David Brooks: How to Fix Politics

In the middle of this depressing presidential campaign I sometimes wonder, How could we make our politics better? --It’s possible to imagine an elite solution. The next president could get together with the leaders of both parties in Congress and say: “We’re going to change the way we do business in Washington. We’re going to deliberate and negotiate. We’ll disagree and wrangle, but we will not treat this as good-versus-evil blood sport.” That kind of leadership might trickle down. --But it’s increasingly clear that the roots of political dysfunction lie deep in society. If there’s truly going to be improvement, there has to be improvement in the social context politics is embedded in. Read more at New York Times Read More......

The Hidden Reason Why Americans Dislike Islam

Yesterday, YouGov and the Huffington Post released a poll showing that large majorities of Americans -- and pluralities across every political demographic -- have an "unfavorable opinion" of the Islamic faith. The numbers are simply not close.
There will be no doubt some hand-wringing about "Islamophobia" and further calls to continue the American elite's fourteen-year track record of whitewashing Islamic beliefs and culture, but I wonder if the media is missing a powerful, largely-uncovered influence on America's hearts and minds - the experience and testimony of the more than two million Americans who've served overseas since 9/11 and have experienced Islamic cultures up-close.


Read more at National Review Read More......

Culture — Not Genetics — Is the Key to Success

The prevailing social dogma of our time — that economic and other disparities among groups are strange, if not sinister — has set off bitter disputes between those who blame genetic differences and those who blame discrimination. Both sides ignore the possibility that the groups themselves may differ in their orientations, their priorities, and in what they are prepared to sacrifice for the sake of other things.


Read more at National Review Read More......

British Hospital Moves Injured RAF SGT....Because His Uniform Might Offend ‘Different Cultures’

A British hospital has apologized after twice moving a Royal Air Force sergeant out of the sight of other patients over the staff’s concern that his military uniform would offend other patients, British media reported this weekend.
According to the serviceman’s father, hospital workers told aircraft engineer Sgt. Mark Prendeville, 38, that he was moved away from other patients in a waiting room, because they thought his uniform “might upset people,” as they “have all kinds of different cultures coming in.”


Read more at the Blaze Read More......

In Sweden, Trouble in Paradise: Jihadist Trojan horses are flowing through the porous border

Lefties like to tout Sweden — a country of ten milliion people — whenever they’re bloviating about the joys of national socialism. But here’s one native-born Swedish-American who’s having none of it:

This is the last post on this blog. I am leaving Sweden for good shortly, and will no longer be following its descent from what was once the third most prosperous country in the world. Frankly, it’s just too damn depressing. I was born and raised in Sweden, which leaves a cultural mark even though I moved to USA in the 1990s and have spent the better part of my adult life as an American. Coming back for a few years has been a shocking experience.When I was a child, Sweden was a dull yet very safe place to live. Yes, there was a heavy blanket of socialism and collectivist values covering everything, but there was a core of pragmatism beneath the redness. The intention and goal was always to benefit the citizens, even though they went about things in a backwards manner.

Read more at Pajamas Media

 

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Saudi Rapist in Colorado Says Sex Offender Program is Against His Religion

Rape however isn’t against his religion.
Homaidan al-Turki’s entire defense strategy from the beginning was Islam. The member of a prominent Saudi family claimed that the prosecution was Islamophobic.
“We are Muslim. We are different. The state has criminalized these basic Muslim behaviors. Attacking traditional Muslim behaviors is a focal point of the prosecution.”
He had a point, because the behavior he was charged with was commonplace back in Saudi Arabia.


Read more at Frontpage Magazine Read More......

The prescience of Pat Moynihan

In the mid-1960s, a social scientist noted something ominous that came to be called “Moynihan’s Scissors”: Two lines on a graph crossed, replicating a scissors’ blades.

The descending line charted the decline in the minority male unemployment rate. The ascending line charted the simultaneous rise of new welfare cases.

The broken correlation of improvements in unemployment and decreased welfare dependency shattered confidence in social salvation through economic growth and reduced barriers to individual striving.

Read more at the New York Post Read More......

Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ): Culture of Control is Unfair & Un-American

MAR. 4, 2014 - Despite not knowing your situation or your specific needs, perfect strangers now decide what is best for you. ✧ Whether it's the food you want to eat, the home loan you want to get, the toys your kids want to play with, the cars you want to drive or how much water your toilets can flush, America's everyday choices have always been plentiful. A primary reason for this abundance is the tradition of negligible government intrusion in your lives. ✧ Unfortunately, this tradition has been eroded over the years, and your choices and your freedom to make even the smallest decision are suffering because of it. ✧ Faceless bureaucrats — strangers who have decided they know better than you — set out a handful of options that they like and force you to "choose" from them. In today's America, this is what government bureaucrats pass off as your choice. The façade of choice is present, but — as you and I both know — we accept their dictates or else.

Read more of Rep. Garrett's opinion piece at Garrett.house.gov/opinion Read More......

DAVID LIMBAUGH: Americans, where have you gone?

Recently, I saw a photoshopped depiction of Charles Manson next to an unborn baby, and the caption suggested that liberals are more interested in protecting Manson than they are the baby. It got me to thinking. ✧ Yes, it got me to thinking about the absurd positions modern liberals hold, which wouldn’t be nearly so disturbing but for the fact that I’m not talking about fringe liberals. I’m talking about mainstream liberals, who control the Democratic Party, the old media, the executive branch of the federal government, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. Supreme Court half the time, the mammoth federal bureaucracy, many state governments, our universities, our national educational establishment and other cultural institutions. ✧ It still may be true that significantly more Americans self-identify as conservatives than as liberals, but liberals are calculating visionaries by nature, and with decades of planning and activism, they’ve exercised influence wholly disproportional to their numbers. Their Orwellian mindset oozes intolerance for opposing viewpoints and, with their cultural bullying, they’ve effectively scared many conservatives and other non-liberals into silence.

Read more (including a short sampling of the Obama/Democratic/liberal agenda and record) at Rare Read More......

IMPRIMIS: Football and the American Character

By John J. Miller
Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.

When we talk about football, we usually talk about our favorite teams and the games they play. The biggest ongoing story in the sport right now, however, is something else entirely. It’s not about the Bears vs. the Packers or Michigan vs. Ohio State, but rather the controversy over concussions and the long-term health effects of head injuries.

On August 29, 2013, the National Football League agreed to pay $765 million to settle a lawsuit involving more than 4,500 players and their families, who had claimed that the league covered up data on the harmful effects of concussions. Although medical research into football and long-term effects of head injuries is hardly conclusive, some data suggest a connection. A number of legal experts believe the NFL, which will generate about $10 billion in revenue this year, dodged an even bigger payout.

Football, of course, is much bigger than the NFL and its players, whose average yearly salary is nearly $2 million. Football’s ranks include about 50,000 men who play in college and four million boys who play for schools or in youth leagues whose pockets aren’t nearly so deep. A Colorado jury recently awarded $11.5 million to a boy who suffered a paralyzing injury at his high school football practice in 2008. How long will it be before school districts begin to think football isn’t worth the cost?

Earlier this year, President Obama waded into the debate. “If I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football,” he said. He also called for football “to reduce some of the violence.” Others have called for a more dramatic solution: Malcolm Gladwell, the bestselling author of The Tipping Point and other books, thinks football should go the way of dogfighting. He would like to see America’s favorite sport run out of polite society.

(This is paragraph 5) So football’s future is uncertain. But the past may offer important lessons. After all, football’s problems today are nothing compared to what they were about a century ago: In 1905, 18 people died playing the sport. Football became embroiled in a long-running dispute over violence and safety—and it was almost banned through the efforts of Progressive-era prohibitionists. Had these enemies of football gotten their way, they might have erased one of America’s great pastimes from our culture. But they lost—and it took the efforts of Theodore Roosevelt to thwart them.

On November 18, 1876, Theodore Roosevelt, a freshman at Harvard who had just turned 18, attended his first football game. Destined for great things, he was enthusiastic about athletics in general and eager to see the new sport of football in particular. So here he was at the second game ever played between Harvard and its great rival Yale.

