Two of the worst features of humanity are how limited our brains are in general, and how parochial our interests which drive our use of our limited wetware tend to be -- often just "me, me, me", or "hurray for my team"!
Thomas Sowell is less limited -- he is a genius with a practical heart that rivals his intellect. Having been born in inner city poverty, being bull headed enough to remain a Marxist even while studying under Milton Friedman, and then being converted to free market capitalism by his experience of being a government bureaucrat for awhile, his wisdom is invaluable.
Just go and read it. The plight of our inner city youth is dire unto death -- 5K or more killing each other each year with guns, on top of massive drug abuse, rampant crime and incarceration. The decrepit inner city schools stocked with union drone teachers steeped in the doctrine of low expectations assist in keeping largely minority youth enslaved in "The Party" (TP-D) and it's noxious doctrine of dependency for life.
Indeed, the teachers unions themselves are an integral part of the TP machine which provides huge dollars and ground troops to TP, while TP provides them with no standards in the classroom and as much income and benefits as can possibly be generated for the teachers, and worse, the ever more bloated public education administration apparatus. The relationship is a study in the corruption of socialism and bureaucracy (but I repeat myself), with the destruction of the inner city blacks since the '60's, while indoctrinating them as vote slaves that vote over 90% for TP.
Naturally TP must fight DeVos with all they have -- and as we have seen over the years, when it comes right down to the core of the choice of "big government" vs for over simplification purposes "returning to America from BOistan", "Republican" is a very weak brand. The alleged party of small government has been heavily corrupted by participation at the the trough of big government.
America will never return unless the strangle hold of left-wing indoctrination of our children is broken. Pray that the battle finally turns here.
An opportunity has arisen -- belatedly -- that may not come again in this generation. That is an opportunity to greatly expand the kinds of schools that have successfully educated, to a high level, inner-city youngsters whom the great bulk of public schools fail to educate to even minimally adequate levels
America was exceptional because of limited government. BOistan is quasi-European because of UNlimited government.
"The Party" (TP-D) was very certain that "demographics was destiny", so no Republican would ever occupy the White House in BOistan. They were nearly as certain that they would also re-take the Senate.
Thus, we have an all out attack on Trump from even prior to his being inaugurated that keeps rolling along now that he is in office. We have the people that created UNlimited government protesting the elected government, thus the term PAD (Political Autoimmune Disease).
As in living bodies, having your system attack your system is not a recipe for health, and is one of the chief reasons why unlimited governments tend to become totalitarian sooner rather than later. When government is limited, the transfer of government power is honored as part of the contract of being a Constitutional Republic rather than a "democracy" with mob rule. Kind of like running your body temp up to 106, the last line of defense here is the 2nd ammendment -- might be hot, but it can add color.
BOistan is a lawless tribal state, so there is no understanding of governance, law, or even basic decency. Rioting to prevent speech at a university is seen as completely acceptable, even by the founder of BOistan -- BO himself.
One of the joys of America was that even cretins like Slick Willie who stained the office of president, followed enough decorum to shut their noxious pie holes after citizens had been subjected to their vacuous lying rhetoric for 8 years. In this life, even the damned deserve a little respite! BOistan has no decorum, so even this drop of water on the tounge is denied.
Finally, as The Resistance organized itself and pushed on multiple fronts, a new supporter spoke up to encourage the protesters — former President Barack Obama, who managed to stay out of his successor's affairs for all of 11 days.
So Slick successfully removed the requirement for character in a president and TP cheered. BO established the new low bar of no requirement for having ever led anything in order to have the highest leadership position in the land. He then ignored the Constitution, the separation of powers, and used the IRS and other government agencies against his political "enemies". TP swooned.
Now TP is all about making sure that elections are no longer honored, and "resistance" is somehow "patriotic" (or just "an appropriate tantrum") when mere "opposition" 8 years ago was "racist".
The key here is the meaning of "no rules" -- as Pat Buchanan once said, "lock and load". Cammo and John Deere hats vs pussy hats and vagina outfits? I guess if that is what it takes, bring it on.
I kinda liked America, but it looks like there will be no return without using up a bunch of ammo sooner or later.
