Repost from 2013: Principled Conservatism Can Save This Country--Not Leftism (Lest We Forget)

Principled conservatism can still save this country from the Left. It must do it because nothing else will! 

Here's a number of conservative thoughts that attempt to portray the illusive and inter-related concepts that define "conservatism." It's more difficult to capture than you might think.

Incidentally, Conservatism is not necessarily "Republican." I tend to support a more libertarian conservatism championed by Ron Paul, who is widely respected but basically ignored. I will also say that the current administration and it's band of misfits best represents the contradictions and fallacies of Leftism.

OK, here goes:

• Decentralize and devolve political power back to the State and Local level . We need a multi-year or multi-decade movement to decentralize and devolve political power back to the State and Local level and away from the Federal level. This Federalism was the true and central intent of ALL of the Founding Fathers, all of their writings and embodied in The Constitution where only a few enumerated powers are reserved to the Federal government.  Concentration of power at the Federal level leads to abuse of power, corruption, abuse of personal liberties, undue influence of 'money' in the political system, excessive debt, cartels and crony capitalism.
• States should be the "incubators" of policy within the bounds of the Constitution. It's happening now in matters of gay marriage or unions (until the Supreme Court decided to override The States on gay marriage), decriminalization of marijuana, and even health care reform. I think each state should come up with it's own solutions to problems and policy.  Let the 50 states experiment with policy first then the national policy should or could follow.  Massachusetts has it's universal healthcare system. Great! Colorado decriminalized marijuana. Great!  Vermont legalized gay marriage.  Fine with me!  
• The concept of limiting Federal power is at the very heart of America's history, our country's philosophical foundation and THE most fundamental feature of Conservatism. By allowing Federal Government to expand we have the NSA scandal, IRS persecutions of citizens, the weaponized EPA, bankers writing Dodd-Frank to protect their privileged 'cartel' status, the drug and health insurance companies writing the rules and getting 'in bed with the government' in the ObamaCare disaster. Big government has bought you the ineffective and hugely expensive TSA, countless "intelligence" spy organizations all focused on spying on the American people in the name of "terrorism". Obviously I could go on and on. Just read today's headlines for more examples of government overreach.
• Reduce the Breadth and Scope of the Federal Government The size, breadth and scope of the Federal government needs serious reduction--not just from a Conservative standpoint---but from a budget standpoint! We can't afford it, the waste and their handouts! Trillion dollar deficits don't cut it -- and they will be back! The Patriot Act should probably be repealed. Many departments of the Government should be either completely eliminated or severely downsized including the Homeland Security, Education, Agriculture, and Energy Departments. Also cut most of the Commerce Dept., get rid of the Housing and Urban Development Department. See my comments below on restraining Entitlements which threaten to swallow the entire Fed. budget.
• Low taxes.  Low taxes is a result of restraint of government growth. Remember, there wasn't an income tax until 1913. (Then 5 years later, in 1918, top tax rates were 90% to fund our involvement in WWI) Low taxes allow people to prosper, invest and fund their retirement. Conversely, high taxes feed big government that wastes money, ruins the society, ruins populations (blacks, native Americans) squanders wealth on programs and entire departments that don't work, individuals become dependent on government and their retirement programs, and stifles the economy. Low taxes allow people to get rich enough to take risk, start businesses, invest and fund their own retirement (as opposed to being a ward of the "State"for your retirement security. One day, the government may not have enough money to pay your retirement benefits since it's a pay-as-you-go system).  High income taxes is antithetical to a vibrant, active economy.  Look at Europe!  Try to get a job in high tax France or Britain. Good luck!
• Our Nation's Social Foundations used to be Family, Marriage, Community, Charities and Faith Communities. But growing government and subsequent intrusion in the "charity business" (housing programs, income replacement programs, loan programs, employment and training programs, 'welfare' programs, etc) have hurt our traditional social foundations of family, marriage, community, charities and faith communities. No faceless, anonymous bureaucratic entity can replace these pillars.  Now 72% of black children are born to a family without a father. Poverty is again at an all-time high. It didn't use to be that bad. How about that as a sign of social decay?  Guess which group is the focus on numerous welfare and social programs designed to "help?" With "help" like that, who needs enemies?!  The Left refuses to see that they, in part, caused this. They, in fact, they love to be needed in a sick co-dependency. But it's really all about power, control, and it's all supported by the extortion of other people's money. That extortion gets nice sounding names like "fairness."
• America's success is primarily based in our Religious Faith, and the cultural understanding and legal codification of Judeo-Christian faith and ethical traditions.  Faith in people or "government" is no substitute to faith in God as best defined by long-standing world faiths and religious traditions. The Left makes fun of people of faith, but they are the idiots. The Left doesn't believe in anything! They are lost! Without grounding in a religious faith or tradition, liberals are only left with a faith in man or, worse, government institutions.

Without a faith and grounding in religious faith, the result is cynicism and despair when "man" and his institutions always fail to fulfill and inspire, then fail entirely. An even deeper and more profound failure of liberalism then is the lack of courage. Without faith, there can be no courage. If you don't have a view of what ultimately matters, informed from the great traditions, then you will find yourself adrift in moral relativity, with no convictions and buffeted by the trends and fads of the day.

Leftists attack and try to discredit the religious faithful. Think about the communists who place themselves at the apex of authority: not God or a "higher power." All communist (Leftist) regimes outlaw religion. It's happening today in China where Christians are actively persecuted. Communists are the extreme end of socialism and leftism.

• Self reliance, Personal responsibility are the foundations of any society.  What else?? Personal responsibility and self reliance are the cornerstones of any society, so government should not undermine that even if unintentional.
• Social safety nets ('welfare'and unemployment programs) should have a finite period and therefore end.  This would mean that various aid programs like Food stamps, unemployment, and maybe even Medicaid should have a finite period--something like a year. Then, it must end.  Otherwise you promote a crippling dependency.   Obviously disability programs are different. 
• Both Social Security and Medicare were conceived as MUCH more modest and MUCH more limited programs than they've become--both are examples of gov't "mission creep," and politician "vote buying." And they were started in a time of very favorable demographics--plenty of young workers and few beneficiaries. Now entitlements threaten to consume the entire Federal budget in future decades, leaving nothing left for the few "constitutional" functions of government. Just witness the "gnashing of teeth" in response to modest sequester cuts of 'discretional' portions of the budgets--and where entitlements are left untouched and growing.  
• Therefore, Medicare/Medicaid programs future benefits must be modified now as the ratio of workers to beneficiaries is dropping fast. Otherwise, these programs consume the entire Federal budget.  This train wreck was predictable 30 years ago but the government has failed to manage the inevitable. The Obama administration hasn't done anything and everything is worse under him.
• Leftism represents the "easy way out" in nearly all matters--not because it's the right thing to do but because it buys votes. So what if you're killing fetuses: abortion relieves you of responsibility, accountability. Can't pay your debts? Then liberals want to ease debt burdens (at the expense of others including future generations). Huge corruption in liberal programs are to be tolerated rather than eliminate the program. 
• The reality of life is that there are no easy ways out.  Everything in life requires hard work. Life is much harder than anyone imagines growing up. Hard work and struggle is the very thing that makes one self-reliant, responsible and principled. There are no short cuts. People are lulled into thinking by politicians that there are shortcuts, until government runs out of money. Government, trying to tame the business cycle has created 2 financial crises from which we are still trying to recover. There will  be more and worse crises thanks to relentless "government."
• "Tough love" is real love and is essential for individuals, groups and even nations.  People have to learn about life by making mistakes and know the 'sting' of life's lessons. Life is much more difficult than mom ever told you! Government cannot make everything easy for everyone for vote buying purposes!  It's NOT their job! Eventually it won't work. 
• Leftist  elites are jealous of the very people who have prospered based on their own hard work:  businessmen and entrepreneurs. Churchill said "Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy."
  