As Roosevelt shivered in the cold and windy fall weather, he watched a game that was quite different from the sport we know today. There were no quarterbacks or wide receivers, no first downs or forward passes. Before play began, the teams met to discuss rules. What number of men would play? What would count for a score? How long would the game last? They were like school kids today who have to set up boundaries, choose between a game of touch or tackle, and decide how to count blitzes.

Harvard’s veterans agreed to a couple of suggestions proposed by Yale. The first would carry a lasting legacy: Rather than playing with 15 men to a side, as was the current custom, the teams would play with eleven men. So this was the first football game to feature eleven players on the field per team.

The second suggestion would not shape the sport’s future, but it would affect the game that afternoon: Touchdowns would not count for points. Only goals—balls sailed over a rope tied between two poles—kicked after touchdowns or kicked from the field during play would contribute to the score.

In the first half, Harvard scored a touchdown but missed the kick. By the rules of the day, this meant that Harvard earned no points. At halftime, the game was a scoreless tie.

After the break, Yale pushed into Harvard territory and a lanky freshman named Walter Camp tried to shovel the ball to a teammate. It was a poor lateral pass that hit the ground and bounced upward, taking one of those funny hops that can befuddle even skilled players. In a split second, Oliver Thompson decided to take a chance on a kick from about 35 yards away and at a wide angle. The ball soared into the air, over the rope and through the uprights, giving Yale a lead of 1-0. No more points were scored that afternoon.

In a letter to his mother the next day, Roosevelt gave voice to the frustration that so often accompanies defeat in sports. “I am sorry to say we were beaten,” he wrote, “principally because our opponents played very foul.”

More about Teddy Roosevelt and what he did for football in a moment. But first, let me discuss briefly why football matters.

Love for a college football team, whether it’s the Texas Longhorns or the Hillsdale Chargers, is almost tribal. In some cases the affiliation is practically inherited, in others chosen. Whatever the origin, football has the power to form lifelong loyalties and passions and has supplanted baseball as America’s favorite pastime. Yet it almost died 100 years ago. Over the course of an ordinary football season in those days, a dozen or more people would die playing it, and many more suffered serious injuries. A lot of the casualties were kids in sandlot games, but big-time college teams also paid a price.

Football isn’t a contact sport—it’s a collision sport that has always prized size, strength, and power. This was especially true in its early years, when even the era of leatherheads lay in the future: Nobody wore helmets, facemasks, or shoulder pads. During the frequent pileups, hidden from the view of referees, players would wrestle for advantage by throwing punches and jabbing elbows. The most unsporting participants would even try to gouge their opponents’ eyes.

The deaths were the worst. They were not freak accidents as much as the inevitable toll of a violent game. And they horrified a group of activists who crusaded against football itself—wanting not merely to remove violence from the sport, but to ban the sport altogether. At the dawn of the Progressive era, the social and political movement to prohibit football became a major cause.

The New York Evening Post attacked the sport, as did The Nation, an influential magazine of news and opinion. The latter worried that colleges were becoming “huge training grounds for young gladiators, around whom as many spectators roar as roared in the [Roman] amphitheatre.” The New York Times bemoaned football’s tendency toward “mayhem and homicide.” Two weeks later, the Times ran a new editorial entitled “Two Curable Evils.” The first evil it addressed was lynching. The second was football.

The main figure in this movement to ban football was Charles W. Eliot, the president of Harvard and probably the single most important person in the history of higher education in the United States. Indeed, Eliot hated team sports in general because competition motivated players to conduct themselves in ways he considered unbecoming of gentlemen. If baseball and football were honorable pastimes, he reasoned, why did they require umpires and referees? “A game that needs to be watched is not fit for genuine sportsmen,” he once said. For Eliot, a pitcher who threw a curve ball was engaging in an act of treachery. But football distressed him even more. Most of all, he despised its violence. Time and again, he condemned the game as “evil.”

One of Eliot’s main adversaries in the battle over football was Walter Camp, one of the players in the game Teddy Roosevelt watched in 1876. A decent player, Camp made his real mark on football as a coach and a rules-maker. Indeed, he is the closest thing there is to football’s founding father.

