Commentary by James Shott
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) gave a speech on the Senate floor last week where he said this about the disastrous implementation of the Affordable Care Act: "Despite all that good news, there’s plenty of horror stories being told. All of them are untrue."
This abjectly stupid remark ignores the problems millions of the people Harry Reid serves as Majority Leader have encountered at the hands of this Democrat-created nightmare, some of them with life-threatening consequences.
Some say he really was alluding to claims made in ads paid for by the Koch brothers, about which he specifically commented shortly after that major gaffe, claiming the Kochs are trying to “buy America” through Americans for Prosperity, a 501(c)(4) started by David Koch and Richard Fink.
He believes that the Koch brothers are the single greatest threat to liberty, “spending hundreds of millions of dollars telling Americans that Obamacare is bad for them.”
However, Koch Industries donated less than $3 million in the 2012 election cycle, earning 77th place on the Top Donor List of OpenSecrets.org. Americans for Prosperity is reported to have spent $40 million, but does not appear on the Top Donor List.
Top Donor organizations ahead of Koch Industries include: the National Education Association, #5 at $14.7 million; the United Auto Workers, #8 at $13.3 million; the American Federation of State/County/Municipal Employees, #10 at $11.4 million; the AFL-CIO, #14 at $9 million; and the Service Employees International Union, #18 at $6.6 million. Ten more labor unions beat Koch Industries in spending. Organized labor is “buying America” to a much larger extent than Koch Industries and Americans for Prosperity combined.
Harry Reid misleads us on political spending, and lied to us during the 2012 campaign about Mitt Romney having paid no taxes for 10 years. He epitomizes the sordid aspects of partisan politics, and simply cannot be believed.
*****
On May 5, 2010 Latino students at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, California turned out to celebrate their Mexican heritage on Cinco de Mayo.
When some American students showed up at school wearing American-flag shirts, school officials ordered the American students to turn their shirts inside-out or go home, to avoid a repeat of the unrest that had occurred during past observances of this date.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week upheld the action of school officials.
So, when students from Mexico attending American schools want to flaunt their Mexican-ness in the face of the American students by waving Mexican flags on a Mexican holiday, and some American students decide to show their patriotism by wearing American flag shirts, the school authorities believe that the American students are wrong, and the Mexican students are right, and a federal court agrees with them.
Disgusting!
Whacky, radical rulings like this one have earned the Court the nickname, “The 9th Circus.” The Mexican students should not be allowed to stir up sentiments by waving a foreign flag around to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. If they prefer Mexico to the U.S., perhaps they should just go back.
*****
Congressman Dave Camp (R-Mich.), Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, has produced a tax reform plan based upon three years of hearings and discussions with bi-partisan groups.
Hardly anyone who pays taxes will argue against reforming this overly complex system. The last round was in 1986, and at that time the tax code was more than 26,000 pages. Thirty years later, the tax system is a incoherent mess that negatively affects prosperity, job creation and investment, and is regulated by a tax code that has nearly tripled in size to roughly 75,000 pages.
Each year the tax code gets further complicated with more special interest loopholes, credits, and carve-outs.
Rep. Camp would make several changes to the code, like eliminating loopholes, reducing tax rates, whittling down the current seven tax brackets to three, and lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent, the highest in the industrialized world, to 25 percent.
In those 75,000 pages are goodies for numerous interests, and they will scream bloody murder if their special goody is on the chopping block. The Heritage Foundation’s Stephen Moore notes that we can “expect the White House to lambast this plan as a ‘tax cut for the rich,’ but the evidence from history shows that lower tax rates are usually associated with higher overall tax receipts and more taxes paid by the rich. In the 1980s after two rounds of Reagan tax rate reductions, income tax receipts doubled, and the share of taxes paid by the top 1 percent, 5 percent, and 10 percent rose as the economy expanded.”
This plan simplifies the tax code by allowing millions of tax filers a larger standard deduction, meaning they don’t need to itemize and can use the EZ form. For those who do itemize, the mortgage and charity deductions remain.
While the Camp plan isn’t perfect, and produced quite a few knee-jerk criticisms, it has many advantages, and is certainly a good start toward finally transforming the current tax code into something that is sensible and easy to understand. Let’s hope Congress has the courage to follow through.
Cross-posted from Observations
Tampilkan postingan dengan label political correctness. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label political correctness. Tampilkan semua postingan
We’re at home one evening, and someone is banging on the front door!