It seems pretty clear that somebody whimped out here -- might have been HD, might have been Trump. Marketing in the bike segment tends to be a bit smash mouth. "Truth in marketing" is often an oxymoron. Wussing out isn't a well received biker value.
So how about Indian invites Trump to Spirit Lake IA, another state that flipped to play a little hardball?
I've got nothing against HD, still own one in fact. Their reliability has radically improved, but as also being a Gold Wing owner, it hasn't got like "stellar".
I'd be VERY tempted to drive down to try to pump up the crowd if the "The Donald" (I'm thinking "TD" for his nickname on the blog) would bring the big jet to IA. Sounds like a hell of a PR opportunity to me!
OK, I had "heard" about the Ashley Judd rant but had not bothered to listen to the whole thing. I'm still not sure who she is, but I hope she took a cough drop to her speech. That "Nasty woman" must have had a sore throat after wasting all that breath.
It does get a little long of course, but true to form, the Enterprise takes care of her at the end -- PROPERLY!
While listening to the rant, I realized who her voice reminded me of.
Can't revisit Black Oak without reflecting on this deep theological wonder!
Trying to reduce what to pass on to the next generation to "5 things", or even one thing, is a time honored desire of mankind. At some point in our short lives, we realize that we won't be around long in any case, and usually realize through the death of a friend or family member that "short time" may be our next breath.
As in much of modern life, the author jumped right by meaning on the way to his list.
We’ve prioritized the acquisition of knowledge around what we assume society would deem most “worthy”. For much of history, knowledge was rooted in theology: it was about explaining the world in a supernatural way, seeing goodness as a tenet. The industrial revolution saw a vast shift away from this to a way of maximizing return on investment in a production-centric environment.
His list is:
Relationships
Curiosity
Agility
Creativity
Compassion
I'd argue that for all of history -- past, present and future, a meaningful life is, has, and will be about MEANING. The core of all life in the past and all life in the future consists of birth, family and death. Some may want to remove family, however we are all born into one, and if a majority decides that having children and raising them well is not a priority, then their and our future history ceases. This fact has been lost on Western civilization today.
My life is still based on "theology" in the sense of faith. All lives are -- including the list author, the only question is the realization of that fact. He has faith in a meaningless godless universe / world, and that his five items can make a life worth living. He chooses to either ignore philosophy or just lump it in with theology as no longer applicable to the world he believes he lives in. A scientific world that denies human consciousness, love and beauty because none of those are measurable.
My list is as follows:
Faith -- "The beginning of wisdom is the fear of God". The base of all meaning to is the tenet of a teleological universe that is created by a PERFECT God and fallen through misuse of the gift of free will. We all have a faith -- if you believe you don't, study some basic philosophy to understand what your faith is (solipsism, empiricism, determinism, positivism, etc)
Faith and hope cover "agility" from the other list. By accepting our true place in the universe, the things of this world can be considered in the perspective of God's perfect love and the fact of eternity.
It all has a purpose, and that purpose is greater than me. (although, God wants it to INCLUDE me!)
Hope -- Of redemption for me, redemption for those I love, and eventual redemption or re-perfection of the world and universe by a sovereign God. The story of life the universe and everything has a universal class happy ending, insured by God.
Love -- Love for God, love for family, love for others, and love for myself as I know God loves me. Relationships and compassion on the other list are covered by love.
"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no account of wrongs ..."
Christ (and the Beatles) tell is love is all we need. "Love the Lord thy God wIth all thy heart and soul, and thy neighbor as yourself" (even (especially?) if your neighbor is your "enemy").
Wisdom -- As I believe I live in a meaningful universe, God has provided me with a desire to know him and to grant me wisdom. Some now, much more in eternity. The pursuit of wisdom is one of my greatest joys.
Vocation -- God has given me a purpose, and if I seek him, that purpose is made clear to me. As I work at my purpose, God directs the universe to help me to "succeed" in achieving of that purpose.
