Refugee "Women and Children"

Mr. Obama assures us in his customary condescending manner that we are ridiculous, not to mention cowardly, for expressing concern about these "women and children".

Migrants queue on a street to enter the compound outside the Berlin Office of Health and Social Affairs (LAGESO) for their registration process in Berlin, Germany Photo: REUTERS

Hmm. I have noticed that our language has deteriorated in the recent past although I doubt it has descended to such depths that even the most progressive of newspeak language architects would apply the description of "women and children" to those in the photo above.

Meanwhile, it seems a few "women and children" are unaccounted for in Germany.

"German authorities are reportedly searching for 12 people who entered the country illegally as refugees using fake Syrian passports and then disappeared."

 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/12064943/Germany-searching-for-migrants-who-entered-Germany-using-same-passports-as-Paris-attackers.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

The story never does get around to declaring the genders and/or age of the missing.

Indeed

"The whole system seems to have lost its mind. That there’s even a debate about whether security officials should be allowed to look at the social-media posts of immigrants is a sign that our bureaucrats have such open minds their brains have fallen out."

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428712/terrorism-government-fails-americans

The Black Lives Matter Foundation

A large majority of the black American population is facing an existential crisis. Dope, family disintegration, poor education and a lack of infrastructure have been plaguing these millions for years.

They have been the target of large scale attempts to improve their environment. Some of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" programs were targeted for black Americans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society). Then there was school busing and affirmative action and generous welfare regimes. The outcome is generally regarded to be a catastrophe with vast numbers of black Americans suffering from ever worsening drug, domestic, educational and infrastructure problems. 50+ years, countless billions of dollars and very little to show for it.

It seems obvious, given all that has been tried, that solutions which depend on conventional American policy preferences have failed miserably. Internecine  war is well underway and claiming new victims in black America every day.

During the period of time that has elapsed since the 1960's civil rights offensive  there has been another, parallel, development that has transformed a small but important part of the black community.

Racial barriers to success in sports and entertainment have been removed and declared dead. One noteworthy result of this development has been the accumulation of a vast amount of wealth by some black Americans.

• It is reliably reported that there are about 35,000 black American millionaires as defined by the IRS; assets - liabilities - the value of one's primary residence (Dr. D. Kimbro, "The Wealth Choice"). 35,000 millionaires means that they hold, cumulatively, at least 35 billion dollars. That is not assets it is net worth. The remainder after deducting their liabilities.

• We know that they hold a great deal more wealth than that. In fact, the ten wealthiest black Americans hold, between them, 14.6 billion dollars (http://www.techscio.com/richest-african-americans/), so the group of 35,000 can be said to have net worth of at least 49 billion dollars. If half of them have net worth of 10 million dollars and the rest net worth of 1 million dollars then the value of all their net worth would be at least 200 billion dollars. The total is likely closer to 350 billion dollars.

These black American millionaires and billionaires (there are only 2)  are easily identifiable. Many of the top 10 are household names; Oprah, MJ, Magic, Tiger and Bill Cosby. We can all name dozens of others; Charles Barclay, Lebron James, Dwayne Wade, Shaq, Kobe, Chris Rock, Morgan Freeman, Barack Obama and so on. No doubt there is a mailing list that identifies them all.

They should create and fund The Black Lives Matter Foundation and proceed to attempt the rescue of their brethren from an existential crisis.

That neither federal, state nor local governments are capable of dealing with the problem is apparent. That there are more black Americans succeeding in less spectacular ways than the millionaires is not arguable. At least that has been accomplished. That many millions more are trapped in an endless cycle of poverty and self-destruction is similarly not arguable.

There is precedent for the members of a community who have succeeded banding together to save those of their brethren who have not. Wealthy American Jews, that very small proportion of Jews who found great success, spent what had to be spent to save the rest of us. Government was no help. Antisemitism was rampant. Our benefactors built hospitals, schools, community centers, in other words, infrastructure. This was not accomplished overnight. But, as is obvious to anyone who cares to see it, it has been wildly successful.

It is, in my opinion, time for that newly minted class of extremely wealthy black Americans to coalesce, assert themselves and commit a portion of their vast wealth to saving their people, as ours were saved. The government has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that it is entirely incapable of ameliorating these problems. Some of the reasons government fails so badly at these efforts are baked into the nature of government and the motives of politicians. Government is not a philanthropic undertaking. Politicians are motivated differently than private philanthropists. There is no one else to rely on but yourselves.

Privately funded community centers based on the Jewish Community Center model could provide, free of charge (or otherwise depending on your preferences) supplemental education, job skills training, productive living training, day care services, legal services, drug treatment, food, shelter and an oasis of safety in otherwise turbulent neighborhoods.

No decent medical services in  the neighborhood? Build some, we did. You have vast and rapidly growing resources, use them and save your people.