Commentary by James H. Shott
There was banging on the door at 8:20 p.m. The 14 year-old daughter answered the door and found some 30 armed Washington, DC police officers in full tactical gear with a search warrant. She let them enter the home.
After entering the house, the police immediately went upstairs, pointed guns at the heads of the homeowner and his girlfriend, and forced them to lie facedown and be handcuffed.
The 16-year-old son was in the shower. “They used a battering ram to bash down the bathroom door and pull him out of the shower, naked,” said his father. “The police put all [four] children together in a room, while we were handcuffed upstairs. I could hear them crying, not knowing what was happening.”
The police shut down the streets for blocks and spent more than two hours searching the house. “They tossed the place,” the homeowner said. He provided photos to the writer of an article in The Washington Times that he had taken of his home after the raid to document the damage, which he estimated at $10,000.
What horrible crime had the man committed to justify a 30-man SWAT team to block off streets, point guns at and handcuff the adults present, isolate and terrify the children, and trash the home in a two-hour search of the premises?
The search occurred because of a charge by the man’s estranged wife, who had persuaded a court clerk to issue a temporary restraining order against him, charging he had threatened her with a gun. As it turns out, a judge later found the charge to be without merit.
The squadron of SWAT police was searching for guns, for which registration with police is required in DC, based solely on the estranged wife’s fraudulent charge. They found none. They did find other things, according to The Times: “The police found no guns in the house, but did write on the warrant that four items were discovered: ‘One live round of 12-gauge shotgun ammunition,’ which was an inoperable shell that misfired during a hunt years earlier. [The homeowner] had kept it as a souvenir. ‘One handgun holster’ was found, which is perfectly legal. ‘One expended round of .270 caliber ammunition,’ which was a spent brass casing. The police uncovered ‘one box of Knight bullets for reloading.’ These are actually not for reloading, but are used in antique-replica, single-shot, muzzle-loading rifles.”
In DC only registered gun owners can possess ammunition, which bizarrely includes spent shells, and because of this the homeowner, Mark Witaschek, a successful financial adviser with no criminal record, is facing two years in prison for possession of unregistered ammunition.
This is an outrageous use of force, misapplication of the law, and simple overreaction. Did the police perform due diligence before subjecting a good citizen, his girlfriend and children to this intolerable episode? Obviously not. How many of those responsible for this outrage will lose their job or be charged for their malfeasance? Given the increasing number of such asinine actions, it sometimes seems that police breathlessly await an excuse to play army against the citizens for whom they work.
To make this hyperactive episode seem even more ridiculous, one month earlier, thinking he had nothing to hide, Mr. Witaschek allowed the “Gun Recovery Unit” to search his home without a warrant. Ninety minutes later, the police had found one box of Winchester .40 caliber ammunition, one legal gun-cleaning kit and a Civil War-era antique revolver that he kept on his office desk, and even though antique firearms are legal and don’t have to be registered, the gun was seized. Mr. Witaschek keeps his hunting weapons at his sister’s home outside the District.
Such episodes result from the anti-gun hysteria that grips the nation, and this one is an example of the increasing militarization of local police. DC’s 1976 gun law is one of the strongest in the nation, but appears to have had little effect on gun crime.
In the weeks immediately after the law was passed, The Times reported on several gun crimes that occurred, one in which a U.S. Senator was the victim. “Since the ban was passed,” the story continued, “more than 8,400 people have been murdered in the district, many killed by handguns. Nearly 80 percent of the 181 murders in 2007 were committed with guns.”
Looks like the hoodlums didn’t get the message about the new gun law in the District of Columbia.
Based upon data from the Centers for Disease Control and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, a study found that Washington D.C. has a higher rate of gun homicide than Brazil, one of the deadliest nations for gun violence in the world.
In DC, the people who carry weapons are primarily law enforcement and criminals. The criminals are always up to no good, and the police may be too busy terrorizing law abiding citizens who might have accidentally run afoul of the broad, over-achieving gun law to fight the crimes that are being committed against citizens who are restricted from using guns to defend themselves against thugs with guns.
Cross-posted from Observations
There was banging on the door at 8:20 p.m. The 14 year-old daughter answered the door and found some 30 armed Washington, DC police officers in full tactical gear with a search warrant. She let them enter the home.
After entering the house, the police immediately went upstairs, pointed guns at the heads of the homeowner and his girlfriend, and forced them to lie facedown and be handcuffed.