That purpose may be the bearing of great pain and suffering -- even unto death, or it may be ruling the world. To look at these and accept the sovereignty of God so that my ultimate purpose is the achievement of God's will, not mine, is the way to the most coveted prize of every life "Well done my good and faithful servant".
It was an interesting exercise to try to do my list of five. Christ knows it best -- the greatest is love! ... and I'm obviously a work in progress since that came in 3rd on my list.
This screed isn't worth your time. Brooks is an elitists elitist and he is what counts for a "conservative voice" at the NY Times as well as every Friday being the voice of the far left, "against" the voice of the far far left, E J Dionne, on NPR. I'm quite certain that neither of them know anyone that knows anyone that even considered voting for Trump.
When the CONSERVATIVE from the NY Times votes for BO against John McCain because he likes the "crease in his pants", it is awfully easy to understand why we need Trump!
Anybody that has to use a gas can knows that government has wrecked it. What I liked was this:
Ask yourself this: If they can wreck such a normal and traditional item like this, and do it largely under the radar screen, what else have they mandatorily malfunctioned? How many other things in our daily lives have been distorted, deformed and destroyed by government regulations?
If some product annoys you in surprising ways, there’s a good chance that it is not the invisible hand at work, but rather the regulatory grip that is squeezing the life out of civilization itself
Over the weekend, Trump made good on his promise to restrict Muslim immigration and increase vetting. As with most of what he did in week one, this was following through on clearly made campaign promises. The nation has become so expectant in campaign promises being completely meaningless, or just out and out lies, following through on them is shocking! (eg BO, "I'll close Gitmo on day one!". "If you like your health insurance you can keep it!"). It's now a shock to the nation to see a successful candidate do what they said they would do.
There were demonstrators out in Rochester and accross the country, special call in shows on NPR, and the lefties on Facebook blew up in anger, sadness, fear, etc. Over?
So what do we need to know about this order?
Like anything in the first week or two of a new president's adminstration, it is largely based on things that BO either did or did not do during his administration. He did a similar ban on Iraqi refugees in 2011, he discriminated against Christians (Trump is mildly reversing that).
"On the whole, 2016 was the first time in a decade when the United States let in more Muslim than Christian refugees, 38,901 overall, 75 percent of them from Syria, Somalia, and Iraq, all countries on Trump’s list — and all countries in which the United States has been actively engaged in drone strikes or ground combat over the past year. Obama had been planning to dramatically expand that number, to 110,000, in 2017 — only after he was safely out of office."
What he is doing is in line with what he has done all through the campaign, written about in his books, and used during his business career -- staking out a position beyond what he expects to get and negotiating. Scott Adams covers that in detail here.
Most people are completely unaware that BO executed a similar order in 2011 because BO did it, so it HAD to be good!
I highly recommend to read the Adams link. While I am still not convinced that Trump is playing 3-dimensional chess while the rest of the world is stuck on Tic-Tac-Toe, it IS possible.
You start the negotiation by throwing a cherry bomb into the room -- because it puts everyone off guard and it makes them LOOK at you.
You take a position that 70-80% will think is "crazy", but 20-30% will think "did not go far enough" -- eg, why not Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries as well? The 20-30% will see the rest of the world going nuts over what they think is not enough and realize that Trump tried very hard to give them what they wanted, but it was a bridge too far.
Because everyone is looking at you and thinks you are crazy, things will come out that would not have otherwise; BO's Iraq order, the discrimination against Christians, the fact that BO had radically increased Muslim immigration on the books for this year, what our historic rates have been, etc.
I would like Trump to do a speech focused on the the 40K over the last decade and the over 100K planned for this year alone and say; "BO pulled the pin on an immigration bomb and left it in the Oval Office. I fell on it as soon as I found it and there is collateral damage. I can live with that, my mission is to protect the American Peoople."
Much like during the campaign, the most entertaining thing about Trump is to watch the fireworks. I've always enjoyed fireworks!
I understand the sentiment expressed in this column very well. It opens with:
There's a frustrating game that the left plays with conservatives. It's an Alinksy tactic called, "Make them live up to their values." Now, living up to one's values isn't a bad thing, but setting high standards ultimately means that you'll sometimes fall short.
