I made the mistake of turning on CNN yesterday and saw all the hypnotized pundits trying to work the secret persuasion word “chaos” into every comment about President Trump. That’s your tell that none of the pundits are offering independent opinions. They are part of the hive mind led by some uncredited persuader on their side. Someone told them to say “chaos” a lot, and so they do. This might signal the return of Godzilla. Reminds me of “dark,” their hive-mind word for the summer of 2016.
There are two basic styles of management. One is the cautious style of Fortune 500 companies. The other is the rapid-iteration and A/B testing style of entrepreneurs. Trump is bringing the latter style to the office. The markers for this style of management include:
1. Rapid and decisive hiring and firing.
2. Bias toward action.
3. Rapid A/B testing. Release the early beta version and judge reactions. Adjust accordingly.
4. Emphasis on the psychology of success. Entrepreneurial management includes lots of persuasion and bullshit because entrepreneurs have to fake it until they make it. In other words, they have to create demand via persuasion.
...The world is watching Trump trade some “chaos” to get the benefits of entrepreneurial management. It’s fast and messy, but he’s testing in real time. He’s watching protests. He’s watching news coverage. He’s watching social media. And he’s rapidly adjusting as needed. The net effect of Trump’s bias for action in his first week is that he created a presidential brand of being the most action-oriented president of all time. Your first impression will be sticky. If things work out for Trump, you will forget any temporary “chaos” and remember him as the most effective president in history. Success fixes everything. Every entrepreneur knows that.
The smartest person I know told me that the secret to business success does NOT necessarily involve hiring the right people. We just think it does. The real secret to success is firing the people that you discover to be the wrong fit until eventually you END UP with the right people. No one is psychic enough to do hiring right every time. Job applicants are good at misrepresenting themselves. But a good leader knows which employees to fire and does it quickly and humanely.
Trump fires well. We saw him fire campaign managers as needed to restaff for each phase of his campaign. Lewandowski was perfect for the scrappy first months. Manafort was the right campaign manager to get Trump through the nomination process. And Conway was the right pick as his closer.
I’m not suggesting that everything Trump does is the right move. Quite the opposite. I’m suggesting that he has chosen an entrepreneurial management style that is guaranteed to create more small-scale unforced errors than you might see from a boring Fortune 500 management style. If Trump quickly fixes his unforced errors, you’re seeing a style done right, not wrong.
If you see a pundit crying “chaos” about Trump’s early moves, you’re probably seeing someone with no entrepreneurial management experience. In the startup world, speed has replaced intelligence whenever you can rapidly test*. Doing things quickly, and adjusting as needed, often gets you to a faster/better result than planning a moonshot that has exactly one path to success.
Obviously you want to match the management style to the situation. The messy entrepreneurial style might work great for fixing “systems” in the government, such as healthcare and immigration. It should work against ISIS too. And I expect it will be great for negotiating with other countries because they don’t know what to expect.
Tuesday, January 31, 2017
Trump's entrepreneurial management style
Scott Adams writes,
Who is not broken in some way?
Ann Voskamp writes,
The Body of Christ may have a thousand different opinions, a thousand fractions and divisions, and circles. But there’s not one of us that isn’t broken in some way.Read more here.
And acknowledging our own brokenness is what makes high walls between people crumble.
Because it turns out — that when you know you are broken – it’s always your pointing finger that is broken.
You can’t point at anyone else anymore as the only sinner.
Brokenness breaks us from our need to be “right” and breaks us open to our need to extend the grace we have been given.
Democrat reset? Not yet!
Victor Davis Hanson writes,
...Trump essentially ran against a united Democratic party, the Republican establishment, the mainstream media (both liberal and conservative) — and won.Read more here.
...The twin agents of progressive dogma, the media and the university, are themselves under financial duress, must recalibrate, and have lost support from half the country.
...What the media and Democrats see as Trump’s outrageous extremism now looks, to more than half the country, like a tardy return to normalcy: employing the words “radical Islamic terror,” or asking cities to follow federal law rather than go full Confederate, or deporting illegal aliens who have committed crimes, or building a wall to stop easy illegal entry across the U.S. border, or putting a temporary hold on unvetted refugees from war-torn states in the Middle East. In the eyes of many Middle Americans, all these measures, even if sometimes hastily and sloppily embraced, are not acts of revolution; they are common-sense corrections of what were themselves extremist acts, or they are simply continuances of presidential executive-order power as enshrined by Obama and sanctified by the media.
...Instead of seeing Barack Obama (both his successful two elections and his failed two terms) as the wave of the future, Democrats would be wise to reassess his electoral legacy as a unique phenomenon. In truth, Obama’s legacy is twofold: He took the party hard left, and he downsized it to a minority party of the two coasts and big cities. And then he faded off into the sunset to a multimillionaire retirement of golf and homilies.
The progressive movement, the Democratic party and its cultural appendages in entertainment and the media seem to be doubling down on a failed electoral strategy. Instead, they all hope that either Donald Trump will crack and spontaneously implode after some new sort of Access Hollywood disclosure, or that their own unrelenting invective will eventually grind him down, as it did with Richard Nixon.
In sum, the architects of Democratic-party reform are themselves the problem, not the solution. On key issues, they represent a minority opinion, one confined to the entertainment industry, academia, race/class/gender elite activists, and the wealthy scions of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Wall Street. In addition, minority activists themselves do not get out in the heartland and mistakenly believe that the demeanor, mindset, and, yes, guilt of white urban liberal elites in their midst characterize the white working and middle classes in general. And they mistakenly assume they themselves cannot be out-of-touch elites, given their ethnic and racial heritage, when in fact many most certainly are. Do Eric Holder and Colin Kaepernick know more about poverty and hardship than a West Virginian miner or an out-of-work fabricator in southern Ohio? Does an affluent Van Jones visit depressed rural Michigan to lecture out-of-work plant workers and welders about their endemic white privilege?
The current Democratic reset plan certainly does not resemble the 1976 strategy of nominating a governor from the South in order to avoid another 1972 McGovern catastrophe; nor does it share the 1992 wisdom of nominating Bill Clinton to fend off a second Dukakis disaster. For now, the Democratic-party strategists are doubling down on boutique environmentalism and race/gender victimhood, while hoping that Donald Trump implodes in scandal, war, or depression. They are clueless that their present rabid frenzy is doing as much political damage to their cause as is the object of their outrage.
Neil Gorsuch nominated for the Supreme Court
President Trump has nominated Denver Federal Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill the Scalia vacancy on the Supreme Court. One of my very best friends in Denver is Ryan Gorsuch, who bears a strong physical resemblance to Judge Gorsuch. If Neil is as brilliant as my friend Ryan, we'll be in good shape!
Read about Neil Gorsuch here.
Read about Neil Gorsuch here.
A letter to the president
Oregon Muse wrote a letter to encourage PresidentTrump to stay the course. He recommends you and I do the same. Here's his:
I have just done something I have never done before. I have written a letter to the president. Not even in the days of 9/11 have I felt so moved to do this. It's just that with every day there's a new yelly, shouty, Soros-funded attack that I'm afraid President Trump will be tempted to cave in. I think he needs to be encouraged not to do this. As Rush points out, he really doesn't have any support, not from the opposition party, not from the media, not from academia, not even from elements in his own party, nobody except from those of us who voted for him, and perhaps those of you who did not vote for him, but do not want to see him destroyed by a howling mob of imbeciles. So I encourage all of you to go to this link, bring up the e-mail form, and write an encouraging note to the president. Here is what I told him:
Mr. President--
Ever since your inauguration, there has been nothing but hysterical, dialed-up-to-11 outrage coming at you from the Democrats, the media, and even elements in the Republican Party. George Soros is undoubtedly bankrolling some of this ginned up outrage. Even so, I have never seen anything like this before in my life. I love it that you are apparently that big a threat to the status quo. And the last thing America needs right now is a go-along-to-get-along status quo politician.
Mr. President, please stay the course. Please do not go wobbly on us.