The 16-year-old son was in the shower. “They used a battering ram to bash down the bathroom door and pull him out of the shower, naked,” said his father. “The police put all [four] children together in a room, while we were handcuffed upstairs. I could hear them crying, not knowing what was happening.”
The police shut down the streets for blocks and spent more than two hours searching the house. “They tossed the place,” the homeowner said. He provided photos to the writer of an article in The Washington Times that he had taken of his home after the raid to document the damage, which he estimated at $10,000.
What horrible crime had the man committed to justify a 30-man SWAT team to block off streets, point guns at and handcuff the adults present, isolate and terrify the children, and trash the home in a two-hour search of the premises?
The search occurred because of a charge by the man’s estranged wife, who had persuaded a court clerk to issue a temporary restraining order against him, charging he had threatened her with a gun. As it turns out, a judge later found the charge to be without merit.
The squadron of SWAT police was searching for guns, for which registration with police is required in DC, based solely on the estranged wife’s fraudulent charge. They found none. They did find other things, according to The Times: “The police found no guns in the house, but did write on the warrant that four items were discovered: ‘One live round of 12-gauge shotgun ammunition,’ which was an inoperable shell that misfired during a hunt years earlier. [The homeowner] had kept it as a souvenir. ‘One handgun holster’ was found, which is perfectly legal. ‘One expended round of .270 caliber ammunition,’ which was a spent brass casing. The police uncovered ‘one box of Knight bullets for reloading.’ These are actually not for reloading, but are used in antique-replica, single-shot, muzzle-loading rifles.”
In DC only registered gun owners can possess ammunition, which bizarrely includes spent shells, and because of this the homeowner, Mark Witaschek, a successful financial adviser with no criminal record, is facing two years in prison for possession of unregistered ammunition.
This is an outrageous use of force, misapplication of the law, and simple overreaction. Did the police perform due diligence before subjecting a good citizen, his girlfriend and children to this intolerable episode? Obviously not. How many of those responsible for this outrage will lose their job or be charged for their malfeasance? Given the increasing number of such asinine actions, it sometimes seems that police breathlessly await an excuse to play army against the citizens for whom they work.
To make this hyperactive episode seem even more ridiculous, one month earlier, thinking he had nothing to hide, Mr. Witaschek allowed the “Gun Recovery Unit” to search his home without a warrant. Ninety minutes later, the police had found one box of Winchester .40 caliber ammunition, one legal gun-cleaning kit and a Civil War-era antique revolver that he kept on his office desk, and even though antique firearms are legal and don’t have to be registered, the gun was seized. Mr. Witaschek keeps his hunting weapons at his sister’s home outside the District.
Such episodes result from the anti-gun hysteria that grips the nation, and this one is an example of the increasing militarization of local police. DC’s 1976 gun law is one of the strongest in the nation, but appears to have had little effect on gun crime.
In the weeks immediately after the law was passed, The Times reported on several gun crimes that occurred, one in which a U.S. Senator was the victim. “Since the ban was passed,” the story continued, “more than 8,400 people have been murdered in the district, many killed by handguns. Nearly 80 percent of the 181 murders in 2007 were committed with guns.”
Looks like the hoodlums didn’t get the message about the new gun law in the District of Columbia.
Based upon data from the Centers for Disease Control and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, a study found that Washington D.C. has a higher rate of gun homicide than Brazil, one of the deadliest nations for gun violence in the world.
In DC, the people who carry weapons are primarily law enforcement and criminals. The criminals are always up to no good, and the police may be too busy terrorizing law abiding citizens who might have accidentally run afoul of the broad, over-achieving gun law to fight the crimes that are being committed against citizens who are restricted from using guns to defend themselves against thugs with guns.
Cross-posted from Observations
Death to Nidal Hasan and the better food in schools movement?
On November 5, 2009, US Army Major Nidal Hasan, a Muslim and psychiatrist at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, Texas, opened fire on his fellow soldiers inside the center, screaming “Allahu Akbar,” and killing 13 soldiers and an unborn child in her mother’s womb, and wounding 30 others.
While the victims were military personnel trained in the use of weapons, they were unarmed, forbidden from carrying on base the weapons many would use when deployed. Fortunately, Sgt. Kimberley Munley, a civilian police officer, arrived and wounded the jihadist doctor, interrupting his murderous rampage, but he shot Sgt. Munley three times, and just as the terrorist was about to finish her off, another civilian officer, Sgt. Mark Todd, shot him, and ended the killing spree.
This murderous attack left 13 dead, eight widows, one widower, 12 minor children without a father, 18 parents who lost children, 30 soldiers and one civilian police officer wounded.