  
  Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/winstonchu164131.html#rzvKR5XyLybc3Z1w.99
  Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery
  Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/winstonchu164131.html#rzvKR5XyLybc3Z1w.99
  Liberals don't mind taking your money -- especially the money of the wealthy and they'll do it by confiscation if required.  Liberals love taxes, especially on the wealthy.  (But in 2015, the top 5% now pay 58% of the income taxes but they are branded as 'not paying their fair share.") They don't understand, or care about, the sacrifice and risk most businessmen undertake. Worse, they think that the wealth from success is somehow unworthy or ill-gotten.  Like Churchill said, they are envious of the successful. Do you think Obama has any idea about how to run a business or make a payroll?  Not a chance! Ironically, most liberal politicians are quite wealthy-- often from inherited wealth.
• Free-markets and appropriately regulated free market capitalism is the best path to prosperity.  But Capitalism requires failure. Entities that make bad decisions and engage in stupidity, fraud and dangerous finance should be allowed to fail.  Failures in Capitalism weeds out the unfit and weak like the law of the jungle.  It removes the bad actors.  Failures should not be rescued by the corrupt, big government.  That's not Capitalism!  That's Cronyism!
• Let's recap the greatest political lesson of the last century: Communism and Socialism bring nothing but failure or stagnation:  Communism is/was a disaster in every way: totalitarian, human rights, environment, economic.  Socialism in a large economy is not much better. Both have led to drab mediocrity, stagnation and even collapse. Why do people want to move toward such political positions when history has spoken so loudly and that the success of the American "experiment" has been so successful? Capitalism has it's crises but these crises historically were allowed to result in enterprise failures that clean out the ineffective and the excessive. Capitalism without failure is not capitalism. The bailouts of 2008 and 2009 didn't allow enough failure; prolonging our current agony of so-called "recovery."
• Socialist European countries have economies the size of US States--some with the population of US cities!--so even socialist governments at that size tends not to be as stifling and inefficient, Socialism can work in a small economy--sort of---if you don't mind stagnation and limited opportunities! I didn't say that it worked well!
• The star economies of Europe are Eastern and Central European countries who have adopted the purest forms of capitalism: low and flat taxes, low regulation, small government. They have embraced a high degree of economic freedom. They are now more Capitalist than America. They are more similar to Singapore and are prospering similarly.
• Balanced budgets States must balance their budgets, why not the Federal budget? A simple Federal law would do it. No Constitutional amendment needed.
• Limit the Federal Reserve to a single mandate of controlling inflation. Get rid of the mandate to maximize employment. The Fed has caused a 98% fall in the value of the dollar and a 28 fold price index inflation since it's inception in 1913. It's failed miserably at controlling inflation. Limit money printing and credit creation using a simple rule of, say, 2% credit growth per year or whatever the non-inflationary growth potential of the economy is. Any emergency liquidity must be "mopped-up" quickly---not easy or free money for 5 years!!
• Sound money: no money printing or monetizing huge government debts!! Wholesale money printing should be banned.  Money printing is about weakening your currency often in another "easy way out" and therefore "un-conservative." Sometimes currency wars are necessary when your trading partner is the evil China who have manipulated their currency for decades. Nixon's breaking the Bretton Woods gold standard is a seminal event in world monetary history--and not in a good way!
• Least amount of regulation as possible   Remember that only the prosperity of free market capitalism created the wealth that allowed for the cost of environment remediation in the 1960s and 1970s. We found out that Communism was an environmental disaster because there was no real prosperity. We'll see that when China collapses too. The current surge of additional regulation from EPA does not make sense. The upcoming cap and trade crap will be a huge job-killer and won't work. There is no public demand for it and the economy is not good enough--we don't have the money or prosperity to afford it even if it were necessary! It's all based in ideology not from any clamoring from the public.   Don't kill the golden goose!  
• Re-instate Glass Steagall   Get back to a separation of Investment banking from retail banking and low leverage requirements: 
• Work rule reform-limit the coercive power of big Unions. Obama's card-check would have promoted coercive unionism. But unionism is killing itself quite well all on it's own. End unionism in all levels of government.
• Free trade as long the other side is playing fair. China has never played fair. The US should have cracked down on Chinese currency manipulation in the 1990s or 2000s and threatened to impose tariffs on unfair imports. It would have resulted in some kind of negotiated settlement that would have likely helped.
• Abortions should NOT be easy to get
• Get money out of politics.  Finance national campaigns with Federal money. Ban lobbying money and any contributions to politicians. Ban any contributions more than about $100?
• Military strength and preparedness causes peace. Reagan was so right about "peace through strength." The movie "Argo" focused on a group of 5 hostages in Iran being rescued in 1979. But the real 'award winning' story, that the Left will never tell, is how ALL of the remaining hostages were released on the day of Reagan's inauguration. No world leader doubted Reagan's resolve and convictions. Reagan later essentially ended the Cold War. On the other hand, weakness engenders wars. (This does not mean that the defense budget is not currently bloated and could be cut substantially by the way.)  The Left never understands this or ignores it to spend money on their socialistic programs. You want proof, just look at the pitiful defense budgets gutted by the Socialists in Europe.

With no courage because of no real faith, liberals never have the conviction that sometimes things are worth fighting for. They become master appeasers that brings war! They rarely understand the doctrine of "peace though strength." Leftism both here and abroad, over time, de-fund military strength to fund the welfare state or their central planning agenda. European countries today have very small militaries and would be unable to fight a war. But that's ok because liberals never believe in anything strong enough to fight for it!  And they denigrate those people who have principles and values.

• Obama is the Ultimate Example of the failure of affirmative action. Obama coasted along his entire life on a wave of affirmative action money; promoted without real achievements, without real merit, without having had to "work" at a real job. Being a somewhat bright black man has been his "ticket." Praise, from liberal elites and institutions, has come without any exceptional effort (apparently, since all of his academic records are sealed, his record must be quite mediocre). Then, suddenly, a 1/2 term Senator with no distinguished legislative record, no career or work history and a sealed academic record, surfs a liberal affirmative action "wave" into the White House. It's the culmination of a liberal dream: a black man in the White House, promoted by and indoctrinated in leftist "values" and the "compromised" standards of affirmative action, all to "prove" that black men are equal (but don't look too close at standardized test results and academic performance).

What kind of result would you expect? The answer is: the same results from other affirmative action programs: Mediocrity. You can call me racist, but Obama is incompetent and is hurting millions of people who need jobs in this country-- hurting blacks the worst.

• Leftists are more often ruled with their heart (or right brain?) and not their head. The expression "bleeding heart Liberal" has a factual basis! Witness the nearly hysterical debate about gun control in the wake of several massacres. They are willing to violate the Constitution to take away ALL guns (as they did in the UK to no notable effect), despite the fact that mentally unbalanced or insane people got this weapons outside of the law --any law. The rush to be seen to be doing something seems to be the most important thing regardless that the prescriptions will do nothing to stop gun violence. But the Constitution just keeps getting in the way of the liberal agenda.

Conservatives believe in limited government because it has worked for the majority of American history and it's clearly the intent of the founding fathers. The recent 7 year long surge in government spending (really since WWII), debt accumulation, government and federal reserve intervention into the economy in an effort to "help" after the crash of 2008 has inhibited economic growth. Similar "activist" government stymied the economy in the 1970s thanks to idiots like Jimmy Carter. (We now have Jimmy Carter II in Obama).  Businesses have pulled back, due the government 'activism' and resulting uncertainty. Obamacare has been a huge shadow over business costs since it's inception.  Also, decades of excessive money creation loaded up the economy and public to the hilt with debt that they could and can not sustain. But rather than back off, the current administration wants even more intervention into the economy!  Obama and fellow Leftists NEVER learn.   Meanwhile millions look for jobs or give up.

The Left, Michael Moore, US Black Leaders & Hollywood All Lauded Hugo Chavez and Castro

I've ranted frequently about how the Socialist "paradises" of Venezuela and Cuba have resulted in the poorest people on the face of the earth. Venezuela, with their kleptocrat Leftist leaders Chavez and Maduro who are the darlings of the Left and US Black "leaders," is collapsing as we speak with hyperinflation, stagnation, crisis and starvation. Ignorant voters, who repeatedly voted for "free stuff" and "free money" now find that the money is worthless and there is nothing to buy even if they had money. This is always the result of hard-Left governments: stagnation, inflation, crisis, collapse. Free money lasts only so long.

It used to be Communist China that was mired in extreme poverty similar to the collapsed Communist USSR.  China liberalized their economy by adopting aspects of Capitalism after watching the wild prosperity of Hong Kong, S.Korea and Taiwan for 60 frigging years!  My God, these people are slow!  Of course, they are still a hyper-centrally planned disaster in the making, not unlike a totalitarian state. So, collapse is coming for them too-- not unlike the USSR.

The disastrous political Left including the likes of Obama and Bernie Sanders, who warmly embrace Socialism and Communism, never learn anything. They absolutely can't allow any facts to get in the way of their beliefs regardless of even astounding evidence.  The Left, Michael Moore, US Black Leaders & Hollywood All Lauded Hugo Chavez and Castro. If you're a Left-wing black Muslim, then you are the world's biggest disaster!!  Obama??

