean that you are protected from this consequence.

The same goes for sex. People have a fundamental right to make their own choices about sex as long as those choices don't violate the rights of another. But with that power, with that freedom, comes responsibility. If someone makes a choice, they have to deal with the consequences. Choosing to have sex means you might get pregnant. Violating someone else's rights (in this case your unborn child's) in order to avoid taking responsibility for your own choices is as good a definition of evil as any I've ever heard.

Abortion is not only evil, it is unnecessary. The solution to the problem that abortion claims to resolve is to avoid becoming pregnant in the first place. Don't have sex with someone you don't intend to have children with. Contraceptives are available, and they do work, but they are not 100%. So either accept the risk that comes with the choice to have sex, or stick to sexual activities that won't result in conception.

NY goes off the deep end.

2010-06-16T10:08:00.000-07:00

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100615/ap_on_el_st_lo/us_voting_rights_election#mwpphu-container

(This post was originally in response to another poster's comments on the article above)

Let me get this straight. Election day comes. John has studied the candidates. He goes to the polls and casts his vote. Juan excludes himself from the political process. He stays home and watches TV.

The election results come in and the candidate that John voted for wins over the candidate that Juan stayed home for.

In our modern Bizarro world, when the system works as intended (i.e. voters get to decide the outcome of elections), federal election law has been violated.

Self-determined behavior on the part of independent individuals now requires state intervention to ensure that members of a specific ethnic group are more likely to vote.

That is pure insanity.

I've no problem with the voting system itself. It seems no worse than any other, at first glance at least. But I do have a very big problem with the attitudes that have inspired this change. It doesn't take a latino to represent latinos any more than it takes a methodist to represent methodists. Ideas and Character are what matter, not ethnic Identity and skin Color. Bobby Jindal is living proof of this. If someone chooses to exclude themselves from the political process because no one from their self-defined identity group is on the ballot, then that person is a fucking loser.

I also dispute the notion that "our civilized society" decided that affirmative action (read racial discrimination) and minority redistricting (read Gerrymandering) are necessary to ensure equality. They do not produce equality, but its antithesis. Everyone should be held accountable to the same standards of conduct and performance. Ethnic Gerrymandering only serves to create and perpetuate ghettos, which is precisely why the left is so fond of it. They want ethnic minorities to feel isolated and marginalized so they'll be more likely to vote for the destruction the country as a whole. Divide and conquer is the name of the game.

Turns out that Jews are Jews after all

2010-06-16T08:11:00.000-07:00

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0610/jewish_genetics.php3

The tyranny of the vocal minority strikes again

2010-06-08T18:40:00.000-07:00

Harvard profs get busted for teen bacchanalia

The police have no business arresting anyone for drinking beer or anything else short of paint thinner (and even then only to take them to the hospital.) The law doesn’t get to define someone as only having certain rights and not others. If someone has reached the age of majority then that person has all of the rights (and responsibilities) that go along with that status. When the government plays favorites and defines some people as more equal than others, all of us are made less free.

You can thank MADD for this nonsense. Rather than punish drunk drivers, they lobbied the feds to punish teenagers. The end result was a ZERO percent decrease in the rate of drunk driving and the creation of an entirely new class of “criminals” where no “crime” had previously existed.

I also believe that these laws are actively enforced as a way to punish young people simply for being young.

I’m 37 years old by the way, and a dedicated libertarian.

2010-06-08T04:19:00.000-07:00

Rival Chains Secretly Fund Opposition to Wal-Mart

This is just another reason for me to do most of my shopping at Wal-Mart.

The left loves to pretend that Wal-Mart abuses its employees. This is a lie of course. It is hard to abuse someone by paying them minimum wage for a job that warrants it.

Not everyone gets to be an astronaut. The average IQ is 100. Because intelligence follows a normal distribution, this means that 50% of the population has an IQ lower than this. What kind of jobs do you think these people are going to have? How much money do you expect them to be able to earn? Unless they have a valuable talent that is not tied to their intelligence, most of them are going to wind up in menial positions making minimum wage. It is unfortunate that not everyone gets to be an astronaut, but it is also inevitable. All men are created equal. That is to say that everyone is equal before the law. No one has special rights or privileges based upon their birth. But that does not mean that human beings are equal in terms of character, ability, inclination, or ambition. These all vary wildly from one person to the next, and it is inevitable that those individuals who hare lacking in ability gravitate towards jobs that are not intellectually demanding. Even if you were to take someone in one of these menial positions and give them a higher paying job, they would not be able to perform that job. They have gravitated to their natural station in life.

What makes America a great nation is the fact that a person’s station is not determined at birth. The children of these menial workers are not themselves forced to assume that same station if their talents and ambitions are greater than those of their parents. Given the genetic diversity of this country it is not at all uncommon for an above average child to be born to parents who are below average. The genius of America is that those kids have the opportunity to achieve their potential.

There are also some people who work at places like Wal Mart who are not lacking for intelligence, but who do lack ambition. Talented losers are nothing new. The other great thing about America is that should one of these underachievers ever come to their senses and see the error of their ways, opportunities to do something better with their life will still be there.

Wal-Mart also works very hard to prevent their employees from unionizing. At first glance that sounds horrible until you realize that unions in America have decayed into corrupt organizations that serve no one’s interests but that of their leaders and their bosses in the Democratic Party. I wouldn’t want to do business with a company whose workers belonged to a union unless I knew for certain that the particular union in question was NOT corrupt. Show me a union of the employees, by the employees, for the employees and I’ll support it. The unions we have in this country today don’t fit that description at all.

Comedy Gold

2010-06-06T16:33:00.001-07:00

Glenn Reynolds: Higher education's bubble is about to burst

"...A New York Times profile last week described Courtney Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University with nearly $100,000 in student loan debt -- debt that her degree in Religious and Women's Studies did not equip her to repay...."

I guess she should have gone for the Art History degree after all.

Keeping people in the Ghetto 101

2010-06-05T16:21:00.000-07:00

Haitian ‘Social Justice’ Groups Want to Burn Aid

Now why do you suppose that a Watermelon Marxist group like Grassroots International would encourage people to destroy seeds that could be used to improve their lives?