It's probably going to get worse before it gets better, but I think you know this. Please, please PLEASE do not back down from any of your proposals or nominations. If you do, your enemies will only smell blood in the water and come at you even harder. Plus, you'll only discourage those of us who want to support you.
This is no "well, we disagree on policy" dispute. They want to destroy your presidency and they want to destroy you personally. If you did not know this when you started your campaign, you probably know it now.
Mr. President, I know you're a fighter. I voted for you because I could see you were a fighter. But now you're in the fight of your life. The attacks are coming at you fresh and new every day. Please do not allow yourself to think that if you give in to their demands, you will avoid conflict. This is a lie, and I'm sure you know this.
Illegitimi non carborundum, Mr. President. Do not let the bastards grind you down.
My wife and I pray for daily.
May God give you strength and may God grant you victory. Because if you win, America wins. If you lose, we all lose.
Thank you
Monday, January 30, 2017
Trump fires Acting Attorney General
The news story of the night is that President Trump fired Sally Yates, Obama's Acting Attorney General. Stephen Dinan reports for the Washington Times,
She got what she richly deserved!
Mr. Trump relieved Sally Q. Yates, the deputy attorney general who had stepped into the role as the government’s top lawyer at the change of administrations, after she issued a kamikaze attack on her new boss, refusing to defend his executive order in the courts.Read more here.
In her place, Mr. Trump named Dana Boente, a federal prosecutor, as acting attorney general.
“Ms. Yates is an Obama administration appointee who is weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration,” the White House said. “It is time to get serious about protecting our country. Calling for tougher vetting for individuals traveling from seven dangerous places is not extreme. It is reasonable and necessary to protect our country.”
She got what she richly deserved!
"Torture works. The generals know it. We’ll find a way to do it if necessary to keep the country safe. You don’t want to know the details."
Adams reports that President Trump
says with surprising candor that he believes torture works but will follow the recommendation of his generals who say it doesn’t.Read more here.
Interpretation: Torture works. The generals know it. We’ll find a way to do it if necessary to keep the country safe. You don’t want to know the details.
We like to believe that experts are more credible than non-experts. And President Trump is no expert on torture. But keep in mind that President Trump is a Master Persuader who can detect bullshit faster than normal people.
You might even call him an expert at detecting bullshit.
When President Trump presents something as fact, the odds are high that it is hyperbole or just persuasion. You don’t want to assume his facts are literally true, although they are usually emotionally or directionally true.
But if President Trump – The Master Persuader – tells you someone else’s facts are bullshit, you can usually take that to the bank. The man knows bullshit when he sees it. And with his skillset he can also smell it coming from miles away.
Check out Texas Governor Greg Abbott!
At Ninety Miles from Tyranny, Mike Miles reports,
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is vowing to pursue legislation to "remove from office" any official who promotes sanctuary cities -- potentially raising the stakes for local sheriffs and mayors who defy federal law.Read more here.
The proposal also could set up a legal showdown between local and state officials in the Lone Star State.
Abbott announced the legislation in an interview Wednesday with "Fox & Friends," saying he and fellow Republicans in the Texas legislature are working to ban sanctuary cities and impose financial and criminal penalties on officials who fail to comply.
"We are working on laws that will ... ban sanctuary cities [and] remove from office any officer-holder who promotes sanctuary cities," he said.
Two Gulf Leaders Agree To Trump’s Request To Set Up ‘Safe Zones’
Alex Pfeiffer reports at the Daily Caller,
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2017/01/29/gulf-leaders-agree-to-trumps-request-to-set-up-safe-zones/#ixzz4XIt0MgtK
The King of Saudi Arabia and the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi agreed with President Donald Trump’s request to support safe zones for refugees in the Middle East, the White House announced Sunday.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2017/01/29/gulf-leaders-agree-to-trumps-request-to-set-up-safe-zones/#ixzz4XIt0MgtK
"The bottom line is that Trump is improving security screening and intends to admit refugees at close to the average rate of the 15 years before Obama’s dramatic expansion in 2016."
David French provides us with a graph showing what the US ceiling on migrants was each year from 1980-2015, compared with how many actually migrated to the US.
Obama’s expansion was a departure from recent norms, not Trump’s contraction.Read more here.
Respected Catholics ask Trump to investigate America's role in ousting Pope Benedict
William F. Jasper writes at the New American, Catholics Ask Trump to Probe Soros-Obama-Clinton Conspiracy at Vatican.
Did billionaire speculator George Soros, President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, and Obama/Clinton adviser John Podesta conspire to overthrow the conservative Pope Benedict XVI and replace him with a radical, Pope Francis? Did they use America’s intelligence agencies, and our nation’s diplomatic machinery, political muscle, and financial power to coerce and blackmail “regime change” in the Roman Catholic Church?Read more here.
Far from being some wild conspiracy theory, there is sound prima facie evidence to indicate that this is a serious effort to expose a political scandal of the highest order, involving flagrant, criminal abuse of power at the top levels of the U.S. government. A group of respected Catholic lay leaders have sent a letter to President Donald Trump urging him to launch an official investigation into the activities of the above-mentioned individuals (and others) who appear to have been involved in this alleged Vatican coup. They cite eight specific questions they seek to have answered concerning suspect events that led to the resignation of Pope Benedict, the first such papal abdication in 700 years.
“Specifically, we have reason to believe that a Vatican ‘regime change’ was engineered by the Obama administration,” say the petitioners, in their January 20 letter to President Trump. The five signatories to the letter, first published in the Catholic newspaper/weblog, The Remnant, are: Lieutenant Colonel David L. Sonnier, US Army (Retired); Michael J. Matt, editor of The Remnant: Christopher A. Ferrara, author, attorney, and president of the American Catholic Lawyers Association, Inc.; Chris Jackson, Catholics4Trump.com; and, Elizabeth Yore, Esq., Founder of YoreChildren.
“We were alarmed to discover,” their letter notes, “that, during the third year of the first term of the Obama administration your previous opponent, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other government officials with whom she associated proposed a Catholic ‘revolution’ in which the final demise of what was left of the Catholic Church in America would be realized.” The letter includes footnote links that take the reader to documents and news stories underscoring their charges and pointed questions. It first directs attention to the Soros-Clinton-Podesta e-mails disclosed last year by WikiLeaks, in which Podesta and other “progressives” discussed ending the “middle ages dictatorship” in the Catholic Church.
...Podesta, a longtime Clinton adviser/confidante and hand-picked top activist for left-wing funder George Soros, revealed in a 2011 e-mail that he and other activists were working to effect a “Catholic Spring” revolution within the Catholic Church, an obvious reference to the disastrous “Arab Spring” coups organized that same year by the Obama-Clinton-Soros team that destabilized the Middle East and brought radical Islamist regimes and terrorist groups to power in the region. The Podesta e-mail is a response to another Soros-funded radical — Sandy Newman, founder of the “progressive” Voices for Progress. Newman had written to Podesta seeking advice on the best way to “plant the seeds of the revolution” in the Catholic Church, which he described as a “middle ages [sic] dictatorship.” The issue that appeared to be the cause of Newman’s e-mail was opposition by U.S. Catholic Bishops to the federally mandated contraceptive coverage in ObamaCare.
...Cardinal Danneels, a Belgian, has long been viewed as a key subversive in the Church prelature for undermining traditional Catholic teaching against abortion, homosexuality, and “gay marriage,” as well as for his efforts to protect pedophiles in the clergy.
Hypocrites!
Who were the biggest opponents of Vietnamese refugees escaping communism to immigrate to America?California Governor Jerry Brown, George McGovern, and Joe Biden! Richard Pollock has the story at The Daily Caller.
Belief systems
Scott Adams writes,
...lately I get the feeling that Trump’s critics have evolved from expecting Trump to be Hitler to preferring it. Obviously, they don’t prefer it in a conscious way. But the alternative to Trump becoming Hitler is that they have to live out the rest of their lives as confirmed morons. No one wants to be a confirmed moron. And certainly not after announcing their Trump opinions in public and demonstrating in the streets. It would be a total embarrassment for the anti-Trumpers to learn that Trump is just trying to do a good job for America. It’s a threat to their egos. A big one.Read more here.