In the rivalry between Eliot and Camp, we see one of the ongoing controversies in American politics at its outset—the conflict between regulators bent on the dream of a world without risk, and those who resist such an agenda in the name of freedom and responsibility. Eliot and other Progressives identified a genuine problem with football, but their solution was radical. They wanted to regulate football out of existence because they believed that its participants were not capable of making their own judgments in terms of costs and benefits. In their higher wisdom, these elites would ban the sport for all.

Into this struggle stepped Theodore Roosevelt. As a boy, he had suffered from chronic asthma to the point that relatives wondered if he would survive childhood. His mother and father tried everything to improve his health, even resorting to quack cures such as having him smoke cigars. Ultimately they concluded that he simply would have to overcome the disease. They encouraged him to go to a gym, and he worked out daily. The asthma would stay with Roosevelt for years, but by the time he was an adult, it was largely gone. For Roosevelt, the lesson was that a commitment to physical fitness could take a scrawny boy and turn him into a vigorous young man.

This experience was deeply connected to Roosevelt’s love of football. He remained a fan as he graduated from Harvard, entered politics, ranched out west, and became an increasingly visible public figure.

In 1895, shortly before he became president of the New York City police commission, he wrote a letter to Walter Camp that read as follows:

I am very glad to have a chance of expressing to you the obligation which I feel all Americans are under to you for your championship of athletics. The man on the farm and in the workshop here, as in other countries, is apt to get enough physical work; but we were tending steadily in America to produce . . . sedentary classes . . . and from this the athletic spirit has saved us. Of all games I personally like foot ball the best, and I would rather see my boys play it than see them play any other. I have no patience with the people who declaim against it because it necessitates rough play and occasional injuries. The rough play, if confined within manly and honorable limits, is an advantage. It is a good thing to have the personal contact about which the New York Evening Post snarls so much, and no fellow is worth his salt if he minds an occasional bruise or cut. Being near-sighted I was not able to play foot ball in college, and I never cared for rowing or base ball, so that I did all my work in boxing and wrestling. They are both good exercises, but they are not up to foot ball . . . .

I am utterly disgusted with the attitude of President Eliot and the Harvard faculty about foot ball . . . .

I do not give a snap for a good man who can’t fight and hold his own in the world. A citizen has got to be decent of course. That is the first requisite; but the second, and just as important, is that he shall be efficient, and he can’t be efficient unless he is manly. Nothing has impressed me more in meeting college graduates during the fifteen years I have been out of college than the fact that on the average the men who have counted most have been those who had sound bodies.

As this letter indicates, Roosevelt saw football as more than a diversion. He saw it as a positive social good. When he was recruiting the Rough Riders in 1898, he went out of his way to select men who had played football. The Duke of Wellington reportedly once said, “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” Roosevelt never said anything similar about football fields and the Battle of San Juan Hill, but when he emerged from the Spanish-American War as a national hero—and as someone talked about as being of presidential timber—he knew how much he owed not just to the Rough Riders, but to the culture of manliness and risk-taking that had shaped them.

Like Roosevelt, our society values sports, though we don’t always think about why—or why we should. My kids have played football, baseball, hockey, soccer, and lacrosse. As a family, we’re fairly sports-oriented. It has forced me to think about a question that a lot of parents probably ask at one time or another: Why do we want our kids to participate in athletics?

Many parents will point to the obvious fact that sports are good for health and fitness. They’ll also discuss the intangible benefits in terms of character building—sports teach kids to get up after falling down, to play through pain, to deal with failure, to work with teammates, to take direction from coaches, and so on.

It turns out that there really is something to all of this. Empirical research shows that kids who play sports stay in school longer. As adults, they vote more often and earn more money. Explaining why this is true is trickier, but it probably has something to do with developing a competitive instinct and a desire for achievement.

Roosevelt was surely correct in believing that sports influence the character of a nation. Americans are much more likely than Europeans to play sports. We’re also more likely to attribute economic success to hard work, as opposed to luck. It may be that sports are a manifestation—or possibly even a source—of American exceptionalism.