The answer to that question can be found in the demographics of the people they are trying to victimize. Virtually everyone in Haiti is black. It is the policy of the left to keep black people in ghettoes. Some ghettoes are neighbourhoods in the inner cities of America. Other ghettoes are comprised of entire nations. The common factors that comprise a ghetto are economic poverty, spiritual and moral poverty, and a sense of hopelessness that anything can be done to make things better. So when someone comes along and offers the people in the ghetto something that might improve things, the left HAS to act to stop it.

If the people of Haiti are better able to feed themselves, this undermines the oppression that the left seeks to impose upon them. So of course the left is going to do whatever it can to prevent them from making progress in this way.

Now you might be wondering why the left would do this at all. Why would the left want to keep certain people in poverty. Well the answer is that they hold these people up as the victims of Democracy and Capitalism. In other words, the left works to prevent these people from receiving the fruits of Democracy and Capitalism so that they can then claim that Democracy and Capitalism have created the problems these people are suffering from.

The kind of alien ICE wants to deport

2010-05-30T17:15:00.001-07:00

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=159377

This article leaves some questions unanswered. Has he sought protection from the Israeli government? Are the Israelis offering to protect him, or have they thrown him under the bus? I doubt that they have abandoned him, but I do have to wonder. Does he believe that they cannot protect him?

ICE actively ignores the presence of millions of illegal aliens in America, but they pay extra special attention to this guy. Why? And by why, I mean what is the real reason. The excuses listed in the article don't hold water. (Are there other reasons the article doesn't mention?) I don't know exactly, though I do wonder how much walking into the DHS office and making himself known to them had to do with it. A Bureaucracy is just a fancy name for organized incompetence. Had he kept a low profile odds are they never would have done a damned thing about him, just like they neglect their duty to deport all of the other illegal aliens.

He came here legally, but did not leave when his visa expired, so he is an illegal alien, albeit one with a strong case for seeking legal asylum.

If it were up to me I'd find out what the Israelis are offering him. If they can't or won't protect him then I'd give him asylum here. In fact I'd probably offer him asylum regardless of what the Israelis say. He has worked to save the lives of Americans and is now being threatened by a common enemy. If he doesn't deserve asylum, then who does?

Fox News misses the point

2010-05-30T13:59:00.000-07:00

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/05/28/calif-college-offers-scholarship-to-illegals

If rule of law is to mean anything at all, all branches of government must take appropriate action to ensure that the law is followed.

A community college is a public institution. While it isn't responsible for enforcing immigration law, it is responsible for ensuring that its admissions standards and processes are compliant with that law.

The article above raises the issue of a scholarship, privately funded but publicly administered. The real issue is that illegal aliens are being admitted to public colleges in the first place.

Another politician panders during an election year

2010-05-28T09:09:00.001-07:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/13/AR2010051304351.html

This article is downright shameful. I couldn't understand why the author was saying the things he did, until I looked at who he is:

"The writer, a Republican, represents Florida's 14th District in the U.S. House."

Suddenly, everything became clear.

Florida has a large Cuban community. This is an election year. He's just pandering to them.

Of all the illegal immigrants in this country, Cuban refugees have the least to fear I would think. They are fleeing communist tyranny. I for one would NEVER support a policy that returns them to Cuba, and I don't think there are many conservatives or libertarians who would. The people of Cuba are victims of a criminal regime and deserve our friendship and support.

If you have not clicked on the link, you should. That article is a good example of what could best be described as a diffused straw man attack. He never quite articulates what exactly it is that is wrong with the law, other than that it is "bad." The complaints that he does make are inaccurate.

First he blathers about Obama and the Dems in order to establish his credibility with conservatives.

Then he drags in the internment camps where we stuck Japanese Americans during WW-II. While regrettable, and something that I hope does not happen again, that bit of history has NOTHING to do with the current law. It is a complete non-sequitur.

Then he talks about securing the border. Nice idea, but without comprehensive enforcement of immigration law throughout the nation, making the border harder to cross just isn't good enough. Once an illegal alien enters the country, he or she is home free. Making it harder to get here helps, but is only part of the solution.

Next he starts pretending that the law is about protecting the majority over the minority. This is just another way of pretending that the law is derived from ethnocentrism. The purpose of this law is to remove illegal aliens from the country. The fact that most illegals in AZ come from the country next door, with a different culture and language, is a coincidence, not a causal factor. Americans (including the Latinos he implies are being targeted) have nothing to fear from this law. The only people who will be touched by this legislation are illegal aliens.

Next he pulls the "Where are your papers?" canard out of his arse, which is a grotesque perversion of what the law actually states. If the police pull you over, they want to see your ID. It makes no difference whether you are an illegal alien or not. They're asking for your ID to determine who you are. It has been this way since time immemorial. To pretend that this now constitutes some sort of fascist attack on our liberties, or racist attack on a privileged ethnic group, is ridiculous.

If he is this dishonest, then why would anyone want to vote for him?

I can only conclude that this guy is yet another individual who has not actually read the law in question.

But you can:

http://www.azdatapages.com/sb1070.html

The Prophet Mohammed

2010-05-20T23:37:00.001-07:00

This is an image of the Prophet Mohammed.

Islamofascist asshats who disapprove of this image can kiss my ass.

Arizona is not the problem

2010-05-19T17:36:00.001-07:00

Arizona is taking up the task of enforcing immigration law because the feds are deliberately avoiding their duty to do so.

The problem here is not Arizona. The problem is a federal government that has abandoned the rule of law.

What legitimacy can a government have when it not only fails to enforce its laws consistently, but refuses to enforce some laws altogether?

The legitimacy of any state is derived from its people, not the other way around. This is something that many Americans have forgotten. Many Americans seem to think that the government is there to tell us what to do and that we have no choice but to obey. Government officials are not our masters. They are not feudal lords and we are not peasants and vassals. They have no authority except that which defined by law. Authority that carries with it the obligation to enforce that law.