From Mish's blog, he recalls how Michael Moore praised Chavez in 2013. Moore is a lover of Fidel Castro too, just like all the US Black "Leadership" in this country.  Here's the tweet:

So much for the future of politicians offering "free stuff" to bribe unsophisticated (stupid) voters.  Check out a few of my posts:

• Socialist Paradise of Venezuela is Burning, Leftist US Black Leaders Silent
• How Socialism Ruined Venezuela
• Socialized Medicine Has Completely Collapsed in Venezuela
• Leftism Destroys Societies
• US is Becoming Venezuela, Obama is Chavez-Lite
• America's March to 3rd World Status, Then Collapse
• Cuba: A Country Hijacked By a Family Who Imposed Totalitarian Communism
• Comrade Obama's Unilateral Gift to Cuba's Junta
• Cuba's stagnation: More Failures of Socialism

Of course Black and Latino populations, with significantly lower median intelligence than those from Northern European (Anglo-Saxons) or E. Asia descent, fall more for the false siren calls of Populists/Leftist politicians who promise "something for nothing." That's why most of Latin America and all of Africa is verging on revolution, extreme poverty, crisis and even starvation.  When black or Latino people are allowed to immigrate here, the same thing happens.  These people should NEVER be allowed to vote in the US.  THEY NEVER LEARN.

Brazil is in an economic depression with massively failed leadership, a failed economy, massive corruption, massive crime, outrageous amounts of murders. Argentina too is nearing complete and utter collapse as we speak.  In my post "Epicenters of Ignorance, Bad Ideas and Destruction" I say: 

Brazil has many of the most dangerous and murderous cities in the world and a national murder tally of 50,000 murders in a recent year. It's mostly black-on-black killing just like in America. While the US has 15,000 murders per year, Brazil has 3 times the murder rate of the US and predictably they also have 3 times the blacks than the US (~50% vs 13% in the US). The Brazil murder problem is black in color --- just as it is in America. Low media IQ means that these people have an average mental age of 14 to 15 years old, have poor impulse control and little logic -- leading to murderous results.

It's much easier to count the countries in Latin America that are well managed, prosperous, orderly and happy. Costa Rica would be one. Chile would be another -- for now.  The biggest problem for Brazil is Brazilians! The biggest problem for Argentina is Argentinians!  The biggest problem for Nicaragua is Nicaraguans and so on and so on!!  They never learn. They should never be allowed to come to this country and vote for more failure!

Hard-Left (Communist) governments have caused untold suffering in modern history due the failures of their Leftist ideologies.The failure rate is 100%.

And the Left never learns or changes and this is what makes them evil. The current Pope, as an example, remains an avowed Socialist in outlook even after the damage and destruction caused by Socialism in his own country of Argentina. Fidel and Raul never changed. Why would they? In communism and socialism, only the elites and those "connected" at the top benefit. The "people" just suffer, then suffer even more.

And remember, Socialism is just Communism-lite. Big government and a predominance of central planning is Socialism. Europe and China are in this category. We even have that in the USA to a large degree. Socialism results in the same misery as hard-Left Communism, it just takes longer to get to the point of collapse. But collapse it does.  

Armstrong: Even US Judicial System Hopelessly Corrupted

I've asked if America is a failed state.  And I also noted during the 2016 election season that the Deep State Democrats were already engaging in a Coup d'Etat against Trump and his candidacy.  All those comments have "aged" very well indeed. This seditious and treasonous Coup efforts continue to this day.  I believe that Trump will have to declare a National Emergency or some form of Marshall Law to clean up our government.  Sadly, the damage is extreme, the corruption is so extensive that it might be better to burn down the entire government and start all over.  We really do need a 2nd American Revolution.

Everything is hopelessly broken in government and nothing is fixed. Nothing and no one can change it. If an outsider like Trump manages to get elected, he or she will get hounded out of office. That's what we are seeing.  Even the US judicial system is hopelessly corrupted where prosecutors have massively unfair advantage against ANY MAN. And since it's likely that all of us have committed felonies since there are so many fuzzy legal statutes, we're all only one step away from being railroaded into oblivion by an aggressive prosecutor. None of us are safe in our corrupt system. And none of us have the resources to fight the government and it's unlimited resources. Just ask any black man! Just ask Trump!!

Take Michael Cohen, Trump's former lawyer.  He's being forced to "confess" to "crimes" in a plea deal written entirely BY THE PROSECUTOR or else he'll be locked away for the rest of his life.  All this thanks to the angry, corrupt Democrats: Mueller's fake investigations and fake allegations built on fake dossiers and fake FISA warrants!  All this to overthrow the Constitutional election of Donald J. Trump. Am I in the old Soviet Union??  No, this is our failed-state America where lies are built on top of lies by professional liars to mislead everyone.

Here's Martin Armstrong's take on Cohen's case and the lessons contained therein:

"Lanny Davis is the attorney representing Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen. Here is a lesson in legal wordsmithing. This attorney Mr. Davis cleverly avoids any direct answer and the press does not even understand his answer. He specifically states that Cohen did not plead in his own word, that the prosecutors wrote the script to which he has to plead or go to jail for decades. He keeps saying (listen closely) that the “prosecutors are saying” to which Cohen “agreed” under oath. The oath part is absolutely absurd for 97 percent of ALL federal convictions plead to whatever the prosecutor tells them to say. If you do not, you go to prison for most of your life. In the 1970s, the conviction rate was 72%. Today, it is 98.7%. Whatever someone says in a plea deal is NEVER the truth. It is what the prosecutor demands you say. This is no different from the Spanish Inquisition. Over 11 million people are arrested every year and less than 4% of the people in federal prison are even there for violence. (full interview)

The conviction rate in Federal Court has EXCEEDED the most notorious court in history where you were determined to be a Jew under Hitler, which had a 90% conviction rate. So the American “just-us” system has beaten even Adolf Hitler. The Spanish Inquisition was notorious for torture. If you refused to plead, you were tortured until you did or you died in the process. The records are by no means complete. One study found that of 44,674 cases, there were 826 executions of people burned alive. The problem was simple. Once convicted, they took all your property.

Today, the United States extracts pleas from people with MENTAL TORTURE. You face 100 years in prison or you plead. They subjected people at Guantanamo Bay to “waterboarding” and NOTHING they ever do will any judge call it torture. During the war in Iraq, both the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency were engaged in torturing people. They violated human rights of the detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. These violations included both physical and sexual abuse, torture, rape, sodomy, and murder. If it were not for a leak of photos, they would never have been caught. The propaganda is always America wears the white hat and would NEVER violate human rights – good one! When judges are former prosecutors appointed by Congress, there will NEVER be any independent checks and balances. They all work for the same team.

The land of the free, home of the brave, and justice for all is now just propaganda. Lanny Davis is against Trump personally and that should be no surprise. He even stated in his interview he wouldNOT represent Cohen unless he flipped against Trump. Claiming that money was given to these two women that were above campaign limits is really a stretch. If Trump paid him personally, it was not campaign funds. This is really a desperate measure on the part of the prosecutors in this case working to feed Cohen to Muller where he will say now whatever they tell him.

This is all about refilling the swamp. It DOES NOT MAKE it a crime just because Cohen pleads. It is only a crime when a jury renders that verdict. This is the Deep State conniving to take down Trump with every trick in the book. They hate him because he is an OUTSIDER. If Putin were to be able to interrogate American intelligence officers who may have been involved with Safra to take over Russia when he stated it was about Russia’s “sovereignty” then the Deep State would be exposed. They will do whatever it takes to prevent the truth ever to surface.

Just listen closely and you will here Lanny Davis states that it is the “prosecutors” who wrote the script and his client “agreed” under “oath” just like the Spanish Inquisition. You will also hear in the full interview Davis say he was personally offended as was Cohen with Trump agreeing with Putin. This is an all-out war to drive Trump from office and to cover up what has been going on behind the scenes. What are they so desperate to protect?"

Doug here once again:  Is there anything about this country left to save? 

Democratic Party Devolving Along With It's Members and Society

Time Magazine asks a very pertinent question: "Do Democrats Matter?"

Unfortunately, the answer is no. It's because Democrats stand for nothing but phony causes, false narratives, wrong ideas and incorrect solutions to fake problems. Since they don't stand for anything, the only thing left is to lie, smear, mislead, and mis-inform. After Trump's surprise election, they've had nothing but pointless rallies and have started a fact-free witch-hunt akin to a McCarthyism to blame Russia for their own and Hillary's incompetence. All that is left for them to do is to stir up trouble.

The Democrats have basically hitched their wagons to the decaying, yes devolving, US black "community" that is mired in stupidity, crime, STDs, derelict dads, murder and a lot of really, really bad ideas. Much of this decay is caused by the Democratic Party itself.