...If you are looking for the tells that this dangerous situation is developing, notice how excited/happy the Trump critics seem to be – while angry at the same time – that Trump’s immigration ban fits their belief system. If you see people who are simply afraid of Trump, they are probably harmless. But the people who are excited about any Hitler-analogy-behavior by Trump might be leading the country to a police state without knowing it.
Details of Trump's 120 day ban on 7 countries
Michael Patrick Leahy writes in Breitbart,
Eighty-seven percent of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are not affected by President Donald Trump’s Friday decision to temporarily withhold visas from citizens of seven Middle Eastern countries.Read more here.
...The Muslim population in each of these seven countries, estimated by Pew Research as of 2010, is: Iran (74 million), Sudan (33.6 million), Iraq (31.7 million), Yemen (24 million), Syria (20.4 million), Somalia (9.3 million), and Libya (6.4 million).
The 90-day temporary block on new visas does not apply to citizens of the six countries with the largest Muslim populations, as determined by Pew Research— Indonesia (209 million), India (176 million), Pakistan (167 million), Bangladesh (134 million), Nigeria (77 million), and Egypt (76 million).
None of the seven countries on which a temporary visa ban has been placed were listed by name in Friday’s, executive order, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United States.”
Instead, the order referenced previous laws and findings that designated three of these countries “state sponsors of terrorism” (Iran, Sudan, and Syria) and four of them (Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen) as “countries of concern” who are ineligible to participate in the Visa Waiver Program, according to the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Improvement Act of 2015.
The 2015 bill was made law once it was signed by President Barack Obama.
Six of the seven countries to which the temporary visa issuance block applies were designated as “state sponsors of terrorism” or “countries of concern” by previous Democrat administrations. Only one — Iran in 1984 — was designated by a Republican administration.
Who has been winning the intelligence war?
David Goldman writes at PJ Media,
...The Obama administration and the Bush administration hoped to persuade Islamist extremists like the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is the Palestinian branch) to change their spots and turn peaceful. That didn't work.Read more here.
...The terrorists have been winning the intelligence war because a very large number of Muslims fear the terrorists more than they do the counterterrorism efforts of the United States and other Western governments. The terrorists infest Muslim communities and operate like a gangland protection racket. It is dangerous to stand up to them. This will change when Muslims fear the U.S. government more than they fear the terrorists.
Is that cruel? Of course. The world is cruel, but its cruelty is not of our making. The first duty of the U.S. government is to show kindness to prospective American victims of terrorism. And it's great to have a president with the guts to do something about it.
Trump to eliminate $5.7 billion in regulatory costs today
Ace of Spades reports that President Trump issued Executive Orders today
Regulations costing businesses and citizens $5.7 billion -- rushed into action as Obama was leaving for his post-presidential golf tour -- will be eliminated today.Read more here.
His order also demanded that for every new regulation put into effect, two regulations would have to be rescinded, and that the net cost of further regulations must be $0.
""The Obama administration was busy during its 'midnight' period for regulation, breaking records for December regulatory output, and publishing $157 billion in regulations," according to a new report from the regulatory watchdog American Action Forum....
"Europe would love to put the genie back in the bottle. They can't."
Bookworm writes,
Because the media is working overtime to out-and-out lie, or just subtly misrepresent, Trump’s immigration stay, ordinary people are having to do the media’s job. That’s what my friend John did, and he came up with something simple, straightforward, and singularly illuminating:Read more here.
SUMMARY
Yes, the MSM is dishonest BUT it’s more what they’re “conveniently” leaving out of the conversation that’s important.
All of Europe continues to have severe issues with Muslim’s unwillingness to assimilate. They would love to put the “genie back in the bottle” and start anew. They cannot.
We’ve had our own issues (9/11, Ft Hood, Boston Marathon, San Bernardino, The Orlando Nightclub, The Ft Lauderdale Airport, etc). And according to the Pew Research Center… 7% of Muslims in America say suicide bombings are sometimes justified and 1% say they are often justified in these circumstances. That means that 240,000 Muslims in America think suicide bombings MAY be OK .
Trump’s 120 day moratorium is a timeout to figure out how we can avoid the USA becoming Europe and how he can keep Americans safe. (that includes the majority of American Muslims).
I’m not sure it’s the “perfect solution”. I’m not even sure there is a “perfect solution”. But, there is unquestionably a SERIOUS issue that needs to be addressed.
Sunday, January 29, 2017
17 Executive Orders in his first week!
At the Washington Examiner, Sarah Westwood has a summary of each of the 17 Executive Orders Trump has signed.
Trump gives Joint Chiefs 30 days to come up with a plan to destroy ISIS.
S.A. Miller has the story at The Washington Times here.
Nothing is stopping you!
The Atheist Conservative reports,
In general, American women are the most free, privileged, protected, cared-for, amply-fed, well-housed, choicely arrayed, luxury-supplied, opportunity-rich group of human beings that has ever existed. They are not excluded from any career. Wealth and power are available to them, and many women achieve both.Read more here.
Yet millions of American women are discontented with their lot. It’s hard to imagine what they need but haven’t got. However, they invent sad tales of not getting paid as much as men, and complain that they themselves must pay for their own aids and devices to prevent them conceiving children, and for children they do conceive being aborted. They want the state to pay for all that. This, they say, is one of their “rights”. They want to be wards of the state. They do not care to be free.
This was made apparent by the Women’s March for … Well, what it was for was not made clear. But it was certainly against the presidency of Donald Trump, who had been inaugurated the previous day. They hate him, and they wanted to show him, and show the world, that they hate him. That at least can be said with confidence about the purpose of the March.
It was not only an unintelligent affair, reflecting not at all well on the women’s ability to think, it was also a hideous and obscene sight. Many of the women dressed themselves up as giant vaginas. Some carried banners promoting love, as for instance “Love trumps Hate”. But the celebrity women who addressed the multitudes rather contradicted that. One of them, the rock-star Madonna, spoke of “blowing up the White House”.
Linda Sarsour was a chief organizer of the March. She calls herself a “racial justice & civil rights activist”. She is a director of the Arab American Association of New York, and a passionate advocate for sharia law. She tweets about how good it is – eg. “shariah law is reasonable and once u read into the details it makes a lot of sense.”
So her remedy for the discontent of American women is to live as Muslim women do in those countries where sharia law is applied.
What would this mean in practice?
A Pakistani woman, a professional writer, Khadija Khan, describes at Gatestone what most women endure:.
...Being covered in black, non-porous cloth in the desert heat; being stoned to death or beheaded; being confined to a house as a brood-mare and servant, effectively enslaved, unable to leave or earn an independent living, are the reality that millions of women are made to suffer every day – supposedly for their “protection”. … These discriminations are imposed by the mullahs as religious obligations. …
The deeper horror is that all these abuses – child marriage, confinement, genital mutilation, rape, torture, and legal discrimination – have accomplices. These enablers are often well-meaning people from the West, “multiculturalists” who are reluctant to pass judgement on other people’s customs no matter how brutal they might be. What they are really doing, however, is providing crucial support for savage injustices either by sweeping them under the carpet or by defending barbarism as “cultural norms”.
...But the marching women would prefer to live under the dictatorship of Castro than under democratically-elected Donald Trump?
Why yes. That is the only sense that can be derived from what they say so passionately.
They are used to getting what they want. They have everything the cornucopia of America can pour out for them, but their spokeswomen say that they’d be better off under sharia law, or in Cuba.
So why should they not have life under sharia law? Life under the Castro regime in Cuba?
And of course they can.
Nothing is preventing them from going to live under sharia law – in Pakistan, for instance. Nothing is stopping them from moving to Cuba.
We say: go, girls, go!
Only you will have to pay for your own passage to these utopias. Cruel President Trump will not allow the state to give you your fares.
What a shame! What a disgrace! What an oppression! What a tragedy!
"Local citizens need not remain silent in this battle."