I have no doubt that many of our black American millionaires are very charitable. I believe their charity is being largely wasted in a low-key scattershot approach to  solving a problem of immense proportion.

You can do it. It has been done before. In fact we built and generously support an entire country, Israel. You are fortunate to have a country. So build your neighborhoods.

Do Black Lives Matter?

Yes, of course. But that does not appear to be the actual question posed. The question being asked is "Do Black lives matter more than other lives?" The answer is no. Emphatically.

I grew up in Canada. There were never any Black slaves in Canada. Black people, as I grew up, were just that, black People. There were not a lot of black People in Canada and I encountered few in the 25 years I lived there. Among those few I encountered was Marion Cumberbatch, our housekeeper of long standing. So, anecdotally I suppose you could say that they occupied the lower levels of society, much as they did/do in the USA. On the other hand, there was the white Scottish housekeeper who worked for a neighbor's family, so who knows.

Being a Jew I benefit from a long tradition of sympathy with oppressed people (we can talk about the "Palestinians" some other time) but I find myself less and less sympathetic to American Blacks as they continue to take advantage of  unconstitutional, in my opinion, so-called Affirmative Action programs while rampaging here and there in protest of the unfair treatment they claim to be enduring at the hands of White Americans.

The reason for my lack of sympathy is the Alice in Wonderland nature of their campaign. Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were thugs who were killed in self-defense.

"Hands up, don't shoot" is a complete and ugly distortion of the facts.

As "presentism" (judging historical figures by today's moral standards) takes hold in America a lot of history is being revised or eliminated. Did you know that 268,000 mostly white Union soldiers died to liberate black slaves? Or that another 300,000 or so were wounded in the same pursuit? Or that more than 1.5 million mostly white men served in the Union armies? Did you know that those 1.5 million represented about 20% of the male population of the North? 1 out of 5 men served. Or that in 2015 dollars the Union spent $147,000,000,000 ($36,700 per slave of the 4,000,000 then in bondage) to liberate the slaves? Apparently even our hillbilly ancestors knew that "Black lives Matter". Too bad their sacrifice has been completely dishonored by the dreadful conduct of so much of the black community recently.

Did you know that the first president of the NAACP was White? Did you know that the chairman of the NAACP in 1914 was a Jew? No? I thought not. Can you think of a reason you don't know that? I know, you would rather not. Me too.

Here is some of the NAACP's history as it appears in Wikipedia:

The conference resulted in a more influential and diverse organization, where the leadership was predominantly white and heavily Jewish American. In fact, at its founding, the NAACP had only one African American on its executive board, Du Bois himself. It did not elect a black president until 1975, although executive directors had been African-American. The Jewish community contributed greatly to the NAACP's founding and continued financing. Jewish historian Howard Sachar writes in his book A History of Jews in America of how, "In 1914, Professor Emeritus Joel Spingarn of Columbia University became chairman of the NAACP and recruited for its board such Jewish leaders as Jacob Schiff, Jacob Billikopf, and Rabbi Stephen Wise."^[19] Early Jewish-American co-founders included Julius Rosenwald, Lillian Wald, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch and Wise.
According to Pbs.org "Over the years Jews have also expressed empathy (capability to share and understand another's emotion and feelings) with the plight of Blacks. In the early 20th century, Jewish newspapers drew parallels between the Black movement out of the South and the Jews' escape from Egypt, pointing out that both Blacks and Jews lived in ghettos, and calling anti-Black riots in the South "pogroms". Stressing the similarities rather than the differences between the Jewish and Black experience in America, Jewish leaders emphasized the idea that both groups would benefit the more America moved toward a society of merit, free of religious, ethnic and racial restrictions."^[20] Pbs.org further states, "The American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League were central to the campaign against racial prejudice. Jews made substantial financial contributions to many civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, the Urban League, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. About 50 percent of the civil rights attorneys in the South during the 1960s were Jews, as were over 50 percent of the Whites who went to Mississippi in 1964 to challenge Jim Crow Laws."^[20]
As a member of the Princeton chapter of the NAACP, Albert Einstein corresponded with Du Bois, and in 1946 Einstein called racism "America's worst disease".^[21][22] Du Bois continued to play a pivotal role in the organization and served as editor of the association's magazine, The Crisis, which had a circulation of more than 30,000.
Moorfield Storey, who was white, was the president of the NAACP from its founding to 1915. Storey was a long-time classical liberal and Grover Cleveland Democrat who advocated laissez-faire free markets, the gold standard, and anti-imperialism. Storey consistently and aggressively championed civil rights, not only for blacks but also for Native Americans and immigrants (he opposed immigration restrictions).

Yes, American slavery was an abomination. Yes,  there continues to be identifiable racism in the USA. There always will be. Just as there will always be anti-semites, anti-Irish, anti-fat, anti ugly and so on. Most of us keep fighting to make these anti's as marginal as possible.