For many Democrats, they are now the "anti-white" party in a country of 70% white persons. Black panther-want-to-be Keith Ellison was almost the DNC chair and, with his connection to Nation of Islam, Farrakhan, etc, I can only imagine what he thinks of white people. Today's epicenter of racism is solidly black in color. The previous DNC chair, Donna Brazile, was a proven liar and cheater who replaced the disgraceful Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Tom Perez is true dolt but slightly better than racist Ellison. What a bunch of losers!

Numerous members of the Congressional Black Caucus have called for impeachment of Trump mere weeks after the inauguration, showing that they are as stupid as can be imagined--only worse. These people are true useful idiots, morons and fools. Idiots!

Dems have also hitched themselves to every other falling star known to mankind. From Morons by Robert Gore:

The Dems have also hitched their wagons double-tight to other falling stars that have already blazed their brightest: the mainstream media (MSM), the intelligence community, and academia. Just like Hollywood, the MSM’s stock in trade is make-believe, and just like Hollywood the MSM’s numbers are dwindling. It shed even the pretense of impartiality this last election, destroying what was left of its credibility while pontificating on “fake news.”

Democrats hate guns and try to portray white NRA members to be a public menace, but it's black Democrats who are the public menace in every major city with a large black community. The real problem is mostly black men, at 6% of the population, who are committing the vast majority of gun crimes and felony murders nationwide. But radical political correctness (lying), another characteristic of the current liberal crowd, prevents any mention of these "inconvenient" facts.

And thanks to the great Muslim apologist Obama, the Democrats are now staunch defenders of the truly devolving Medieval Death Cult (Islam) who have killed or wounded millions of innocents and others worldwide just in recent decades alone. Substantial minorities (8 to 35%) of Muslims overseas believe in violence -- which is obvious to everyone except to Obama and all the other idiot Democrats.

Now, the collapsing, disastrous anti-white party, the Democrats are ALL about irrelevant or phony causes and all of their solutions are completely wrong. For example, at a time when the nation is careening to a debt-fueled financial supernova, Obama Dems focused on the transgendered bathroom non-issue, which might affect the 0.03% of Americans who are transgendered, These people are the very definition of irrelevant.

Another example, there is no "war on women. There is a wage gap but it's not discrimation. Essentially all of the "pay gap"is due to women's choices --- usually family-friendly choices. For example, how many women do you know work on oil drilling rigs, or in a coal mine, or drive trucks? Women aren't doing demanding and dangerous jobs. They work less hours too. The whole "war on women" narrative is bullshit.

But under Obama Democrats started many damaging REAL wars: a war on business (and jobs) by endless barrages of needless regulation, a war on police departments across the nation, definitely a war on WHITE police -- meaning they also started a race war. The entire Obama administration was about agitation, division and fake causes. The end of the Obama/Hillary administration left us nearly with REAL war with Russia over their massively failed foreign policies in general and in Syria.

Democrats are hysterical, irrational and wrong about global warming. Since they have no religion rooted in a real tradition, they worship at the altar of "climate change." Democrats and no one else seems to understand that "fixing" climate change won't be done because it CAN'T be done. Al Gore himself said that it would take $70 TRILLION just to halt any further mild effects global warming. This is so far beyond what is feasible that it's a complete joke. Even if $70 Trillion were somehow managed to be financed and the money spent, the earth might not warm any further, but no one would be able to see or feel a difference as it's so insignificant. The slightly elevated temperatures won't go down. And interest payments on $70 T would be $2 or $3 TRILLION per year. This is the entire US Federal tax revenue collected in a single year! Can't happen!

Democrats hate fossil fuels but, by they oppose any nuclear power opportunities like Thorium MSRs showing they are ill-informed, irrational, anti-progress and wholly unfit to govern!

Free college was basically the only proposal by Hillary or Bernie this past election (other than more government spending, or as they say "investment"--which is bullshit).  But the US government has already vastly inflated college tuition caused by vast amount of Federal loan money flowing into colleges, universities and for-profit schools.  All this money has allowed a vast increase of unqualified kids attending college. It resembles a welfare scheme to keep kids busy because there are few jobs, but an entire generation of young people is now saddled with debt. Over half of these kids aren't even performing at 12th grade academic levels. Some 80% of black kids and 50% of white kids don't measure-up to even 12th grade proficiency levels and therefore probably don't belong at college at all--- unless you think that college should function as remedial high schools. And, yes, colleges are happily taking the money, jacking up tuition fees and are more than happy to be glorified high schools.  But both Hillary and Bernie want even more unqualified kids in "college" through unfordable "free college" promises. Never mind that student loan money has already inflated the cost of college to the moon and priced-out the next generation of students, Hillary and Bernie want even more of the same!!  Fools!! Morons!

Democratic "leaders" show false rage about wealth inequality, but they themselves are millionaires and beneficiaries of millionaire donors. These fakers never mention the out-of-control Federal Reserve (and out-of-control govt spending) that is creating wealth inequality. The truth is they really don't care and don't have a clue either.  Cuba has done a fine job of solving the wealth inequality "problem". After 50 years of glorious revolution, the average wage in Cuba is $25 PER MONTH but the Castro brothers have $billions. Socialists/Democrats want this for America.

ObamaCare was a pack of lies. Every argument for the law was a lie and they knew it. Our national government is failing at everything, but Democrats still want more government. All the entitlements and pensions are rapidly careening to disaster as the worker-to-beneficiary ratio collapses. Debt keeps rising much faster than the economy and financial crisis is nearly assured. Lax immigration policies in our dangerous world is literally insane, but "open borders" are the platform of the Democrats. Democrats see as worthy martyrs the likes of thug Michael Brown in Ferguson or Eric Garner despite that those guys proven to be thug-ass criminals.

Hillary, Schumer and Bernie and all the rest are just morons with no real solutions and don't even acknowledge or understand our real problems.

Democrats are devolving right along with their constituents and our society. It's no wonder that they are no good.

Robert Gore: The Democrats and Deep State Must be Crushed

From Robert Gore:

There can be no better advertisement against Democrats, neoconservatives, and never-Trumpers than their display after the Helsinki summit. Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.

The Democrats’ destruction began long before Trump. They are wholly associated with government, their answer to all problems and the source of their identity and power. Where they once had a healthy hostility towards the military and the intelligence agencies, they are now among their stoutest defenders. Their ideology, such as it is, is simply more: more government, taxes, laws, regulations, revenues, power, surveillance, wars, and programs, in short, more blob.

Democrats and government is not just a marriage of convenience. They believe, to the core of their being, in its power with a fervor and conviction that surpasses most religious faith. Denied control of the government, they are fish on the bank, deprived of their element, flopping helplessly. The cardinal sin of whatever opposition they face is never rooted in ideology, it’s rather that the opposition has the temerity to seek control of their government.

Somewhere along the line Democrats quit caring, or even asking, whether government worked. The first Mayor Richard Daley may have been a distasteful autocrat, but Chicago during his reign called itself the city that worked. Democrats have had lengthy tenures over cities that manifestly don’t work—Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, Cleveland, New Orleans, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and now Chicago—in some cases they’re crumbling. Governance has become an exercise in patronage, payola, and making excuses, the effectiveness of city-provided services not even on the list of concerns.

Obamacare has been the apotheosis of Democrat-sponsored incompetence. It’s the latest in a long string of government failures, epitomized by the huge stack of debt and unfunded promises, and disastrous military interventions. Government über alles has become an albatross for its believers, particularly the Democrats, although there are many Republican acolytes.

The age of centralization and government is passing, cause of death the centrifugal devolution of information, computing and communications power, and weaponry to individuals. Governments will mount repressive rearguard actions, but they can’t fight the central reality of our time: they have failed, massively, and are unable to contain the fallout and blowback. Globalism—more of the same, only bigger—is running into resistance that’s still gathering steam. Just wait until the world’s debt-based financial system and economy collapse.

The Democrats have hitched their wagon to a falling star. When facts are uncongenial, take refuge in fantasy. Democrats embrace the whimsical notion that Hillary Clinton deserved to win the 2016 election. She had to cheat to beat Bernie Sanders, a socialist who would further yoke the party to the falling star. It’s charitable to call her record undistinguished. If she weren’t Bill Clinton’s wife she’d have no record at all. She had trouble citing accomplishments or detailing a program. Her campaign was inept, crowned by the “deplorables” insult that cost her the election.

The Democrats’ academic branch office and intellectual vanguard has gone farthest off the deep end. Socialists in training demand free (to them) higher education, and free (to them) housing and medical care plus a guaranteed income once they’re out of school. Who pays for all this in a country carrying $200 trillion plus in debt and unfunded obligations? Not their problem—they issue demands, not solutions.