Tom Tancredo reports at Breitbart,
President Trump this week signed an executive order declaring war on so-called sanctuary cities. Agencies within the United States Government will begin withholding federal grant funds from those cities, and additional actions to enforce federal immigration law will be taken soon.Read more here.
Unlike Obama, President Trump is not trying to making new laws by executive decree. In his Executive Order, the president is only reminding mayors and governors of existing federal law dating to 1996:
...The president’s executive order is not only good news for law enforcement, it is also a good civics lesson for some mayors and even some members of Congress.
The mayor of Denver last week said in the same breath that Denver is not a sanctuary city but it will continue to defy federal immigration law.
Congressman Michael Coffman, whose district office is located in Aurora, Colorado, made an announcement after the mayor of Aurora similarly disclaimed the label “Sanctuary City” while affirming, sanctuary policies, Representative Coffman said he will propose a bill in Congress defining a sanctuary city as ONLY cities which call themselves sanctuary cities.
Is it any wonder citizens are confused when politicians go to such lengths to obfuscate the issue?
The Trump executive order is also good news for taxpayers. Sanctuary cities impose a huge, billion cost to taxpayers that has been hidden from public view and shielded from political accountability.
That annual taxpayer burden amounts to over $14 Billion nationally, over $1 billion in California and Texas and over $100 million annually in over a dozen states.
...In my home state of Colorado, the 2016 SCAAP report by the state Department of Corrections revealed that state prison system was holding 2,039 criminal aliens at a cost of $37,958 per inmate. That is a total cost of $77,396,362. The federal reimbursement grant was $2,077, 720. That is a grant of 2.7 cents for every dollar of actual cost. Those 2,039 criminal alien inmates were 14% of all state prison inmates: One in every seven felons in the state prison system is a criminal alien.
What are the comparable numbers for your state? You can discover the SCAAP grant amounts for each state prison system and the local county jails applying for federal reimbursement at this website.
...To most Americans, these hidden taxpayer costs are not the most important reason for opposing sanctuary city policies. The real cost is not in taxpayer dollars but in the hundreds of thousands of crimes committed by individuals who should not be here in the first place. If we had secure borders and effective enforcement of all immigration, these criminal alien incarceration numbers would be very small.
Yet, the fact that local governments hide these cost figures is symptomatic of the deeper problem. Too many local officials want all the political benefits of claiming to be the protector of “our immigrant community” while hiding the costs of protecting criminal aliens. Does your local sheriff publish the incarceration costs for criminal alien inmates in your local jail. Does he ever acknowledge the number of criminal aliens released from jail annually who are NOT turned over to federal immigration authorities because of local sanctuary policies? Does anyone on your local city council ever ask those questions?
Some local politicians also use a phony “states rights” argument for resisting federal enforcement of immigration law. This is a phony argument because there is a long string of Supreme Court decisions, most recently the 2012 Arizona v. United States ruling by Justice Kennedy, saying that the Constitution in Article VI gives the federal government preemptive authority over immigration law. States cannot “opt-out’ of federal immigration law, and neither can cities or counties– or universities or private religious organizations.
...Based only on one federal district court decision in 2014 in Clackamas County, Oregon, sheriffs across the country have been intimidated into rejecting ICE detainers by the mere threat of lawsuits by ACLU and sanctuary advocates.
The fact is, ICE has revised its Detainer form to meet the constitutional standards for Probable Cause and thus render that district court ruling moot.
ICE detainers are fully legal and should be — indeed, MUST be– honored by local law enforcement agencies. Local sheriffs and police chiefs have no constitutional basis for refusing to honor ICE detainers.
Citizens should hold local officials accountable when they refuse to obey the law. The Trump administration is making it clear that federal sanctions will be imposed — including the withholding of federal funds — from cities which want to disobey the law. But local citizens need not remain silent in this battle.
Let's talk about that immigration ban from seven countries
Bookworm weighs in on the temporary immigration ban for seven Muslim countries.
Bookworm continues,
Bookworm links to an article by Edward Cline. Percentage of Muslims:
Read more here.
Middle Eastern Muslims, especially the ones from the list of terrorist-promoting countries (a list Obama’s team compiled) are not people who share America’s Biblical morality and cultural traditions. Indeed, their mores are often the complete opposite of ours. As foolish Europeans have already discovered, the citizens from Muslim countries such as those on the Trump list come from cultures that aggressively advocate mass rape, pedophilia, honor killings, genital mutilation, the erasure of women through veils and sequestering, the slaughter of gays, and discrimination (often murderous) against other faiths, especially Judaism.
Regarding that last point, do remember that Muslims aren’t shy about their hatred for Jews. After the Jews refused to recognize Mohamed as their prophet he, in a remarkably un-saint-like way, got petty. He began by denigrating Jews and, as his wounded ego festered, began to demand their deaths.
...Color me paranoid, but I’m not inclined to welcome with open arms people whose ideology mandates my death.
I like how Roger L. Simon sums it up:
I have a question for you: what do we do about Islam?
You will note I say Islam and not some other euphemistic expression like radical Islam or Islamism or Islamofascism. Islam.
I know that disturbs you because chances are you live in a world where cultural relativism prevails and all religions — fusty old things that they are — are equal.
Well, it is so if you think so, but I will note again that at least one interested party — the current president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi — has declared bluntly that his religion is in dire need of a reformation. Chances are he knows more about Islam than you. He certainly does than me. Also, he lives in a hellacious region of the world dominated by that religion and its violent ideology.
How dangerous is that ideology? Ask yourself this: Why is it that since 9/11/2001 there he have been 30,209 terror attacks in the name of Allah? There have been 38 in the last six days alone, resulting in 425 killed and 419 injured. There were also nine suicide bombings during that time frame.
So I repeat, why is that? DNA? That would be racist. Poverty? But most of the terror masters are rich. How about an ideology that urges you to do these things, just as it always has since the seventh century? Could that be the reason — just possibly?
Bookworm continues,
Islam’s rules marginalizing women, forbidding lending for reasonable interest (which is one of the engines of a growing economy), barring Jews and Christians, killing gays, and limiting knowledge to the Koran (which vast numbers of illiterates in the Middle East even cannot read) are perfect ingredients for a violent, degraded, economically stagnant community. Those countries that have some wealth (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc.) achieved their wealth, not through human potential, but for the West’s willingness to pay big bucks for black gold.
It’s worth noting that all these wealthy Muslim countries refuse to touch with a ten-foot pole their Muslim compatriots from countries on the terror-sponsoring list. They know, as Europe is learning, that while Saudi Arab and Qatar and Kuwait have exerted some control on Islam’s worst impulses, the incoming refugees will wreak havoc with and destroy their fragile, wealth-driven stability. Put another way, people who are religiously wedded to hatred and ignorance, many of whom are illiterate as well, are not good immigrants, and that’s true even if they travel to countries that share with them a slightly more civilized (or at least tightly controlled) version of their culture.
Also, the mention of Syria is a reminder that most of these immigrants aren’t escaping war-torn Syria. Instead, as the broad list of countries under temporary ban shows, what they’re really escaping is the poverty their own system breeds. Worse, with their imperialist mindset, they’re coming here to have us support them while they work on imposing on us the same system that they Left behind.
Here’s another difference: Unlike the aberrant mass slaughter of Jews in Europe during the WWII era, the reality is that Muslims (sadly) routinely kill their co-religionists. What’s happening in Syria is a Sunni-Shia battle. During the 1980s, Iraq and Iran engaged in an epic Sunni-Shia battle. Saudi Arabia’s suddenly willingness to engage with Israel is because Saudi is Sunni and it fears a Shia Iran that, thanks in large part of Obama and Kerry, is newly flush with cash and continuing unabated its nuclear question. Lebanon, once a thriving, relatively sophisticated country, has been a battlefield for decades because of the Sunni-Shia schism. In Sudan, even without the Sunni-Shia schism, the killings were systematic: first the Christians, then the wrong kind of — the black kind of — Muslims.
