Universal Health Care?

People who believe in “universal health care” show remarkably little interest—usually none—in finding out what that phrase turns out to mean in practice, in those countries where it already exists, such as Britain, Sweden or Canada

For one thing, “universal health care” in these countries means months of waiting for surgery that Americans get in a matter of weeks or even days. In these and other countries, it means having only a fraction as many MRIs and other high-tech medical devices available per person as in the United States.

In Sweden, it means not only having bureaucrats deciding what medicines the government will and will not pay for, but even preventing you from buying the more expensive medicine for yourself with your own money. That would violate the “equality” that is the magic mantra.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.57

The Need for “Profiling”

We have become so obsessed with political correctness that both common sense and self-preservation have to take a back seat. We don’t dare “profile” anybody going through security checks because that’s not politically correct. Far better to be blown to smithereens than to be politically incorrect.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.47

Racial Disparity Is Not Necessarily Racist

 

Study History

One of the painful consequences of studying history is that it makes you realize how long people have been doing the same foolish things with the same disastrous results.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.44

Are You a Right Wing Extremist?

According to an official document of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, right wing extremists include “groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.” It also includes those “rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority."

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.26

Don't Be Silent!

 

About Israel

Since everybody seems to be criticizing Israel for its military response to the rockets being fired  into their country from the Gaza Strip, let me add my criticisms as well. The Israelis traded land for peace, but they have never gotten peace, so they should take back the land.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.14

One Must Pay Consequences of Decisions

Even in an era of much-ballyhooed “change,” the government cannot eliminate sadness. What it can do is transfer that sadness from those who made risky and unwise decisions to the taxpayers who had nothing to do with their decisions.

Worse, the subsidizing of bad decisions destroys one of the most effective sources of better decisions— namely, paying the consequences of bad decisions.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.25

Government Control of Income?

Another dangerous power toward which we are moving, bit by bit, on the installment plan, is the power of politicians to tell people what their incomes can and cannot be. Here the resentment is being directed against “the rich.”

The distracting phrases here include “obscene” wealth and “unconscionable” profits. But if we stop and think about it—which politicians don’t expect us to—what is obscene about wealth? Wouldn’t we consider it great if every human being on earth had a billion dollars and lived in a place that could rival the Taj Mahal?

Poverty is obscene. It is poverty that needs to be reduced— and increasing a country’s productivity has done that far more widely than redistributing income by targeting “the rich.”

You can see the agenda behind the rhetoric when profits are called “unconscionable” but taxes never are, even when taxes take more than half of what someone has earned, or add much more to the prices we have to pay than profits do.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.12-13

Watch the Distractions

If eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, incessant distractions are the way that politicians take away our freedoms, in order to enhance their own power and longevity in office. Dire alarms and heady crusades are among the many distractions of our attention from the ever increasing ways that government finds to take away more of our money and more of our freedom.

Magicians have long known that distracting an audience is the key to creating the illusion of magic. It is also the key to political magic.

Alarms ranging from “overpopulation” to “global warming” and crusades ranging from “affordable housing” to “universal health care” have been among the distractions of political magicians. But few distractions have had such a long and impressive political track record as getting people to resent and, if necessary, hate other people.

The most politically effective totalitarian systems have gotten people to give up their freedom in order to vent their resentment or hatred at other people— under Communism, the capitalists; under Nazis, the Jews.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.11

Do You Recognize Our Culture?

Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

LEFTISTS and LGBTQXYZ

Every leftist movement wishes to challenge and ultimately destroy the society they feel has “oppressed” them. The LGBT movement is no different. It wants to completely annihilate anything resembling traditional sexual or romantic norms, and “Pride Month” serves as the bridgehead for pushing the societal envelope even further, until eventually it breaks down altogether.

Above all, rainbow activists crave opportunities to push their sexual fetishes on normal Americans and innocent children and receive a “thank you” in return from a thoroughly browbeaten and brainwashed populace. Judging by those loud cheers in the videos above, they’ve convinced a large section of the population to applaud the annihilation of foundational cultural mores and revere the vanguard of this degenerate revolution.

Hayden Daniel, ‘Pride’ Parades Are Nothing But Massive Humiliation Rituals

What LEFTISM Is About

At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.

