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Friday, October 30, 2015

The Death of the American Welfare State

By On October 30, 2015
In 1935, the year that FDR signed the Social Security Act into law, the birth rate was 18.7 per 1,000. In 1940, when the first monthly check was issued, it had gone up to 19.4. By 1954, when Disability had been added, the birth rate at the heart of the Baby Boom stood at 25.3.

In a nation of 163 million people, 4 million babies were being born each year.

By 1965, when Medicare was plugged in, the birth rate had fallen back to 19.4. For the first time in ten years fewer than 4 million babies had been born in a country of 195 million. Medicare had been added in the same year that saw the single biggest drop in birth rates since the Great Depression.

There could not have been a worse time for Medicare than the end of the Baby Boom.

Today in a nation of 319 million, 4.1 million babies are being born each year for a birth rate of 13.0 per 1,000. 40.7% of those births are to unmarried mothers meaning that it will be a long time, if ever, before those single families put back into the system, and most will never put back in as much as they are taking out. Those children will cost more to educate, be more likely to be involved in crime and less likely to succeed economically. But even if they weren't, the system would still be unsustainable.

Liberals act as if the crisis facing us can be fixed if we take more from the "wealthy elderly" or give them less. And the topic even came up at the CNBC Republican debate in a Social Security debate.

But the problem is not the amount of money being spent at the top on the elderly, but the diminishing prospects for paying in money at the bottom. Youth unemployment is high and job prospects are low. And the birth rate is skewed toward populations that are the least likely to be educated, the least likely to have good jobs and the least likely to pay more into the system than that they take out of it.

At the CNBC Debate, Senator Rand Paul said, "It’s not Republicans’ fault, it’s not Democrats’ fault, it’s your grandparents’ fault for having too many damn kids." But it's the other way around. Your grandparents didn't have enough kids. Neither did your parents. Neither do you.

Ron Paul had five kids. He had four brothers. That's a stable generational expansion. Without that, there's no one to pay for an older population that is living longer.

The crisis is born of demographics. It can't be fixed by targeting the elderly because they haven't been the problem in some time. It's the same crisis being faced by countries as diverse as Russia and Japan. The difference is that Russia is autocratic and has little concern for its people while Japan shuns immigration and has a political system dominated by the elderly.

Bernie Sanders admires Europe. But Europe's welfare state is imploding because of low birth rates. And so it adopted the American solution of expecting immigrants to make up the difference. But the immigrants have high rates of unemployment and low rates of productivity. Instead of funding the welfare state, they're bankrupting it even faster.

The United States takes in a million immigrants a year, many of whom also take out more than they put in. In his 2013 State of the Union address, Barack Obama praised Desiline Victor, a 102-year-old Haitian woman who moved to the United States at the age of 79 and doesn't speak English, but did spend hours waiting in line in Florida to vote for Obama.

Between 1990 and 2010, the number of immigrants over 65 doubled from 2.7 million to 5 million. 25 percent of these senior immigrants were over 80. Desiline Victor wasn't an outlier. Elderly immigrants are also much more likely to become citizens, in part because the requirements for them are lower. Many, like Victor, don't even have to learn English to be able to stand in line and vote.

15 percent of senior immigrants come from Mexico largely as a result of family unification programs. If amnesty for illegal aliens goes through, before long the country will be on the hook not just for twelve million illegal aliens, but also for their grandparents.

The welfare state has been spending more money with an unsustainable demographic imbalance. There are fewer working families supporting more elderly, immigrants and broken families. The Russians invest money into increasing the native birth rate. Instead we fund Planned Parenthood because liberal economic eugenics dictates that we should extract "full value" from working women as a tax base to subsidize the welfare state while discarding the next generation.

The "modern" system that we have adopted with its low birth rates, late marriages, working parents, high social spending and retirement benefits is at odds with itself. We can have low birth rates, deficit spending or Social Security; but there is no possible way that we can have all three.

And yet we have all three. 