Ugly, racialist movements like "Black Lives Matter" only serve to make those of us who believed in the fight for equality cringe and stand down. Apparently nothing is enough so why bother.

The Gay Marriage Fight Continues/Updated 9-6-15

I have written before about my opposition to gay marriage. It is, in my view, as simply impossible for two people of the same gender to "marry" as it is for Bruce Jenner to "be" a woman. He can never '"be" a woman. He is a man, now and forever.

That he wishes to imitate being a woman is fine with me. If gay people wish to imitate being married that is also fine with me. They cannot ever "be married" in any traditional way.

Which brings me to the kerfuffle in Kentucky. Kim Davis, Rowan County, KY clerk of courts is probably going to jail for refusing to marry gay people in defiance of the Supreme Court and a contempt citation from a local Federal Magistrate.

This is what happens when 9 people in robes decide to make policy rather than interpret the law. See Roe v Wade. 40+ years of controversy still going strong.

There is an interesting side note to this wee circus.

Those of us on the right have long been playing a game that has come to be called, "Name that Party". It stems from our almost universal observation that the main stream press, when dealing with malfeasance of Republicans, immediately mentions their party affiliation. When dealing with malfeasance by Democrats, well, not so much.

In this story  http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/09/03/rowan-county-ky-court-clerk-marriage-licenses-gays/71635794/ and many others covering the controversy, the political affiliation of Ms. Davis is never mentioned. Name that party? Why, Democrat, of course. http://www.dallasvoice.com/county-clerk-kim-davis-democrat-related-stuff-10203184.html

Given the nature of her objection the MSM gets a bonus by not naming her affiliation.
 Based on the subject matter of the controversy, not naming her party affiliation allows most people to default to the position that she must be a Republican.

After all who else could possibly be mean and stupid enough to oppose gay marriage. A two-fer.

UPDATE: This is just too precious. One of the NYTimes editors fell for their own ruse. This correction appears today:

All Men are Created Equal

It came to my attention during a discussion not long ago that the context of the phrase may have been lost.

The person I was speaking to, not an American, pointed out the obvious: All men are not created equal. Her example was that the son of a prostitute was not at all equal to the son of a doctor. True, except in one regard; we are all created with unalienable rights given to us by our Creator (see previous post for my use of Creator).

At the time that the Founders proclaimed our independence the civil rights regime of every society that I know of was based on God's direct relationship with the various monarchs extant then. The religion practiced by the monarch did not appear to matter. The structure was always the same.You have heard, I am sure, of the Divine Right of Kings. Further, the rights of his subjects were mostly comprised of the rights he chose to confer on them. For the most part they could be given and taken away at the whim of the monarch. (Until after WWII for example, the Emperor of Japan was believed to be the son of god.) There were some exceptions, the Magna Carta, for example, but not many.

For the first time, as far as I know, the American system disengaged the monarch and put the people, all of them, in direct relationship with their civil rights. The first time, ever.
In this respect, and this respect only, were the Founders asserting the equality of men. This was an incredibly revolutionary assertion.

The then existing institution of slavery does not, in my opinion, invalidate their assertion. At that time those who condoned the practice did not consider slaves human. That they were wrong is beside the point. At that time women were generally not considered the equal of men. That they were wrong is also beside the point.

In their context, in their time, the views they held were commonplace. That they were not as enlightened as we are today is entirely predictable and irrelevant. In case it has gone unnoticed, we evolve. Were it otherwise our creation would have been accompanied by the invention of cars, planes, telephones, modern medicine and personal computers. 10's of billions of us lived and died during the thousands of years that humans were such slaves to our needs and environments that there was no time for meaningful innovation.

When did that state of being change dramatically? The Industrial Revolution and the soon to follow establishment of the United States of America, where all men are created equal and a reliable rule of law, not the whim of monarchs, governs. At the time, the only such place on Earth.

Why We Have Rules

I have written often about human nature. It is obvious to me that any policy or political philosophy that ignores human nature is bound to fail. How do we know what human nature is?

Its most objective definition is actually stated in the reverse, in my opinion. That definition is the 10 Commandments. After all, who, if not The Creator, would be in a better position to evaluate the character of characters he created.

The first four command us not to do what we naturally do; extol ourselves. These commandments then posit that left to our own unchecked preferences we would all insist that we are god and prefer our own rules to those laid down by others. Thus, the other, laying down the rules must be far more powerful than mere mortals. You can  use your own experience to evaluate the success of the first four commandments.

The fifth commandment instructs us to honor our parents. I'm guessing that whoever wrote this commandment had noticed that children, particularly teens and young adults, routinely consider their parents to be complete idiots and often treat them accordingly. The author was likely the parent of more than one of these offensive beasts.