Bookworm links to an article by Edward Cline. Percentage of Muslims:
United States: 1.0
Australia: 1.5
Canada: 1.9
China: 1.0-2.0
Italy: 1.5
Norway: 1.8
Denmark: 2.0
Germany: 3.7
United Kingdom: 2.7
Spain: 4.0
Italy: 4.6
France: 8.0
Philippines: 5.0
Sweden: 5.0
Switzerland: 4.3
The Netherlands: 5.5
Trinidad & Tobago: 5.8
Guyana: 10.0
India: 13.4
Israel: 16.0
Kenya: 10.0
Russia: 10.0-15.0
Ethiopia: 32.8
Bosnia: 40.0
Chad: 53.1
Lebanon: 59.7
Albania: 70.0
Malaysia: 60.4
Qatar: 77.5
Sudan: 70.0
Bangladesh: 83.0
Egypt: 90.0
Gaza: 98.7
Indonesia: 86.1
Iran: 98.0
Iraq: 97.0
Jordan: 92.0
Morocco: 98.7
Pakistan: 97.0
Palestine: 99.0
Syria: 90.0
Tajikistan: 90.0
Turkey: 99.8
United Arab Emirates: 96.0
Bookworm continues,
When your Progressive friends get all shrill and weepy about the fact that President Trump, using terrorist data from the Obama administration, has put a 90-day hold on the influx of dangerous people from a perpetually hate-filled, ignorant, misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic, anti-Christian, anti-Hindu part of the world, in order to come up with immigration systems that can more readily separate the more violent immigrants from the ordinary lumpen mass of people steeped in medieval hatred, comfort yourself with the thought that Trump is on the side of morality and wisdom. A President’s first job is to protect Americans. This is not the same as shutting our eyes while people die abroad. This is a sober, compassionate evaluation that says we cannot save others if we cannot first save ourselves.
Read more here.
More fake news
Seth J. Franzman reports,
The public should be suspicious of Trump’s policies and the media should speak truth to power and demand answers from the administration. But the media should also be truthful with the public and instead of claiming Trump singled out seven countries, it should note that the US Congress and Obama’s Department of Homeland Security had singled out these countries. It should have told us about the Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015 rather than pretend this list was invented in 2017. Trump’s executive order said “countries of concern,” it didn’t make a list. That list was already made, last year and years before.Read more here.
Will they do it?
Tyler Durden reports at Zero Hedge,
After a pompous, liberal agenda was crammed down the throats of the American people during his first two years in office, President Obama suffered staggering losses in Congress for the next six years that cost Democrats control of both houses. But, heavy Democrat losses, courtesy of an electorate that vehemently rejected a far-left agenda, didn't stop Obama from continuing to push through countless new rules and regulations from the White House all while pushing his authority to the brink of every Constitutional boundary known to man.Read more here.
Of course, the problem with "legislating from the White House" is that all those rules and regulations can be undone by the next administration. And, as Kimberley Strassel points out in a Wall Street Journal Opinion piece today, a little know tool within the Congressional Review Act could allow Republicans to wipe out 8 full years of Obama's liberal agenda, with a simple majority vote, all while preventing similar rules from every being recreated by future administrations.
Todd Gaziano on Wednesday stepped into a meeting of free-market attorneys, think tankers and Republican congressional staff to unveil a big idea. By the time he stepped out, he had reset Washington’s regulatory battle lines.
These days Mr. Gaziano is a senior fellow in constitutional law at the Pacific Legal Foundation. But in 1996 he was counsel to then-Republican Rep. David McIntosh. He was intimately involved in drafting and passing a bill Mr. McIntosh sponsored: the Congressional Review Act. No one knows the law better.
Everyone right now is talking about the CRA, which gives Congress the ability, with simple majorities, to overrule regulations from the executive branch. Republicans are eager to use the law, and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy this week unveiled the first five Obama rules that his chamber intends to nix.
So, here's how it works:
But what Mr. Gaziano told Republicans on Wednesday was that the CRA grants them far greater powers, including the extraordinary ability to overrule regulations even back to the start of the Obama administration. The CRA also would allow the GOP to dismantle these regulations quickly, and to ensure those rules can’t come back, even under a future Democratic president. No kidding.
Here’s how it works: It turns out that the first line of the CRA requires any federal agency promulgating a rule to submit a “report” on it to the House and Senate. The 60-day clock starts either when the rule is published or when Congress receives the report—whichever comes later.
“There was always intended to be consequences if agencies didn’t deliver these reports,” Mr. Gaziano tells me. “And while some Obama agencies may have been better at sending reports, others, through incompetence or spite, likely didn’t.” Bottom line: There are rules for which there are no reports. And if the Trump administration were now to submit those reports—for rules implemented long ago—Congress would be free to vote the regulations down.
But, it gets even better:
There’s more. It turns out the CRA has a expansive definition of what counts as a “rule”—and it isn’t limited to those published in the Federal Register. The CRA also applies to “guidance” that agencies issue. Think the Obama administration’s controversial guidance on transgender bathrooms in schools or on Title IX and campus sexual assault. It is highly unlikely agencies submitted reports to lawmakers on these actions.
“If they haven’t reported it to Congress, it can now be challenged,” says Paul Larkin, a senior legal research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Mr. Larkin, also at Wednesday’s meeting, told me challenges could be leveled against any rule or guidance back to 1996, when the CRA was passed.
The best part? Once Congress overrides a rule, agencies cannot reissue it in “substantially the same form” unless specifically authorized by future legislation. The CRA can keep bad regs and guidance off the books even in future Democratic administrations—a far safer approach than if the Mr. Trump simply rescinded them.
As Strassel points out: "The entire point of the CRA was to help legislators rein in administrations that ignored statutes and the will of Congress. Few White House occupants ever showed more contempt for the law and lawmakers than Mr. Obama. Republicans if anything should take pride in using a duly passed statue to dispose of his wayward regulatory regime. It’d be a fitting and just end to Mr. Obama’s abuse of authority—and one of the better investments of time this Congress could ever make."
A new breed of conservatives
At Ace of Spades, Oregon Muse writes about a new breed of conservative.
I remember back in the old days, public conversations between liberals and conservatives usually went something like this:
1. liberal: says something
2. conservative: responds
3. liberal: you're a racist | sexist | bigot | pejorative du jour
4a. conservative: I am not a racist | sexist | bigot | pejorative du jour
4b. conservative attempts to give evidence for statement 4a.
5. liberal: not good enough
6. Goto step 3
Pussification: The Effeminization of the American Male by Doug Giles
This is how he advertises it:
PUSS-I-FI-CA-TION*: The act, or process, of a man being shamed, taught, led, pastored, drugged or otherwise coerced or cajoled into throwing out his brain, handing over his balls and formally abandoning the rarefied air of the testosterone-leader-fog that God and nature hardwired him to dwell in, and instead become a weak, effeminate, mangina-sporting, shriveled up little pussy.
* From The Doug Giles 2016 Dictionary of Grow the Hell Up, You Pussy!
Doug Giles, best-selling author of Raising Righteous And Rowdy Girls and Editor-In-Chief of the mega-blog, ClashDaily.com, has just penned a book he guarantees will kick hipster males into the rarefied air of masculinity.
That is, if the man-child will put down his frappuccino; shut the hell up and listen and obey everything he instructs them to do in his timely and tornadic tome.
There is a lot of hype here and I don't advise going to Giles' ClashDaily.com site without first strapping on an extra-strength ad blocker. Anyway, he is obviously being deliberately provocative -- he's all but mooning feminists and progressives. This would not be possible 30 years ago. But it's been a long time coming.