The left loves to exploit these shortcomings--every Christian who falls short of perfection is a hypocrite; the social values candidate you voted for just got arrested for drunk driving. Haha, everything you believe and advocate is now discredited.
What I tried to do at the end of my blog was indicate what was needed to "all get along" ... "shared values, Constituion, figuring out what we are "FOR" rather than just what we are against.
At that time, I would have never believed that Trump would be elected -- and now that he has been, the left is responding exactly has I would have predicted. We are definitely a tribal state and what tribes do is make war -- which is what Western civilization was created to rise above and did.
Everyone knows that Republicans are "Pro-Life". Everyone also knows that Democrats are "Pro-Black".
At least that is what "everyone knows".
If we look at the top most murderous cities in the US ... Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, DC, New Orleans, St Louis, etc, they are all Democrat fiefdoms of welfare, urban blight, failed public schools, drugs, crime and single parent households. Democrats like it that way -- being "pro-black" means encouraging blacks to live in a manner that keeps them voting over 90% Democrat. Why worry about anything else?
On the Republican side? Why alienate the "moderates" by giving the wacked out pro-lifers anything but flapping lips and broken pormises? What part of "politician" was it that the rubes failed to get anyway? There is always a "good excuse" for not REALLY nominating SCOTUS judges that will overturn Roe V Wade and return the infant slaughterhouse rules to the states. The Democrats won't let us get through the Senate, we will lose the woman vote, we will lose the "libertarians" (all 2-3% of which they lose anyway), etc.
We were assured by the MSM that Trump would not actually appoint a pro-life judge to the SCOTUS ... for the reasons above, and because "he doesn't care'. Of course we were assured there was no way he could win as well.
Perhaps being taken only flew for a little over 40 years!
In this time of mass media and the internet, human life is one of constantly being persuaded/manipulated/marketed than it ever has been. Marketing streams at us pretty much every waking moment, the media has an agenda, the political parties have an agenda, and certainly Trump has an agenda -- he is preseident because he is a better persuader than either party or the mass media.
I'm not at all certain HOW he manages all he manages. Sure, some of it is obvious -- the fact that Trump is able to have the media chasing around like a cat after a laser pointer by tweeting. His tweets have the same effect on the media and much of the hard left as seeing a squirrel does on Doug the talking dog in this clip.
The linked article points out a classic media manipulation technique. Numbers are important when THEY say they are! Pro-Life rallys for over 40 years? Numbers completely unimportant. Obama's inauguration, VERY important! Trump rallys conmparted to Hillary rallys? TOTALLY unimportant. Number of women at women's march? Hugely important!
We could just keep quoting -- number of Chicago murders vs a single black killed by police, gun deaths vs heroin deaths ... the use of selective numbers is a constant form of the manipulation we deal with. Likely voters or straight poll of "Americans"? Deficit in raw numbers or as a percentage of GDP? All these and more are used to attempt to get people to think what the manipulator of the moment wants to have us think -- and the biggest manipulator was always the MSM prior to Trump.
The use of polls or not using polls is another. I wasn't even aware that controls on abortion had a strong plurality over abortion on demand -- not one of those messages the media is interested in making clear.
Not much of this is new, but what is new is TRUMP. Does his incessant apparent obsession with the crowd size at the inauguration have an actual purpose, or is he just "insane / stupid" as the MSM tells us? Could he really be purposely holding the media on the "numbers thing" to force them to pay attention for the March for Life?, or if he can't get them to do so, reduce the media credibility even farther? Does it actually work for him to "stupidly focus on the numbers" so that even the most media addled see at least subconsciously that "it takes two to play the stupid numbers game"? I mean, if it is "ridiculous to focus on crowd size", then why is the MSM interested in it sometimes and not others?
Up until Trump was elected, the MSM story was that "he doesn't really care about abortion" -- I suppose similarly to them saying that "BO isn't really against gay "marriage" in 2008 -- he just SAID he was'. What I find interesting is that even though Republicans were supposed to be "the party of life" for the entire time since Roe, Pence will be the FIRST VP to talk to the March for Life rally! Taking a base that you feel you own for granted has been one of the tried and true methods of both political parties for a long time.