Later in life parents tend to become a burden to their children. Another appropriate time for the application of the commandment in an effort to ensure that the children, no longer young, are sufficiently afraid of other-world complications that they will abide by the injunction. You can use your own experience to evaluate the success of the fifth commandment.

Numbers 6,7 and 8 tell us what god thinks is part of our nature but commands that we not succumb to our nature and; murder, commit adultery and steal. Considering the current pace of murder, divorce and theft it looks to me, once again, as though The Creator knows his customer. Given the astonishing rate of incarceration and divorce in this country, it seems, once again that he understands our character.

Number 9, "Thou shalt not bear false witness..." points to the fact that many of us are liars. That is apparently so basic and pervasive a human trait that any important document tells us that we must swear that we are not lying.

It is so basic a feature in fact that several words and phrases have been developed to be used to persuade our friends, absent a sworn declaration to the contrary in support of the veracity of our assertion, that we are not lying. These words and phrases include, "frankly", "honestly", "to be perfectly honest", "to tell you the truth" and so on. Don't ever use them.

Number 10 addresses covetousness. As we have all observed humans are extremely jealous creatures. Disastrously so in many cases.

So, our Creator, the bible tells us, for reasons left completely unexplained, decided to create a bunch of creatures who:
1) Have little respect for anyone but themselves;
2) Treat their parents like crap;
3) Murder, steal and commit adultery;
4) Lie constantly; and
5) Live lives fueled by being jealous of their fellow men.

That is the judgment of human nature according to the 10 commandments. Although I refer to god and The Creator, I do so for convenience only. It is clear to me that there is no god and that some other method of creation produced us. Imagine the spectacular idiocy of knowingly creating a group that you know in advance will be severely flawed. Ridiculous. Whoever the authors of the old testament were, they were simply creating a blueprint for socialization using a bogey man as their weapon for forcing compliance. Not a unique tool. Every religion created before and after Judaism proceeds similarly.

The lesson here is that we cannot create policies and/or political philosophies that rely on honesty, respect, fair dealing or selflessness and expect them to succeed without the simultaneous application of severe penalties for transgression.

The spectacular abuse of every social program in this country is evidence enough to prove this point.

Socialism fails at every turn because it must rely on an absence of covetousness to succeed. Can not happen. Capitalism works because it appeals to our true nature. Covetousness, for example, is rewarded if it is accompanied by hard work. Of course, there are those who choose to substitute murder and/or dishonesty for hard work and are also rewarded. The Mob, for example.

So conduct yourselves accordingly. Plan for those you interact with to be liars and cheats if they can get away with it. Your planning will protect you from many of the usual human behaviors. Ronald Reagan may have said it best: Trust but verify. A few moments of thought will lead you to the conclusion that this phrase actually restates, politely, a very old saying: I don't trust him as far as I can throw him.

Capitalism's Creative Juice, the Threat of Failure

Over the last few years I have added a new name to my list of favorite opinion writers, Kevin Williamson of National Review. An article he published today is, in my opinion, a must read. He is an unabashed supporter of Capitalism and seems to me to understand its workings with more clarity than most.

"One of the rarely appreciated aspects of the capitalist model of innovation is that the wealthy subsidize the development of products for everybody else: The mobile phone is a case study in that process, as is the electric car, as indeed were ordinary cars. The firm that developed the first automotive air-conditioning and power windows was a high-end marque that despite its landmark innovations is no longer with us: Packard. The Bonfire of the Vanities–era financiers who carried the first mobile phones paid for much of the research and development that made them ordinary products for non-gazillionaires. My own financial means at the moment do not, alas, afford the purchase of the new plug-in hybrid from Porsche — which is a million-dollar supercar — but the technologies developed for the 918 Spyder will make their way through the marketplace the same way that the automatic transmission (Oldsmobile, 1940), the supercharger (Mercedes, 1921), and the independent suspension (Mercedes, 1933) went from being expensive options on cars for the rich to being standard equipment on your Hyundai."

This, to me, is an excellent insight and might be valuable knowledge for the Occupied crowd to have as they talk to each other on their cell phones castigating the evil rich. But for the evil rich they would have no cell phones or much else for that matter. Anyone remember the Lhada? No? That is because it no longer exists. It was a car built in the USSR. My sister bought one back in the 70's. Predictably the worst car ever manufactured. There is a good reason for its failure and Williamson explains it below.

Williamson's piece is actually a response to a comment made by the US Government's Chief Technology Officer. She said,

“Why can’t the federal government have websites and digital services that are awesome?”

He proceeds to answer her question. In his penultimate paragraph he explains:

"Non-performing federal agencies do not go bankrupt, federal bureaucracies do not see their shares tank when they do poorly, and government entities do not have their assets acquired by more effective competitors. Political bureaucracies are creatures doing violence to the evolutionary equilibrium — dinosaurs running amok in modern technological civilization, and Jurassic Park taught us how that turns out."

