Grief counselors are in high demand nowadays

Shoe, March 14, 2018:

#RESIST the left's unhinged rhetoric

"Donald Trump is such a terrifying fascist

dictator that literally no one fears speaking out

against him on literally any platform."

— Sonny Bunch

"A well-regulated militia": the Left's delusion about the Second Amendment

This image, which is making its way around Facebook in the wake of the Orlando nightclub massacre, zeros in on the part of the Constitution's Second Amendment that is the most confusing to modern eyes.

Before we, too, zero in on this phrase, consider for a moment what the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments) actually was.  Why were these amendments added all at once, and so soon after the adoption of the Constitution?  Because they were adopted as a condition of the approval of the Constitution by several of the states.

There was widespread suspicion that the proposed Constitution didn't go far enough to explicitly curtail the powers of the central government. The dissenters felt that individual rights would quickly fall prey to expanding government power in the absence of explicit declarations of the inviolable rights of individuals.

The Bill of Rights is the answer to these concerns, and the promise of these was sufficient to get all of the states to sign on to the Constitution.

Here, then, is the complete text of the Second Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Noting the neighboring words "security" and "State", many on the Left would have us believe that the phrase "well regulated Militia" is referring to the military and to state and local law-enforcement agencies -- that this amendment guarantees the government the ability to undertake any and all efforts necessary to protect the country (military) and maintain public order (local law enforcement).

But why, in the midst of a collection of amendments designed to guarantee individual rights, would the Founders drop in a grant of government power that, in essence, had the potential to render the rest of the Bill of Rights moot?

Does anyone honestly think that the dissenters would have gone along with this new government if this were the case?  All of human history testifies that when the people of a country have no means to resist the tyranny of their government, their government will sooner or later drift into tyranny.

So what, then, did the phrase "well regulated Militia" mean to 18th-century American eyes?

The militia were the ones who were expected to grab their guns and take action whenever the need arose.  Most importantly to the contemporary debate, though, all able-bodied males, regardless of occupation, were considered part of the militia, whether or not they had ever served in the armed forces.  This in itself argues for the notion that this amendment was not a restrictive one.

What about "well regulated"?  Surely this phrase shows that arms-bearing must be done under the supervision of the government, doesn't it?  Actually, no.  At the time, the phrase "well regulated" was used interchangeably with "well trained" or "orderly".

Well, then, what about "security of a free State"?  In context, "state" is obviously referring to the nation itself, not to the government.  There are two ways of seeing the phrase "free state": (1) a nation as a whole free from the control of other nations (this is the modern understanding of the term), and (2) a nation comprised of individuals who are free from the oppression of their government.

If we accept the notion of the entire Bill of Rights being a Bill of Individual Rights, that second interpretation of "free state" gains a considerable amount of weight.

So. Taking the Second Amendment as a whole, I see this paraphrased declaration: A nation of citizens in the possession of and well-trained in the use of firearms is an effective bulwark both against conquest by other nations and against oppression by that nation's government.  Therefore, the central government shall take no steps to interfere with the right of the citizens to keep and bear such firearms.

A well-armed, well-trained citizenry is necessary to secure the freedom of said citizenry.

The Left, the Founders, and the Constitution

Well, of course the left understands the U.S. Constitution better than its authors did.

Everybody knows that straight white males are supposed to be self-loathing

Via The Meta Picture

Intellectual diversity is a threat to progressive hegemony, and it shall not be tolerated

Carl Trueman writes in First Things about the fact that modern universities seem designed to prevent vigorous-yet-civil debate about contentious issues.  As the progressive tribe solidifies its hold on western culture, the name of the game is conformity to the progressive ideal.  Not only will dissent not be tolerated; it will be punished in any way possible.