P.J. O’Rourke

What Is Wisdom?

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

Charles Spurgeon

Racial Crime

In the post-George Floyd era, black juveniles are shot at 100 times the rate of white juveniles. Blacks between the ages of ten and 24 are killed in drive by shootings at nearly 25 times the rate of whites in that same age cohort. Dozens of blacks are murdered every day, more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, even though blacks are just 13 percent of the population. The country turns its eyes away. Who is killing these black victims? Not the police, not whites, but other blacks.

As for interracial violence, blacks are a greater threat to whites than whites are to blacks. Blacks commit 85 percent of all non-lethal interracial violence between blacks and whites. A black person is 35 times more likely to commit an act of non-lethal violence against a white person than vice versa. Yet the national narrative insists on the opposite idea—and too many dutifully play along.

These crime disparities mean that the police cannot restore law and order in neighborhoods where innocent people are most being victimized without having a disparate impact on black criminals. So the political establishment has decided not to restore law and order at all.

Heather Mac Donald, Disparate Impact Thinking Is Destroying Our Civilization. Imprimis, February 2024.

Beware of Secularists

Secularists can be viewed in their natural habitat at nearly any of America’s more than three thousand colleges and universities. Here Secularists have found success, capturing impressionable young adults as they are released into the wild. Many Secularists see themselves as liberators, lifting students out of religious superstition and other nonsense holding back society’s progress.

Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, by Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, pg. 81.

Equal Rights?

 

Morals vs Ethics

Religion is concerned with morals, Philosophy with ethics: the difference between the two being essentially this, that morals have to do with man’s relationship to God and ethics with man’s relationship to man.  Morals are absolute, ethics are relative. If we may substitute meta-nature for metaphysics we may say that the subject matter of Philosophy is meta-nature (as the subject of Science is Nature) but the subject matter of Religion is super-nature. In Religion, miracle is in one sense and essential adjunct, but in Philosophy miracle is simply of no concern. The end object of all Religion is to find God, but the end object of Philosophy is to find truth. This does not mean that Religion does not have the discovery of truth as and object, but only that it is a secondary one.

Arthur C. Constance, The Doorway Papers: Shem, Ham, and Japheth in World History, pg.18

Sharia Law is Dangerous to Freedom

Shariah law governs everything from diet and sexual practices to the punishment of crime. Many of its aspects are shockingly harsh, legitimizing slavery, advocating physical abuse of wives, demanding heavy taxation of Christians and Jews living in Muslim lands, and calling for the killing of Muslims who convert to another faith.

Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, by Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, pg.54

Don’t Ignore the Danger of Islam

Islam is an ideology—a worldview—that by its nature demands political control at the expense of democracy, freedom, and constitutional government.

Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, by Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, pg. 54.

LEFTIST Politics

 Leftist politics are one part perpetual outrage, two parts magical thinking and four parts pagan godhood. The old days when powerful men could pretend to be gods were dashed by religion and then democracy. Until socialism, wealth bought you only so many privileges. Now it buys you the privilege of looking down and toying with the less well off in the name of social justice.

Daniel Greenfield, The View From Mount Olympus

The State of the USA

Every perversion known to mankind is being embraced and gradually legalized.  The idea that morality is created by each individual as he makes decisions throughout each day is a step beyond anarchy.

Since Lawrence v. Texas decriminalized homosexuality, we have been in a state of moral anarchy.  Crude and licentious parades with many naked or almost naked men celebrating sodomy are considered by many to be positive and invigorating.   

The abrogation of Roe v. Wade in the recent Dobbs decision does not end abortion, but simply leaves the existence of abortion laws up to each separate state.  There are so many different laws now on when it is legitimate to abort a baby.  Thus, the people have decided that it is legitimate for citizens to decide when a life is a life.

E. Jeffrey Ludwig, Moral Anarchy: An Understatement

LEFTIST Ideology Doesn't Work

We Need to Fight the LEFT

The Left is not just a movement: it is a state of mind. Like all evils, it will not vanish. Just when you think it might be on the way out, it emerges again. Its ideas rebound no matter how often they have been discredited because its seed is present in every human soul.

It will not disappear, because human nature is not about to change.