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/418162/bureaucracies-dinosaurs-run-amok-technological-civilization-kevin-d-williamson

 

Read the whole thing if you have the time and the interest.

Lies, Always

The gender wage gap has been getting a lot of press recently. Of course, as we all know if we give it a moment's thought, there is no such thing. Would any of you tolerate, absent seniority implications, doing the same job, with the same skills, dedication and outcome for less money than the person sitting beside you doing the same job? No you wouldn't. Do you know anyone who would? It has been the law in this country since 1965 that wage discrimination by gender is unlawful.

The famous "Women earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by men" is true. It is also entirely meaningless. That statistic is arrived at by adding up all wages earned by women and dividing that number by the number of women in the work force, doing the same for men and comparing the results. Given the career choices that women and men make for various reasons the outcome is entirely predictable. Teachers and Librarians are deemed to be less valuable to our economies than Doctors and Lawyers. They just are. I doubt it surprises anyone that Doctors earn more than Teachers.

The Left is heavily invested in their "War on Women" trope and so they cannot let this go. And so they do what they always do...Lie.

 http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416974/sarah-silverman-admits-she-made-wage-gap-story-then-calls-critics-maniacs-katherine

This reminds me of a recent Michelle Obama story. When asked during an interview with People Magazine last winter whether  she had experienced racism personally she answered in the affirmative and related the story of having gone to Target "in disguise" and being asked by another customer to reach something on a shelf for her. Implicit in her telling is that the customer just assumed she was a lowly Target worker because Michelle is black. It was a terrible experience. http://www.redstate.com/2014/12/19/michelle-obamas-imaginary-racism-target/

The following is copied from the linked story. This is how she told the story somewhat earlier during a Letterman appearance.

“That’s my Target run. I went to Target,” she said. “I thought I was undercover. I have to tell you something about this trip though. No one knew that was me because a woman actually walked up to me, right? I was in the detergent aisle, and she said — I kid you not — she said, ‘Excuse me, I just have to ask you something,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, cover’s blown.’ She said, ‘Can you reach on that shelf and hand me the detergent?’  I kid you not.”
As the audience laughed, she went on, “And the only thing she said — I reached up, ’cause she was short, and I reached up, pulled it down — she said, ‘Well, you didn’t have to make it look so easy.’ That was my interaction. I felt so good. … She had no idea who I was. I thought, as soon as she walked up — I was with my assistant, and I said, ‘This is it, it’s over. We’re going to have to leave.’ She just needed the detergent.”

So, a short person (color of skin not noted) asked a tall person  to get something off a high shelf for her.  Just a normal human interaction. No racism, no nothing. Michelle just "felt so good".

Disgraceful liars, all of them all of the time. There is an element of very good news here. A 50 year old black woman cannot point to a single act of racism in her life. That is real progress. We should be congratulating each other on our accomplishment. So congratulations. You will not hear that from these black libs because many of them would be out of business if they confessed to their lies.

They Never Take Ingenuity into Account

There have always been Malthusians among us, even before there was a Malthus.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe

These are people who look at the present and extrapolate it to the future without considering that historically humans have shown that we learn as we go along. An essential part of being human is being creative and adaptive.

Despite the evidence of the last 200 years of technological breakthrough after breakthrough the same people continue to predict man-made disaster from over population and over industrialization without a moments regard for our innovative history.

At the link you will find an excellent exposition of the complete failure of  the Malthusians predictions since 1970. All the predictions were reasonable if you choose to think of the human race as one that never learns anything.

http://thefederalist.com/2015/04/24/seven-big-failed-environmentalist-predictions/

Enjoy.

Good Faith

Quoting from Black's Law Dictionary:

"The phrase 'good faith' is used in a variety of contexts, and its meaning varies somewhat with the context. Good faith performance ....excludes a variety of types of conduct characterized as involving "bad faith" because they violate community standards of decency, fairness or reasonableness..."

Good faith is a basic requirement for civil discourse. Without it there is no point in discussing anything. If your opponent in a debate is constantly lying about his position, or having changed his position fails to note that change and/or claims he has not changed positions at all it is impossible to reach any meaningful conclusion, other than that your opponent is acting in bad faith.

At the link http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2015/05/04/nbc-geller-caused-texas-shooting/
is an excellent example of how and why liberals operate in bad faith. Always.

In a three month period of time Matthews' opinion changes 180 degrees. The only apparent  reason for the change is that the actor being described has changed from a left wing publication to a right wing activist.

Matthews does not bother to tell us; 1) What his original opinion was; 2) Why he changed his mind; nor 3) Which of his two diametrically opposed positions is his real opinion.

This is standard procedure on the left. See my earlier post regarding the 2013 SOTUS.