Universities [...] are not supposed to be confessional institutions inculcating a particular creed, nor should they be built on politicized extensions of child-rearing philosophies founded on self-esteem. They should be places where debate is part of the way of life, and where one has to live shoulder to shoulder with those with whom one differs. Yet they have become the very places where this inability to disagree is now apparently cultivated as a positive virtue. The truly educated person is now no longer the person who understands an opposing viewpoint even as he rejects it. For even to understand an alternative viewpoint is to collude in the oppression which such an opinion embodies.

I suspect that the future health of democracy depends upon university administrators worrying less about the dangers posed by whatever is the micro-aggression du jour and more about providing safe places for those who actually want to hold opinions and have debates. Safe places, that is, that are marked by the very risks and danger involved in intellectual engagement.

Trueman's hope (expressed in the second paragraph of the excerpt) is no more than a pipe dream, at least for now.

The first "Native Americans" popped out of the soil here, apparently

This bit of left-wing agitprop amuses me to no end.

Image found at The Meta Picture

Mandatory voting is, quite possibly, one of the worst ideas ever

This week, I was quite surprised to learn from my Facebook newsfeed that quite a few on the left are excited about the notion of mandatory voting for American citizens (at least, I assume they're wanting this just for the citizens).  My gut reaction is that this is, quite possibly, one of the worst ideas ever presented as a solution to the phenomenon of low voter participation.

Before explaining why I believe this, I should note that this erupted into the news this week because our Dear Leader just endorsed the notion.  Yahoo! News, March 18:

Obama floated the idea of mandatory voting in the U.S. while speaking to a civic group in Cleveland on Wednesday. Asked about the corrosive influence of money in U.S. elections, Obama digressed into the related topic of voting rights and said the U.S. should be making it easier — not harder— for people to vote.

Just ask Australia, where citizens have no choice but to vote, the president said.

"If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country," Obama said, calling it potentially transformative.

Yes, it would be grand if citizens took seriously their civic responsibility to participate in our democratic institutions.  So, why don't they?  The president's speech encapsulates the reasons that I usually see proffered by the Left:

Not only that, Obama said, but universal voting would "counteract money more than anything."

Disproportionately, Americans who skip the polls on Election Day are younger, lower-income and more likely to be immigrants or minorities, Obama said. "There's a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls," he said in a veiled reference to efforts in a number of Republican-led states to make it harder for people to vote.

Yikes!  So...anywhere from a half to two-thirds of voting-age citizens are informed, motivated folks who are systematically kept away from the polls by Republican voter-suppression efforts.

Seriously?

Forcing these 50%+ of voting-age citizens to the polls won't turn them into informed, motivated voters.  Any person who takes a half-serious look at human nature should be able to conclude two things: (1) These uninformed, unmotivated folks will look for the easiest way to avoid the failure-to-vote penalty (most likely a fine); and (2) The informed, motivated folks (both left and right) will be ready to help the uninformed, unmotivated folks discharge their duties in the most expedient way possible.

"Just tell me who to vote for, okay?"

This will come down to a contest of which ideological tribe can get the most apathetic sheep to the polls.  The Left's giddiness about the mandatory voting proposal is evidence enough that progressives believe that they would win that contest.

Appeasers hate those who confront evil (Obama's idealism v. Netanyahu's realism)

Dennis Prager has a concise explanation for why the Obama administration is so offended by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's hard line against the Islamists:

Appeasers hate those who confront evil.

Given that this president is the least likely of any president in American history to confront evil — or even identify it — while Benjamin Netanyahu is particularly vocal and eloquent about both identifying and confronting evil, it is inevitable that the former will resent the latter.

The negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program are today’s quintessential example. Those who will not confront a tyranny engaged in terror from Argentina to the Middle East, and which is committed to annihilating another country, will deeply resent Israel and its leader.

Why can't Netanyahu understand that the terrorists don't need to be confronted and defeated; they need jobs?

