The Democrats are in a hurry to pass the so called “health care reform,” legislation. To make a long story short: the House of Representatives is planning to pass an amendment to the Senate version of the healthcare bill that includes a rule stating the bill has already been passed. In other words, they won’t vote on the bill itself, only on a rule determining the bill has already passed.
It’s appropriately called “the Slaughter Rule,” after the House Rules chairlady. It’s also called the “Slaughter Rule,” because it will overcome the resistance to abortion funding through Federal tax dollars in the healthcare bill, allowing millions more children to be… slaughtered.
The Democrats are in so much of a hurry, in fact, that they are letting their usually buried worldview slip.
What are Democratic leaders saying? “If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more. That’s one of the arguments I’ve been hearing,” Stupak says. “Money is their hang-up. Is this how we now value life in America? If money is the issue — come on, we can find room in the budget. This is life we’re talking about.”
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And the politics of the issue are pretty rough. “This has really reached an unhealthy stage,” Stupak says. “People are threatening ethics complaints on me. On the left, they’re really stepping it up. Every day, from Rachel Maddow to the Daily Kos, it keeps coming. Does it bother me? Sure. Does it change my position? No.”
There has always been an underlying contradiction in the liberal position on moral issues; it’s “for the children,” but human life doesn’t begin until birth (or shortly thereafter). After you’re 30, you’re just another cog in the political and corporate wheels, stuck yearning for your younger years, when you had potential, rather than reality. At some older age, you become “unproductive,” and hence your life becomes “not worth living.” It’s “for the children,” but apes, dolphins, and humans should all have the same “rights.”
Even in the statement above the contradiction comes blasting out: “This bill is all about preserving life through better medical care and reducing the number of living. And if you don’t agree, we’ll ruin your life (because your life isn’t worth anything if you stand in our way).”
Truly, the ability of the human mind to hold multiple contradictory ideas as “true,” at the same time is breathtaking. Romans 1, indeed.
We all know the best thing for young kids is to be socialized. It’s drilled into our heads every day; “you can’t home school, how will your kids be socialized?” What we don’t often realize is that groupthink is the ultimate end of socialization; placing the group’s feelings and thoughts above your own is the final goal.
Unfortunately, by what I saw at the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference here in Atlanta, most social studies teachers are either wicked indoctrinators or too dumb to know that they are carrying out the wishes of the Dr. Evils in education, i.e., those with Ed.D.s who are administrators, curriculum devisers, and education professors.
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Today, students don’t expect to learn—especially from a teacher or professor.
Instead, they expect to “do” as in “doing social studies” as I learned by spending two days at the social studies educators’ annual conference. To demonstrate one way social studies is “done” in Georgia a class of eleventh-graders was marched on stage and divided into little groups. The song “Home on the Range” was played for them and they were asked to answer questions about the “feelings” this song evoked in them, and then in various victims and victimizers associated with the settling of the American West—miners and mine owners, blacks and whites, Native Americans and whites. The young scholars then proceeded to collaborate, and believing themselves “critical thinkers,” came up with the correct answers! Of course, the bright, young geniuses knew that Native Americans would feel “sad” or “angry.”
What we can’t see is how this push towards socialization and groupthink impacts our society at large. Look at the world around you and consider the impact of groupthink; you’ll find it everywhere. Why is “the market” behaving a certain way? Because most people think there is wisdom in market moves, so they follow them. It is only the person who can do analysis, and understand the underlying factors, and then understand the groupthink of most other investors, who can do well in the market. The stock markets are no longer about whether or not a company is sound, or has a record of innovation, it’s all about groupthink. A perfect example? Cisco’s recent announcement of the CRS-3 router. How many people even know what a router is, or what it does? And yet, this announcement was hyped to “influence the consumer”—I would guess primarily the consumer of Cisco stock.
We see it in our propensity to endorse “causes” about which we know nothing.
A woman with a petition went among the crowds attending a state fair, asking people to sign her petition demanding the banning of dihydroxymonoxide. She said it was in our lakes and streams, and now it was in our sweat and urine and tears. She collected hundreds of signatures to ban dihydroxymonoxide — a fancy chemical name for water. A couple of comedians were behind this ploy. But there is nothing funny about its implications. It is one of the grim and dangerous signs of our times. This little episode revealed how conditioned we have become, responding like Pavlov’s dog when we hear a certain sound– in this case, the sound of some politically correct crusade.
