Yep
Two Wrongs
Beyond the scourge of drugs, what drives the crime rate in Chicago is the same thing that contributes to crime in so many other American cities — family breakdown and particularly the absence of responsible fathers. The fate of Laquan McDonald, abandoned by his father when he was 3 years old, is not a rare occurrence for kids in Chicago, and is increasingly common across the United States. Forty percent of children were born to unmarried women in 2013, and more than 70% of black children are born to unwed mothers. Given these socio-economic realities, isn’t it obvious that black kids in Chicago have problems that cannot be blamed on racist cops? Officer Jason Van Dyke is charged with murder, but the hourly updates on CNN about “unrest” in Chicago isn’t a story about one trigger-happy cop. No, it’s the Endless White Guilt Trip that the liberal media can’t quit shoving at us, insisting that “society” (a term that is liberal media shorthand for white middle-class suburbanites) is to blame for whatever is wrong in American race relations.
The problem with this kind of blame-shifting — to make “society” or “racism” the explanation of what happened to Laquan McDonald is that it is antithetical to personal responsibility. Instead of blaming the criminal for his fate, we blame society. Instead of blaming the cop, we blame racism. Why are there protest mobs on the streets demanding “Justice for Laquan” when (a) his mother already got $5 million from the city, and (b) the cop who shot Laquan has been charged with murder? Keep Reading….
Blinded By The Light
The plight of the neurotic and oft offended new children of the corn…
“The person will pass from the bubble of college to the bubble of social enforcement, keen on perfecting the world. And for the rest of his or her or xer professional life, they’ll be shouting BE QUIET to a calm, rational adult who is too terrified to say “you’re a terrible child who understands nothing. Go to your room.”
These people will produce nothing. They will create no great art, write no symphonies, conjure no novels that speak across the decades, sculpt nothing of beauty. The world outside the bubble is irredeemable. It cannot, of course, be remade all at once, but tomorrow’s a new day. Rome wasn’t wrecked in a day.”
— James Lileks
Keep Your eye On The Ball
It comes to mind that there is a bunch of peripheral stuff going on that has the media, politicians, and the American public so inundated with crisis, it’s hard to focus on important issues of the day. Now all of these things may be coincidence but it keeps our attention shifting from one crisis to the next, when our attention should be on one thing only, which is getting this country healthy again.
I don’t know about you, but I think the U.S. has more to worry about, more too focus on, than bringing in a new batch of refugees. If the U.S. government doesn’t tighten it’s collective belt, it won’t matter that Putin is in the Ukraine, it won’t matter that ISIS has taken another city, it won’t matter that college students are offended by whatever injustice they perceive has been done to them, it won’t matter that the LGTB community can’t buy a cake, it won’t matter how many Mexicans are here, it won’t matter whether climate change is a hoax, it won’t matter because the country will have destroyed itself by the very people who were elected to protect her.
This country is in free fall thanks to Democrats and Republicans alike and until we stop throwing good money after bad, our fate will have already been chosen for us by political incompetence. Choose your next President wisely my friends. Keep your eye on the ball and remember the person elected will need to undo a half century of bad decisions pushed by progressive agendas and self serving politicians.
$3.25 Trillion: Government Collects Record-High Taxes in Fiscal Year 2015. Although the federal government brought in approximately $3.25 trillion in revenue in fiscal 2015, according to the Treasury, it also spent approximately $3.69 trillion, leaving a deficit of approximately $438 billion.
So to be clear, apparently 3.25 Trillion is not enough. My question, your question, and the question to be asked of our elected officials….why? If it were your family budget I would imagine you would be in trouble, maybe lose your home…….same thing for the country if you think about it.
Somebody has to run the place, but the government now employs more people than manufacturing….disgusting really.
So as you choose your next President, think about the man or women who has stood up against big government, is not content with the status quo, and is wiling to make enemies not friends in DC. I am aware of one.
Bam!!
Notice that ISIS does something terrible, and the overwhelming thrust of the conversation on Meet the Press is that the American people have done something wrong and must look inside their hearts and feel guilty over the overwhelming racism and Islamaphobia in their society. News flash: We’re not the villains here.
— Jim Geraghty
Heh…
….wait….hmm.
Generation Identity
“Colourful, diverse, heterogeneous; you sure like to sell yourselves as proponents of diversity. You tolerate every perversion and think that by doing so that you’re doing diversity a service. Yet you’re wrong once again. A picture doesn’t take on vivid contrasts when one mixes all the colours together, but when one paints each colour in its respective place. Large-scale diversity requires small-scale homogeneity.You can’t grasp this. You see one multicultural metropolis, and you want every city to become like it. You speak of diversity, but you want to make everything the same. Don’t you preach it to us every day? There has to be one market, you claim. One form of government is the right one. You want to implement one formulation of human rights, which should apply to everyone. We all live in one world. These are your slogans. How is it then that you dare to claim that you stand for diversity, when you hate diversity from the depths of your being?
We don’t want to see one and the same kind of city spread across the entire world. We want to travel to other countries and experience entirely different cultures, not further outposts of a universal, globalised metropolis. We want to return home to our own culture, where we feel in harmony with ourselves, not to a cookie-cutter colony of conformity to a multicultural empire.