To fight the Left, we must beat it at its own game. The Left operates by infiltrating and corrupting our institutions, and the minds and hearts of a new generation. We must build better than they do, to uphold what they want to destroy, and to fight the inner battle for the soul of America. Then we will not simply be fighting out of outrage or pain, we will have something to fight for.

Daniel Greenfield, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left, pg.236

Know the Future by Experience

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. 

Patrick Henry, cited in Daniel Greenfield, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left, pg. 235

Sincere Tyranny?

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. … Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

C.S. Lewis

We MUST Embrace the Past

The Utopian Left is convinced that history can be broken away from the past and that its ideology will cary us away to “the right side of history.” Conservatives innately understand that there will be no great break with the past. That is why the Left makes war on the past, canceling historical personalities and demanding a blank slate, while conservatives embrace our roots.

Daniel Greenfield, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left, pg. 234

Today's America

In America today, there is a shortage of good manners, politeness, consideration, and a work ethic. Two generations were taught they need not work, apply themselves in school, or restrain their tempers. And the schools not only went along with the parents' shortcomings, but took them a step further and encouraged such miscreant behavior, taking it to the extreme of actually promoting sex changes. That is ugly to the bone.

M.B. Mathews, “America the disgusting.”

Government Needs to Be Bridled

We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion.

John Adams, as cited in, Daniel Greenfield, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left, pg xxvii

Acknowledge the Skills Gap and the Behavior Gap

We need to face up to the truth: the reason for racial underrepresentation across a range of meritocratic fields is the academic skills gap. The reason for racial overrepresentation in the criminal justice system is the crime gap.

And let me issue a trigger warning here: I am going to raise uncomfortable facts that many well-intentioned Americans would rather not hear. Keeping such facts off stage may ordinarily be appropriate as a matter of civil etiquette. But it is too late for such forbearance now. If we cannot acknowledge the skills gap and the behavior gap, we are going to continue destroying our civilizational legacy.

Heather Mac Donald, Disparate Impact Thinking Is Destroying Our Civilization. Imprimis, February 2024.

Allowing Illegal Immigration Is STUPID

 

LEFTISTs Are EVIL

To the Romans, the right hand was dexter and the left, sinister. In Ecclesiastes, King Solomon warned that, “A wise man’s understanding is at his right hand; but a fool’s understanding is at his left.” To the Jews, as to the Indians, the Arabs and many ancient peoples, the left side was the wrong way. And the wrong way was evil. Even when it wasn’t evil, it was still a poor idea.

In English, the word left is derived from the old English lyft, meaning weak, foolish, and worthless.

Daniel Greenfield, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left, pg. xiii

Justice Should be Color-Blind

The curious state of our criminal justice system today is a function of the disparate impact principle. If you wonder why police officers are not making certain arrests, or why district attorneys are not prosecuting whole categories of crimes—such as shoplifting, trespassing, or farebeating—it is because apprehending lawbreakers and prosecuting crime have a disparate impact on black criminals. Urban leaders have decided that they would rather not enforce the law at all, no matter how constitutional that enforcement, than put more black criminals in jail.

Heather Mac Donald, Disparate Impact Thinking Is Destroying Our Civilization. Imprimis, February 2024.

Be a REAL Man

To the gentlemen here today, part of what plagues our society is this lie that has been told to you that men are not necessary in the home or in our communities. As men, we set the tone of the culture, and when that is absent, disorder, dysfunction, and chaos set in. This absence of men in the home is what plays a large role in the violence we see around the nation. … Be unapologetic in your masculinity, fighting against the cultural emasculation of men. Do hard things. Never settle for what is easy. You might have a talent that you don’t necessarily enjoy, but if it glorifies God, maybe you should lean into that over something that you might think suits you better.

Harrison Butler, commencement speech at Benedictine College, Atchison, Kansas, 5/11/24

Ignoring Reality Bites

You can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.

Ayn Rand

Citizenship Is A RIGHT

"Science" and Racial Disparity

The federal government is shifting medical research funding from pure science to studies on racial disparities and social justice. Why? Not because of any assessment of scientific need, but simply because black researchers do more racism research and less pure science. The National Institutes of Health has broadened the criteria for receiving neurology grants to include things like childhood welfare receipt because considering scientific accomplishment alone results in a disparate impact.