DNA, GMOs, and the Left's dilemma

io9 reports January 18 on a fascinating study by Oklahoma State University:

A recent survey conducted by the Oklahoma State University Department of Agricultural Economics found that 80.44% of respondents supported a government policy mandating labels on foods containing DNA. Not GMOs. DNA, the genetic material contained in every living thing known to science and practically every food, GMO or otherwise.

The results smack of satire, but they're real. The Food Demand Survey (FooDs) is an online poll of a representative sample of the U.S. population, conducted every month by Oklahoma State agricultural economist Jayson Lusk and research specialist Susan Murray. The most recent month's survey included a question regarding the institution of government policies concerning food. The results, which you can read in full here, indicate that "a large majority (82%) support mandatory labels on GMOs." What's curious, note Lusk and Murray, is that roughly "the same amount (80%) also support mandatory labels on foods containing DNA."

Even though the survey's sampling method does not appear to be ideal, the result does seem to reflect the human social tendency to jump onto issue bandwagons with little or no factual knowledge of the issues.  If someone we know and admire (be it a friend or some celebrity) is passionately for or against something, it's easy and natural to tag along.

There is a common superstition that all "chemicals" in food are bad.  "DNA" sounds like a chemical (which, of course, it is), so you bet I want to be informed when chemicals with ominous-sounding three-letter acronyms are present in my food!  Indeed, many who embrace the concept of "organic" foods seem to think that it is too much work to ponder the scientific pros and cons of various additives that have been part of our food supply for generations.

The GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) controversy is another good example of hysteria driven by scientific illiteracy.  Foods with one or more GMO ingredients have been dubbed "Frankenfoods" -- a reference to Frankenstein's monster -- by many activists.  I doubt they wish us to carry the analogy too far, given that the townspeople's reaction to the creature was irrational and emotion-driven.  The analogy the activists WANT us to take from the story is the notion that we must never tamper with nature, ever, for any reason.  A large majority of Americans are emotionally drawn to this argument, which almost certainly accounts for the fact that 82% support the proposed GMO labeling requirement, despite the fact that there is little or no scientific evidence that any of the GMOs approved for consumption are harmful to humans in any way.

To me, the curious twist to the anti-GMO crusade is that its activist core appears to reside in to the part of the political left boasting an average education level higher than that of the general population.  They have every reason to be familiar with the scientific truth behind GMOs, but they're the ones that appear to be driving the emotional opposition.

How can this be?  Some on the right are fond of observing that when Soviet communism collapsed, unreconstructed Marxists in the west appear to have adopted the environmental movement as the platform for continuing the advancement of their socioeconomic agenda.  There is strong circumstantial evidence to support this notion.  First, the environmental movement started to blossom dramatically even as the dust was still settling from the collapse of the communist bloc. Second -- and this is more significant to me -- virtually every policy prescription advanced to solve the environmental crisis du jour happens to align perfectly with the socioeconomic goals of the Marxist left: crippling regulation, punishing taxation, global wealth redistribution, etc.

This also appears to be the underbelly of the activist left's opposition to GMOs: it's driven by ideology, not by science illiteracy.  You see, GMOs can be patented...by corporations!  If we allow GMOs into our food supply, that benefits greedy capitalists.  So, even if someone comes up with something like "golden rice", which has a scientifically demonstrable benefit to human health, it must be opposed at all costs. 

The dilemma for the educated activists on the left is that their numbers aren't anywhere near what is needed to successfully advance their anticapitalist agenda, so they have no choice but to harness the ignorance of those whose convictions about food are driven more by superstition than by facts.  Thus, even though these activists often scorn the scientific illiteracy of average Americans, expediency keeps their mouths shut as GMO myths continue to run rampant in the mass media, in blogs, and on Facebook.

Obamacare sticker shock leads to heart attacks, many new patients for health care system

'I was all for Obamacare until I found out I was paying for it'

This quote (from the article linked below), ladies and gentlemen, may go down in history as one of the iconic summaries of the political support the 'Affordable' Care Act enjoyed before anyone actually signed up for it and found out how much it would cost.