One of my favorite examples of this tactic is courtesy of the NY Times. When republicans controlled the Senate in the mid-1990's NYT editorialized that the Senate filibuster rules were the cornerstone of American political freedom. 10 years later, with republicans now in the minority and making things difficult for the democrat majority the NYT editorialized that the filibuster was an anti-democratic construct that threatened the very cornerstones of American political freedom. No reference made to the earlier editorial on exactly the same subject  and no explanation for their change of heart. Bad faith actors all. (http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/then-and-now-the-hilarious-hypocrisy-of-new-york-times-editorials-on-the-filibuster/article/2539617 is a story about a third incarnation of their thinking based on their 2005 position and their 2013 position)

It must be so when your only principle is the quest for power and your determination to make sure your opponents are kept from it.

Chris Matthews was a speech writer for Jimmy Carter during the latter's Presidency.

SOTU 2013

Back in January 2013 I was surprised to hear from my daughter (a 21 year old college student at the time) that she and her boyfriend had decided to watch Obama's SOTU speech. She told me what a wonderful speaker he is and that he had some good ideas. I was shocked. Below is my deconstruction of several parts of the speech written for her benefit.

"Verbatim excerpts from 2013 State of the Union speech with my annotations in italics. http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-02-12/politics/37059380_1_applause-task-free-enterprise

In 2011, Congress passed a law saying that if both parties couldn't agree on a plan to reach our deficit goal, about a trillion dollars' worth of budget cuts would automatically go into effect this year. These sudden, harsh, arbitrary cuts would jeopardize our military readiness. They'd devastate priorities like education, energy, and medical research. They would certainly slow our recovery, and cost us hundreds of thousands of jobs. That's why Democrats, Republicans, business leaders, and economists have already said that these cuts, known here in Washington as "the sequester," are a really bad idea. A really bad idea proposed by Obama, not that he would do other than pretend he had nothing to do with it. http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/sperling-admits-obama-misled-debate-president-did-propose-sequester_705015.html

After years of talking about it, we are finally poised to control our own energy future. We produce more oil at home than we have in 15 years. Yes we do. However this is in spite of, rather than because of Obama. We are producing less oil on Federal Lands which he controls access to. The increase has come exclusively from state and private land production. http://eenews.net/public/Greenwire/2012/02/27/4 We have doubled the distance our cars will go on a gallon of gas, and the amount of renewable energy we generate from sources like wind and solar – with tens of thousands of good, American jobs right  http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/13/us-usa-campaign-green-idUSBRE83C08D20120413 to show for it. We produce more natural gas than ever before – and nearly everyone's energy bill is lower because of it. And over the last four years, our emissions of the dangerous carbon pollution that threatens our planet have actually fallen. Yes, they have fallen without any need for Kyoto or any other climate change nonsense regulation. Our emissions have fallen because the economy stinks and we have found and produced fantastic amounts of cheap natural gas causing the conversion of many factories from coal (dirty) to gas (much cleaner) http://news.yahoo.com/ap-impact-co2-emissions-us-drop-20-low-174616030--finance.html  Keep in mind that most of the new gas is available because of fracking which Obama and his minions oppose! Does that stop this lying piece of crap from taking credit for it? Of course not.

But for the sake of our children (the use of the preceeding phrase should always cause you to become more vigilant. It actually means that we are going to propose limiting your freedom and you would never go for it unless we invoke “the children”) and our future, we must do more to combat climate change. Yes, it's true that no single event makes a trend. But the fact is, the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15 ( Maybe. There are a lot of questions about the baseline data and since the world leaders in this research refuse to release their raw data, in stark violation of non-proprietary scientific endeavors,  who knows. There is one thing we do know if we concede the assertion. 11 of the 12 took place between 1998 and 2007 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071213101419.htm which means that only one has occurred in the last 6 years.   Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods – all are now more frequent and intense complete nonsense http://www.prisonplanet.com/global-warming-doublespeak-snowmageddon-blizzards-are-part-of-heating-trend.html . We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades nonsense http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drought_in_the_United_States , and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science – and act before it's too late.

As long as countries like China keep going all-in on clean energy, so must we. Right. Researchers from Harvard University and Tsinghua University have found that the People's Republic could meet all of its electricity demands from wind power by 2030.^[5]
Despite this, Wen Jiabao Premier of China stated in a March 5, 2012 report that China will end the "blind expansion" into wind and solar energy, instead developing nuclear power, hydropower, and shale gas.^[6]  Why? Because solar and wind are unreliable and unpredictable. We don’t know when the sun will shine or when the wind will blow.

That's why my Administration will keep cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits. More lies.  http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/04/politics/fact-check-oil-gas/  . Whenever Obama talks about this stuff you must keep in mind that his stated goal is that energy prices of all kinds should rise dramatically. Here he is talking about electricity http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlTxGHn4sH4 )

Indeed, much of our new-found energy is drawn from lands and waters that we, the public, own together. ( As stated above, almost none of the new production comes from Federal Land and, overall production is down on Federal lands that “we, the public, own together”.