We oppose your credo of multiculturalism with the principle of ethnopluralism. Instead of mixing and standardisation, we want to preserve difference. We want different peoples, cultures, and identities. Our own included! We want the world to remain a colourfully vibrant and enchanting mosaic; we don’t want a drab, grey projection screen. We are the real representatives of diversity; its real guerrilla warriors. For we are generation identity.
Willinger, Markus
The Unwritten Law
Keep fighting, keep questioning, keep demanding…one invasion per generation is enough.
There exists a law, not written down anywhere, but inborn in our hearts, a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading, a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice, not by instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Planet Bullshit
Learn Something New Every Day
Didn’t have an opinion on the TPP. After reading this article, sounds like the people making decisions in our government are, as Trump puts it, idiots.
What’s in the Trans Pacific Partnership?
1. A Legislative Body Superior To Congress
The Commission would not be particularly powerful if its decisions could be ignored. However, the “Arbitration Tribunals” in the pact will have the power to award multi-billion dollar judgments against any member government that violates its decisions.
2. A Vehicle to Pass Obama’s Climate Change Treaty
When President Obama finished negotiating the Iran Nuclear Deal, he went first to the UN Security Council, not to Congress, to get the deal approved. More or less the same thing could happen with the multilateral environmental agreement that Obama negotiates in Paris. It will be incorporated into the TPP, whether Congress agrees with its terms or not.
This wouldn’t matter, except that the “Arbitration Tribunals” in the TPP can impose multi-billion dollar fines upon the U.S. government if the U.S. violates anything that is in the pact. In other words, the tribunals can force whatever Obama negotiates in Paris upon the American people, and Congress will have very little say.
3. Increased Legal Immigration
These provisions could lead to a massive flow of immigrants who had been hired abroad by foreign companies to provide services within the United States. Germany’s experience with “temporary” workers from Turkey demonstrates that once they arrive in a developed country from a poor country, they find a way to stay. Under some interpretations of U.S. law, if they have a baby while they are in the United States, that baby is awarded automatic U.S. citizenship.
If Congress were to try to slow the massive immigration flow that could stem from these provisions, it could be sued by the foreign service providing companies under the arbitration procedures of the TPP. Under the threat of billions of dollars of damage assessments, Congress would be forced to withdraw such limitations.
4. Reduced Patent Protection on U.S. Pharmaceuticals
A few weeks before Chapter 18 was leaked to Wikileaks, the stock prices for companies in the U.S. pharmaceutical and biotech industries fell 10% in stock value, probably due to insider trading by people who knew the then-secret treaty’s terms. But it is not just falling stock prices that should concern the American people. The pharmaceuticals industry generates exports and growth to the American economy. Also, many people will be condemned to premature deaths because the drugs that would have saved them would no longer be profitable to develop.
5. Quotas On U.S. Agriculture Exports
The small co-ops that share their profits with their farmer owners won’t get very many of these certificates. Only the big agribusinesses will have the resources and knowledge needed to game the system. They are the ones that can afford to pay the necessary political contributions.
But this treaty is not designed to open markets to free trade. It is designed to give big American agricultural companies big profits in return for big campaign contributions. This is the crony capitalist deal of trade deals. Governments decide who gets the profits, and only the biggest companies will be able to pay to play.
6. Increased Currency Manipulation
Moreover, the Declaration just says that governments that engage in currency manipulations should not do it. There are no penalties, whatsoever. In fact the Group can’t even complain about a country’s currency manipulations unless such a conclusion reflects “the collective views of the Group.” That means that any decision to condemn must be agreed to by the country being condemned!
All of this is simply unenforceable window dressing that ignores the fact that Malaysia, Vietnam, Mexico and Japan (four of the countries in the agreement) are already active currency manipulators, giving them huge trade surpluses with the United States. For the 12 months ending in September 2015, they had merchandise trade surpluses with the U.S. of $21 billion (Malaysia), $30 billion (Vietnam), $57 billion (Mexico) and $68 billion (Japan).
7. Reduced U.S. Power
After World-War II, the U.S. adopted a low tariff system, which worked great until Japan and Germany and then many other countries, mostly in Asia, discovered the power of currency manipulation. Their government-owned banks, especially their central banks, forced loans upon the United States by buying U.S. assets such as U.S. Treasury Bonds, so that the United States dollar would go up in exchange rate and their currencies would go down in exchange rate.
As a result, the currency-manipulating countries, especially China, Japan and Germany rapidly grew in wealth and power while the U.S. lost wealth and power. The TPP could be another nail on America’s coffin by further constraining U.S. action to rebalance trade.
Doesn’t sound like a good deal to me.
If the TPP is enacted, some Americans will benefit, but the effect upon the American economy would be unambiguously bad. There would be soaring electricity prices resulting from the climate treaty. There would be a loss in service sector jobs due to increased immigration. There would be a reduction in the research and development of pharmaceuticals and biologics due to reduced patent protection. There would be a loss of factories due to continuing currency manipulation. And there would be a decline in U.S. power due to continuing trade deficits.
In short, the TPP is not worth the 5,466 pages that it is printed upon. A free trade treaty just with countries that don’t cheat, such as Canada, would be worthwhile. But this trade agreement includes countries that manipulate exchange rates to give themselves trade surpluses and give the U.S. trade deficits.