The risk pool has been forcibly expanded to include those who were formerly uninsurable due to the fact that they already had conditions guaranteeing that the insurance companies would take a loss on these customers from day one.

I'm not speaking against people who have trouble getting insurance; I'm merely asking: why is anybody surprised that insurance rates would go up when millions of high-risk customers were suddenly added to the risk pool?

Of course, not even Congress read the text of the Affordable Care Act before passing it, so why should we expect consumers to know picky little details like this?

Saturday's Los Angeles Times ran an article about California residents experiencing a rude awakening over the realities of losing their current coverage and being forced into plans that have significantly higher premiums.  Excerpts [emphasis added]:

Thousands of Californians are discovering what Obamacare will cost them — and many don't like what they see.

These middle-class consumers are staring at hefty increases on their insurance bills as the overhaul remakes the healthcare market. Their rates are rising in large part to help offset the higher costs of covering sicker, poorer people who have been shut out of the system for years.

Although recent criticism of the healthcare law has focused on website glitches and early enrollment snags, experts say sharp price increases for individual policies have the greatest potential to erode public support for President Obama's signature legislation.

"This is when the actual sticker shock comes into play for people," said Gerald Kominski, director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. "There are winners and losers under the Affordable Care Act."

If you're in one of the demographic categories that the ACA was designed to help, the law really appears to be a godsend.  But if you're not one of the favored ones, guess what?  You're basically being taxed to support the favored ones.

On balance, many Americans will benefit from the healthcare expansion. They are guaranteed coverage regardless of their medical history. And lower-income families will gain access to comprehensive coverage at little or no cost.

The federal government picks up much of the tab through an expansion of Medicaid and subsidies to people earning up to four times the federal poverty level. That's up to $46,000 for an individual or $94,000 for a family of four.

But middle-income consumers face an estimated 30% rate increase, on average, in California due to several factors tied to the healthcare law.

This is coming as quite a surprise to many who enthusiastically supported the law as long as it remained an abstract collection of promises.

Pam Kehaly, president of Anthem Blue Cross in California, said she received a recent letter from a young woman complaining about a 50% rate hike related to the healthcare law.

"She said, 'I was all for Obamacare until I found out I was paying for it,'" Kehaly said.

Obamacare really does seem designed to fail.  Whether or not the current form of the law was written with malicious intent, it is clearly not politically sustainable.  As the horror stories mount, the clamor for a government-run single-payer system will likely become deafening (especially with the media energetically amplifying said clamor).

[Image credit: various websites.  If you know the original source, please let me know!]

Obamacare: Just wait until it's the only choice

When a private company provides a mediocre product, customers can "punish" the company by denying it their business. Are we sure we want to entrust our lives and health to a bureaucracy that will pay no penalty for being wrong?

I ask because the Affordable Care Act in its current form is almost certainly not the end game of our current president and his fellow travelers. Once we get to single-payer health care in this country, we will have no alternative but to endure debacles like the online health insurance marketplace which, despite three years of work and half a billion dollars of investment, should not have gone live earlier this month.

Washington Post, October 21:

Days before the launch of President Obama’s online health ­insurance marketplace, government officials and contractors tested a key part of the Web site to see whether it could handle tens of thousands of consumers at the same time. It crashed after a simulation in which just a few hundred people tried to log on simultaneously.

Despite the failed test, federal health officials plowed ahead.

When the Web site went live Oct. 1, it locked up shortly after midnight as about 2,000 users attempted to complete the first step, according to two people familiar with the project.

As new details emerged about early warning signs of serious deficiencies in HealthCare.gov, Obama on Monday gave a consumer-friendly defense of the health-care law, insisting that the problems many Americans have faced in trying to enroll in insurance plans will be fixed quickly.