Study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road. But today, fewer than 3 in 10 four year-olds are enrolled in a high-quality preschool program. Most middle-class parents can't afford a few hundred bucks a week for private preschool. And for poor kids who need help the most, this lack of access to preschool education can shadow them for the rest of their lives. enough said on this in our earlier communication.

Through tax credits, grants, and better loans, we have made college more affordable for millions of students and families over the last few years. But taxpayers cannot continue to subsidize the soaring cost of higher education. (Costs are soaring because of tax credits, loans and grants. It is the same phenomenon as we see in the medical care business. Government money skews the economics of the market. If there were fewer students able to “afford” college then the colleges would be forced to be more competitive. Easy government money means they do not have to be competitive so they hire more and more people to do less and less work. Ultimately, it is these poor saps taking out these loans who pay the price for “affordable” college”.

But today, a full-time worker making the minimum wage earns $14,500 a year. Even with the tax relief we've put in place, a family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line. Minimum wage is paid for entry level jobs. Your first job might be minimum wage but if you are a decent employee, an employee your employer considers valuable, your wages will increase steadily. You saw that dynamic in action yourself at City Tan. You did a good job and got raises because your employer didn’t want you looking elsewhere for a better paying job. As a high school student working part-time or a recent graduate working full-time at an entry level job you should not be married with two kids! So, if you spend year after year making minimum wage it is your fault, not the fault of the minimum wage and making that wage more “livable” will make the problem worse, not better. Also note the real agenda here, as with mandatory pre-school. Most union contracts define wage levels as a function of the minimum wage http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061111000556AAr0KHu  so a raise in the minimum wage means an increase for almost all union members, a democrat constituency. I negotiated a union contract years ago and this is exactly how it works.

Tonight, let's declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to $9.00 an hour. This single step would raise the incomes of millions of working families. Indeed. It will also raise prices on many things, including many that this guy now making $9/hr will have to buy since business owners do not take the money for the increase out of their pockets, they charge more for goods and services to make up for their increased costs.

When any Americans – no matter where they live or what their party – are denied that right (to vote) simply because they can't wait for five, six, seven hours just to cast their ballot, we are betraying our ideals.

We should follow the example of a North Miami woman named Desiline Victor. When she arrived at her polling place, she was told the wait to vote might be six hours. And as time ticked by, her concern was not with her tired body or aching feet, but whether folks like her would get to have their say. Hour after hour, a throng of people stayed in line in support of her. Because Desiline is 102 years old. And they erupted in cheers when she finally put on a sticker that read "I Voted." ( Wow, what a story. Ancient woman goes to vote on election day and stands in line for hours and hours. Terrible. Of course, that is not what happened. What happened was that some democrat booster wanted to make sure this woman voted and so took her to a polling station on the first day of early voting, not election day. There was no reason for her to be there at all. Early voting was intended to allow people who would not be in their district on election day to cast their ballots early. Dems have since used early voting to ensure as many of their voters as possible cast their votes without the excuses for failing to vote on election day coming into play. “had to work late; kids had a soccer game” etc. There are very few polling places open for early voting and even they would be adequate but for democrats taking advantage of the system. If they had an ounce of decency they would have arranged an absentee ballot for this 102 year old woman and she could have voted without ever leaving her home. By the way, what sort of people stand in line for hours ahead of a 102 year-old women? Would you not have given up your place to her? Do you know anyone who would not have done the same? Me either.  http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/a-102-year-old-face-of-voting-delays-at-the-state-of-the-union/ 

In the linked article you will see that the longest wait times in the country on election day were actually in Florida. How long? 3 hours, no; 2 hours, no; 1 hour, no; 45 minutes, yes and that was the longest wait time in the entire country! The article does say that blacks and Hispanics had the longest wait times. Big surprise since a much greater proportion of them live in urban areas which are, by definition, more crowded.

So, that’s all for now. Please note that links to CNN, Reuters and AP are links to media wildly in favor of Obama so they do their best to minimize his transgressions but even they, as you have seen from reading the links, have to reluctantly concede that he is lying.

Love…Me

Human Nature 2, Civility and Gridlock

You will often hear politicians and pundits complaining about government gridlock.

Anytime you hear this be assured that the speaker either has no understanding of the nature of the history of the founding of our Constitutional Republic or is a Democrat trying to shut up any opposition to their grand plans. Unfortunately, usually both.

Our system of government is designed to be slow and cumbersome. Checks and balances are in place to prevent humans from being human. It is supposed to be very difficult to move legislation through the House and the Senate and get a President to sign it into law.
If it was easy the route from a Constitutional Republic to an Authoritarian State administered by the political elites would have been a quick one. We are seeing, in Obama's Executive actions, what the Founders were trying to prevent. Not being able to get Congress to go along with his wishes he has invoked "Gridlock" (the prescribed state of normal for a Constitutional Republic) in order to justify his actions.