When Roosevelt ascended to the presidency, football remained controversial and Harvard’s Eliot continued his crusade for prohibition. In 1905, Roosevelt was persuaded to act. He invited Walter Camp of Yale to the White House, along with the coaches of Harvard and Princeton. These were the three most important football teams in the country. “Football is on trial,” said Roosevelt. “Because I believe in the game, I want to do all I can to save it.” He encouraged the coaches to eliminate brutality, and they promised that they would.

Whether they meant what they said is another matter. Walter Camp didn’t see anything wrong with the way football was played. Harvard’s coach, however, was a young man named Bill Reid. He took Roosevelt more seriously, because he took the threat to football more seriously. Indeed, within weeks of meeting with Roosevelt, he came to fear that Eliot was on the verge of success in having Harvard drop the sport, which would have encouraged other schools to do the same.

At the end of the 1905 season, therefore, Reid plotted with a group of reform-minded colleges to form an organization that today we know as the NCAA and to approve a set of sweeping rules changes to reduce football’s violence. In committee meetings, Reid outmaneuvered Camp while receiving critical behind-the-scenes support from Roosevelt.

As a result, football experienced an extreme makeover: The yardage necessary for a first down increased from five to ten. Rules-makers also created a neutral zone at the line of scrimmage, limited the number of players who could line up in the backfield, made the personal foul a heavily penalized infraction, and banned the tossing of ballcarriers.

These were important revisions, and each was approved with an eye toward improving the safety of players. Yet the change that would transform the sport the most was the introduction of the forward pass. Up to this point, football was a game of running and kicking, not throwing. There were quarterbacks but not wide receivers. It took a few years to get the rule right—footballs needed to evolve away from their watermelon-like shape and become more aerodynamic, and coaches and players had to figure out how to take advantage of this new offensive tool. But on November 1, 1913, football moved irreversibly into the modern era.

Army was one of the best teams in the country, a national championship contender. It was scheduled to play a game against a little-known Catholic school from the Midwest. The headline in the New York Times that morning read: “Army Wants Big Score.” The little-known Catholic school was Notre Dame. Knute Rockne and his teammates launched football’s first true air war, throwing again and again for receptions and touchdowns. And they won, 35-14. Gushed the New York Times:

"The Westerners flashed the most sensational football that has been seen in the East this year. The Army players were hopelessly confused and chagrined before Notre Dame’s great playing, and their style of old-fashioned close line-smashing play was no match for the spectacular and highly perfected attack of the Indiana collegians."

A West Point cadet named Dwight Eisenhower watched from the sidelines. He was on Army’s team but didn’t play due to injury. “Everything has gone wrong,” he wrote to his girlfriend. “The football team . . . got beaten most gloriously by Notre Dame.”

With that game, football’s long first chapter came to a close. It had reduced the problem of violence, and the game that we enjoy today was born.

The example of Roosevelt shows that a skillful leader can use a light touch to solve a vexing problem. As a general rule, of course, we don’t want politicians interfering with our sports. The only thing that could make the BCS system worse is congressional involvement.

At the same time, our political leaders help to shape our culture and our expectations. They can promise a world without risk, or they can send a different message. As a father myself, I can sympathize with President Obama’s cautious statements about football. At the same time, his comments would have benefited from some context: Gregg Easterbrook, who writes a football column for ESPN, has pointed out that a teen who drives a car for an hour has about a one in a million chance of dying—compared to a one in six million chance for a teen who spends an hour practicing football.

Americans are a self-governing people. We can make our own judgments about whether to drive or play football—and when we make these choices, we can make them in recognition of the fact that although sports can be dangerous, they’re also good for us. They not only make us distinctively American, they make us better Americans.

JOHN J. MILLER is director of the Herbert H. Dow II Program in American Journalism at Hillsdale College and national correspondent for National Review. A graduate of the University of Michigan, where he served as editor of the Michigan Review, he has also worked on the staff of The New Republic. A contributing editor of Philanthropy magazine, he writes regularly for newspapers and journals including the Detroit News, the Wall Street Journal, and National Review. He is the author of several books, including The First Assassin, a novel set during the Civil War, and most recently The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football. The article above is adapted from a luncheon speech delivered at Hillsdale College on September 9, 2013. Read More......