From once illustrious institutions has come an exciting panoply of newly discovered gender variations—with matching pronouns—and sexual deviancies. No minority group claiming victimhood and mouthing the required pieties is too small for the solicitous concern of campus social justice warriors. Anyone who questions socialism, identity politics, or mandated tolerance is met with an intolerant storm of vitriol that increasingly transmutes into violence.

The left’s signature issues resonate with perhaps 30 percent of the electorate. Russiagate gets a rise out of even less. Yet these burning issues are the horses the Democrat will ride come November.

Some are inclined to write off the Trump-Russia collusion story as yet another fantasy, irrelevant to most Americans, but it’s much more than that. That it’s pure concoction finds ultimate confirmation in one simple fact: its proponents have not offered a scintilla of actual proof.

We’ve had assessments, assertions, maybes, might haves, could haves, and “informed” speculation; a remote “hack” that couldn’t be a remote hack, but rather an onsite download because of the high transmission speed; a Democratic-funded dossier used as the basis of a FISA court surveillance request and its subsequent renewals; indictments against potential defendants who will never be tried; banner headlines for and endless media trumpeting of inconsequential developments, and prosecutions and plea bargains that have nothing to do with the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia.

They’ve thrown everything but the kitchen sink at this gargoyle, but the kitchen sink for which reasonable people keep looking is any hard evidence from those who bear the burden of proof that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. As SLL has said from the beginning, the story is pathetically flimsy, a sign of its purveyors’ weakness, not strength. It’s driven not by Russophobia, but prosecution-phobia. Washington broke into insane hysteria the night of November 6, 2016 not because Donald Trump said he’d seek better relations with Russia, but because of his catchphrase: “Drain the Swamp!”

Trump knows or suspects where some of the bodies are buried, and the powers that be fear he’ll go after them for everything from garden-variety graft, bribery, theft, and influence peddling to crimes as sordid as child molestation and murder.
“Plot Holes,” SLL, 2/26/17

Corruption and criminality have been a way of life in Washington for decades. Trump is clearly a threat.

This, not the fear that Trump will revise US policy towards Russia, is behind the Deep State’s cold sweat, motivating its hysterical—comical if wasn’t so serious—campaign to depose him. This is the first time it has faced an unfriendly in the White House, with presidential powers to investigate, expose, prosecute, scandalize, and ruin.
“Plot Holes”

Trump has driven his opposition batshit crazy. Drowning in their own fetid fantasies and irretrievable irrelevance, he’s got an opportunity to throw them anchors. It’s the perfect time to go on the offensive.

If the economy and stock market hold up, if the US doesn’t invade anybody, and if no nuclear bombs drop between now and November, the Democratic blue wave will be just another one of their fantasies. The election may well amount to an endorsement of Trump. However, nothing is set in stone and if the blue wave does materialize, Trump guarantees himself two years of headaches and obstruction, at best, and impeachment—if rabid Democrats get their way—at worse. Forget about any prosecution of the Deep State and the clowns who have led its inept coup, it could be Trump wearing the new black.

Taking Rand Paul’s suggestion and revoking the security clearances for some of those clowns—John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Susan Rice, Michael Hayden, and Andrew McCabe—would be a powerful first step. It signals that something more serious—indictment and prosecution—may be on the way. He would be moving against enemies who have so overplayed their weak hand they’ve actually increased his support. Although there would be plenty of flack, especially from the captured media, the majority of Americans would applaud the move.

It would send another, subtextual message as well. It turns the treason calumny against those who have so irresponsibly used it.

You take away security clearances from people who pose a security threat. These conspirators are part of a cabal trying to remove the legitimately elected president of the United States. They are using their Russiagate concoction to oppose at every turn any attempt by Trump to improve relations with the one country on the planet that has as many nuclear weapons as the US. This dangerous, arrogant, and corrupt cabal represents a grave threat to what remains of the rule of law, the institution of the presidency, and the life of every American.

They must be stopped. It’s time for Trump to stop them.

Kunstler on the Deep State's War on Trump

From Kunstler's Clusterfuck Nation:

It was refreshing to read the response of Federal Judge T. S. Ellis III to a squad of prosecutors from Robert Mueller’s office who came into his Alexandria, Virginia, court to open the case against Paul Manafort, erstwhile Trump campaign manager, for money-laundering shenanigans dating as far back as 2005. Said response by the judge being: “You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud. You really care about getting information that Mr. Manafort can give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump and lead to his prosecution or impeachment or whatever.”

Judge Ellis’s concise summation was like a spring zephyr clearing out a long winter’s fog of unreality in our national politics — the idea that Mueller’s mission has been anything but the Deep State’s ongoing crusade to nullify the 2016 election. In the meantime of the past year, Mueller has been additionally burdened by obvious misconduct in the FBI and its parent agency, the Department of Justice, which makes Mueller himself look like the instrument of a cover-up, or at least a massive organized distraction from the misdeeds of the Deep State itself.

I was never a Trump supporter or voter, but it seems to me he deserves to succeed or fail as President on his own merits (or lack of). It’s much more disturbing to me to see the runaway train that federal prosecution has turned into, along with orchestrated intrigues of FBI and DOJ officials at the highest level. These are of a piece with the creeping surveillance of all Americans, and the collusion of multiple intelligence agencies with social media companies and what used to be the respectable organs of the news, especially The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN — all of which are behaving like Grand Inquisitors in a medieval religious hysteria.

Judge Ellis’s remarks also speak to a growing consensus that the Russia “collusion” or “meddling” story is a phantom, if not a fabrication of the FBI itself, and that Robert Mueller’s appointment to investigate it was illegitimate from the start. In any case, it seems, for now, to be going nowhere, except maybe ricocheting back at itself — because more and more it looks like Mueller is there only to defend the reputation of the agency. Also, for now, the FBI and DOJ are engaged in a war of wills with both houses of congress. Senator Charles Grassley, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and members of the House Intelligence Committee are battling Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for official documents that he refuses to produce. It only makes the FBI and DOJ look like rogue agencies.

Now Judge Ellis is asking to see unredacted memoranda spelling out Mueller’s exact commission as Special Counsel, to determine just where his authority begins and ends. Ellis is apparently familiar with the stratagems casually employed by overzealous federal prosecutors that can look like dirty pool — for instance, turning witnesses with janky charges, setting perjury traps, or, in the separate case of General Flynn, threatening to bankrupt a person for lawyers’ fees to defend himself against Mickey Mouse charges.

The Deep State — and when I use that term, I mean the swollen, entrenched, permanent federal bureaucracy and their water-carrier corps of lobbyists, policy wonks, contractors, and media mouthpieces — may not get away with this inquisition. It’s possible that Judge Ellis may, at least, send the Manafort case to a different jurisdiction, the US Attorney for the Eastern District Court of Virginia, if he doesn’t throw the case out altogether on the grounds of prosecutorial overreach. The latter would be a blow against Special Counsel Mueller. It ought to be grounds for his dismissal. And what’s left of the Russia case after that? General Flynn’s guilty plea for lying to FBI agents about whether he had a conversation with the Russian ambassador?

Behind the disintegrating RussiaGate campaign is a much deeper, darker swamp of official misconduct at the FBI and DOJ, for which there is already a ton of evidence that has been made public and which seems worthy of prosecution.

Re-Post From 2012: Ridiculous Chinese Claims On S. China Sea

With a three aircraft carrier flotilla heading right now to disputed waters to challenge China, I thought it might be useful to re-post this explanation of how we've gotten to this ridiculous position. It's all Chinese insanity. The Chinese are insane mercantilists (unfair traders who basically block imports, except raw commodities, from most of their trading partners and run huge trade surpluses to enrich themselves). Then they make absurd claims on ALL of the South China Sea including territorial waters that many neighboring countries are lawfully exploiting.  A tribunal in The Hague has ruled against these ridiculous claims on the entire S.China Sea. The Chinese have overstepped. They have one old aircraft carrier that they brought from the Russians. But they are building more. It's time to stop their unfair trade and their unfair claims.

Here's the re-post:

Have a look at a map showing Chinese territorial claims versus claims of it's SE Asian neighbors. (UNCLOS, referenced in the map below, is an acronym for UN Convention on Law of the Sea.)  Most of the world operates within the UNCLOS agreement which gives each country the right to exploit waters out to 200 miles for their own exclusive economic use. It is the basis for every offshore leasing programs for every country in the world including the US. Only China is making ridiculous claims that contradict the UNCLOS.