There’s little positive from that event, other than that Nidal Hasan is now paralyzed from the waist down, and will likely never walk again.
Despite concerns about Hasan’s radical Islamist leanings, revealed when he was an intern at Walter Reed Medical Center, later as a physician in a PowerPoint presentation to other Army doctors, and Islamic abbreviations and phrases on his business card, the Army did not see fit to remove him from duty, or give him the punishment he so rightly deserved. In fact, an email from an Army investigator reveals the ugly politically correct nature of military service today: "Had we launched an investigation of Hasan we'd have been crucified."
Inexplicably, the charges the Department of Defense filed against Maj. Hasan ignored his Islam-based terrorist attack, but was instead labeled “workplace violence,” as if he had merely started a fight with a co-worker or thrown a chair at his boss. Such a designation deprives those soldiers killed and injured in this terrorist attack the benefits they are entitled to and would receive had accurate charges been filed.
During his opening statement at trial, in which he was convicted on all charges, Maj. Hasan apologized, not to the victims and their families, the nation or the Army, but to his fellow jihadists for not destroying more innocent life, and admitted shooting the 13 soldiers, and said he wanted the death penalty. Last week the jury sentenced him to death.
As one who believes in the death penalty for certain vicious crimes when guilt is not in question, in this case I hope that the death penalty for Nidal Hasan, a painless lethal injection, is set aside, as it has been for those in the military since 1961.
He deserves to live out his miserable life in abject misery, not in the glory of Islamic jihadist martyrdom for which he so badly hungers. Too bad that murderers, rapists, and others among the worst scum of humanity are treated so well when they are condemned to an American prison for their vicious crimes.
* * * * *
America’s First Ladies have always been advocates for important issues in our country. Rosalyn Carter championed mental health, Nancy Reagan fought against drug abuse, Barbara Bush worked to increase literacy, Hillary Clinton pushed for health reform, Laura Bush advocated for improvements in education, and Michelle Obama has worked to have a positive effect on childhood obesity.
Given the overweight nature of the US population generally, and that of the younger generation specifically, who can logically argue that a better menu in the nation’s public schools is a bad thing?
However, this particular effort has been met with resistance, and even outright rebellion, with school kids refusing to eat the better food being served in cafeterias, and school systems losing money on the deal as a result, and bailing out of the program.
One example of the growing national rebellion against the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which set new nutrition standards for school cafeterias and changed the way children are qualified for school meal programs, occurred recently at a contentious meeting of the Harlan County, Kentucky school board.
Board members were treated to a raft of complaints about school meals, which were called crappy and served in portions that critics say are too small. Someone said the meals tasted like “vomit,” and one parent said, “kids can’t learn when they’re hungry.”
Parents criticized the brown wheat bread, the skim or one-percent-fat milk, and the nonfat chocolate- and strawberry-flavored milk.
Where this effort has gone wrong is that it attempts to mandate through law the way kids eat, and even though the standards set by the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act are nutritionally superior to previous standards, school kids liked the old food and they don’t like the new food, and therefore don’t eat it.
In it’s own way this is a citizen rebellion against an over-reaching state: the people are against the government trying to tell them how to eat, among other things.
Our government has no business doing this. Perhaps this mild revolution will get the point across. But probably not.
Our government has no business doing this. Perhaps this mild revolution will get the point across. But probably not.
Privacy under attack? Stop-and-frisk vs. NSA surveillance
As Americans, we each have a guaranteed right to privacy. The online legal site FindLaw explains it this way: “The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects personal privacy, and every citizen's right to be free from unreasonable government intrusion into their persons, homes, businesses, and property – whether through police stops of citizens on the street, arrests, or searches of homes and businesses.”
That seems plain enough, but how one interprets the word “unreasonable” provides ample opportunity for mischief, as well as for good law enforcement.
As for good law enforcement, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has credited the City’s stop-and-frisk policy with helping drive crime to record lows since the policing policy was implemented in 1994, with the murder rate falling by an astounding 82 percent by 2009.
New York’s stop-and-frisk policy seeks to prevent crime before it happens by deploying officers with pinpoint precision to critical street segments in high-crime areas where they interact with individuals displaying suspicious behavior: they approach, question, and sometimes frisk the individuals. That practice has led to fewer people, such as members of street gangs, risking arrest by carrying a weapon on their person, and with fewer gang bangers carrying weapons, there are fewer spur-of-the-moment shootings in New York, and correspondingly fewer deaths.