It shows up in our popular entertainment almost incessantly; every Barbie movie ever made has essentially the same plot with varying characters. Girl is disappointed, meets other girls, pledges eternal friendship moment, girls “acting as a group” overcome. One member (always Barbie) is thrust out front, but she refuses to take credit, saying “we did it.” The newly minted friends live happily ever after.
And we see it in our government, as well. How else can you explain this sort of thing?
That’s Nancy Pelosi talking about the government healthcare takeover bill—”you have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it?” These people have lived inside their echo chamber for so long they think the echo chamber is the world; that acceptance in the echo chamber is acceptance in the world. Is this even rational? No, unfortunately, it’s not—and this is where groupthink really gets us into trouble. For “groupthink” is actually misnamed; it’s not thinking at all. It’s emotion centered, reliant on every person in the crowd deciding their desire to belong is more important than what they actually think.
The only effective defense against groupthink is to learn to really think.
“I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from My Father I have made known to you.” John 15:15
God is very selective as to whom He chooses to call His friends. There was only one person in the Old Testament who was called a friend of God – Abraham (2 Chr. 20:7, James 2:23). Even Moses, while God “would speak to [him] face to face, as a man speaks with his friend” (Ex. 33:11), was called God’s servant [1]. We are very privileged to be counted as God’s friends.
Jesus tells us here that friendship with Him comes with revelation from the Lord. This was the case for Abraham; see Gen. 18:17.
The major difference between a servant and a friend is that a servant’s job is to obey (such as Moses, being given the Law). A friend is not an employee, but one to spend time with, one to share with, one to understand and be understood by you. Jesus taught His disciples many things about the Father, even though they didn’t understand it straight away. He showed them the things that would come to pass in the future – speaking often about His death and resurrection, and the Second Coming.
The revelation of God is ongoing in each of our lives, and will not be complete until we get to heaven. Paul says, “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12). We can take comfort in hard times. If we were the servants of God, He could require us to do the dirty jobs just because they need to be done. But because we are His friends, everything that He brings us through is ultimately for our benefit and growth.
The current Obama approach to Syria includes dispatching six high-level State Department delegations, announcing that our ambassador will return to Damascus, rescinding banned shipment of aircraft parts, and deals worth several billion dollars. Secretary of State Clinton purred over this “slight opening” with Syria and expressed hope that it would lead Syria to curb support for Iran as well as Hezb’allah and Hamas.
Syrian President Bashir Assad, responding instantly following departure of the U. S. Under-Secretary of State from Damascus, invited the Iranian president to his capital. The Assad-Ahmadinjead press conference can be described most tactfully as a roast of the Obama administration. The two presidents announced removal of travel visas, meaning that Iranian terrorists are free to travel to the borders of Europe and Israel. Assad, not ordinarily known for humor, said of U.S. hopes of separating Syria from Iran that “[w]e must have understood Clinton wrong because of bad translation.” The Iranian president reliably played straight man: “The Americans are forced to leave the region, leaving their reputation, image, and power behind in order to escape. The U.S. has no influence to stop expansion of Iran-Syria, Syria-Turkey, and Iran-Turkey ties. God willing, Iraq too will join this circle.”
Okay, kids, it’s story time. There was once a little boy who was always picked on by bullies. One day, he decided he’d had enough, so he started going to the gym and working out. The bullies laughed at first, but then they started to notice that when they tried to pick on him, he hit back, and it was starting to hurt. So, finally, they decided to bully someone else.
Once safe, the little boy was listening to a psychiatrist who told him he was doing nothing but contributing to world anger by hitting back; that he would be much better off to not hit back. That defensive violence is the same as offensive violence. “Didn’t Jesus say someplace to love your enemies,” the psychiatrist asked? “Doesn’t that mean to promote social justice?” So the little boy decided he was, after all, doing wrong.
He stopped going to the gym. He spent his money on speech lessons instead, so he could speak quite eloquently and forcefully.
The next time the bullies came around he said, “hey, guys, you’re contributing to world anger with all this bullying, you’re making the world warmer, destroying the environment, and mocking social justice, so stop it.” Then he proceeded to give them a long, eloquent speech about social justice.
The bullies laughed. And beat him up. Worldviews have consequences.