Obviously this is outrageous. It is also totally inconsistent with any modern maritime agreement or tradition. The Spratlys and Paracels islands are basically uninhabited, but the Chinese have made a big "show" by recently putting a military garrison on one of them. From the New York Times

China recently established a larger army garrison and expanded the size of an ostensible legislature to govern a speck of land, known as Yongxing Island, more than 200 miles southeast of Hainan. The goal of that move...is to allow Beijing to “exercise sovereignty over all land features inside the South China Sea,” including more than 40 islands “now occupied illegally” by Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia.

In the past several weeks, China has steadily increased its pressure, sending patrols with bigger ships and issuing persistent warnings in government-controlled newspapers for Washington to stop supporting its Asian friends against China.

Not only are their claims ridiculous and unreasonable, now the Chinese are using military force and intimidation to defend the ridiculous. As recently as July 2012, there was a stand-off with China and the Philippines recently regarding a Chinese show of force near the Scarborough Shoals off of the Philippines (see map above). Both sides had military vessels in the area and tensions were running high.

All of this is about oil and gas resources by the way. Vietnam has ongoing offshore leasing, exploration and production activities that include foreign operating companies within their 200 mile limit (just like the rest of the world). According to The Economist:

On June 21st Vietnam's parliament passed a maritime law that reasserted the country's claims to the Spratly and Paracel Islands (see map below). China called this a “serious violation” of its sovereignty. It responded by declaring that a county-level government which supposedly governs the two archipelagoes and much of the rest of the South China Sea from one of the Paracel Islands, had been upgraded to the administrative level of a prefecture. Chinese media described this notional jurisdiction, Sansha, as by far the biggest prefecture in the country (though its population of a few hundred people is heavily outnumbered by gulls and its ill-defined territory is mostly water). Some Chinese internet users speculated excitedly about who might be appointed mayor, but reports on some websites that a 45-year-old hydrologist had got the job were later dismissed as a spoof.

Tensions rose further with an announcement late last month by CNOOC, a Chinese state-owned oil company, that it was opening nine blocks in what China calls the South Sea to international bids for oil and gas exploration. These reach to within 37 nautical miles (68km) of Vietnam's coast, according to PetroVietnam, a Vietnamese state-owned oil firm.

The association of Southeast Asian Nations, ASEAN, met several weeks ago and the Chinese, with the help of Chinese client-state Cambodia, squashed all evidence that this conflict was even discussed much less settled. I don't know who the Chinese think they're kidding. Do they think the rest of the world is stupid?

From The Economist:

The American statement backs the multilateral approach to the disputes championed by ASEAN. Its members are still smarting over their failure—for the first time in the organisation’s 45-year history—to agree on a joint statement after their annual foreign ministers’ meeting, which they held last month in Phnom Penh. It was blocked because Cambodia, a faithful Chinese client, refused to accept wording on the South China Sea demanded by some of its fellow members.

China are communist imperialistic pigs hellbent on driving their economy forward at breakneck speed because the communist party's only legitimacy is that they are creating jobs for their citizens. This includes running roughshod over the environment, human rights, trade policies, their own citizens and/or international law.  They will do anything to stay in power.  They even threaten their SE Asia neighbors with raw and unlawful displays of military force. To feed their perverted drive for legitimacy, they'll distort world's commodity, currency and financial markets and they'll also do anything to hush and silence critics. We see the true colors of the Chinese Regime at work here. 

It's time to stop their unfair trade and their unfair claims.  I hope Trump takes them on.

Dem's Plan to to Assure Electoral Dominance: Make the US a 3rd World Shit-hole

From Julia Hahn at Brietbart from 2015:

Fifty years ago today, Ted Kennedy began changing the face of the United States by ushering the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act through Congress. That legislation resulted in the fundamental transformation of the demographic, economic, social, and political landscape of nation, exactly the opposite of what its supporters promised.

The Kennedy immigration law abolished the national origins quota system, which had favored immigrants from nations with a similar heritage to our own, and opened up American immigration visas to the entire world.

While about nine in ten of the immigrants who came to the United States during the 19th and 20th century hailed from Europe, the 1965 law inverted that figure. Today about 9 out of every 10 new immigrants brought into the country on green cards come from Latin America, Africa, Asia or the Middle East.

The size of the numbers also grew exponentially as well. According to Pew Research Center, 59 million immigrants entered the United States following the Act’s passage. Including their children, that added 72 million new residents to the U.S. population.

In 1965, according to Pew, the country was 84 percent white, 11 percent black, 4 percent Hispanic and less than 1 percent Asian.

In 2015, as a result of Kennedy’s immigration law, the country is now 62 percent white, 12 percent black, 18 percent Hispanic and 6 percent Asian.

Pew projects that in forty years time, “no racial or ethnic group will constitute a majority of the U.S. population,” as “whites are projected to become less than half of the U.S. population by 2055.” Therefore, by 2065, the nation would be 46 percent white, 24 percent Hispanic, 14 percent Asian and 13 percent black.

Moving forward, Pew projects, births to current Americans will be vastly outnumbered by new arrivals unless Congress hits the “pause” button on issuing new green cards. If that doesn’t happen, Pew projects an immigration flow so large that nine-tenths of all new residents will be immigrants or their children. In a 2012 report, the Center for Immigration Studies observed that: “if the level of immigration the Census Bureau foresees in 2050 were to continue after that date, the U.S. population would reach 618 million by 2100 — double the 2010 population.”

Those numbers could go even higher as many politicians, most notably Senator Marco Rubio, are pushing to dramatically expand the number of green cards, foreign workers and refugees. These limitless immigration expansions are sought by donors who want to keep workers’ salaries as low as possible.

Today, after five decades of large-scale immigration, real average wages are lower than they were in 1973, shortly after the green card gusher began.

Because foreign workers do jobs for such low pay, their incomes are padded with welfare. A census data report authored by the nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies recently found that “immigrant households use welfare at significantly higher rates than native households,” with more than half of U.S. immigrants on welfare.

Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald has observed foreign-born Hispanics and their American-born children use welfare at rates which vastly exceed those of native-born whites. “Native-born Hispanics collected welfare at over twice the rate as native-born whites,” Mac Donald writes.

Moreover, the Hispanic population accounted for almost the entire increase in poverty from 1990 to 2004. As Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson has reported:

The number of Hispanics with incomes below the government’s poverty line [rose] 52 percent; that [represents] almost all (92 percent) of the increase in poor people,” Samuelson writes. “Among children, disparities are greater. Over the same period, Hispanic children in poverty [rose] 43 percent; meanwhile, the numbers of black and non-Hispanic white children in poverty declined 16.9 percent and 18.5 percent, respectively.

The impact of the Kennedy-backed bill is also evident on the nation’s education system. After five decades of providing visas to poor nations, a majority of public school students are minorities, a majority of students now qualify for subsidized school lunches, and U.S. test scores have plummeted. As the liberal-website Vox recently observed:

The results for last year’s SAT test-takers are in, and they’re not good: the lowest on record in the last decade… The pool of test takers is more likely to include poor and nonwhite students than before… SAT-takers have become more racially diverse, largely because a greater share of test-takers are Hispanic now than in the past. The share of students from poor families and those who learned English as a second language have increased… as the pool of test-takers has gotten more diverse and poorer than in the past, the average score has fallen slightly from year to year. To some extent, that’s to be expected.

Increased spending, combined with race-based affirmative action policies, have been widely instituted to try to equalize the results between white and soon-to-be-majority students. But the “achievement gap” remains.

The failing schools, in turn, feed into gangs.

As Heather Mac Donald explains:

California, with one-quarter of the nation’s immigrants and its greatest concentration of Mexicans and Central Americans, is the bellwether state for all things relating to unbridled Hispanic immigration, including crime. The Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, conducted by sociologists Alejandro Portes of Princeton and Rubén G. Rumbaut of the University of California, Irvine, followed the children of immigrants in San Diego and Miami from 1992 to 2003. A whopping 28 percent of Mexican-American males between the ages of 18 and 24 reported having been arrested since 1995, and 20 percent reported having been incarcerated—a rate twice that of other immigrant groups. Anyone who speaks to Hispanic students in immigrant-saturated schools in Southern California will invariably hear the estimate that 50 percent of a student’s peers have ended up in gangs or other criminal activities.

Repost From 2014: China Causing More Trouble in SE Asia; Sticks a Fat Finger in Obama's 'Asia Pivot' Eye

In a heavy-handed move to assert broad and outrageous territorial claims, there are now 86 Chinese vessels, ships and an oil rig inside of Vietnam's offshore territorial waters. Local news reports that 3 Chinese military ships are surrounding a Vietnamese marine police vessel this morning and water cannon use continues against Vietnamese ships.