Instead of forming a comprehensive picture, our approach is to tackle each problem as if were wholly separate from everything else. Working parents are applauded because they swell out the tax base in the short term. Young immigrants are applauded because they are supposed to swell out the lower part of the demographic imbalance. Manufacturing jobs are cast aside for modern jobs. The long term consequences of each step is ignored.

In the European model that we have adopted, men and women are supposed to spend their twenties being educated and their thirties having two children. These Johns and Julias will work in some appropriately "modern" field building apps, designing environmentally sustainable cribs for the few children being born or teaching new immigrants to speak enough English to vote. Then they plan to retire on money that doesn't actually exist because they are still paying off their student loans.

The reality is that John and Julia begin their marriage with tens of thousands in debts, only one of them will work full time, while the other balances part time work, and they will do all this while being expected to support social services for new immigrants and a native working class displaced by the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, not to mention the elderly and the entire bureaucracy that has grown around them. If John and Julia are lucky, they will find work in a technology field that is still growing, or, more likely they will pry their way into the social services bureaucracy which will keep on paying them and cover their benefits until the national bankruptcy finally arrives.

John and Julia are Obama voters. They have two children. They don't worry about the future. The future to them seems to be a bright and modern thing overseen by experts and meticulously planned out in every detail. The only dark clouds on their horizon are the Republicans and the Great Unwashed in the Red States who are resisting the future by clinging to their guns and bibles.

In this post-work and post-poverty economy, those most likely to have children are also least likely to work or to be able to afford to have those children.

Birth rates for women on welfare are three times higher than for those who are not on welfare. Within a single year, the census survey found that unmarried women had twice as high a birth rate as married women. These demographics help perpetuate poverty and feed a welfare death spiral in which more money has to be spent on social services for a less productive tax base.

Children raised on welfare are far more likely to end up on welfare than the children of working families.

Fertility rates fall sharply above the $50,000 income line and with a graduate degree; that has ominous implications in a country whose socio-economic mobility rates continue to fall. There are a number of factors responsible, but one simple factor is that work ethics and skills are no longer being passed down to a growing percentage of the population.

Liberal activists still talk as if we can afford any level of social service expenditures if we raise taxes on the rich, but workers can't be created by raising taxes. The issue isn't "investing more in education" which is the liberal solution for everything including the imminent heat death of the universe.

It's liberalism.

Everything that the left has done, from breaking up the family to driving out manufacturing industries to promoting Third World immigration has made its own spending completely unsustainable. On a social level alone, we don't have the people we need to pay the bills. And at the rate we are going, we will only run up more bills that our demographics and our culture can no longer cash.

By 2031, nearly a century after the Social Security Act, an estimated 75 million baby boomers will have retired. Aside from the demographic disparity in worker ages is a subtler disparity in worker productivity and independence as senior citizens are left chasing social spending dollars that are increasingly going to a younger population. ObamaCare with its Medicare Advantage cuts was a bellwether of the shift in health care spending from seniors to the welfare population.

14 million people are now on Disability. That means that there are more people on Disability than there were people in the country during the War of 1812. Half of those on Disability are claiming back problems or mental problems. There are over a million children on Disability and the program is packed with younger recipients who are substituting it for welfare.

Increasing welfare is only a form of Death Panel economic triage that doesn't compensate for the lack
of productive workers. It's easy to model Obamerica as Detroit, a country with a huge indigent welfare population and a small wealthy tax base. The model doesn't work in Detroit and it's flailing in New York, California and every city and state where it's been tried.

After a century of misery, the left still hasn’t learned that there is no substitute for the middle class. It’s not just running out of money, it’s running out of people.

The welfare state is bankrupt and doesn't know it yet. Reality hasn't caught up with the numbers. Instead the welfare state is floating on loans based on past productivity, old infrastructure and a diminishing productive population whose technological industries employ fewer people and don't require their physical presence in the United States.

The welfare state has no future. It is only a question of what terms it will implode on and what will happen to the social welfare political infrastructure when it does. The violence in Venezuela and the slow death of Detroit give us insights into the coming collapse of the welfare state.