How San Francisco’s $10.24 minimum wage hurts the people it allegedly helps

NBC Bay Area, March 29 brings us another example of the tyranny of good intentions:

Signs posted at Subway sandwich shops sadly inform San Francisco patrons -- we hear Willie Brown is a big fan -- that "all SUBWAY Restaurants in SF County DO NOT PARTICIPATE IN Subway National $5.00 Promotions," according to the newspaper.

[…] Apparently, the city's new minimum wage, raised to $10.24 as of Jan. 1, make $5 footlongs an impossible business model.

Apparently the economic concept is too difficult for the compassionate left to grasp: Raising the minimum wage also raises the cost of items sold at businesses that employ minimum-wage workers.  As these workers go out and spend their raise, the extra income is consumed by the price increases, and the employees are not much better off than they were before. 

When employers are allowed to pay wages at a level where each employee’s labor is a net economic benefit to the business, prices remain stable (absent other upward pressures on costs, such as government regulations or taxes).

The best way for a low-wage employee to better his life is to make himself more valuable to his employer through merit, or to get some training and find a better job.  When he does that, and the employer has the freedom to pay the employee what his labor is worth, everybody wins.

How to know if we really believe in the right to free speech

Mark Steyn, in a recent speech given in Australia:

Anyone can be in favour of free speech for Barney the Dinosaur and the Wiggles, but if you’re not in favour of free speech you find offensive and repellent and loathsome, you’re not in favour of free speech at all. And you’re on the side of creeping totalitarianism.

Ironically, a generation ago it was the left that claimed the need to remind conservatives of this truth.

Memo #2 to Occupiers: You are almost certainly being played.

Well, the Occupiers haven't backed down on their Bolshevik rhetoric, so I'll go ahead and repeat the point I made in my last post:

If, somehow, your wildest dreams are realized and you end up overturning the capitalist system, YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO CONTROL WHAT TAKES ITS PLACE.

As soon as you realize you've been played by those who are even more nefarious than you are, it'll be too late -- you'll be a "stain on a tank tread".

Something tells me this is what Scott Adams had in mind with today's comic.

Memo to the idealists currently “occupying” Wall Street and various other places

Suppose you got everything you seem to want, up to and including the overthrow of capitalism.

You will not be able to control what takes its place.  Seriously.

You envision a utopian society, characterized by economic and social justice, where all is sunshine, rainbows and unicorns, where everyone happily puts the needs of the many above the needs of the few.

It will never happen, not in this life.  Mankind’s fallen nature guarantees it.  History proves it.  If you try it again, you’ll prove it again.

NAACP blasts lack of diversity in NBA and NFL

Just kidding!  They would never complain about the overwhelming dominance of African Americans in professional basketball and football!

This week their target is the television newsroom, as reported July 7 by the Wall Street Journal:

In a press release issued this morning, the NAACP condemned 24-hour cable news channel CNN for its recently announced prime time news lineup, calling the lack of diversity in its collection of news anchors a “glaring omission.”

Of course, they don’t do the heavy lifting of proving that qualified minorities are trying to get jobs or promotions and are being denied.  As usual, they simply infer discrimination without having to be in the same ZIP code as the facts.

As our president is fond of saying, let me be clear: The NAACP's goal is not diversity.  Its goal is to increase representation of African Americans wherever it sees said representation to be deficient.  This is not necessarily wrong in itself.  What's wrong is the fact that they're hiding under the cloak of Diversity.  If diversity was truly the the NAACP's goal, it would at the very least express discomfort at the overrepresentation of African Americans in basketball and football.  Raise your hand if you think that will ever happen.

(Don’t miss the part of the article where the NAACP press release essentially says, “everyone knows Fox News is racist, but we expected better from CNN”. Again, reinforcing the liberal meme without being required to prove anything.)

PC police raid Pooh's Corner

A Florida State University sociologist frets that children's literature is insufficiently diverse, as Fox News reports May 6:

A comprehensive study of traditional children’s book characters has determined that Pooh Corner may be rife with gender inequality.