The last words in Selzer’s essay are, “Whatever else is said in abortion’s defense, the vision of that other defense [i.e., of the child defending its life] will not vanish from my eyes. And it has happened that you cannot reason with me now. For what can language do against the truth of what I saw?”
Satan is a huge fan of reason -- when he shows up in the Bible, he pretty much sounds like a lawyer. We now know through science that we can't make decisions without emotion. As Jonathan Haidt showed us in "The Righteous Mind", even "liberals" who will TELL you that disgusting things don't disgust them are lying. Put a PET scan on their brain and the moral modules light up just like they do in the person that admits that they have morals! Denying your natural moral nature is very costly.
I'll bet dollars to donuts that if you put a PET scanner on even the most supposedly pro-abortion woman out there, the scanner will show that she inherently knows it is murder as she watches one. That is going to be hard to prove, but if you take the little time required to watch this video, at least YOU will know that it is murder -- this woman, Gianna Jessen, is a survivor of that attempted murder.
Why did Christ have to come and die on the Cross? For the cosmic version of the reason that Gianna had to survive an abortion. So you could FEEL the TRUTH of Gods Love and Grace! Because thinking about things never actually allowed anyone to make a decision. We don't decide on reason!
Satan wants to give you a long list of "logical reasons" to not believe in Grace, Love, Redemption, Truth, God, Spirit, Eternity, etc. At the head of the list is "If you don't believe in those things you can be "god", or at least your own version of the idea -- and you can be smug". For a season -- really just an "instant" on the cosmic scale. Pride. You can be proud!
And then you die -- alone. More alone than is possible to imagine from this earthly coil. Satan knows you will be alone. Take the class or the gathering or the trip where you felt the most alone in your life and multiply it by a few billion, and then possibly you can imagine a mere wisp of how alone Hell is. God is surrounding you here -- generously gifting you your breath and your pulse, holding you in this mortal coil and begging you to acknowledge that Grace already won and available explicitly for YOU!
Have you ever noticed how critical it is for Satan to have "more numbers"? Since the election we definitely know that BOistan is ruled by Satan -- both Trump and the left are ALL about "numbers". "We won the popular vote"! "No you didn't, there was fraud!". "The inauguration was sparsely attended"! "No it wasn't"! "We had a MILLION marchers!" ... and so it goes. There are MORE PEOPLE on MY side!
We all know that the road to Hell is wide and easy -- with busloads of marchers. If you know Truth, it matters not at all if others agree. God and one is an extreme majority.
The linked article is well worth reading. It makes the case in one section that abortion is a sign of extreme sickness in our society. If you were a naturalist who came upon an area where all the creatures were harming themselves, maybe eating some poisonous plants to abort their young, you would not say "this is wonderful, I should help them"! You would realize that something had gone horribly wrong and look for the cause of this clear abomination of nature!
If you were a Star Trek sort of space traveler who saw such a planet where sentient life was killing their young in the womb, I can pretty much guarantee you that you would also find mass killings, rampant and rising, drug abuse, families falling apart and an extreme lack of love and caring for others "outside their tribe". All of these things are endemic to loss of meaning, respect for life, and hope. Welcome to planet BOistan.
I wrote, “No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg.”
Much like the animal, the woman who chooses to murder her child lives with the gnawing that she did. Unlike the animal, unless she allows redemption to wash her clean, her wound will fester for eternity.
I close with this.
The pro-life cause is perennially unpopular, and pro-lifers get used to being misrepresented and wrongly accused. There are only a limited number of people who are going to be brave enough to stand up on the side of an unpopular cause. But sometimes a cause is so urgent, is so dramatically clear, that it’s worth it. What cause could be more outrageous than violence — fatal violence — against the most helpless members of our human community? If that doesn’t move us, how hard are our hearts? If that doesn’t move us, what will ever move us?
I've written about the phenomenon that our emotions are required for decision making more than once in the blog -- I've certainly read about it more than once. Here is a version of it from this linked article.