You might think that, given the obvious level of success in reducing the murder rate in the Big Apple, such a policy would fall outside the Fourth Amendment’s proscription against “unreasonable” searches. But you would be wrong, according to U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin, who believes that the policy indeed does violate the Fourth Amendment protection.
Mayor Bloomberg believes that the judge's decision will cause a reduction in the use of stop-and-frisk, which would reverse crime reductions and make his city a more dangerous place. And data indicates he is correct. In 2011, guns were used in 61 percent of all homicides, but in black neighborhoods 86 percent of young black males died from gunfire. Stop-and-frisk reduced the total number of deaths by reducing the number of guns on the streets.
The challenge to the policy arose because officers stop minority residents at a rate disproportionate to their number in the general population. But those stops are not disproportionate to the minority resident population in the crime-ridden neighborhoods or disproportionate to the number of crimes minorities commit in those neighborhoods.
As we have seen recently, there is the possibility that authorities may lose perspective and become abusive in the use of policies like this one, but supervisors are charged to competently manage their operation. And due to the depths of its crime problem when the policy was implemented, New York police applied stop-and-frisk more aggressively than other cities. But whether or not the City is too aggressive ought not be decided without considering its unique circumstances and surprising rate of success in reducing murders.
An opposite approach to systematically and thoughtfully targeting areas where crimes mostly occur and populations that most often commit them like New York City is doing is the blanket, indiscriminate, suspicion-less spying on telephone, email and other private communications and activities of millions of Americans by the National Security Agency.
The government’s spying on Americans is so egregious – eavesdroppers broke privacy rules or overstepped their legal authority thousands of times every year – it’s no wonder the administration wants to arrest and try Edward Snowden for making the information about its spying public.
Where New York police might appear to have been over-aggressive in implementing stop-and-frisk, the federal government’s policy itself is over-aggressive by design. Surely, observers familiar with the Fourth Amendment’s restrictions on searches would be unable to conclude anything other than that NSA spying is precisely why there is a Fourth Amendment.
As reported in The Washington Times, “A Top Secret internal NSA audit, leaked by Mr. Snowden to freelance journalist Barton Gellman earlier this summer and published online by The Washington Post Thursday night shows that, in the 12 months prior to May 2012, there were 2,776 incidents of ‘unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications’ — those between Americans or foreigners legally in the United States.”
“Most were unintended,” according to The Post. “Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure.” Even if the problems were unintended, sloppiness certainly is no excuse: The infringements are no less wrong, no less a breach of individual privacy, and no less intolerable.
The larger the scope of a program, the greater the chance that something will go wrong, and the more opportunities there are for something to go wrong. Congressman Peter King (R-NY) defends the program, saying that the situation is being blown out of proportion, that the rate of error is miniscule.
Maybe so; however, since the NSA program seeks to find a few fake grains of sand on a beach, and involves millions upon millions of records. For every million records, ten thousand mistakes can be made, affecting the privacy of ten thousand Americans, and the success rate is 99 percent.
Even if such gargantuan programs are run efficiently and competently, they are examples of unjustified government excess, and should not be allowed.
Beware the Dictators of Virtue
Stolen (With permission) from Patriot's Corner
This article was so good, that I had to share it here in its entirety. Credit goes to Daniel Greenfield (AKA Sultan Knish), and the original can be found on Daniel Greenfield (AKA Sultan Knish), and the original can be found here.
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America is becoming a more tolerant nation, we are told. Each new thing that we learn to tolerate makes us more progressive. But tolerance is a relative thing. For every new thing we learn to tolerate, there is a thing that we must stop tolerating.
Tolerance can only be allocated to so many places. The balance of tolerance and intolerance remains the same no matter how progressive a society becomes. A tolerant society only allocates its intolerance differently.
America today tolerates different things. It tolerates little boys dressing up as little girls at school, but not little boys pointing pencils and making machine gun noises on the playground.
The little boy whose mother dressed him up in girlish clothes once used to be a figure of contempt while the little boy pretending to be a marine was the future of the nation. Now the boy in the dress is the future of the nation having joined an identity group while the aspiring little marine is suspected of one day trading in his sharpened pencil for an assault rifle as soon as the next gun show comes to town.
The Duke of Wellington once said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton. What battles will the boys playing on the playgrounds where dodgeball is banned and finger guns are a crime win and what sort of nation will they be fighting to protect? The trouble with tolerance is that there is always someone deciding what to tolerate. A free society does not tolerate people; it allows them to live their own values. And a tolerant society is not free. It is a dictatorship of virtue that is intolerant toward established values in order to better tolerate formerly intolerable values.