Progressives aren't interested in what we have to say, or in having a "reasonable dialog" with us. It's nothing but "shut up or we'll shut you up!". This is what their shouty, dialed-up-to-11 rhetoric is designed to do. And this generally works, or at least, that's how it has worked in the past. But what has happened over time is a process very much like how we produced antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Like a dose of penicillin, the shouty rhetoric takes out "nice" conservatives or conservatives who decide they have better things to do than to get shouted at by shouty progressives. But some conservatives manage to survive, so the dosage is upped: the shouts get even louder and the attacks get more vicious and are extended beyond the political arena into personal lives. This creates a very hostile environment. But even it drives out or silences many conservatives, it also creates a new strain of tough conservatives who don't mind fighting, who like to fight, and can throw 2 punches for every one they take. I'm thinking of Ann Coulter, Andrew Breitbart, and Milo Yiannapoulos. To this we can add the guy who wrote this book, Doug Giles, and Townhall.com columnist Kurt Schlichter. There are probably others I've missed. And of course, what is now the most imperviously resistant conservative ever, Donald Trump, who is so impervious that nobody really knew for sure until a couple of months ago that he even was conservative. Oh sure, there were indications, but there were indications the other way, too, so it was kind of a guessing game as to how he would actually govern until he started naming individuals to fill the various open cabinet positions.
Nothing in the progressives' conservative eradication toolkit has worked against Trump. They keep upping the dosage, the shouting gets more shouty, but it all just bounces right off. They've actually got a new drug they've been trying to use, they've left off calling Trump a "racist" because the word has lost its effectiveness due to overuse, like the little boy who cried 'wolf', after awhile, people stop responding. This new drug they've rolled out is "white supremacist", which I guess is supposed to a more potent version of "racist." They first tried it out on Trump aide Steve Bannon. But even though it didn't work, the specialists haven't figured out that it didn't work, and is not working on Trump, either. Another "next-gen" drug they're using is "literally Hitler." They tell us that Donald Trump is "literally Hitler." Now, at this point, the progressives have pretty much shot their wad. What could possibly be worse than being "literally Hitler"? Literally Hitler's mom? Literally double-secret Hitler?
There have been downstream consequences of the progressive failure. Many conservatives simply don't care anymore. Warden's excellent piece earlier this week makes this clear. The new, Trump-era "honey badger conservative" playbook appears to be this:
1. conservative: says something
2. liberal: you're a racist | sexist | bigot | pejorative du jour
3. conservative: fcuk you.
Somewhere, Andrew Breitbart is smiling.
Saturday, January 28, 2017
Liberation Day!
Okay, team, it is time to liberate 200 chicks from their nursery.
Let's put them one-by-one in this carrying cage.
Wow! Do we get to climb up on that thing? This is going to be fun! Who are all those big birds in the next room? Why does that guy keep on saying "Cock-A-Doodle-Do? Can't he think of anything else to say?
Let's put them one-by-one in this carrying cage.
Wow! Do we get to climb up on that thing? This is going to be fun! Who are all those big birds in the next room? Why does that guy keep on saying "Cock-A-Doodle-Do? Can't he think of anything else to say?
"I can't!"
Jay B. Hueweiler was in Basic Combat Training with Chelsea Manning. He reports,
Chelsea Manning wasn’t being picked on at the Shark Attack when the Drill Sergeants said she had to lift her own bag like everyone else, and she said she couldn’t. She wasn’t being picked on when those Soldiers tried to help motivate her to lift the Jerry Can over her head and even picked up their own and did the exercise again, with her, out of solidarity. And when she faked a choking fit in the middle of the Dining Facility, it wasn’t because someone else was tormenting her – she was tormenting herself.Read more here.
...Chelsea Manning was not picked on or harassed because of her gender or identity; she was not bullied because she was small or appeared easily overpowered or dominated. No, Chelsea Manning was ostracized. Because some unknown in her character prevented her from ever truly entering into that covenant of self-sacrifice upon which collective group defense depends, she could not ever satisfactorily contribute to the welfare of the group. In a social schema where the defense of the group becomes the perpetual rationale for why the group should even continue existing, Chelsea Manning either could not or would not sacrifice enough of herself to inspire loyalty among comrades. Soldiers usually adopt these values in reaction to physical and emotional stressors, to the demands of group accountability, and to their dependency on the group for survival. For that reason, by the end of Basic Combat Training most grudges have been put aside, and any rivalries have abated; this happens exactly because Soldiers have by then learned those lessons in loyalty and self-sacrifice. Everybody learns those lessons.
Everybody except …
"So if men really care about women, they’ll do what real men do: refuse to participate in movements that undermine individual liberty. Instead, they’ll respect themselves as men and show women love and respect in their personal lives, not scribble their intentions on a piece of paper and post it online."
The latest "insidious attacks on masculinity" come from the #AllMenCan" movement. D.C. McAllister reports at The Federalist,
On the heels of the liberal Women’s March during the inauguration weekend, the hashtag campaign that started a few years ago, #AllMenCan, picked up steam. This is another of those movements where people hold up handwritten signs to show how sensitive they are. In this case, it’s a bunch of men telling the world they stand by women.Read more here.
What it really amounts to is well-meaning guys looking like a bunch of saps. Why? Because this campaign isn’t about respect for women. It’s about promoting feminism. And the two aren’t one and the same.
We have a legacy of male entitlement? What about female entitlement? In sexual assault cases, a woman’s word is often taken over a man’s. Men are often presumed guilty until proven innocent on college campuses. In custody cases, women are given preferential treatment. The welfare system is constructed in a way that allows women to raise children without men, thereby shutting out fathers.
Women can abandon their duties as mothers by killing their offspring, and they’re celebrated for it. But if a man abandons his duty as a father, he is shunned by society. Men pay for dates more than women. When women are out of work, that’s okay, but men face stigma.
Again, where is this mysterious patriarchy that’s so powerful in our nation? It’s doing a pretty bad job of getting men preferential treatment structures.
Abortion Isn’t Pro-Women, and Men Aren’t Anti-Woman
Clearly, these men have bought into the propaganda that Trump is out to get women and that they have to prove that they’re not misogynists. The president has offered no policy proposals that threaten women in any way, a point that is often made to women who supported the march. When asked how their rights are being threatened, they keep coming back to “reproductive rights.”
As for their need to prove they’re not sexist, this is a trap. When you try to prove you’re not a misogynist, you will become enslaved to women’s will and whims. It’s no different than white people having to prove they’re not racist. You can’t prove a negative. You will never be able to do enough to prove that in the deep recesses of your heart you’re not what these women think you are—a sexist pig.
There’s nothing wrong with men wanting to support women on legitimate issues. It’s great to promote goodwill, love, and respect among all people. But that’s not what’s going on here with the #AllMenCan movement. Men who buy into it might think they’re noble souls and deserve praise, but they’re really dupes whose consciences have been taken captive by a feminist ideology that isn’t about empowering women. It’s about empowering the state—because to get what they want, they need the state to be big and powerful and involved in every area of our lives, from health care, to our families, to our churches, to our employment.
That’s not good for anyone—not women, and certainly not men. So if men really care about women, they’ll do what real men do: refuse to participate in movements that undermine individual liberty. Instead, they’ll respect themselves as men and show women love and respect in their personal lives, not scribble their intentions on a piece of paper and post it online.
Video from Portland, Oregon traffic blockers, with appropriate police response
In Portland, Oregon "protesters" were blocking traffic. Someone called the cops. They came and threw the "protesters down in the street, to the applause of people on the sidewalk. Go here to see the video.
Soros-funded groups go to court to stop Trump from keeping us safe from foreign terrorists
Aaron Klein reports at Breitbart,
Immigration lawyers from groups financed by billionaire George Soros, a champion of open border policies, were signatories to a lawsuit filed Saturday to block President Donald Trump’s executive order halting visas for 90 days for “immigrants and non-immigrants” from Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, Yemen, Iran, and Iraq.Read more here.
The executive order further suspended the entry of all refugees for 120 days, indefinitely blocks Syrian refugees from entering and lowers the ceiling to 50,000 for refugees allowed to enter the U.S. during Fiscal Year 2017.
Three new executive actions signed by Trump today
Michelle Moons reports for Breitbart,
President Donald J. Trump signed three new executive actions on Saturday afternoon, including a five year lobbying ban, reorganization of the National Security Council, and a plan to defeat the Islamic State.Read more here.
...Ahead of the signing, a senior administration official indicated that the lobbying ban included not only a five year ban on administration officials, but a lifetime ban on administration officials lobbying for a foreign country.