The sole purpose of state power is to enforce the law. The powers of the state are defined, and limited, by law. The authority to enforce the law carries with it the OBLIGATION to do the same. Just as the state cannot assume powers not defined by law, neither can it neglect to enforce the law using the powers it has been given.

Any government that neglects its duty to enforce the law as written is illegitimate. Any government official who acts in bad faith and shirks his or her duty to enforce the law as written has violated their oath of office and should be subject to civil, if not criminal, prosecution.

It doesn't matter if you're Red or Blue, Winners win and Losers lose

2010-05-11T00:54:00.001-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/opinion/10douthat.html

The above article notes that couples consisting of professionals with college and (especially) graduate degrees tend to have stable marriages. They also tend to live together before marrying, marry relatively late in life, have children at a later age (and fewer children at that), and have few children out of wedlock.

Meanwhile couples consisting of negligibly educated bottom-dwellers tend to have unstable marriages and suffer from all of the other ills that most people associate with them.

The article goes on to describe the winning formula as a "Blue" lifestyle and the losing formula as a "Red" lifestyle.

These labels are completely arbitrary. They were chosen to damage the brand equity of conservativeness in general.

I'm no fan of social conservatives, but neither do I pretend that they are losers. There are plenty of social conservatives who are well educated, have good jobs, and strong marriages. The same is true of many liberals.

Meanwhile there are other social conservatives and other Liberals who aren't so well educated, who don't have real jobs, whose relationships are dysfunctional, and who engage in self-destructive bullshit (drug abuse, etc, etc, etc, etc).

The difference is not between Red and Blue, but between winners and losers.

Winners win.
Losers lose.

The difference between a winner and a loser is not WHERE they are in the game, but WHO they are at a fundamental level.

Even when you change the rules of the game, once the dust settles you will find the very same people on top, and the very same people on the bottom, as you did before the board was shuffled.

Political ideology is not nearly as strong an indicator of personal and professional success as are basic competence and character.

You can only turn a winner into a loser by destroying that person. You must kill them or otherwise devastate them in such a way that they never recover. What you can't do is turn them into a loser by taking from them the rewards that they have won from life by being a winner. Do this and they'll simply go out and win them all over again, or perhaps choose other goals that they will be equally successful at achieving. What they won't do is turn into a loser.

Neither can you turn a loser into a winner, except perhaps by some form of psychotherapy not yet invented by which a person's fundamental character can be forged anew. A loser can become a winner, but only through the realization that they are in fact a loser and through the determined effort to effect inner change. You cannot change a loser into a winner by handing them the rewards that come from being a winner. Anything you give them will be squandered and wasted, and they will be no better off than before, and in fact will often be worse. Losers who suffer a windfall often find that they finally have enough money to really get themselves into trouble.

Regardless of which direction the winds of fortune blow, both losers and winners will always gravitate back to the station in life that their own character has destined them to occupy.

Attempting to apply such transparent culture-war labels to these two camps is as dishonest as it is ridiculous.

The Manchurian President

2010-05-01T10:45:00.000-07:00

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/05/01/on-my-desk-the-manchurian-president/

The problem with a book like this, and books like these in general, is that they are books. To read them requires that a person actually spend the time and money to procure a copy.

Who is going to do this? The people who already know (or strongly suspect) what is in the book and approve of its message.

I know the authors want to make money from this book. They spent time and money of their own to research and write it. But if they really want as many people as possible to be made aware of the information they have uncovered, posting that information to blogs and other websites is the best way to disseminate it.

The truth matters, but truth that people are unaware of is truth that cannot help them. If the average American had good knowledge of who and what Obama is during the Dem primaries, he wouldn't be in the White House now. We might have Hillary instead because McCain was such a loser, but we wouldn't have Obama.

Modern politics is an information war. The lefties control most of the media and use that to block and distort the truth while promoting lies. Writing a book that will only be read by republicans, conservatives, and libertarians, and even then only by those eager to spend the time and money to do so, is literally preaching to the choir. They already know that Obama is bad. They buy and read this book to confirm that assessment of him. Independents and honest leftists (also known as future libertarians) won't get this information because they aren't looking for it. You have to put it out there where they are likely to encounter it, or at least encounter someone from the left trying to discredit it.

Think for a moment about the stings that brought down ACORN. Had O'Keefe and Giles written a book about their experiences, instead of providing video on the internet, nothing would have happened. Breitbart uses the power of mass media to get the truth out there, and the authors of this book should consider doing the same.

Yet another leftard pretends Arizona is Nazi central.

2010-04-29T18:09:00.000-07:00

This is one of the more ridiculous reactions to the AZ anti-illegal law that I've come across. I can only assume that this woman is one of those New Yorkers who lives in isolation from the outside world.

She says she works at Bellevue, but her though processes make me wonder if she isn't a patient.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/medicine-in-translation/201004/arizona-the-newest-soviet-republic

Here is the response I posted:

The easiest way for people in Arizona to prove that they are legal residents is to pull out their Arizona driver's license or state-issued ID card. If someone lives here, then that is something that they should already have.

Arizona does not issue ID cards to illegal aliens. You must be either a US citizen, or a legal alien with the proper documentation.

Federal law requires legal aliens to carry their green card at all times. So even if someone is a legal resident of the US, but lives in another state, they will still be able to prove that they are here legally.

The people who will be most affected by this are Americans from other states which DO issue driver's licenses to illegal aliens. I confess I don't know off the top of my head which states do this, but it is my understanding that some states do. I work at ASU and we have many out of state students who will likely be affected by this. The good news is that this law has not gone into effect yet. They have plenty of time to obtain an AZ driver's license or ID card.

This new law does not authorize the police to go around asking for ID from every person they see. Such a law would never have been passed.

What it does do is require police officers to determine the legal status of the people they are already interacting with. Why this should be so controversial is really beyond me. If a police officer pulls you over for running a stop-sign and asks for your license, one of the first things he or she does is check to see if you have any outstanding warrants. How is checking to make sure that you are here legally any different? If someone is not here legally, then they are breaking the law. This is an irrefutable truth. Try as I might, I really, really can't get my head around the idea that the police are not supposed to enforce the law.