“I have told you these things, so that in Me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” John 16:33
This verse concludes Jesus’ final teaching to the disciples before His arrest and crucifixion. It is interesting to note His tone – He is more concerned for them than for what is about to happen to Him. He knows that they will be deeply shaken by the events that will happen, and so He comforts them.
In this world we will indeed have trouble. “Everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Tim. 3:12). “No servant is greater than his master. If they persecuted [Him], they will persecute you also” (John 15:20).
Jesus faced this persecution, and more. But He faced it knowing that He had overcome it, and that the suffering was only for a time. He proved that He had overcome the world by rising from the dead. Now, if we are in Christ, we too are overcomers (Rom. 8:37, 1 John 5:4-5). We can have peace in the storm, knowing that He has gone before us. Hallelujah!
The people of Louisiana must sleep soundly knowing that their state protects them from … unlicensed florists.
That’s right. In Louisiana, you can’t sell flower arrangements unless you have permission from the government. How do you get permission? You must pass a test that is graded by a board of florists who already have licenses. To prepare for the test, you might have to spend $2,000 on a special course.
The test requires knowledge of techniques that florists rarely use anymore. One question asks the name of the state’s agriculture commissioner — as though you can’t be a good florist without knowing that piece of vital information.
This is the essence of why big government fails. It might seem strange; why would florist’s licenses have anything to do with big government failure? Because it shows precisely where governments go when they gain the sort of control required to license florists. Rent seeking is the ultimate end of all big governments, and all big government programs.
Rent seeking, if you’ve not read anything here or elsewhere on the topic, is simply business asking for special favors from government to improve the profit ratio. Quite often rent seeking takes the form of asking the government to freeze a particular market in place, through regulation, so that newer, more able competitors cannot enter the market. Something like 75% of all the regulations on businesses in the United States probably support keeping existing markets for products stable, rather than the actual health and safety of anyone. Once you see this fundamental fact, you can suddenly see rent seeking all over the place. Why is there a requirement to pass a test to be a florist in Louisiana? To keep the number of florists down, and hence the price of floral work high.
But rent seeking reaches deeper into the government than this.
Emails recently obtained under the Freedom of Information Act — seen here for the first time — show how political influence and lobbyists are shaping Obama administration policy and public relations.
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The emails show that the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) coordinated their response to a damning Spanish report on “green jobs” with wind industry lobbyists and the Center for American Progress (the progressive think tank founded by John Podesta and funded by George Soros).
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The 900 pages of emails, obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Christopher C. Horner, show staff members from the DoE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the EPA developing a response to the report. They also show them coordinating the response with the Center for American Progress, plus the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) and the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) — two wind industry lobbyist groups.
The recent shift in political donations belies this same marriage of big business and big government.
“Wall Street shifting toward Republicans,” blared a front-page headline in The Washington Post last week. “Commercial banks and high-flying investment firms have shifted their political contributions toward Republicans in recent months amid harsh rhetoric from Democrats about fat bank profits, generous bonuses and stingy lending policies on Wall Street,” the Post announced…
As several lobbyists have explained to me, just as a matter of political math, the Republicans matter now. When Senate Democrats had all the power, lobbyists had to give more money to Democrats. Now that the equation has tilted back toward the center, giving has become more evenhanded…
The lesson here is fairly simple: Big business is not “right wing,” it’s vampiric. It will pursue any opportunity to make a big profit at little risk. Getting in bed with politicians is increasingly the safest investment for these “crony capitalists.” But only if the politicians can actually deliver. The political failures of the Obama White House have translated into business failures for firms more eager to make money off taxpayers instead of consumers.
Rent seeking always ends up making big governments fail in a very simple way: by freezing markets in place and preferring poor technologies and choices over good ones, the government undermines the very society supporting it. Eventually, big governments always drive the economies supporting them into bankruptcy by forcing markets not to adapt to changing times and technologies. This is the specific point made by a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.
Market entrepreneurs like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Hill built businesses on product and price. Hill was the railroad magnate who finished his transcontinental line without a public land grant. Rockefeller took on and beat the world’s dominant oil power at the time, Russia. Rockefeller innovated his way to energy primacy for the U.S.
Political entrepreneurs, by contrast, made money back then by gaming the political system. Steamship builder Robert Fulton acquired a 30-year monopoly on Hudson River steamship traffic from, no surprise, the New York legislature. Cornelius Vanderbilt, with the slogan “New Jersey must be free,” broke Fulton’s government-granted monopoly.