A free society does not tell people of any religion or no religion what to believe. A tolerant society forces them all to pay for abortions because its dictators of virtue have decided that the time has come to teach this lesson in tolerance. An open society finds wisdom in its own uncertainty. A tolerant society, like a teenager, is certain that it already knows all the answers and lacks only the means of imposing them on others. It confuses its destruction of the past with progress and its sense of insecurity with righteousness.
To the tolerant, intolerance is the most powerful act possible. They solve problems by refusing to tolerate them. School shootings are carried out with guns and so the administrative denizens of the gun-free zones run campaigns of intolerance toward the physical existence of guns, the owners of guns, the manufacturers of guns, the civil rights groups that defend gun ownership and eventually toward John Puckle, Samuel Colt, John Moses Browning and the 82nd element in the periodic table.
None of this accomplishes a single practical thing, but it is an assertion of values. The paranoid mindset that cracks down on little boys who chew pop tarts into deadly shapes, little boys who point pencils and fingers at each other, is not out to stop school shootings, but is struggling to assert the intolerance of its tolerant value system over the reality of violence. It’s not about preventing school shootings, but about asserting a value system in which there is no place for the aspiring marine, unless he’s handing out food to starving children in Africa in a relief operation or serving as a model of gay marriage to rural America.
To understand the NRA’s argument about the moral value of a gun deriving from the moral value of the wielder would require a worldview that is more willing to accept a continuum of shades, rather than criminalizing pencils and pop tarts for guilt by geometric association. A free society could do that, but a tolerant society, in which everything must be assigned an unchanging value to determine whether it will be tolerated and enforced or not tolerated and outlawed, cannot.
That is as true of Newtown as it is of Boston. The same tolerant liberalism that can see deadly menace in a pencil or a pop tart is blind to the lethal threat of a Chechen Islamist. If a gun is innately evil, then a member of a minority group, especially a persecuted one, is innately good. In the real world, it may take bad guns to stop good Muslims, but the system just doubles down on encouraging students to recite the Islamic declaration of faith while suspending them for chewing their pop tarts the wrong way. Liberal values are at odds with reality and they are not about to let reality win. In their more tolerant nation, there is more room than ever for little boys who dream of one day setting off pressure cooker bombs at public events in the name of their religion, but very little room for little boys dreaming of being the ones to stop them.
The little boy in a dress has put on the uniform of tolerance while the little boy making rat tat noises with a pencil is showing strong signs of playing for the wrong team. The wrong team is the one that solves problems by shooting people, rather than writing denunciations of them to the tolerance department of diversity.
The complainer is the hero and the doer is the villain. Reporters and lawyers are the heroes because they are the arbiters of tolerance. Soldiers and police officers are the gun-happy villains because they respond to realities, rather than identities. They unthinkingly shoot without understanding the subtext.
A free society is practical. It acts in its own defense. A tolerant society acts to assert its values. The former fights terrorists and murderers, while the latter lets them go to show off its tolerant values.
This is the clash of values that holds true on the playground and on the battlefield of war. On the playground, little boys are suspended for waving around pencils and on the battlefield, soldiers are ordered not to defend themselves so that their country can win the hearts and minds of the locals in the endless Afghan Valentine’s Day that has stacked up a horrifying toll of bodies. In their cities, men and women are told to be tolerant, to extend every courtesy and to suspect nothing of the friendly Islamists in their neighborhoods. It is better to be blown up as a tolerant society, they are told, than to point the pop tart of intolerance on the great playground of the nanny state.
This article was so good, that I had to share it here in its entirety. Credit goes to Daniel Greenfield (AKA Sultan Knish), and the original can be found on Daniel Greenfield (AKA Sultan Knish), and the original can be found here.
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Tolerance can only be allocated to so many places. The balance of tolerance and intolerance remains the same no matter how progressive a society becomes. A tolerant society only allocates its intolerance differently.
America today tolerates different things. It tolerates little boys dressing up as little girls at school, but not little boys pointing pencils and making machine gun noises on the playground.
The little boy whose mother dressed him up in girlish clothes once used to be a figure of contempt while the little boy pretending to be a marine was the future of the nation. Now the boy in the dress is the future of the nation having joined an identity group while the aspiring little marine is suspected of one day trading in his sharpened pencil for an assault rifle as soon as the next gun show comes to town.