...The White House senior administration official also said ahead of the signing that the executive action regarding ISIS would give military leaders 30 days to compile and present a report to the President on a strategy to defeat ISIS.
Nutrition myths
At Maggie's Farm Dr. Joy Bliss takes on the subject of nutrition.
I have repeatedly insisted that a "healthy human diet" cannot be defined. As omnivores, humans can survive and thrive on many sorts of diets. Each culture has its own food biases, myths, preferences.
It is an imaginary First-world problem to obsess about food as if food were medicine, magical, or potential toxins in our civilization of revolutionary food abundance, quality, variety, safety, and flavor.
(We have discussed weight loss and physical fitness ad nauseum here, so this is not about those special nutritional areas.)
Old wive's tales, obsolete studies, superstitions, misrepresented press reports, etc. These are my own views via the literature. Do your own research if you want. This applies to otherwise relatively normal people without serious ailments:
- Coffee is bad for you. Wrong.
- You should drink X glasses of water per day. Nonsense. If you are peeing, you are hydrated.
- Beer and coffee are dehydrating. False. They are just enhanced water.
- Red meat is bad for you. Nonsense. Where did that myth come from? The Federal Chicken Board?
- Organic foods are "better for you." Zero evidence for that, but there is evidence that organic foods have fewer nutrients. Not that it matters; it is de minimus.
- You need roughage to prevent colon cancer. That is disproven. It will give you larger BMs if that is what you enjoy.
- Fruit and fruit juice is good for you. Nope, they are just flavored sugar, what I term warm popsicles. Tasty though. Fruit is just a dessert as the Italians understand, not real food. Worried about scurvy, are you? Fruits are not really healthy foods, but are good sources of sugar if you are sugar-deprived.
- Eggs are bad for you. Wrong. They are an excellent food, actually one of the few "perfect" foods (ie balances of fat, protein, and carb). A "perfect food" means you can thrive on it, alone, for a long time.
- Carbs and starches are bad. Nope. They are great foods as long as you are not dealing with a weight problem. With the egg, potato is the other "perfect" food item. Well, milk too.
- Eating fat makes you fat. Wrong. Excess carbs make people fat. Carbs, plus general gluttony.
- Three meals per day. Why? It's just a habit. For youth and manual laborers, certainly - plus snacks.
- Vegetarian diets are healthier. Utter cultish nonsense. Active humans and growing kids need plenty of good protein for normal growth and muscle maintenance and repair, which is difficult for vegetarians to obtain without extra effort and expense. Low-protein cultures generally have littler people with less strength.
- Gluten? Don't get me started.
- Salt is bad. No, it is essential for health. If you have dangerous blood pressure, take a pill.
- Vegetables and greens are "healthy." Not especially. They are just cheap, sometimes tasty, tummy-fillers. If you hate all veggies and greens (even steamed spinach with garlic), take a multivitamin once or twice a week and forget about it. Otherwise, enjoy them.
- Low cholesterol diets? There is no meaningful relation between dietary cholesterol and heart disease unless you have severe familial hypercholesterolemia in which case you take a pill and hope for the best.
- Alcohol is unhealthy. Nope, good for body, soul, and cheerful companionship if not abused.
- White vs. Brown breads, rice, and sugars? The brown thing is pure foolishness, except for flavor preferences. If you need brown rice for the microscopic protein in it, you need Food Stamps desperately. Get an EBT card and buy yourself a Big Mac.
- Fish oils are healthy. A health-food scam, same as "organic." Fatty fishes are delicious, though: shad, tuna, swordfish, trout and salmon, bluefish. Even a baked mackerel with garlic and rosemary.
- "Free range" is better. If it's a cultural, moral, or flavor thing for you, go for it if you can spare the cash. I'd like to see a blind tasting. I do hate to see animals raised in meat factories, but all animal husbandry is meat factories. Nursery schools and day care are caged meat factories too, but we don't eat the product.
Where am I in error?
Temporary ban on refugees from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya
The Hill reports,
Speaker Paul Ryan's (R-Wis.) office said Saturday that President Trump's executive order limiting immigration from several Muslim-majority countries does not target Muslims.More here.
“This is not a religious test and it is not a ban on people of any religion,” AshLee Strong told The Washington Post.
Several congressional aides also told the newspaper that the new immigration directive does not seek to single out a preference for Christians, with restrictions mainly focusing on areas with terrorism.
During an interview with Christian Broadcasting Network on Friday, however, Trump signaled that he may be favoring persecuted Christians in the Middle East for a refugee status.
When asked if he plans on prioritizing Christian minority groups who have been victims of armed conflict in the region, Trump responded "yes."
The executive order signed on Friday prohibits foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslims countries – Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya – from entering the U.S.
The immigration restriction is expected to stay in place for a minimum of 90 days.
Use Fed Ex!
Fox News has video of a Fed Ex employee grabbing a fire extinguisher from his truck and putting out a fire. What was the cause of the fire? Stupid millennials burning American flags! He does get support from one millennial, who tells the rioters, "That is not the way to unite the country." As if they cared about uniting the country. Watch the video here.
"The creation of misleading narratives and outright falsehoods to deceive the public"
Victor Davis Hanson writes,
No one has described the methodology of fake news better than Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security advisor for Barack Obama and brother of the president of CBS News, David Rhodes. Ben Rhodes cynically bragged about how the Obama administration had sold the dubious Iran deal through misinformation picked up by an adolescent but sympathetic media (for which Rhodes had only contempt). As Rhodes put it, “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”Read more here.
Translated, that meant that Rhodes and his team fed false narratives about the Iran Deal to a sympathetic but ignorant media, which used its received authority to report those narratives as “truth”—at least long enough for the agreement to be passed before its multitudinous falsehoods and side-agreements collapsed under their own weight. “We created an echo chamber,” Rhodes bragged to the New York Times: “They [reporters] were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
Obama’s healthcare advisor Jonathan Gruber likewise saw the virtues of fake news in pushing a political agenda. Gruber assumed that the public, not just the media, was stupid and easily conned: “Lack of transparency,” he said, “is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever.”
Again, the term “fake news” is best applied to mainstream media reporting of fantasies as facts that are demonstrably not true—and are probably known to be not true, but are thought to help advance a desired progressive political or cultural agenda.
...What unites these fake news narratives and gives them greater media resonance than other fables and urban myths is again their progressive resonance. Fake news can become a means to advance supposedly noble ends of racial, gender, class, or environmental justice—such as the need for new sexual assault protocols on campuses. Those larger aims supersede bothersome and inconvenient factual details. The larger “truth” of fake news lives on even after its facts have been utterly debunked.
...And indeed, the fake news mindset ultimately can be traced back to the campus. Academic postmodernism derides facts and absolutes, and insists that there are only narratives and interpretations that gain credence, depending on the power of the story-teller.
In sum, fake news is journalism’s popular version of the nihilism of campus postmodernism. To progressive journalists, advancing a leftwing political agenda is important enough to justify the creation of misleading narratives and outright falsehoods to deceive the public—to justify, in other words, the creation of fake but otherwise useful news.
"No virtue greater than authenticity, and no vice worse than phoniness"
David Ernst, writing at The Federalist, reminds us of a speech Donald Trump gave at the Al Smith dinner just days before the election.
Ernst's analysis:
And a special hello to all of you in this room who have known and loved me for many, many years. It’s true. The politicians. They’ve had me to their homes. They’ve introduced me to their children. I’ve become their best friends in many instances. They’ve asked for my endorsement and they’ve always wanted my money. And even called me really a dear, dear friend. But then suddenly, decided when I ran for president as a Republican, that I’ve always been a no-good, rotten, disgusting scoundrel. And they totally forgot about me.
Ernst's analysis:
In other words: even if I have been a no-good, rotten, disgusting scoundrel, what does that make you? At least I don’t pretend to be decent; you people, on the other hand, have the gall to pretend that you’re any better than I am. Let’s dispense with the fiction that you would have treated me with any less contempt if I had bothered to live up to any of your standards of decency in the first place, and acknowledge that they have nothing to do with decency per se, and everything to do with power. Your presumption of any moral superiority is a willful, bald-faced lie, and I’m going to keep calling you on that crap until it puts me in the White House.Read more here.