In response, in the past two days, there has been rioting by Vietnamese people against Chinese businesses in both the North and South of the country.  From Reuters,

Thousands of Vietnamese set fire to foreign factories and rampaged through industrial zones in Binh Duong and Dong Nai provinces near Ho Chi Minh City on Tuesday, officials said. Protests continued on Wednesday.

The doctor at a hospital in central Ha Tinh province said five Vietnamese workers and 16 other people described as Chinese were killed on Wednesday night in rioting, one of the worst breakdowns in Sino-Vietnamese relations since the neighbors fought a brief border war in 1979.

"There were about a hundred people sent to the hospital last night. Many were Chinese [Sadly many were Taiwanese who were mistaken for mainland Chinese.]  More are being sent to the hospital this morning," the doctor at Ha Tinh General Hospital told Reuters by phone.

Hundreds of Chinese working in the zones have fled, most to neighboring Cambodia and others by air.

"Yesterday more than 600 Chinese people from Vietnam crossed at Bavet international checkpoint into Cambodia," Cambodian National Police spokesman Kirt Chantharith told Reuters.   Bavet is on a highway stretching from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's commercial centre, to Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh.

Why are the people so mad?  Well, maybe it's because, China claims the ENTIRE South China Sea as THEIRS -- not giving a damn that most nations abide by the UNCLOS  (the UN Convention on Law of the Sea) economic exclusion zone of 200 nautical miles.  Have a look at a map below showing Chinese territorial claims versus claims of it's SE Asian neighbors.

Most of this is about potential oil and gas resources by the way.  Vietnam has very active offshore leasing, exploration and production activities including foreign operating companies in their 200 mile economic exclusion zone (like many countries around the world), and according to The Economist

On June 21, 2012 Vietnam's parliament passed a maritime law that reasserted the country's claims to the Spratly and Paracel Islands (see map below). China called this a “serious violation” of its sovereignty. It responded by declaring that a county-level government which supposedly governs the two archipelagoes and much of the rest of the South China Sea from one of the Paracel Islands, had been upgraded to the administrative level of a prefecture. Chinese media described this notional jurisdiction, Sansha, as by far the biggest prefecture in the country (though its population of a few hundred people is heavily outnumbered by gulls and its ill-defined territory is mostly water). Some Chinese internet users speculated excitedly about who might be appointed mayor, but reports on some websites that a 45-year-old hydrologist had got the job were later dismissed as a spoof.

Tensions rose further with an announcement late last month by CNOOC, a Chinese state-owned oil company, that it was opening nine blocks in what China calls the South Sea to international bids for oil and gas exploration. These reach to within 37 nautical miles (68km) of Vietnam's coast, according to PetroVietnam, a Vietnamese state-owned oil firm.

China has been inflaming the region with their outrageous territorial claims for years.  They have even used military force and intimidation in recent years to step on it's regional neighbors.  As recently as July 2012, there was a stand-off with China and the Philippines recently regarding the Scarborough Shoals off of the Philippines (see map above).  Both sides had military vessels in the area and tensions ran high.

Add the fact that China claimed a wide air exclusion zone far outside of it's boundaries which disrupted international air travel routes and affecting Japan.  The Chinese are also claiming the disputed Senaku islands that are also claimed by Japan. The US has nothing to challenge this thanks to our timid leadership.

So, everyone in SE Asia now hates the Chinese (and Japan).  But at least Japan has been a good neighbor for the past 70 years.

All of this is more evidence that the post-WWII world order is under serious assault due, in part, to Obama's intentional effort to weaken US influence abroad.  Weak or inept leadership invites bad behavior by the world's bad actors.  It leads to wars not peace.   Obama's laughable "Asia Pivot" is a case in point.  It's obviously laughable to the Chinese. The oil rig placement was done just after Obama's region-wide tour and was done seemingly to poke a finger in his face.  As to weak and/or inept leadership, think about Putin's triumphs in Syria and Ukraine. The Chinese continue to provoke nearly all of it's SE Asian neighbors plus Japan despite the US "Asia pivot" promises (while Obama reduces our military strength like the good Liberal that he is).   

China are communist imperialistic, mercantilist pigs bent on driving their economy forward at breakneck speed -- all in the name of "GDP."  This is necessary because the communist party's only claim to legitimacy is creating jobs and a modicum of hope for their citizens (while racking up massive debts, accumulating huge trade surpluses and foreign currency reserves vis-a-vis with everyone else). They will do anything to stay in power. This includes running roughshod over the environment, human rights, their own citizens, trading partners and international law.  They even will threaten their SE Asia neighbors with raw displays of military force.  To feed their perverted drive for legitimacy (because they are illegitimate), they'll distort world's commodity, currency and financial markets and they'll also do anything to hush and silence critics. We see the true colors of the Chinese Regime at work here. 

A Theology For the 21st Century: Simple But Powerful

In my blog posts entitled "A Theology for the 21st Century," "A Theology for the 21st Century: Faith is not Believing the Unbelievable" and "A Theology for the 21st Century: An Open Letter to Atheists and Non-Believers", I have tried to briefly explain a few aspects of my faith underpinnings mostly formed about 40 years ago during my college years.

In these blog posts, I occasionally intimate that traditional religions go too far with their complicated dogmas and are too confident or too certain in their proclamations. And their use of religious language is too rigid, too rote and often stale or uninspiring. Too many literally interpret the Bible without understanding the many problems with ancient languages & linguistics and the difficulty in understanding the ancient cultures and their history. Finally, we must recognize the use of myths throughout the Bible yet still appreciate and understand their important meanings and symbolism. Biblical literalism or fundamentalism is a dangerous Biblio-idolatry. All of our scriptures come from very ancient times after all, so none of this should be a surprise. Scholars can and do spend their entire lifetimes studying the Bible and the cultures of that time.

Some people might read the posts in this series and accuse me of being "Chrisitan-lite" or that I am a Christian apologetic. I'm OK with that. Everyone is entitled to their opinions.  But there's something to be said about not going too far and keeping it simple. Even simple theological principles can do wonders.

Take Alcoholics Anonymous for example. They lay out a simple 12 step plan that includes the most minimal theology imaginable, a good bit of wisdom and a simple emphasis on community. These 12 steps and the resulting small communities of self-professed "sinners" have changed millions of lives and saved millions from the ruin of alcohol or drug addiction worldwide.  Here's the 12 steps:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take a personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Like the 10 commandments, these 12 steps contain enough inspiration and wisdom to have saved millions of lives worldwide since 1935. The basics are a) acknowledging God as you understand him. b) You must make an honest moral inventory of ourselves and c) Confessing to God your sins d) asking God to help remove our sins and e) making amends to people you're wronged and asking forgiveness. They let each person define what God is to them -- not much dogma there!

Here's the biggest thing: it is that like-minded people, who have admitted their sins, get together as a community where they must be honest with themselves, God and other members, share the common theology outlined above and work toward physical and spiritual health. As a community they are committed to helping each other. Most people in AA have a sponsor who is available at anytime to help someone else if they are in trouble, at risk of relapse or in crisis.

Remember, community is really the same as church. AA is a type of Church then. 

The magic is a) accepting a higher power in our lives, that we are powerless or even insane without this understanding (beware Atheists) b) that there is wisdom, helping and healing to be derived from prayer, c) having a realistic and truthful understanding of our faults and sins, c) sharing and helping others brings healing and growth. In fact, you could say that when two or more people who gather in His name, He is there. Helping and healing should be understood as miraculous and has a cosmic dimension.

The AA program is working around the world even in Buddhist countries who don't technically have a theology.

The other thing that supports AA's success is that many of their members come to AA at their "wits end"or at "rock bottom"where nothing else has worked, so they are powerfully motivated for change. They are ready to receive these messages. We live in time where many people are in a existential or spiritual crisis but don't have a substance abuse problem could still benefit from such a program. Anyone could. 

Alcoholics Anonymous shows how a simple a theology guiding a faith community can impact millions and millions of troubled lives all over the world. It's simple and powerful.

Diversity is a Disaster: European Edition

Western countries are in the grip of "globalist" idiot-leaders who want "diversity"-- meaning they want to erase borders and foolishly allow mass migration of peoples who are very or totally different in culture, median intelligence, language and religion into previously homogeneous cultures. I discuss this in my blog post "Homogeneous Cultures Are Peaceful: Diversity is a Disaster."

Whereas "protecting" and "promoting" blacks is one major effort of US Leftists, in Europe the most desperate propaganda and totalitarian methods are designed to "protect" and remediate the horrible reputation of the hordes of Muslim invaders that have been allowed to surge into Europe from their own failed countries.