The Duke of Wellington once said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton. What battles will the boys playing on the playgrounds where dodgeball is banned and finger guns are a crime win and what sort of nation will they be fighting to protect? The trouble with tolerance is that there is always someone deciding what to tolerate. A free society does not tolerate people; it allows them to live their own values. And a tolerant society is not free. It is a dictatorship of virtue that is intolerant toward established values in order to better tolerate formerly intolerable values.
A free society does not tell people of any religion or no religion what to believe. A tolerant society forces them all to pay for abortions because its dictators of virtue have decided that the time has come to teach this lesson in tolerance. An open society finds wisdom in its own uncertainty. A tolerant society, like a teenager, is certain that it already knows all the answers and lacks only the means of imposing them on others. It confuses its destruction of the past with progress and its sense of insecurity with righteousness.
To the tolerant, intolerance is the most powerful act possible. They solve problems by refusing to tolerate them. School shootings are carried out with guns and so the administrative denizens of the gun-free zones run campaigns of intolerance toward the physical existence of guns, the owners of guns, the manufacturers of guns, the civil rights groups that defend gun ownership and eventually toward John Puckle, Samuel Colt, John Moses Browning and the 82nd element in the periodic table.
None of this accomplishes a single practical thing, but it is an assertion of values. The paranoid mindset that cracks down on little boys who chew pop tarts into deadly shapes, little boys who point pencils and fingers at each other, is not out to stop school shootings, but is struggling to assert the intolerance of its tolerant value system over the reality of violence. It’s not about preventing school shootings, but about asserting a value system in which there is no place for the aspiring marine, unless he’s handing out food to starving children in Africa in a relief operation or serving as a model of gay marriage to rural America.
To understand the NRA’s argument about the moral value of a gun deriving from the moral value of the wielder would require a worldview that is more willing to accept a continuum of shades, rather than criminalizing pencils and pop tarts for guilt by geometric association. A free society could do that, but a tolerant society, in which everything must be assigned an unchanging value to determine whether it will be tolerated and enforced or not tolerated and outlawed, cannot.
That is as true of Newtown as it is of Boston. The same tolerant liberalism that can see deadly menace in a pencil or a pop tart is blind to the lethal threat of a Chechen Islamist. If a gun is innately evil, then a member of a minority group, especially a persecuted one, is innately good. In the real world, it may take bad guns to stop good Muslims, but the system just doubles down on encouraging students to recite the Islamic declaration of faith while suspending them for chewing their pop tarts the wrong way. Liberal values are at odds with reality and they are not about to let reality win. In their more tolerant nation, there is more room than ever for little boys who dream of one day setting off pressure cooker bombs at public events in the name of their religion, but very little room for little boys dreaming of being the ones to stop them.
The little boy in a dress has put on the uniform of tolerance while the little boy making rat tat noises with a pencil is showing strong signs of playing for the wrong team. The wrong team is the one that solves problems by shooting people, rather than writing denunciations of them to the tolerance department of diversity.
The complainer is the hero and the doer is the villain. Reporters and lawyers are the heroes because they are the arbiters of tolerance. Soldiers and police officers are the gun-happy villains because they respond to realities, rather than identities. They unthinkingly shoot without understanding the subtext.
A free society is practical. It acts in its own defense. A tolerant society acts to assert its values. The former fights terrorists and murderers, while the latter lets them go to show off its tolerant values.
This is the clash of values that holds true on the playground and on the battlefield of war. On the playground, little boys are suspended for waving around pencils and on the battlefield, soldiers are ordered not to defend themselves so that their country can win the hearts and minds of the locals in the endless Afghan Valentine’s Day that has stacked up a horrifying toll of bodies. In their cities, men and women are told to be tolerant, to extend every courtesy and to suspect nothing of the friendly Islamists in their neighborhoods. It is better to be blown up as a tolerant society, they are told, than to point the pop tart of intolerance on the great playground of the nanny state.
A Speech Every American High School Principal Should Give
By Findalis
Monkey in the Middle
America has lost its decency, manners, politeness……………soon without quick changes character!
Listen to the young people, F-this, F-that, and nary anyone will step up and correct them- even with wife and kids in tow!
New high school principal
We watched high school principal Dennis Prager of Colorado , along with Sara Palin and Tom Brokaw on TV a couple of weeks ago….what a dynamic, down to earth speaker. Even though Palin and Brokaw were also guest speakers they did little but nod and agree with him.