...In contrast to the many religions, systems of moral thought, and other ancient traditions that have distinguished every effort to better the human condition, postmodernism presumes that all of these endeavors are the cause of human failure. It therefore, operates according to just one moral imperative: discredit anything that other people presume to stand for goodness, because the belief that anything is superior to anything else inevitably results in prejudice, interpersonal strife, and inequality.
Thus, the Venus de Milo has no more aesthetic value than a crucifix in a jar full of urine; Beethoven’s symphonies are no more profound than the latest round of top 40 hits; all religions are fundamentally the same, and their “moderate” postmodern adherents are all comfortably represented on the “Coexist” bumper sticker. In a sense, it isn’t culture at all, but rather an anti-culture that measures success insofar as it deconstructs anything that other people value.
Provided that the postmodern man believes in nothing and values nothing, one wouldn’t be unreasonable in concluding that he cares about nothing. But anyone who knows postmodern man also knows that nothing could be farther from the truth. Rather, the “cult of non-discrimination” is filled with bright-eyed idealism about making the world a better place, and in the cases where it challenges baseless prejudice, it does make the world a better place. Like other utopian visions that seek to remake human beings into something alien to their nature, however, it is incapable of compromise, and thus lends itself to hypocrisy and fanaticism.
PC’s fakeness is only outdone by its fanaticism, which has grown with considerable intensity in recent years. Everything from Brendan Eich’s firing from Mozilla for donating to Proposition 8 in California, to the eruption of protests on college campuses over the offensiveness of Halloween costumes, to the controversy over state laws that restrict bathroom usage according to biology rather than gender identity, suggest that the postmodern “cult of nondiscrimination” only grows more desperate the more it succeeds. What gives?
The answer is that the postmodern man ultimately finds satisfaction in the only thing that is left for him: power. Moral superiority is an undeniable source of power over other people, and postmodernism’s moral imperative offers it cheaply to anyone who accepts its premises. The power to shut others up by merely insinuating that they are a bigot is subtle, but its potency is difficult to overstate.
...As they run out of traditions, institutions, and customs to deconstruct, however, the more diluted the power rooted in their outrage becomes. Hence the growth in moral hysteria over ever smaller and more trivial things.
...As soon as the PC outrage machine decides something is wrong with whatever you think, then it has no interest in your thoughts or reasoning: you must submit or remain silent.
All this raises an uncomfortable question for people who have no use for PC’s agenda, and who value the freedom to think for themselves. How do you respond to someone who is determined to smear you for your alleged bigotry regardless of what you think and why? How do you win an argument against someone who willfully changes the meaning of words, maintains that the truth is completely relative, and feels perfectly justified in accusing virtually anyone of the gravest moral failure?
...Trump grasps our postmodern culture intuitively, and put it to use with devastating effect.
If our opponents are going to accuse us of being evil-minded bigots, regardless of what we say or think, then what’s the point in bothering to convince them otherwise? Let’s play by their own rules of relativism and subjectivity, dismiss their baseless accusations, and hammer them mercilessly where it hurts them the most: their hypocrisy. After all, if there is no virtue greater than authenticity, and no vice worse than phoniness, then the purveyors of contrived PC outrage are distinctively vulnerable.
Democrats gleefully welcomed Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries with the expectation that they’d bury him in a pile of condescension for being a buffoon and scorn for being the next Hitler. Better yet, they figured that his astounding rise confirmed everything they had long assumed about half the country and were now free to say out loud: they are indeed a basket of irredeemable racist, sexist, homophobic deplorables. Mainstream Republicans would surely hop on board the progressive train rather than be associated with these creeps.
So I’m a scoundrel because I don’t pay income taxes? Maybe so, but it also makes me smart, just like all the other billionaires who are backing your campaign. So I’m a sexist because you found a video of me bragging about how my superstar status enables me to grab women by the p—y? Maybe it does, but allow me to publically introduce four of the women who have accused your husband of everything from indecent exposure to rape. So I’m a greedy businessman who stiffs my contractors? Fine. You’re a corrupt politician who sells out our national interest to line your own pockets.
Maybe everything they say about me is true, but at least I’m authentic, at least I’m real: you on the other hand, are a bloody, disgusting hypocrite.
So say goodnight to the bad guy! Because this bad guy is now our president.
Friday, January 27, 2017
True to his word!
Pamela Geller writes in The American Thinker,
Unfortunately, Palestinian Authority officials say they did receive the money.
President Trump: True to his word
By Pamela Geller
It's been less than a week since President Donald J. Trump took office, and he has, in no short order, astonishingly delivered on myriad campaign promises. In spades. His hands-on style of governing is breathtaking.
The people spoke. The people won. And our man is delivering the goods. It's what freedom is supposed to look like. We have been living under the boot of leftist autocrats for so long, we forgot it could be this good. We have been set free. Every day is Christmas.
The whole of the enemedia are in a collective tailspin, hell-bent on ignoring Trump's monumental accomplishments, and instead are churning out fake news stories about crowd size – his and the sore losers' march (funny how they never did a story on Tea Party crowd size). Last night, ABC news anchor David Muir, in the first interview Trump gave as president, made something of an ass of himself trying to bait the president by focusing on "crowd size" and today's favorite enemedia meme: "who'll pay for the wall?" As if the Democrats ever gave a fig about costs. Who paid for the absurd "cash for clunkers"? Or Obama's endless bailouts? Or Obamacare? Or Obama's hundreds of billions to Iran? Or Obama's 20-trillion-dollar deficit? If Trump says Mexico will pay for that wall, rest assured, it will – one way or another.
Trump's accomplishments in five days are nothing short of miraculous. We are witnessing history. And it's wonderful. And no one is talking about it. It's Kafkaesque.
The old Republican guard, falling into the media's trap once again, decry Trump's handling of the media. They say he shouldn't be responding to the media's false accusations. Instead, he should be talking about the actions he is taking. As if the media would report (no less positively) about what Trump has set in motion And why are the RINOs still considered our spokespeople? They are not. Has Fox learned nothing from this election? They, too, are playing into the enemedia's false narratives of crowd size, wall costs, and black sites.
The left will not go quietly. They want a war, and by George, they may very well get one. Wednesday night, they demonstrated in Washington Square Park – led by Hamas-tied CAIR. It is amusing that the left has handed the reins of power to terror-tied groups such as CAIR, who seek to impose sharia across this great land. Black slavery (in many Muslim countries), gender apartheid, creed apartheid is now the rallying cry for the left? Perfect. The left has become a parody of itself.
This week, Trump abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Obama's signature trade deal. He signed an executive order to defund International Planned Parenthood. He signed executive orders restricting immigration. He signed an order for the Mexico border wall. He declared his intention in a phone call with Egyptian President El-Sisi to fight terrorism.
Obama buried Israel at the U.N. President Trump is resurrecting her: he announced intentions to defund U.N. groups who give full membership to the Palestinian Authority. To the very last minute, Obama was aiding, abetting, and arming Islamic enemies of freedom. He released $221 million to the Palestinians in his administration's last hours. Officials say the outgoing Obama administration defied GOP opposition and sent funds to the Palestinian Authority that had been blocked in Congress.
But President Trump halted Obama's $221,000,000 parting gift of U.S. taxpayer money to the Palestinians. That money would have gone to fund Jew-killing – Obama's parting gift to the Jews. The Muslim leaders of the "Palestinian Authority" exhort Muslims living in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria to kill Jews and attack the Jewish state. They glorify murder and reward terrorists and their families and indoctrinate their young to grow up to be homicide-suicide bombers. These funds would have been used to slaughter, maim, and destroy. That would have been Obama's crowning legacy.
President Donald Trump has begun in just days to undo the damage Barack Obama done. There is much more to do, but he has given free people tremendous grounds for hope.
Unfortunately, Palestinian Authority officials say they did receive the money.
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