Heather Mac Donald, Disparate Impact Thinking Is Destroying Our Civilization. Imprimis, February 2024.

"WOKE" Degradation of Western Art

Chinese, African, and Indian cultural traditions are still treated with curatorial respect, their works analyzed in accordance with their creators’ intent. As soon as a critic turns his eye or ear on Western art, however, all he can see or hear is imperialism and white privilege. It is a perverse obsession. We are teaching young people to dismiss the greatest creations of humanity. We are stripping them of the capacity to escape their narrow identities and to lose themselves in beauty, sublimity, and wit. No wonder so many Americans are drowning in meaninglessness and despair.

Don and Joy Veinot, Freedom vs Coercion – Will the True Cult Stand Up?

Legal Profession Is Failing

Standards are falling in the legal profession, which came up with the disparate impact concept in the first place. Upon taking office in 2021, President Biden announced that he would no longer submit his judicial nominees to the American Bar Association for a preliminary rating. Why? According to a member of the White House Counsel’s Office, allowing the ABA to vet candidates would be incompatible with the “diversification of the judiciary.” This claim was dubious.

The ABA, after all, cannot open its collective mouth without issuing a bromide about the need to diversify the bar. Its leading members are obsessed with the demographics of corporate law firms and law school faculties. This is the same ABA that gave its highest rating to a Supreme Court nominee who as a justice would make the false claim during a challenge to Covid vaccine mandates that “over 100,000 children are in serious condition [from Covid] and many are on ventilators.”

Heather Mac Donald, Disparate Impact Thinking Is Destroying Our Civilization. Imprimis, February 2024.

Who Controls the Mind of the Nation?

Whoever controls the media and the educational system ultimately shapes the “mind” (or prevailing view) of a nation. If used artfully, it becomes easy to segregate individuals or groups from one another and even pit them against each other. Many people are completely shocked to see this dark scenario play out on university campuses around the country as students put into action what they have learned from their professors.

Don and Joy Veinot, Freedom vs Coercion – Will the True Cult Stand Up?

Evolution?!?

It is foolish to examine the human body without an eye to design. It is foolish to experience the seasons of life and never sense the witness of God. It is foolish to listen to Handel’s Messiah and picture evolving monkeys making music.

D. James Kennedy, as cited in Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, by Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, pg. 42

Where From Morals?

Christian morality is founded on the conviction of an absolute moral order outside of, and yet somehow inscribed on, our very being. It flows like a river from the nature of the Creator through the nature of created things and into our minds and hearts. We cannot make it up. To quote [C.S.] Lewis again, “The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary color, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.”

D. James Kennedy, as cited in Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, by Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, pg. 41

What Is YOUR Ethical System?

When a person makes up his own ethical code he always makes up an ethical system which he thinks he has kept. In the law of God, we find a law which smashes our self-righteousness, eliminates all trust in our own goodness, and convinces us that we are sinners. The law of God leaves us with our hands over our mouths and our faces in the dust. We are humbled before God and convinced that we are guilty transgressors of his law.

D. James Kennedy, as cited in Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, by Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, pg. 40

Do You Think?

Suppose there were no intelligence behind the universe. In that case nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. Thought is merely a by-product of some atoms within my skull. But if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course, I can’t trust the argument leading to atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I can’t believe in thought; so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.

C.S. Lewis, cited in Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, by Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, pg. 36

The Mystery of Creation

At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story  ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Robert Jastrow, Ph.D in theoretical physics, God and the Astronomers, pg.116. Cited in Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, by Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, pg.36

A Designer Does Not Evolve

The more I study science the more I am impressed with the thought that this world and universe have a definite design—and a design suggests a designer. It may be possible to have design without a designer, a picture without an artist, but my mind is unable to conceive of such a situation.

Paul Amos Moody, Introduction to Evolution, pg. 497. Cited in Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, by Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, pg 35

There IS an Intelligent Designer

The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion

David Hume, Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian. Cited in Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, by Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, pg.35

True Islam

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.

Winston Churchill, The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan (vol.1), 1899. Cited by Raymond Ibrahim, Churchill Gets the Last Word On Islam.