SO HILLARY’S SCANDALS ARE ANCIENT HISTORY, BUT SLAVERY IS AS FRESH AS TODAY! DOJ Official: Slavery to Blame for Riots in Ferguson and Baltimore.
Archive for 2015
May 19, 2015
GOVERNMENT DOESN’T “ASK” ANYTHING: Thomas Sowell rips apart President Obama’s recent remark opining that the way to reduce poverty is to “ask from society’s lottery winners” that they make a “modest investment” in government programs to help the poor.
[T]he federal government does not just “ask” for money. It takes the money it wants in taxes, usually before the people who have earned it see their paychecks. Despite pious rhetoric on the left about “asking” the more fortunate for more money, the government does not “ask” anything. It seizes what it wants by force. If you don’t pay up, it can take not only your paycheck, it can seize your bank account, put a lien on your home and/or put you in federal prison.
So please don’t insult our intelligence by talking piously about “asking.”
And please don’t call the government’s pouring trillions of tax dollars down a bottomless pit “investment.”
As for referring to successful individuals as “society’s lottery winners,” Sowell observes:
Most people who want to redistribute wealth don’t want to talk about how that wealth was produced in the first place. They just want “the rich” to pay their undefined “fair share” of taxes. This “fair share” must remain undefined because all it really means is “more.”
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Obama goes further than other income redistributionists. “You didn’t build that!” he declared to those who did. Why? Because those who created additions to the world’s wealth used government-built roads or other government-provided services to market their products.
And who paid for those roads and other government-provided services if not the taxpayers? Since all other taxpayers, as well as non-taxpayers, also use government facilities, why are those who created private wealth not to use them also, since they are taxpayers as well?
The fact that most of the rhetorical ploys used by Barack Obama and other redistributionists will not stand up under scrutiny means very little politically. After all, how many people who come out of our schools and colleges today are capable of critical scrutiny?
Yep, it’s the LIVs who fail to realize they are being brainwashed by mainstream media “journalists” and Marxist professors who keep this “us against them” tactic alive. Conservatives need to increase their ranks in the media and the academy, or none of this can change. If the Koch brothers or other wealthy libertarian/conservatives really wanted to help change things, they would start endowing some U.S. civic and history programs at the secondary school level, funding academic positions in universities for those who possess libertarian/conservative views, and buying major newspapers (and ensuring that its editorial board was not leftist). These investments would buy more bang for the buck than all the white papers in the world.
READER BOOK PLUG: From James DiBenedetto, Fever Dream.
WHY GOOGLE’S SELF-DRIVING BUBBLE CARS might catch on.
THE LONG, WEIRD HISTORY of the flying car.
REPORT: Waco Biker Gang Shootout May Have Started Over a Parking Dispute: Cops.
InstaPundit’s crack investigative team has uncovered a photo of the precise moment that kicked things off:
FROZEN HUMAN LEFTOVERS: The Washington Post has an interesting story today about “leftover” embryos from fertility treatment that are in indefinite frozen limbo in storage facilities across the country.
Loblein was 35 when she walked down the aisle for the second time, and she was already a mother to three children from her first marriage. But the meteorological satellite operator knew that she wanted a child with her new husband, and in vitro fertilization was necessary.
Today, they have a little boy and a little girl — and, despite Loblein’s best efforts not to create more than they needed, that extra embryo she had wanted to avoid. Waiting in limbo for her to decide its fate.
The Lobleins are among thousands of couples and individuals in the United States grappling with difficult choices regarding their stored genetic material. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that more than 600,000 frozen embryos are stored nationwide, in addition to countless more cryo-preserved eggs and sperm.
Some States, such as Georgia and Louisiana, have laws that specifically allow for embryo adoption. In most States, however, a frozen embryo is just a form of “property,” that can be relinquished the same as eggs or sperm. Disputes over who has the right to frozen embryos in the context of divorce are shockingly common. The “ownership” of frozen embryos post-mortem is likewise increasing.
It is kind of depressing to think of all those frozen embryos that could find good homes with couples that are desperately waiting to adopt. There are frozen embryo adoption agencies, but the biggest impediment seems to be convincing the progenitors to cede the excess embryos to others:
One survey of more than 1,000 patients from nine U.S. fertility clinics who had extra embryos found that nearly 60% said they were “very unlikely” to donate them to another couple trying to have a baby; only 7% were “very likely” to consider this option. “It was the idea that their child was walking around, and they couldn’t ensure it was having a great life,” says lead author Dr. Anne Drapkin Lyerly, an ob-gyn and associate director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “If they couldn’t raise that child, many felt that the responsible choice was to make sure they didn’t become children in someone else’s life. One woman told me, ‘I’d rather have them destroyed than born.’ ”
Yeah, I can understand that sentiment.
RICHARD EPSTEIN: The “Income Inequality” Warriors.
IN THE MAIL: From Harry Turtledove, American Front (The Great War, Book 1).
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A MASTERFUL RICK WILSON RANT ON THE CLINTONS AND THE MEDIA: “The rules; nothing from the Clinton history matters. Everything from the Bush history is of the highest consequence.”
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 740.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Pathei Mathos: What I Relearned the Last 12 Months.
MICHAEL WALSH: The Real Stephanopoulos Scandal: He Was Never A Journalist In The First Place. No, but he was allowed to play one on TV. “It’s not his blatant partisanship, his ties to the increasingly thuggish Clinton Machine, or even his complete lack of journalistic ethics. It’s that ABC should never have hired him in the first place.”
THE ATLANTIC: The Painful Loss of Ramadi: Islamic State control over the capital of Iraq’s largest province is a symbolic and strategic blow to the United States. Well, yes. A little history:
As late as 2010, things were going so well in Iraq that Obama and Biden were bragging. Now, after Obama’s politically-motivated pullout and disengagement, the whole thing’s fallen apart. This is near-criminal neglect and incompetence, and an awful lot of people will pay a steep price for the Obama Administration’s fecklessness.
Related: National Journal: The World Will Blame Obama If Iraq Falls.
Related: What Kind Of Iraq Did Obama Inherit?
Plus, I’m just going to keep running this video of what the Democrats, including Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, were saying on Iraq before the invasion:
Because I expect a lot of revisionist history over the next few months.
Plus: 2008 Flashback: Obama Says Preventing Genocide Not A Reason To Stay In Iraq. He was warned. He didn’t care.
And who can forget this?
FACT: President Obama kept his promise to end the war in Iraq. Romney called the decision to bring our troops home “tragic.”
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 22, 2012
THE IRAQ WMD UNICORN: Jamie Weinstein debunks the liberal/progressive’s favorite myth: That President Bush intentionally lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He concludes, “It would be nice if the left would stop falsifying history.”
Yeah, and it would be nice if they would all grow some common sense, a backbone, and some appreciation for the Constitution, but that won’t happen, either.
HOPEY-CHANGEY: White House steps up warnings about terrorism on U.S. soil. It used to be “fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.” Now, I guess, it’s “since we’re retreating over there, we’d better get ready to fight them here.”
GOOD NEWS: “The world is awash in crude.” Hey, remember “Peak Oil?” The science was settled!
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