The full text of the law can be found here:

http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/bills/sb1070s.pdf

Boo fucking hoo

2010-04-28T20:00:00.000-07:00

Truck driver arrested in AZ, forced to show birth certificate

The ICE agents who arrested this guy are federal agents who deal with illegal aliens as part of their daily routine. If they thought he was an illegal alien then they probably had good reason. You won't find out what that reason is from the article of course, because telling the whole truth would interfere with the narrative. If the ICE agents acted inappropriately or made a mistake then I sincerely hope they will be reprimanded.

Having a commercial driver's license doesn't prove anything. While AZ does not issue driver's licenses to illegals, there are other states that do. Where was his license from? The article doesn't say. (Check again, it does not say.)

As for AZ licenses, they would serve as proof that the person was either a citizen or a legal alien since AZ doesn't issue licenses to illegals. If you are a citizen then they want your birth certificate or proof of naturalization at the DMV. If you are a legal alien then they want the documentation to prove that you are here legally.

A fake license might get you past a bouncer at a club, but the cops can call that license up on the computer in their patrol car and verify whether it is real or not. They also look at state issued ID for a living, so even if they didn't have access to a terminal they'd be able to spot all but the best of fakes on sight. You also have to ask yourself why they would assume that a license was fake and the person was an illegal alien. It's not like the cops are going to go around assuming that everyone is an illegal alien and challenging us to prove otherwise. There would have to be reasonable suspicion that someone was an illegal before the issue would even come up.

As for a person's license being lost or stolen, all you have to do is go to the AZDOT website and they'll send you a replacement in the mail.

Legal aliens are required by law to carry their green card with them at all times. So even if they don't have an AZ license, they're still supposed to have proof that they are here legally.

Given that some other states do issue ID to illegals, this may cause problems for Americans who live in AZ but whose licenses are issued by other states. There are many ASU students who fall under that category. The good news is that these people now have time before this law goes into effect to get their shit together and get an AZ license or ID card.

No normal person is going to go around without proper identification. Even if they don't drive they would still need a state-issued ID card to function in society. The only people who don't carry ID are illegal aliens and criminals.

If Joe Blow has a warrant from Illinois, hiding out in Arizona under an assumed name becomes a lot easier if he avoids carrying ID. If the cops interact with him in an official capacity they will give him a hard time, and might even arrest him, but he still has a better shot at avoiding extradition if they have trouble determining who he is.

Lets not forget all of the criminals who come up from Mexico also. Hiding out in the US is easy for Mexican criminals because they can just blend in with all of the other illegal aliens. US law enforcement isn't necessarily looking for them, and there is an underground support system already in place to help them work under the table and find a place to live anonymously. Meanwhile they can get back to their life's work of being a criminal

The Federal government has refused to enforce its own legislation, which places the burden for enforcement on the states. I'm very glad that I live in a state that is willing to step up to the plate and take care of the problem. The people who cast this as some kind of "human rights" issue are foolish at best. There is no universal right of domicile in the United States of America. Leftists want illegals here, and want them to have the power to vote here because the American people reject leftist crap for the most part. This is a center-right country and always has been. Bringing in illegals is simply a ploy to manipulate the political complextion of the country. The left wants to expand the ranks of people who will support their evil nonsense, and they see illegals as a ready made "victim" group they can fool into supporting their agendas. All of their whining is cover for a scheme to jerrymander the electoral system, only instead of moving the border they simply move people from one side of it to the other. Their bullshit is as transparent as it is rancid. They will be punished for it in due time.

I fully expect that this law stand up to legal scrutiny in the courts and I hope that other states will adopt similar legislation.

Here is the full text of the law in case anyone is confused about exactly what it says:

http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/bills/sb1070s.pdf

As for me, I'd love to get deported "back" to Ireland.

Get me set up in a nice apartment in Dublin where the music never stops, the bars never close, and the fiery lasses like Americans.

The more I think about it, the better that idea sounds.

If anyone would like to sic ICE on me, I'd appreciate it.

Excess demand??

2010-04-13T12:05:00.000-07:00

Nation Faces Shortage of 150,000 Doctors in 15 Years

Apparently one of the side effects of ObamaCare is that there won't be enough doctors to treat everyone, at least in theory. I don't really believe that because if there is more demand for a good or service then the supply will also increase.

Let me be the first to say that if more people are able to pay for medical care, then that is not a bad thing. I'm in no way a fan of ObamaCare, but I will not criticize it for enabling consumers to pay for medical treatment.

Lieberman falls back on an old canard

2010-04-12T12:01:00.000-07:00

Dropping 'Islamic extremism' term is 'Orwellian and counterproductive'

“The failure to identify our enemy for what it is, violent Islamist extremism, is offensive….”

Why does he feel the need to complain about this policy on purely subjective grounds?

Criticisms of objective reality based on purely subjective criteria are fundamentally invalid.

Anything can be “offensive” to anyone at any time and for any reason, including no reason at all. It is an argument that has absolutely no rigor attached to it. One that can be made without anything to substantiate it. This is why it is a favorite the left. Anyone can claim to be “offended” when presented with facts they cannot refute. Leftists love to shift the rules of evidence from the real to the subjective when they have a losing argument (and they cannot lie outright), and this is merely the easiest way for them to do so.

So why is Lieberman doing it here? He undermines his own position when he trots out that old canard, and needlessly so because the factual arguments he does make are very strong.

I think it must be second nature to him, something he does without really thinking about it or understanding what it is that he is actually doing.

The violation of Democracy

2010-04-12T09:43:00.000-07:00

According to Rasmussen, a full 58% of the public supports repeal of the Dems new "health care plan." Two weeks ago only 54% of the public supported repeal.

Now just stop and think about that for a moment. A majority of Americans were opposed to this new legislation before it passed, and almost 60% of Americans are in favor of repealing it now. The Dems began working to pass this monstrosity over a year ago against majority opposition that only increased as time went on.