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

The War Against the Jewish Trees

By On October 28, 2015
You might think that the obstacles to peace are the rockets from Gaza and the brutal murders of Jews.

You might be foolish enough to think that the obstacles are the ordinary Muslims who taunted and beat Adelle Banita-Bennett, suddenly widowed at 22, trying to escape the Muslim terrorist who had just murdered her husband.

You might think that it’s the fact that a majority of Muslims in ’67 Israel spit on the Two-State Solution and that PLO boss Abbas rejected the Oslo Accords in a speech at the United Nations.

And you would be wrong.

None of those things are obstacles to peace. If they were, surely the media would have told us so.

The real threats are the fig, palm and carob trees around a hiking path near Jerusalem. The true threat to peace comes from the pine trees that shade the kids playing in the water in a Ma'ale Adumim park.

The pine tree, you see, is a Jewish tree.

As anti-Israel activist Michael Davis accuses, “This foreign tree displaced the olive trees of the indigenous population.” The “indigenous” population he mentions were the Muslim conquerors while the “foreigners” are the Jewish indigenous population who were planting the “foreign” Jerusalem pine trees that are mentioned in the Bible by that notorious foreigner, the Prophet Isaiah.

The trees of Israel were displaced not by the Jews, but by the Ottoman Caliphate building a railroad to the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Charcoal for Allah’s magic railroad consumed what few forests existed in Israel under Muslim rule and every tenth fruit bearing tree. Then the Zionists, in addition to planting trees, also thumbed their noses at the Caliphate and blew up its holy railroad.

No one cuts down forests for charcoal and the train no longer runs through Israel to Medina anymore.

 But facts, like trees, are obstacles to peace. And if we’re ever going to have peace, we need to do something about the Jewish facts and the Jewish trees. And the Jews who produce facts and trees.

According to the anti-Israel hate group T’ruah, the trees planted by the Jewish National Fund block peace. According to T'ruah head Jill Jacobs, planting trees in '67 Israel violates Jewish “values.”

Jacobs, who sits on J Street’s Rabbinic cabinet and backed the Iran deal that lets the terror state get nukes and fund Hezbollah and Hamas, claims that it's the Jewish arboreal menace that is "getting in the way of a secure future for Israel.” It’s the trees, not the nukes, that are the problem.

“Is a park in Ma’alei Adumim an impediment to peace?” asks the CEO of JNF. Obviously he isn’t very familiar with the Islamic position on the evil ways of Jewish trees.

Does not the holy Hadith, which is also incorporated into the Hamas charter, declare, “The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.”

How are Muslims supposed to kill the Jews… if the damn Jews keep planting trees to hide behind?

Especially these Jewish trees which are Islamically notorious for their sympathy to the Jewish people.

71% of Muslims in ’67 Israel agree with the “Kill the Jews” Hadith. Only 1 in 3 accepts the Two-State Solution.  But it all depends on the willingness of the trees to cooperate in the anti-Semitic Jihad.

In the recent suicide bombing in Maaleh Adumim, the terrorist shouted “Allahu Akbar,” but only managed to injure one police officer. The photos show plenty of trees, but none of them seemed to have warned the Muslim terrorist where the Jews were hiding. The trees let the terrorist down.

Maybe it’s because they were the “trees of the Jews.”

The former Grand Mufti of Egypt warned that "Jews are planting Gharqad trees all over the West Bank" so they can hide from the Muslims carrying out their peaceful Islamic rock-and-tree Holocaust.

The Gharqad tree is the boxthorn, not the pine, but if the Jews managed to make the Jerusalem pine into a foreign “Jewish” tree, who is to say that they haven’t managed to subvert other trees as well?

The Muslim resistance fighters of Hamas recently arrested a dolphin who was caught spying for the Jewish State. Hezbollah busted an eagle working for the Jews, Sudan took down a spy vulture and Egypt arrested a Zionist duck (or possibly a Zionist stork). Iran nabbed 14 squirrels for spying for Israel.

And with squirrels, it’s just a hop and a skip to the trees.