If all schools nationwide adopted this ideology for their schools, I know we would all be better off!
Pass this along if you agree. . . . If not delete …. .and later regret it !
Monkey in the Middle
America has lost its decency, manners, politeness……………soon without quick changes character!
Listen to the young people, F-this, F-that, and nary anyone will step up and correct them- even with wife and kids in tow!
New high school principal
We watched high school principal Dennis Prager of Colorado , along with Sara Palin and Tom Brokaw on TV a couple of weeks ago….what a dynamic, down to earth speaker. Even though Palin and Brokaw were also guest speakers they did little but nod and agree with him.
A Speech Every American High School Principal Should Give.
By Dennis Prager.
To the students and faculty of our high school:
I am your new principal, and honored to be so.
There is no greater calling than to teach young people.
I would like to apprise you of some important changes coming to our school. I am making these changes because I am convinced that some ideas that have dominated public education in America have worked against you, against your teachers and against our country.
First, this school will no longer honor race or ethnicity.
I could not care less if your racial makeup is black, brown, red, yellow or white. I could not care less if your origins are African, Latin American, Asian or European, or if your ancestors arrived here on the Mayflower or on slave ships. The only identity I care about, the only one this school will recognize, is your individual identity — your character, your scholarship, your humanity. And the only national identity this school will care about is American.
This is an American public school, and American public schools were created to make better Americans. If you wish to affirm an ethnic, racial or religious identity through school, you will have to go elsewhere. We will end all ethnicity, race and non-American nationality-based celebrations. They undermine the motto of America , one of its three central values — epluribus Unum, “from many, one.” And this school will be guided by America ‘s values. This includes all after-school clubs. I will not authorize clubs that divide students based on any identities. This includes race, language, religion, sexual orientation or whatever else may become in vogue in a society divided by political correctness.
Your clubs will be based on interests and passions, not blood, ethnic, racial or other physically defined ties. Those clubs just cultivate narcissism — an unhealthy preoccupation with the self — while the purpose of education is to get you to think beyond yourself. So we will have clubs that transport you to the wonders and glories of art, music, astronomy, languages you do not already speak, carpentry and more. If the only extracurricular activities you can imagine being interested in are those based on ethnic, racial or sexual identity, that means that little outside of yourself really interests you.
Second, I am uninterested in whether English is your native language. My only interest in terms of language is that you leave this school speaking and writing English as fluently as possible. The English language has united America ‘s citizens for over 200 years, and it will unite us at this school. It is one of the indispensable reasons this country of immigrants has always come to be one country. And if you leave this school without excellent English language skills, I would be remiss in my duty to ensure that you will be prepared to successfully compete in the American job market. We will learn other languages here — it is deplorable that most Americans only speak English — but if you want classes taught in your native language rather than in English, this is not your school.
Third, because I regard learning as a sacred endeavor , everything in this school will reflect learning’s elevated status. This means, among other things, that you and your teachers will dress accordingly. Many people in our society dress more formally for Hollywood events than for church or school. These people have their priorities backward. Therefore, there will be a formal dress code at this school.
Fourth, no obscene language will be tolerated anywhere on this school’s property — whether in class, in the hallways or at athletic events. If you can’t speak without using the f -word, you can’t speak. By obscene language I mean the words banned by the Federal Communications Commission, plus epithets such as “Nigger,” even when used by one black student to address another black, or “bitch,” even when addressed by a girl to a girlfriend. It is my intent that by the time you leave this school, you will be among the few your age to instinctively distinguish between the elevated and the degraded, the holy and the obscene.
Fifth, we will end all self-esteem programs. In this school, self-esteem will be attained in only one way — the way people attained it until decided otherwise a generation ago — by earning it. One immediate consequence is that there will be one valedictorian, not eight.
Sixth, and last, I am reorienting the school toward academics and away from politics and propaganda. No more time will be devoted to scaring you about smoking and caffeine, or terrifying you about sexual harassment or global warming. No more semesters will be devoted to condom wearing and teaching you to regard sexual relations as only or primarily a health issue… There will be no more attempts to convince you that you are a victim because you are not white, or not male, or not heterosexual or not Christian. We will have failed if any one of you graduates this school and does not consider him or herself inordinately fortunate — to be alive and to be an American.
Now, please stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of our country. As many of you do not know the words, your teachers will hand them out to you.
If all schools nationwide adopted this ideology for their schools, I know we would all be better off!
Pass this along if you agree. . . . If not delete …. .and later regret it !
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