It is demoralizing to watch supposedly informed policy makers and their critics display their utter lack of understanding of our Constitutional Republic. The Founders were very clear that they were creating a system where getting anything done politically would be very difficult. Persuasion and compromise would be the only paths to legislation. That was the point. Every new law infringes our liberty. It was never their intention that we should have 51 legislatures filled with career politicians doing nothing but passing laws day and night.

Civility has never been part of American politics. Today whenever the admonition to be civil in politics is issued it is from the mouths of Democrats and actually means Republicans should shut up and go along with whatever it is Democrats want to do.

Politics were so "civil" around the time of the Founding that Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr fought a duel with pistols. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr%E2%80%93Hamilton_duel  Hamilton died of his wound.

Things were so civil when Lincoln was elected President that political cartoons portrayed him as a monkey.

In 1856 things were so civil..."In 1856, a South Carolina Congressman, Preston Brooks, nearly killed Sumner on the Senate floor two days after Sumner delivered an intensely anti-slavery speech called "The Crime Against Kansas".^[2] In the speech, Sumner characterized the attacker's cousin,^[3][4] South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler, as a pimp for slavery.<sup>[5]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sumner

Brooks never suffered any real consequences for his attempted murder. 

 " Although an attempt to oust him from the House of Representatives failed, and he immediately resigned his seat, he received only token punishment ( a $300 fine. A fairly large sum at the time) and was re-elected by the people of South Carolina." http://www.ushistory.org/us/31e.asp

In fact, Southern newspapers  applauded his actions and suggested there should be much more of the same.

George W Bush was routinely vilified in and out of the press as a Nazi, warmonger, war criminal and everything else under the sun by every Democrat with a mouth.

"Politics ain't bean bag" has been a saying in active use since 1895.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finley_Peter_Dunne

Civility and Gridlock lamentations have only one goal, as I stated earlier: To bully us into going along. My advice? Don't.</sup>

Human Nature 1

Human nature is many things. Among the most important of its components:

a) The further from destitution we are removed the lazier we become. It was not long ago, perhaps 300 years, that the vast majority of humans were engaged in agriculture in some form or other. We had to make sure we had enough to eat. Now, far removed from any threat of starvation, at least in the West, we are a fat, lazy and entitled civilization.

b) The further we get from an embarrassing or troubling event the smaller its impact on our behavior. Our heart-felt apologies and pledges to never do "that" again lose their urgency and so the old event has an ever decreasing impact on our current behavior.

c) Honesty and integrity are highly valued characteristics. Like so many things of great value, diamonds, gold and beauty, for example, they are in short supply. Be honest, have integrity and you will be highly valued. I do not mean this in a monetized way, although that may come to pass.

Reporting as it is now known and ideological blinders

 At the link below is an article that appeared in the Boston Globe. It describes LSU's economic struggles in an era of shrinking State support.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2015/04/23/lsu-draft-insolvency-plan-jindal-cuts-loom/e2dMpep32tc3GgVU99MHtJ/story.html#comments

What I consider noteworthy about the report is the editorializing of the piece's final sentence:

"State cuts to higher education have sent tuition soaring across the United States, adding to the more than $1.2 trillion in student-loan debt. "

It is manifestly not reduced government support that has caused tuition to "soar". Reduced government support has caused revenues to fall. "Soaring" tuition rates are the remedy of choice by administrators who refuse to cut costs and would rather burden their students with the costs of their own comfort.

It is a combination of an explosion in non-academic (read administrative) hiring:

" Between 1975 and 2005, total spending by American higher educational institutions, stated in constant dollars, tripled, to more than $325 billion per year. Over the same period, the faculty-to-student ratio has remained fairly constant, at approximately fifteen or sixteen students per instructor. One thing that has changed, dramatically, is the administrator-per-student ratio. In 1975, colleges employed one administrator for every eighty-four students and one professional staffer—admissions officers, information technology specialists, and the like—for every fifty students. By 2005, the administrator-to-student ratio had dropped to one administrator for every sixty-eight students while the ratio of professional staffers had dropped to one for every twenty-one students."
 http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features/administrators_ate_my_tuition031641.php?page=all

and the apparent refusal of college administrations to do what families and businesses do when revenue decreases. Decrease spending. Not for these empire builders, nor for their like-minded friends in the press.

It is no surprise that democrat activists with by-lines, also known as Reporters when Republicans are in office, push this line. It has two objectives, in no particular order of importance;
1) Blame Bobby Jindal, the Republican Governor of Louisiana and,
2) Continue laying the groundwork for forgiving student loans.