Sen. Rubio on the Obama & Co. 'Culture of Intimidation'

Rubio On IRS Scandal: Obama's Culture Of Political Intimidation Leads to this Scandalous Behavior

Read More......

'Abortion Battles' Video Shows New York College Students Pretending They're Killing Unborn Fetuses

IBT: A disturbing YouTube video of students at New York City's Hunter College pretending they are killing unborn fetuses has gone viral online, angering pro-life activists and shocking viewers countrywide. ✧ The video, called "Abortion Battles" before it was removed from YouTube, depicts a number of Hunter students playing a "game" with the same name in a cafeteria at the school. ✧ To play the game, two students first shove balloons under their shirts to appear pregnant. A female student seems to be in charge during the unsettling game. ✧ "Ready, set, go," she says, and the showdown begins. The faux-pregnant students try to pop one another's balloons with plastic eating utensils in a crude mockery of abortion. Read more at International Business Times... Read More......

Do Recent Events Show the World Is Falling Apart, or Reaffirm Timeless Principles?

By Timothy H. Lee - To some people, recent events suggest that the world as we know it is falling apart. ✧ But think of it another way. Paradoxically, today’s events simply reaffirm timeless principles. Moreover, they reassure us that recommitment to those principles offers a remedy. ✧ Consider: The nation’s credit rating just declined for the first time in history. The floor suddenly dropped from stock markets. Unrestrained rioters terrorized England and set it aflame. Moammar Gadhaffi remains in power, months after President Obama promised that the Libyan military effort would be measured in “days, not weeks.” ✧ Can anyone truly consider these events surprising, given the public policies that led to them? Only if one dismisses the laws of economics, morality, physics and human nature. Read more at Center for Individual Freedom (CFIF)... Read More......

Geert Wilders in Rome: Defending the West from Cultural Relativism and Jihad

AMERICAN THINKER, 3/26/2011 by Andrew G. Bostom (Hat tip: John H. Detweiler via MILINET/email) - Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders made a seminal address yesterday evening (March 25, 2011) at the Annual Lecture of the Magna Carta Foundation in Rome, Italy. ∴ As is his wont, Wilders presentation moved far beyond the timorous platitudes about the most obvious (and dangerous) failures of cultural relativism belatedly echoed by Western European leaders Angela Merkel, Nicholas Sarkozy, and David Cameron. Wilders demands that the West acknowledge the jihad-both cultural and military-being waged against it openly and incessantly by institutional Islam, Muslim nations, and the global umma. The Ducth Parlaimentarian concludes his eloquent and informative speech by insisting that four concrete measures must be taken immediately, quoting Ronald Reagan, so we can "...act today to preserve tomorrow."

1. Defend freedom of speech
   
2. End cultural relativism and re-assert our belief in the superiority of Western culture compared to Islamic culture
   
3. Stop the Islamization of the West because, "more Islam means less freedom."
   
4. Restore the supremacy and sovereignty of the nation-state

Wilder's speech in its entirety, is reproduced [at]: American Thinker... Read More......

Hecker: Six Steps to the Right

THE CORNER, 1/5/2011 by Ryan Hecker - "Based on Speaker Boehner’s performance today, I am very hopeful that the Republican leadership will stick by the principles of limited government and economic conservatism in the coming term. Speaker Boehner and the new Congress listened to the American people and enforced a rule today that requires each bill introduced to identify the specific provision of the Constitution that gives Congress authority to do what the bill does. This idea was the top vote-getter (82 percent support) in the grassroots, crowd-sourced Contract from America. What this reflects is that the Speaker recognizes that the election victory in November was not a mandate for Republican rule, but rather a last chance to stand up for conservative ideals and fix the tax-and-spend Capitol Hill mindset.

Going forward, the new majority must remain bold in passing legislation that will fundamentally change Washington D.C. culture. The tea party movement does not want weak attempts at deficit reduction with minor spending cuts. We want a balanced-budget amendment and enforced spending cap limits. We want Republicans to arduously fight to defund Obamacare and to take real steps to curb lobbyist power that ultimately harms the American consumer.

President Obama has moved our country five steps to the left. Speaker Boehner needs to lead a charge that moves our country six steps to the right, not just one or two."