If the Obama model takes hold, we will enter the Golden Age of the Political Entrepreneur. The green jobs industry that sits at the center of the Obama master plan for the American future depends on public subsidies for wind and solar technologies plus taxes on carbon to suppress it as a competitor. Politically connected entrepreneurs will spend their energies running a mad labyrinth of bureaucracies, congressional committees and Beltway door openers. Our best market entrepreneurs, instead of exhausting themselves on their new ideas, will run to ground gaming Barack Obama’s ideas.
The eventual goal of any “one world government” will be to freeze technology, and people, in place.
It is more than a little sobering to realize that, but for a few gigabytes of purloined emails and one upstart candidate’s upset Senate victory in Massachusetts, both measures might by now have received his final signature. It’s downright frightening to realize that these leftist victories, had they been achieved (and one may yet be), would largely have resulted from big business’ attempts to make peace with people who are capitalism’s sworn enemies.
That business leaders are frequently all too willing to sell out the core principles of the free market system in the name of perceived and often illusory short-term profits is not exactly news. Adam Smith wrote over 200 years ago that “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
Too many businesses, when they reach a certain size and gain confidence that they are no longer just a few missteps away from serious financial problems, often put more energy into cementing their current market positions through anticompetitive means than into growing or expanding their enterprises. If they become big enough, they often turn into institutions inexplicably perceived as “indispensable,” which then enables them to lobby for unfair breaks from governments. Thus, at the local and state level, supposedly indispensable businesses that are sometimes as small as a few hundred employees receive tax abatements and other incentives.
The only way to be a permanent winner in the game of musical chairs is to stop the music once you’re in the “best” chair. And the only way to stop the music is to control what people can say (hate speech), do (nanny state control, government run healthcare), and think (education) through the force of government power.
The girl came home from school upset. A classmate had called her names. Told her everyone hated her. Said she couldn’t sit with the others at lunch. The other girls all went along with it. Such “mean girl’’ behavior is not new. Girl-on-girl cruelty has long been the subject of books, TV shows, and movies about tween and teen girls. But this girl was 7 years old.
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“I think what’s different is how uninhibited it [bullying] has become. There’s just a real lack of empathy,’’ said Deborah Weaver, executive director of a self-defense and safety program for Boston girls, who has worked with more than 6,000 girls between 8 and 18.
Of course, the first place to turn when this sort of problem becomes widely known is the government.
The parents felt the teacher was unresponsive to their complaints, so they went to the school counselor. As a result, the school will implement a bullying prevention program.
Such programs would be required in every grade across Massachusetts under the antibullying bill in the Legislature.
But the bottom line problem, according to the “experts,” is the media we surround ourselves with.
Some believe that the popularity of shows such as “Gossip Girl’’ and the talk radio shout-fests that kids listen to from the back seat of the car have fanned the flames, which are spread face-to-face and through cyberspace.
Maybe the problem runs deeper than this—and I don’t just mean faith (although our lack of looking to God is definitely the underlying problem). Let’s consider the average four or five year old’s life no more than 20 years ago to the average four or five year old’s life today. Twenty years ago, kids stayed home with their mothers until they were at least 6 years old. At the age of 6, they were placed in a school, from whence they rushed home (generally walking distance, in an age when walking distance was much longer than it is now), to spend time with their families, or a few select friends.
What’s the pattern today? Mom drops the kids off at a day care center every day, starting from when they are about two or three months old. They are forced into social interaction situations with other children, often with very light parental supervision, for eight to ten hours a day. After this time, they come home to watch the television for several hours, or, at a slightly older age, to participate in “group activities.”
All of this so our children are properly “socialized.” I wonder if anyone has ever considered the obvious explanation for all these “bullying” problems we’re seeing. Maybe socialization, itself, is the culprit. Oh, perish the thought, right? We all need to learn to get along among other people, right? We all need to become team players, learning to put the needs of the group above our own needs. After all, how else are we going all become the good solid socialists the government wants us to be?
But let me ask the heretical questions.
How often, in your life, are you working with others, verses working on your own? Maybe in some high level management position you are constantly working with someone else, but frankly, most of the real production in the world comes from individuals working on their own. The farmer doesn’t gang plow, he sits there on his tractor plowing the field. Maybe others are in the field with him, and he needs to coordinate his motions, but that’s a far cry from “socialization.” The engineer works alone most of the time, with occasional spurts of interactivity. In most occupations, work is alone, or in small teams of two or three people. It’s almost never in groups of 20 or 30.