Islam's terrible reputation is well-deserved. Their 1400 year history is full of violence and murder and it continues today with at least a dozen violent war zones occurring today around the world. Islam is much more than a religion, it's also a political movement -- really the modern day Nazi Party. They are taught to hate Jews, gays and anyone or any culture who is not Islamic. And like Nazis, they are fanatics and supremacists. This is so despite the fact that every majority Muslim country or community is either a complete failure, or nearly so. But that's why millions are fleeing into Europe: the entire Arab/Muslim culture in the Middle East is in collapse. Their "culture"is generally a massive failure with a few exceptions in Asia.

Most people, except Leftists, can see that Muslims are not even remotely compatible with liberal democracy yet this population is being championed, protected and coddled by Western Leftists who are blind to their considerable evil (including Obama). This is true even after some 35 Islamic terrorist attacks have already plagued Europe in the last 18 months alone! A smaller number of Islamic attacks have occurred in the US as well.

Only a handful of European elites have allowed this to happen, and no one else was or is given a choice or a vote.

The poster child of this idiotic fantasy and ignorance is Sweden's Leftist leader's policy of importing Arab and North African Muslims. This insane policy continues despite massive evidence that they are creating a huge cultural disaster. Leftists are stubborn, stupid people who are immune to any facts and reality that conflicts with their insane ideas. These people have essentially ruined Sweden and they must be driven from office and power by force if necessary.

This disaster is best described by a Swede:

"Sweden is in the process of destroying a civilization that took 1,000 years to build. It floods its cities with aliens who dislike the food and climate, feel uncomfortable with the taciturn, reserved Swedes around them, mostly cannot work for months or years for language reasons, and end up festering in angry and unemployment-plagued parallel societies in the suburbs. I don’t care what the stats are made to say. What I know is this. When I first stayed in Sweden, three decades ago, crime of any kind was a rarity. When I last stayed there, a few years ago, it was a daily occurrence. I don’t need BRAA reports to know that everything in Sweden has changed. You name it: murder, non-fatal shootings and stabbings, burglary, rape, rioting, vandalism, molestation, benefit swindling: all of these things are now daily occurrences in large parts of most cities, and in nearly all of Malmo. In cities, young women do not dare to go out alone at night. That’s a banal observation that hides an awful truth: Sweden has lost the most valuable thing any society can have: civic trust. For decades Swedes could trust strangers to do the right thing. Well, they can’t any more. In fact, a lot of them simply avoid certain parts of town, and look away from certain faces. That too is new. The old Sweden—the real Sweden--never really had places you could not feel safe in. But thanks to mass immigration, all that has gone, as it has gone in our country too."

This sort of unvarnished truth is hard to come by as there as a Political Correctness totalitarianism that has descended on Europe (and Sweden) by Leftist elites -- designed to manipulate the masses and hide even the most obvious truths such as the disaster of Muslim migration. And opposing opinions must be stifled by highly propagandized media messages and totalitarian "hate" laws --which are massively abused (as should be expected).  Orwell's 1984 is now a reality in Europe. A similar effort is underway in America too as the hand-full of corporate media outlets have turned into just massive liars and propagandists.

Homogeneous Cultures Are Peaceful; "Diversity" is a Disaster

Homogeneous populations are peaceful. "Diverse" populations are not peaceful but full of strife and conflict.  Diversity is never a good idea. It is in fact the cause of most of the world’s conflicts: Shia and Sunni, Jew and Arab, Hutu and Tutsi, Tamil and Sinhalese, Hindu and Muslim and, in America, black, white, and brown. "Diversity" is now causing of the dissolution of America AND Europe is next.

Wise countries like Korea and Japan have a long-standing understanding that a homogeneous culture preserves peace and relative tranquility. And it continues to work very well even today. They don't have any race riots or religious wars or any discord of one group getting welfare benefits and another grouping paying for the benefits. They have one dominant culture that includes everyone.

The US also used to be very homogeneous because US immigration policies historically preferred white, English-speaking and Christian northern Europeans for nearly our entire history. (Yes, a good amount of Asian migration too.) All of that worked beautifully because we imported people: 1) from the same highly evolved culture, 2) that are competent adults with high levels of median intelligence, 3) that have high or even unrivaled academic, moral and educational standards and achievements, 4) possess good creativity and intelligence driving huge prosperity, 5) that hold similar religious views with similar ethical traditions and a strong work ethic. For theses reasons and for most of our history, there was no state welfare system as families, local and faith communities, and local and state governments were all competent in taking care of their own. And economic freedom was so great that certain highly competent entrepreneurs (all white men) built-out our nation's entire industrial economy and infrastructure employing millions. The US government was small enough to be irrelevant.

It used to be that local communities where allowed to persist unmolested complete with various community standards --otherwise known as freedom. Kids in West Virginia went to high school during hunting season with a shot gun mounted in their trucks so they could hunt after school. Nothing like that existed in Boston or New York.

Then the Liberal Left and their activist courts intervened. Suddenly Christmas manger scenes or prayers were not allowed. The Ten Commandments can't be displayed in public buildings without challenges from insane Leftists. Homosexuality, which was quietly tolerated, is now taught to our kids at our schools (whether parents want it or not), Blacks were forced to co-exist with Whites through court-ordered desegregation.

Desegregation of previously peaceful but poor and exclusively black communities forced black kids into white high schools where 90+% can not compete with white kids. On average, Black kids are literally at the bottom of academic achievement compared to other students. Very few can perform proficiently at 12th Grade high school level. Most Blacks are not graduating from high schools leaving them with few legitimate options in our de-industrialized economy. It isn't working!  It's not changing either. You're not even "allowed" to talk about any of this.

Then in the US, the Left and Globalists allowed mass immigration of relatively uneducated, often illiterate and unskilled, non-English speaking Latinos with no financial means to come in massive numbers with all the problems that come with that---the welfare of our nation or affected communities be damned.  Of course every one of our laws governing immigration were ignored and broken. All of these people came seeking work, not holidays.  And seeking work lawfully requires work permits which, in turn, requires some evidence that the migrant can do something that native-born Americans can't do. This is true in every country in the world including the US.  I can't go to any country in the world and just settle-in or work. To immigrate to another country and work  requires that I apply in advance and show that I have financial means or a job arranged, provide a CV to show that I have desirable skills that local people in the host country don't have,  provide a police report from my home country, medical certifications and other bureaucratic hurtles.  It all must be done in advance. 

Every country on earth enforces these similarly strict rules of immigration for work or any kind of residency permissions EXCEPT stupid America. Instead in dumbass America we allow masses of people into our country who often have little to offer our country. Worse, our economy is not creating enough jobs for anyone. All this devastation to secure votes and give corporations cheap labor. I don't blame Latinos for taking advantage of our idiocy.

First generation Latino immigrants are in a somewhat better situation than native blacks as their cultural roots and family structure are much more intact. But what's never discussed is that subsequent Latino generations, where more than half don't graduate from US high schools, many turn to gangs, and illicit, criminal activity similar to ghetto blacks. The resulting black and brown ghettos are immature, uncultured, depraved, violent, primitive and basically have no place in our previously advanced civilization. Isn't diversity wonderful?

Thanks to pricks like Obama and cunts like Hillary Clinton, suddenly half our country has REALLY lost it's mind as militant Blacks, Latinos, Lesbians and various other "victims" have taken control of the Democratic Party. Now white men are under attack as the source of societies ills (also called "projection" in psychological terms). White boys and men are now supposed to become de-masculinized or they are "too white"as claimed by incredibly ignorant minorities. Females, gays and transsexuals are approved for combat duty whether it's well-advised or not. What is good for the country or military is irrelevant. Only propagating various unproven, false and nonsense memes matter ---a kind of mass insanity  These people are obsessing about and told that they can select their gender and sexual identity at will as if it were some kind of smorgasbord. All of this because the now hijacked Democratic party and the Left are profoundly ignorant, disconnected from knowledge of our cultural roots and our Judeo-Christian heritage, our history, science, psychiatry or any other facts. These ignoramuses are running rampant tearing down anything that they don't like or understand. And if you present them with facts, they want to shut you up.  What's missing from all this?  REALITY!

Ah, the fruits of "diversity."

The Left will never get it because they are utterly stupid and ignorant of, history, logic or facts. They just want to act on "feelings." They are desperate to create what they believe should be. But everything they believe is wrong! They are very disrespectful people. They hate America, they hate everything that is good and wholesome in this country and they hate anyone that disagrees with them.  They are the stupidest people on earth because they never listen and never learn. No one can tell them anything. They will never see that their agenda, including diversity, is a disaster.  They must be driven from our courts, the government, the media and must be driven from anywhere where they have power over other people by force if necessary. The Left IS the disaster.