A few years ago, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio made a groundbreaking discovery. He studied people with damage in the part of the brain where emotions are generated. He found that they seemed normal, except that they were not able to feel emotions. But they all had something peculiar in common: they couldn’t make decisions. They could describe what they should be doing in logical terms, yet they found it very difficult to make even simple decisions, such as what to eat. Many decisions have pros and cons on both sides—shall I have the chicken or the turkey? With no rational way to decide, these test subjects were unable to arrive at a decision.
At some point, I hope to do a thorough review and tie this factoid together. I actually think all of us are pretty intuitive about this. Our "guts" or "right brains" give us the answer, and then our left brains, the logical part make up a story was to why it was "rational". Thus my oft used quote "we are rationalIZING not rational!".
For those of us in the Christian Right, we have known this since at least 2008, if not 1999 when we failed to impeach Clinton for perjury and the crime of sexual harassment that would have gotten any kids having sex at McDonalds fired. We could even go back to 1973 and say that when a nation embarks on a holocaust that quickly surpassed that of Germany, any person who still has a moral compass knows that war will eventually result.
There are those on both the left and the right who call for American “unity.” But these calls are either naïve or disingenuous. Unity was possible between the Right and liberals, but not between the Right and the Left.
How does one make "peace" with those who will kill 60 million innocents as has happened with abortion? By winning.
Liberalism – which was anti-Left, pro-American, and deeply committed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of America, regarded the melting pot as the American ideal, fought for free speech for its opponents, regarded Western civilization as the greatest moral and artistic human achievement, and viewed the celebration of racial identity as racism – is now affirmed almost exclusively on the right and among a handful of people who don’t call themselves conservative.
I think Praeger is a bit of a Pollyanna as he looks at "liberals of old". Certainly there WERE many such liberals, but even at the time of Buckley writing "God and Man at Yale", it was clear that belief in God was becoming unacceptable at "liberal institutions", and Marxism was considered the winning hand over Capitalism. He is certainly correct however that the modern US and European Left is against every one of those values in the paragraph above at this point.
As long as conservatism was losing, the war was covert -- but with the Trump win, we see it heating up. Can conservatism win without firing a shot as Reagan did against the USSR? I doubt it, but we can always hope. Apparently Praeger doesn't agree with me that the elected government of BOistan has become a SERVANT of the Administrative State and the courts. We shall see.
The article is not that long, highly recommend reading it all. This is how he closes.
With the defeat of the Left in the last presidential election, the defeat of the Left in two-thirds of the gubernatorial elections and in a majority of House and Senate elections, this is likely the last chance liberals, conservatives, and the Right have to defeat the American Left. But it will not happen until these groups understand that we are fighting for the survival of America no less than the Union troops were in the First Civil War.
If Trump was a Democrat, this would be VERY exicting news! As it is, it is awfully muted. As US News says though:
But the achievement wasn't tough to see coming, considering stocks have boomed in the aftermath of President Donald Trump's electoral victory. The Dow has climbed more than 1,600 points since Election Day – up more than 9 percent over the course of a little less than two months.
It is good to remember that one of the reasons for NOT voting for Trump was "econmic disaster". Over at the NY Times on election night when market futures went down, former Enron advisor and Nobel prizewinner Paul Krugman was certain they were going down and never coming up.
It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover?
Frankly, I find it hard to care much, even though this is my specialty. The disaster for America and the world has so many aspects that the economic ramifications are way down my list of things to fear.
Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.
The Times advertises all the time as "Truth" -- in this age of "fake news", one wants hard hitting accurate reporting from experts like Krugman!
He isn't the only one ... poor muti-billionaire George Soros managed to lose one of his billions betting against Trump markets, and a lot of millions supporting Hillary and other left wingers.
Ah yes, things that make you go "boo hoo".
Does this mean that presidents make markets? Certainly not before they are elected, no ... we are talking "sentiment" here. In the long run? Well, that is why we have the sentiment -- while Hillary was the darling of Wall Street and the wealthy, Trump has promised to bring back some economy for the little folks.
If he can follow through on that remains to be seen, but people are voting again with their money and driving the markets up at this point, while the elite wealthy like Soros are unhappy and grumpy.