So how is it possible that the Dems passed it, knowing full well that doing so was against the wishes of the majority of Americans from whom the legitimacy of our government is derived?

Because the Democrats don't believe in Democracy. The Dems have turned the federal government into a rogue organization. In a republic, it is the consent of the governed that makes the laws legal. Laws that are passed without this consent violate the sovereignty of the American people and are fundamentally invalid. Attempts to enforce such a law constitute tyranny.

Back when Bush was in office the left continuously portrayed him as a would-be tryant, someone who sought to destroy our republic and turn it into a fascist dictatorship. If there is anything I've learned about the left, it is that they consistently project their own sins onto those they oppose. If they accuse someone of something without merit, then you can be dead certain that it is something that they themselves are guilty of, or would be if they had the chance.

This is what makes the accusations of racism against the Tea Party movement so telling. Such accusations are complete fabrications and have no basis in reality. The fact that the left screams this so loudly and vehemently is to me positive proof that they themselves are racists.

But then the concept of racism has been bandied about so much that its actual meaning has been thoroughly conflated with other concepts that have nothing to do with it. It has devolved into a gratuitous accusation that can mean anything, or nothing, at all. How can one defend against a charge of nothing? This is even more diabolical than the old standby "Do you still beat your wife?" At least in this question the actual crime is clearly specified and understood, even if the question itself is rigged to ensure that the accused can never be found innocent.

The debasement of racism as a concept is quite intentional. The most pernicious use of language by the left involves what I call Nothing Words. These are terms to which emotions can be attached but which have no real concrete meaning, or a definition that is an antonym of their most obvious interpretation. This goes beyond being a mere euphemism into the realm of deliberately deceptive language.

"Social Justice" is a good example of this. What does this term actually mean? A naive person might assume it means something good because justice is a good thing. Who would not be in favor of justice? In truth this phrase promotes abusing the power of the state to confiscate money from one person or group and give it to another. In other words, Marxism.

"Affirmative Action" is another good one. What does this term mean? This term is even more ephemeral than the previous one. Attempting to break it down and derive some notion of its meaning from its constituent words is futile because the meaning of both is dependent upon the context in which they are used. It would be like trying to figure out what a "Blue Maybe" is. But as anyone knows, this term is just a cover for racial, sexual and other forms of discrimination on the part of the left.

What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.

Perhaps someone should come up with an updated version of the Devil's Dictionary to explain these terms. Call it the Democrat's Dictionary.

Crazy cuts both ways

2010-04-07T08:53:00.000-07:00

Sex Education Could Mean Charges for Teachers

I'm so very glad that I'm not a teenager living in Wisconsin.

This story is a strong reminder for me of why I detest "social conservatives" almost as much as I despise leftists.

I guess their notions of small government and individual liberty only apply to topics where they're not completely bug-fuck insane.

I don't know what is worse, the fact that you've got a social authoritarian prosecutor trying to write his own legislation, in direct opposition to the legislation that was actually passed, or that sex between two 17 year olds is considered a crime there.

As always, the usual suspects are trying to indoctrinate young people, and fighting with each other over who gets to do it.

Why the hell are people so neurotic when it comes to sex? Why is this issue such a source of never-ending insanity?

To me the whole idea of specialized "Sex Education" is ridiculous. Not because I'm one of those people who says that sex is such a serious touchy subject that it should only be dealt with in the home, in secret, where no one else can hear.

On the contrary, the ubiquitous nature of sex makes it something that should be as ordinary and unremarkable as driving a car or anything other normal activity in life.

We don't let children drive cars, but we don't hide the existence of cars from them. Why do we treat sex any differently? Kids know about cars and know that people drive them. They see cars and have some idea of how to operate one long before they actually get behind the wheel.

Now some, particularly the neurotic and intellectually dishonest, will pretend that I'm promoting the sexual abuse of children under the guise of "sex education." Well all I can say is that I'm most definitely not. There are evil people who want to abuse children and they need no excuse. What I am promoting is a world where sex is not hidden away and treated like some dread secret. Where the average person knows as much as possible about it long before the time comes when they will actually start doing it themselves.

I'm not one who buys into the unspoken and irrational belief that sex is somehow bad, and that knowledge of sex somehow ruins a child's "innocence."

If you want teenagers to be sexually responsible you have to teach them to be, starting LONG before they reach puberty. Hiding sex from them, or trying to brainwash into believing that it is somehow dirty or evil or shameful or any of the other neuroses that seem to persist among certain subcultures, is just plain crazy.

I find it peculiar that many of these "social conservatives" will teach their children the responsible use of firearms from a young age, and yet go completely nutty when it comes to sex. If someone is irresponsible with a gun, people get maimed and killed. If someone is irresponsible when it comes to sex, people get pregnant. Not a good outcome of course, but not nearly as bad as what can happen when firearms are misused.

The reason this matters is that teenagers are walking around with loaded guns in their pants, and I'm not just talking about the guys either. What sense does it make to carefully instruct them in the care and use of a firearm that they won't generally have access to, while completely ignoring the loaded gun that is part of their own anatomy?

I've been watching this circus act my whole life and I don't expect it to change anytime soon. I have no doubt that 50 years from now people will still be waxing psychiatric over sex, and being especially psychotic when it comes to the knowledge and understanding that the young have about sex.

Observations of leftists in the wild

2010-04-07T01:46:00.000-07:00

After reading posts on hotair.com from leftists who portray businesses as if they were evil, I’m starting to understand the pathology behind the nutters who claim that the Apollo moon landings were shot in a TV studio.

It takes a special form of intense self-deception to maintain the twisted world view that casts the engines of human progress as evil. The wheel wasn't invented by a cave-man government bureaucrat. It was invented by someone who was looking for something that would increase his or her survival potential. In other words it was invented by someone inspired by the profit motive. The leftists don't understand this because they are the unintended consequence of a world where losers are no longer culled from the gene pool. Civilization trumps natural selection.

The world is not a perfect place, and it never will be. Human beings are flawed and limited and some are quite evil and mad. This is reflected in the nature of our institutions, including everything from governments to companies to country-clubs. This is why power must be limited, why checks and balances are essential, and why each individual must ultimately be empowered to defend his or her own liberty from the forces of tyranny whether they come from a corrupt government or a corrupt business.