— Ryan Hecker is a lawyer in Houston and organized the Contract from America. Read More......

Sanger's 'Negro Project' alive and well

ONENEWSNOW, 10/26/2010 - In his most recent column, "Planned Parenthood's Negro Project Lives On," Ron Miller claims Planned Parenthood continues to target blacks for abortions, decades after eugenicist Margaret Sanger conceived her Negro Project in 1939. Read more at One News Now...

SEATTLE PI, 8/2/2010 - Planned Parenthood endorsements: All Democrats Read More......

Barone: Tea Partiers Fight Obama's Culture of Dependence

TOWNHALL.COM, 4/19/2010 by Michael Barone - [...] But public policy also helps determine the kind of society we are. The Obama Democrats see a society in which ordinary people cannot fend for themselves, where they need to have their incomes supplemented, their health care insurance regulated and guaranteed, their relationships with their employers governed by union leaders. Highly educated mandarins can make better decisions for them than they can make themselves. That is the culture of dependence. Read more at Townhall... Read More......

United In Hate, Parts 1 & 2

Jamie Glazof, Front Page contributor and author of United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror, discusses leftist psychology and how it aligns with brutal totalitarian regimes at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, May 14, 2009, in Los Angeles, California.

United in Hate, Part 1 (20:50)


United in Hate, Part 2 (20:10)

Hat tip: Maggie's Farm Read More......

Francisco d'Anconia

Francisco d'Anconia's 'Money' Speech from "Atlas Shrugged," The Trial of Hank Rearden by Ayn Rand

Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl who made some sound of indignation, "Don't let him disturb you. You know, money is the root of all evil — and he's the typical product of money." Rearden did not think that Francisco could have heard it, but he saw Francisco turning to them with a gravely courteous smile.

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor — your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions — and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made — before it can be looted or mooched — made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except by the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss — the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery — that you must offer them values, not wounds — that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of GOODS. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best your money can find. And when men live by trade — with reason, not force, as their final arbiter — it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability — and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality — the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth — the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve that mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Money is your means of survival. The verdict which you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is the loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money — and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it."

"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another — their only substitute, demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride, or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich — will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt — and of his life, as he deserves.

"Then you will see the rise of the double standard — the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money — the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law — men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims — then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion — when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing — when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors — when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you — when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice — you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account overdrawn.'

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are.

"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while your damning its life-blood — money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves — slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers — as industrialists.

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money — and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being — the self-made man — the American industrialist.

"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose — because it contains all the others — the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity — to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide — as, I think, he will.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns — or dollars. Take your choice — there is no other — and your time is running out."

(Formerly published at BCRW News, Etc., May 17, 2007) Read More......

Freedom? That old canard?

From Ed Driscoll:

On “CNN Newsroom” on April 28, Sanchez interviewed Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., about the departure of Sen. Arlen Specter, Pa., from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party. He asked the senator from South Carolina if Specter was correct in his analysis that the conservative wing of the Republican Party was squeezing out a segment of the electorate. ∴ “You’re shrinking the electorate to an extreme - to a point where a regular Republican can’t win,” Sanchez said, paraphrasing Specter. “What do you make of that argument?” ∴ DeMint explained it was which ideology was best suited to give Americans the freedom to choose in their daily lives that propagated a more prosperous society - both economically and culturally. ∴ “That’s quite the opposite,” DeMint said. “We’re seeing across the country right now that the biggest tent of all is the tent of freedom and what we need to do as Republicans is convince Americans that freedom can work in all areas of their life - for every American, whether it’s education, or health care or creating jobs.”

However, with that response, Sanchez had his Jim Mora moment - when Mora, the head coach of the Indianapolis Colts went into his “playoffs” rant after a 40-21 loss to the San Francisco 49ers on Nov. 25, 2001. ∴ “What the hell does that mean?” Sanchez said. “I mean, the biggest tent is freedom? Freedom? I mean you got to do better than that!”

And then the Barrister at Maggie's Farm wrote,

It may be hard to believe, but that is what we're up against, friends. There are Americans who have no clue about why this nation exists.

Read More......