Dr. Janice McCabe, a sociologist at Florida State University, examined nearly 6,000 children’s books between 1900 and 2000 and determined the stories have a definitive gender bias and a disproportionate representation of genders.

“We found that males are represented more frequently than females in the titles and the central characters in the book,” McCabe told Fox News Radio.

[...] “I had kind of expected that books would start off in 1900 being unequal and become more equal over time,” she said. 

“We were surprised by the historical patterns and by the animals. The fact that the animals were the most unequal and even in the 1990s there were still two male animals to every one female animal.” 

I'm wondering... are there any barriers to women in general, or feminists in particular, getting their children's stories published?  I'm not aware of any. What's stopping them?

So, what's the real problem here?  Obviously the parents are the problem:

“A lot of times this is invisible to people,” she said, encouraging parents to pay attention to gender when selecting books and reading material for their children. “I’m not saying they shouldn’t read books about men and boys,” she said. “Instead, just think about the gender of particular books and be aware of it.” 

Apparently, Mom (who typically makes the purchase decisions regarding children's books) and Dad are still trapped in the roles defined for them by our oppressive patriarchal culture, and are thus blind to the injustice of the status quo.

Hey, let's try a wacky little experiment: If children's book writers publish a bunch of "gender-balanced" books that are enjoyable and don't have an obvious agenda, maybe the public will reward them by buying the books.

I wonder why Dr. McCabe didn't think of this?

When the going gets rough, the Democrats run away -- First Wisconsin, now Indiana

Just like in Wisconsin, today in Indiana we are being treated to the spectacle of legislators from a minority party, completely beholden to a small constituency (less than 12% of all workers nationwide, according to the BLS), refusing to live up to their constitutional responsibility. Indianapolis Star, February 22:

Seats on one side of the Indiana House were nearly empty today as House Democrats departed the the state rather than vote on anti-union legislation.

A source tells the Indianapolis Star that Democrats are headed to Illinois, though it was possible some also might go to Kentucky. They need to go to a state with a Democratic governor to avoid being taken into police custody and returned to Indiana.

The House came into session twice this morning, with only three of the 40 Democrats present. Those were needed to make a motion, and a seconding motion, for any procedural steps Democrats would want to take to ensure Republicans don’t do anything official without quorum.

With only 58 legislators present, there was no quorum present to do business. The House needs 67 of its members to be present.

House Speaker Brian Bosma said he did not know yet whether he would ask the Indiana State Police to compel the lawmakers to attend, if they can be found.

It seems obvious that the Dems hope to be seen as heroic, on a par with anti-regime protesters in various Middle Eastern countries, but the fact of the matter is that they are cowards who refuse to acknowledge that their biggest campaign cash source is a huge drag on our ailing economy and on the taxpayer's wallet.

The Democrats aren't about to bite the hand that feeds them.

A question I wish Wisconsin students would ask their teachers

"Teacher, based on your actions of the past several days, can I conclude that you think it's okay to lie and steal if it's for a cause you feel strongly about?"

The Atlantic's Ford Vox (himself a brain injury physician) is horrified to learn that many doctors in Wisconsin have conspired with public school teachers to defraud taxpayers by writing fake sick excuses.  Read what he has to say in his February 21 post.  He links to several Youtube videos documenting this activity -- which ought to be sufficient to get the teachers fired and the doctors hauled before medical ethics boards.  Here's one of them:

By continuing to hide like cowards in another state, and by declaring their solidarity with the protesters, it can be argued Wisconsin Dem senators are tacitly endorsing these tactics.

UPDATE: Fox News, Feb. 21:

The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health is investigating whether some of its doctors wrote fake sick notes to people protesting the governor's plan to strip public union employees of the right to collectively bargain.

Over the weekend, FOX News reported that doctors from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine were manning a doctor station to write medical notes excusing those protesting at the Wisconsin State Capitol from work. Physicians were seen standing on a street corner wearing lab coats and giving out medical notes.