The view of leftists that casts government as the white knight protector of the people against the predations of private enterprises is ridiculously sophomoric. These people know nothing of the nature of evil. They unwittingly rail against a cartoon concept of villainy, often at the behest of real villains. Reading their comments and getting a glimpse into the way they think is like hanging out with a bunch of middle schoolers. Kids really do say the darnest things!

Parents send their kids to Yale?

2010-04-05T19:26:00.000-07:00

New rule forbids romantic relationships between students and faculty

The rationale behind this new rule?

"Parents don’t send their kids to Yale to sleep with their professors. Why don’t we say that?"

Since when did Yale University make a habit of admitting juveniles?

I have no issue with a rule forbidding romantic relationships between students and faculty. Given the power disparity between these two groups such a rule is only common sense. What I do have an issue with is the rationale behind it.

College students are not children.

Yale University is not band camp.

In my lifetime I have seen the definition of childhood creep ever upwards, and I'm only 37. Back when I was 18 or 19, a person that age was expected to be an adult. Not an adult in the same way that a 40-something with a mortgage and 3 kids is, but an adult nonetheless. Today a person that age is expected to be an infant, and is treated accordingly not only by our culture but by our institutions.

I was out on my own at the age of 20, and that actually made me something of a late bloomer in 1993. Today people well into their twenties, who should be making their way out into the world under their own steam, are instead still living with their parents as if high school never ended.

This new rule at Yale is nothing more than another manifestation of the perpetual adolescence that has been foisted upon the younger adults of this country.

I work at a University where our students aren't simply presumed to be infants, but legally classified as such. Would you believe that by default a 25 year old is classified as a dependant of his or her parents as far as financial aid is concerned?

The Tea Parties are about racism

2010-04-04T01:48:00.000-07:00

Or at least that is what the lefties would have us believe.

As a member of the local Tea Party movement in the Phoenix east valley region, I can tell you first hand that it is not. Not only is the tea party movement not racist in any way, but race isn't even a topic that the tea party touches on, even tangentially.

The people accusing us of racism are completely disconnected from reality.

Seriously though.

It is one thing to have philosophical differences with a group of people. It is quite another to dishonestly paint them as villains, and especially in such a childish and transparent way. Who would actually believe the things that they say about us? The more time goes by and the more outlandish their accusations become, the less convinced I am that anyone believes them.

Racism???? Really? Is that the best they can do? Can’t they at least come up with a canard that isn’t also a cliche? Please, if you’re going to tell hateful lies about me, at least make them interesting.

Why do they do this? Why can’t they debate us on the issues?

Because they would lose. Leftist ideology just doesn’t stand up to the harsh light of truth, logic, and reason. The leftists have long known this, hence the emergence of post-modernist “thought” with its denial of objective reality itself, as best revealed by the Sokal Hoax.

These people are wrong and they know it. But just like any other cultie they are unable to actually turn away from the lies they have swallowed and find the truth. For them the only thing that can be done is to start hurling irrational insults and hope that enough people are distracted by them to lose track of the real issues. But the very fact that they are doing this shows just how desperate and fearful they really are. They’re not even trying to confuse the public with sophistry, they’re going straight to the ad hominem attacks, way down there at the bottom of the barrel.

Keep it up comrades, you’re winning our battles for us.

Evil vs Incompetence

2010-04-03T01:52:00.001-07:00

The more I look at the state of affairs in the US today, the more convinced I am that our plight is not directly the result of evil on the part of leftists, but of incompetence on the part of conservatives.

Conservatives have allowed themselves to be bullied by the left. Conservatives have allowed their public image to be dishonestly mis-defined by the left. Conservatives have grown afraid to present themselves and their ideas to the public. They have ceased to present these ideas in a positive and energetic way. Instead they do so almost apologetically, and then only when something that the left does is especially egregious, such as ObamaCare. Conservatives have allowed themselves to be shamed based on slander and cast as a caricature of their true nature.

Then of course we have the Republican party. Choosing between the Democrats and the Republicans is like deciding whether you'd like to be tossed a hand grenade or force fed a shit sandwich.

First the Repubs handed us McCain in 2008, and now they seem to want Romney to be the new golden boy. Are you fucking kidding me? These jackasses are what the Republican party thinks passes for presidential candidates?

It is easy to blame the left for being evil. I would welcome a world without them in it. But the fact is that they exist and unless human nature changes they will always be there to cause problems. Some people are fucked in the head in certain ways and the result is that they become leftists. These people are not going away. Neither are they going to change. They are like cockroaches. The most we can do is keep them at bay.

This is where the Republicans have failed, and dramatically so. The left can only get a foothold when conservatives fail to live up to the expectations of independents.

A perfect example of this is health care reform. ObamaCare is a good example of that hand grenade, but why did it even see the light of day in the first place? If conservatives had sought health care reform (and not as a half-assed response to ObamaCare) and pursued real solutions to the existing problems, then ObamaCare would have been stillborn.

There are issues that are important to enough people that the left has succeeded in using those issues to trick voters into pulling the lever for the leftist candidate. This was only possible because the Republicans FAILED to address those issues.

This is why we now have the Tea Party movement. It is almost entirely comprised of conservatives who feel betrayed by the Republican party. I'm one of them.

This brings me to JD Hayworth. Why is it that a Republican congressman who was voted out of office is now suddenly considered a good candidate for the senate? Getting rid of RINO McCain is a perfectly good idea, but with Hayworth? If he had been doing his job he'd still be a congressman.

NYT set to further reduce its relevance

2010-01-17T11:13:00.000-08:00

NYT to begin charging for online subscriptions

One commenter to this story wrote:

"The NY Times is an incredible newspaper."