How often, in your life, are you working with others within a year or two of your age, of the same sex, on the same precise work? How many times in life is the classroom environment really mimicked? I can’t think of a single place where 20 or 30 people work on the same task in parallel in a social setting in real life.
So why all the focus on large groups in our lives, and our children’s lives? Has anyone ever considered that it might actually be harmful? That forcing kids to work in these extremely social environments from a very early age really isn’t the best thing for them? Has anyone ever considered that children who are home schooled do better simply because of the one-on-one attention they receive free of a classroom of their peers? That they associate with others occasionally, rather than all the time?
One of the scariest things about government is its exemption from laws by virtue of its monopoly on lawmaking and enforcement. I see this every day, from the mundane to the profound.
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Government service offers veritable tenure and steady wages for the price of bypassing the American dream of “getting rich” in the private sector. Most follow the odds and realize that a federal bird in the hand is better than two in the private bush.
Yet legions of government (and often union) employees by needs must audit often far richer others, whether at the IRS, the county planner’s office, the zoning authority, or the state regulator. And here the public auditor can, by virtue of his unassailable position, quite easily stymie his private sector upstart counterpart.
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Here are the apparent protocols of such big government socialism: no one believes in it; everyone seeks to cheat the system and others in it; no one wishes to criticize the system when it is easier to con it; the public pretension of humanitarianism encourages private selfishness — sort of like the noble French in 2003 going to the beach for their annual August vacation in scorching temperatures while the state was supposed to keep their aged parents, who died in the thousands, alive in non-air-conditioned flats.
Repressed anger is the national creed: those who work the hardest and pay the most for others less industrious or gifted barely constrain a seething resentment; those on the receiving end constantly channel envy and jealousy as mechanisms to justify why “they” should redistribute income to themselves, the more deserving.
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Government has the power of symbols to create alternate, scary realities. This week driving to and from the coast, I crossed several stretches of “The Honorable Joe Blow” freeway, and saw dozens of signs that essentially said “this project brought to you by big government stimulus.”
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We all need government for defense, security, and infrastructure. But the more of it, the more dangerous — and creepy — our lives become.
A long while back, I remember a teacher I used to listen say that Turkey was going to be a major issue in coming years. That Turkey is one of the linchpins of the Middle East, and of the Scriptural prophecies about the shape of the world going into specific events. It’s interesting to note, [...]
Homeland Security and the National Security Agency may be taking a closer look at Internet communications in the future.The Department of Homeland Security’s top cybersecurity official told CNET on Wednesday that the department may eventually extend its Einstein technology, which is designed to detect and prevent electronic attacks, to networks operated by the private sector. [...]
Far more personal information on students than is necessary is being collected by public schools, according to the Fordham Law School Center on Law and Information Policy, which investigated education records in all 50 states. States are failing to safeguard students’ privacy and protect them from data misuse.
If anyone was looking for a self-righteous extreme feminist, they found one in Angie Jackson. This is a woman who was so proud she was aborting her baby that she announced she would “tweet” her chemical-cocktail abortion live, as it happened, on Twitter. The liberal media found this made-for-TV slaughter fascinating, and not at all [...]
America’s superpower status in the field of higher education is steadily slipping as the efforts of other countries to improve their universities pay dividends. The most recent rankings report shows that, as the grip of U.S. domination weakens, institutions in Asian countries such as Japan and China are gaining ground.
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The United States had 63 institutions [...]
In case you missed the clip of John Loeffler talking about hate speech I posted a few days ago, here is someone from within the gay community saying precisely the same thing, as quoted by The Dunamis Word.
Our job is not to get those people who dislike us to love us. Nor was our aim [...]
“If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated Me first.” John 15:18
During Jesus’ earthly ministry, He was constantly facing persecution from the people who said they were religious, but followed the ways of the world – seeking after fame, fortune, and self-righteousness. The world (Greek kosmos) is driven by Satan. Its mindset [...]
What happens when people who think the government should pay for something they really want, or even deserve, suddenly find out the money simply isn’t there? Well, there’s the Greek example; massive strikes supported by the police authorities that shut down all the airports in the country. And then there’s Iceland’s example.
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