I certainly agree with that statement, though not in the way he meant it. Their credibility certainly isn't what it used to be. Leftists love them. Most other people either distrust or ignore them, and for good reason. The Times is the poster-child for the leftist corruption of what some call the Mainstream Media. That isn't to say that every article is leftist propaganda, but enough articles are that the paper as a whole is made suspect. In addition to the articles that attempt to persuade rather than inform (and I don't mean op-ed either), there is the perpetual question of what they're NOT telling you. If the Times is unable spin a story to their liking, they simply ignore it.

Growing distrust has lead to reduced readership. They try to blame this on the internet, but that argument falls apart when one looks at other papers whose circulation is either stable or growing. There are only so many leftists to sell papers to, and the Times already has that market saturated. The farther out in left field they go, the fewer people are going to buy their paper.

If they adopt a model that restricts open access to their content, bloggers will simply go elsewhere. This may be the point. Right now the Times is regularly called to task by citizen journalists for its lack of honesty. Not only does that criticism sting, but it further damages their brand, which over the long run determines the paper's continued relevance. By limiting access, they limit criticism. The problem is that when you limit criticism by hiding from your critics, you cease to be relevant to anyone who isn't a fanboy.

One might argue that the paper should seek to improve its quality by hiring those with a commitment to honesty and objectivity. The problem is that such people don't go to journalism school. At the very least they don't graduate from it. You can't hire people who don't exist. The Times would have to begin hiring people from other backgrounds, and that would provoke the ire of the Journalism school grads who won't appreciate having their educational credentials devalued like that.

The Road

2010-01-09T02:00:00.000-08:00

The Road

I appreciated this movie, but the kid was annoying.

You would think that having been born into a world of decay and cannibalism, he wouldn't whine so much. You would also think that he would know when to be absolutely silent, like when a clan of cannibals is lurking downstairs. His "poppa! poppa!" routine made me want to reach through the screen and smack him.

His behavior would have made sense had he been a suburban rugrat uprooted from his world of peace and security and dropped into a post-apocalyptic hell. But he was BORN into this world, which made his behavior seem false and out of place. I hate stories that portray children as helpless by virtue of their youth alone. I dare say that a kid born into a world such as that one, who had managed to survive to the age of ten, would give most green berets a run for their money.

Viggo Mortensen's character as the wary and grimly determined father working to protect his son alive made a lot more sense to me.

Racism rears its ugly head again

2010-01-07T07:59:00.000-08:00

Chicago Police scrap entrance exam

This is ridiculous racist nonsense. Hiring and promotion policies should be color-blind. Anyone and everyone should have the same opportunity. If "minorities" aren't pursuing a career in law enforcement, then how does compromising the integrity of the recruitment process make the job more attractive to them? If someone came along and told me that they'd lowered the standards of admission to a school or job so that I would qualify, I'd be angry and insulted. Yet time and time again I see this condescending crap being pushed by racists. Do they really expect a self-respecting "minority" to respond favourably to this? Why would anyone want to work someplace where their competence would always be in question because people with their shade of skin are not held to the same standard as everyone else?

Giving someone a job based on the color of their skin is a violation of the civil rights act of 1964. You would think that law enforcement agencies would be especially careful to actually follow the law.

Race is a social construct. There is no relationship between color and competence. Those who pretend otherwise are racists.

Communism or Environmentalism?

2009-11-18T07:31:00.000-08:00

Anyone remember a british documentary called the Swindle of Global Warming? When I first saw it, I thought it was a slam dunk debunking of global warming.

Then I found out that they'd omitted data from 1980 onwards.

Then I found out that this same data forms the infamous "hockey stick" that has itself been refuted.

So we've got advocates and partisans on at least two sides of this lying, cooking the data, or omitting data that doesn't fit the conclusion they are trying to promote.

THIS is the fundamental problem with the "debate." When you have enough accurate information, the truth becomes self evident. When arguments continue despite the presence of conclusive data, and that data itself is obscured or omitted, it is because of hidden agendas.

I honestly and truly believe that the leftists who promote global warming / climate change / latest euphemism are doing so not for ecological reasons but for political and economic reasons. Its all about making the 3rd world safe for communism because pre-industrial agrarian societies are the ONLY places where communism has emerged from within. Communism can be externally imposed as in the case of eastern Europe under Stalin, but communist revolutions have never evolved on their own in any industrialized nation.

The leftists are well aware of this. However they cannot argue to the freedom loving peoples of the earth that economic development in the 3rd world will prevent a resurgence of communism. So instead they dress up as environmentalists and discourage economic development under the notion that it is bad ecologically.

The thing to remember however is that most of those on the left aren't really aware of this. They really do FEEL (as opposed to think) that carbon is bad, etc, etc, and that they are saving the earth from humanity. They're useful idiots in other words. There is a cadre, a vanguard, who cook these schemes up and drive the rhetoric who are fully aware of the true intent, but they don't advertise what they're really up to. It isn't that they're really trying to hide their true intentions either. They simply promote their false intentions so loudly that anything which reveals their true goals are drowned out. This isn't a huge conspiracy, but a huge scam perpetrated by a relatively small conspiracy.

However, when groups and individuals that set out to oppose these scam artists do things like omit data from 1980 onwards, it only helps the scam artists in the long run. You have to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. You have to tell truths that undermine your argument. If you cannot do this, then your argument itself is flawed. Failure to tell the whole truth will be seized upon and used against you.

Sooner or later the truth of the global warming scam will be understood by most, if not all. But by that time these leftist subversives will have moved on to some other scam. It is far better to fight them here and now than wait for them to cook up some other scam.

PC bullshit now supposedly a constitutional issue

2009-11-11T12:56:00.001-08:00

http://minx.cc/?post=294638

I really don't see what his emails have to do with the 1st amendment.

Locking Hasan up months ago because he sent those emails would have been absolutely unconstitutional, and I'd be the first person to stand up and say that.

Depriving someone of their rights because of what they have said is WRONG. Locking someone up for saying something unpopular is the kind of thing they do in France to those who refuse to knuckle under to the dictates of Political Correctness. It is not what is done in a free society that values the open expression and exchange of ideas, no matter how unpopular.

Being a member of the US military is not a right. Being in a position of trust is not a right. Subjecting someone to scrutiny and careful surveillance on the basis of what they have said is not a violation of their rights, but common sense.

If I say "I want to kill Bob" and the police overhear me, it would be utterly wrong for them to arrest and incarcerate me on the basis of that statement alone. However it would not be wrong for them to keep a closer eye on me, and perhaps to warn Bob about what I'd said.

Diversity is a leftist nothing-word. It means nothing. America is a melting pot of people from a multitude of heritages, cultures and ethnicities. There is no special effort required to ensure that individuals from these various backgrounds live and work together as this is the inevitable outcome of their mere co-existence.

Tolerance is a good thing. Picking on someone for dressing differently, eating different foods, or practising a different religion is wrong. That being said, tolerance of difference does not and should not require the tolerance of evil. Your post-modernist liars will whine and claim that judging other cultures is wrong (and even impossible) because the notions of morality are culturally specific. This is bullshit. Right and wrong may not be ideas that are universally agreed upon, but they are universal truths. Some things are right, other things are wrong, and which is which can be known by the effects and consequences that ensue from each. In many cases one or more things may be right or wrong at the same time, with the difference being a matter of degree.

Tolerating that which you believe to be evil (not just different) is not a moral virtue, it is moral cowardice.

Many Muslims living in America speak a language other than English. This is a difference that should not be disparaged because it is not wrong in any way. Naturally they should be able to speak English as well if they expect to function in an English speaking country, but that is a pragmatic concern, not a moral one.

Many of these same Muslims are also extreme misogynists. This is a difference that should NOT be tolerated because it is demonstrably EVIL. Muslims who practice misogyny should be publicly humiliated and punished just as non-Muslims who do so are.

This is but one example, there are many others.

At the same time, there may very well be moral lessons that the greater society can learn from Muslims or their sub-cultures. The pursuit of moral improvement goes both ways. In a melting pot society, the virtues and positive values from all contributors are blended together, not melted away by the dominance of one.

Wisdom From Ace of Spades

2009-11-09T15:28:00.000-08:00

http://minx.cc/?blog=86&post=294539#c7108018

Just knee cap Hassan and toss him in a pen full of half starved hogs and film it for distribution, then tell the world that this is how all terrorists will be executed. "Engage in jihad and we'll turn you into pig shit."

Gay Marriage and other Irrelevant nonsense

2009-11-06T20:25:00.001-08:00

What difference does it make if dykes and queers have their relationships recognized by the state?

I really do think that issues like abortion and gay marriage are nothing but proxies for other things. Social authoritarians and cultural Marxists use these issues as battlegrounds because they allow both sides to do what they most love, beat up on each other. Forget football or baseball, ideological squabbling is America's real national pastime.

What convinces me that these issues are proxies is that they are so unimportant. Real issues of real import wouldn't attract so many hangers on. Neither would real issues split so cleanly down ideological lines. Gay marriage affects gay people, who are an extreme minority. It doesn't affect normal people. Abortion affects teenagers who are too ignorant and stupid to use contraceptives properly. It doesn't affect responsible adults. It affects the dead babies too of course, but they aren't adding much to the debate. They're a quiet bunch, don't tend to say much.

The bile and vitriol exchanged over these topics are so extreme precisely because the stakes are so small. Whether abortion is legal or not won't make one whit of difference in the lives of most people. The same goes for gay marriage. This is also why a consensus is never reached, because to do so would mean that they players would have to find some other irrelevancy to bitch at each other about.

About the only thing that is good about all this is that it keeps these nutters occupied. Heaven forbid they ever stopped fighting with each other and had the opportunity to lay in to everyone else.

"Honor" maimer now a murderer

2009-11-06T02:16:00.000-08:00

Misogynist succeeds in murdering his daughter

Many would say that he should be executed, but I think that is going easy on him. There are fates in this world worse than death.

I think he should have his hands and feet chopped off. The same hands and feet that operated the Jeep he used to murder his own daughter. Leave him unable to feed himself or even wipe his own ass.

I'd also investigate the hell out the rest of the family too. This kind of crap doesn't happen in a vacuum and is usually a conspiracy hatched by multiple family members.

The AP can't handle the truth

2009-11-06T01:24:00.000-08:00

Senate blocks census US-citizenship question

Apparently the AP doesn't know the difference between a naturalized citizen and an illegal alien. The article above details how the Dhimmis in the senate have blocked a measure that would have census takers ask whether someone is a citizen or not. As transparently malicious as this is, it is what I expect from those turds and so I'm not particularly ruffled over it.

What does get my goat is how the author of the article repeatedly refers to non-citizens as "immigrants." This would be perfectly reasonable if he were writing an article about people with green cards or visas. In this case however he is writing about illegal aliens. To refer to them as "immigrants" is a flat out lie. He is deliberately obscuring the difference between illegal aliens and legal immigrants. This isn't the first time I've seen this kind of deception. Lefties just love to call illegal aliens "immigrants" and talk about how awful it is that so many Americans are bigoted against "immigrants."

Reaction of leftists to conservative victories

2009-11-03T17:36:00.001-08:00

Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town?
-- Mark Twain, "Huckleberry Finn"

Guess not....

The stupidity of the American people has been greatly exaggerated.

Honor Maiming here in Arizona

2009-10-30T10:10:00.000-07:00

Muslim Arizona Man Arrested After Allegedly Running Down 'Westernized' Daughter

Yet another misogynistic bastard using religion to justify his hatred of women and his desire to treat them as property.

Yet another victim group discovered in the UK

2009-10-30T07:46:00.000-07:00

Why are fat people abused?

Attacks on overweight people are not the problem here, they are the symptom. The problem is a society where fundamental notions of decency have decayed away, leaving only malignant nihilism in their place.

Special laws to protect the overweight are just as useless as special laws to protect any other identity group.

Trying to legislate morality simply doesn't work. Morality is learned at home. Morality is the character of a society, and character is destiny. Morality cannot be legislated into place but must be created, preserved and renewed by the people themselves. Failure to do this results in a society of amoral narcissists.

The solution to the problem of overweight people being abused is cultural renewal, not a flurry of new legislation.