Now that the boxthorn and the pine tree have converted to Judaism, what happens if the carob tree puts on a Yarmulke and the olive tree gets a Bar Mitzvah? If all the trees turn against the Muslims, that just leaves them with the rocks as their only friends, and with the way they’ve been mistreating them by throwing them at the Jews, the rocks might not stick around to help in the holy Hadith Holocaust.

So you can see why the JNF planting Jewish trees in those parts of Israel which were part of the Palestinian state since 1967, 1973 or 1993 or never, represents a real obstacle to peace.

Peace being a euphemism for dead Jews.

BDS has boycotted Jewish produce. Now it’s reached the final frontier of boycotting Jewish trees. After all Jewish produce comes from Jewish trees. You can’t fight Jewish oranges without fighting Jewish orange trees. You’ve got to deforest the green Jewish presence beyond the Green Line, root and branch.

There’s only one answer; the horticultural cleansing of Israel to get rid of the Jewish tree problem.

Tree BDS is the future of BDS. Get rid of all the trees. Turn the land back to a desert. Cut down the “foreign” Jerusalem pines and plant indigenous Hamas rockets on their stumps. T’ruah claims that it’s fighting Jewish tree settlements. Maybe the Jews have taken to settling in the trees.

 “It’s an educational opportunity to get the Jewish community to think about where their donations go, and to start asking questions to make sure we’re putting our tzedakha in line with our values,” Jill Jacobs of T’ruah says.

Jill Jacobs’ last “educational opportunity” involved calling on Americans to “repent” for hurting Al Qaeda terrorists. Hating Jewish trees and defending Muslim terrorists are sensible values that show a respect for the Islamic belief that Jewish trees interfere with the holy murderous work of Muslim terrorists.

And yet, despite the Muslim arson attacks that have torched entire forests, the trees of Israel live. And despite the Muslim terror attacks that have taken so many Jewish lives, the Jews of Israel endure.

"And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them," the Prophet Isaiah said. "They shall not build, and another inhabit, they shall not plant, and another eat; for as the days of a tree shall be the days of My people."

“They will not toil in vain, nor bear children to fall to terror.”

While the Muslim colonists and their accomplices plot against the Jews and their trees, it was a higher authority that put both the Jews and the trees there to hold back the desert, physical and spiritual.

As C.S. Jarvis, the British governor of the Sinai, wrote, “The Arab is sometimes called the Son of the Desert, but as Palmer said, this is a misnomer as in most cases he is the Father of the Desert, having created it himself and the arid waste in which he lives and on which practically nothing will grow is the direct result of his appalling indolence, combined with his simian trait of destroying everything he does not understand.”

“A great part of the country in which he now ekes out his haphazard existence was at one time fairly productive and prosperous and, by failing to repair damage done by wear and tear of weather and by wantonly wreaking conduits and cisterns he was too lazy to use, he has succeeded in creating a sun-scorched treeless desert which will remain wilderness as long as he encumbers the land,” he added.

Jarvis wrote that the Bedouin likes rocks, but that the “sight of a tree appears to incense him and he is not happy until he has destroyed it utterly by snapping off its branches and burning its trunk through to the core.” The same thing is happening today with Bedouins and Jewish trees in the anti-tree Jihad.

Or as the poet Joseph Brodsky wrote, “The East is a catastrophe of dust. Green is found only on the banners of the prophet. Nothing grows here, except mustaches… all these turbans and beards, uniforms for heads possessed by only one idea... massacre... ‘I massacre, therefore I exist.’”

This is the terrible logic of the desert. The terrible logic of Islam and its leftist accomplices. The Jews know they exist, because they create. Their enemies know that they exist, because they destroy.
In the war between the tree and the desert, the Jews have taken the side of the tree while their enemies fight to bring back the desert.

BDS battling “Jewish” trees gets down to the root of the true anti-Israel and anti-Jewish agenda. Kill the trees. Kill the Jews. And leave behind a barren spiritual and physical desert ruled by the destroyers.

Friday, October 23, 2015

The Death of Europe

By On October 23, 2015
European leaders talk about two things these days; preserving European values by taking in Muslim migrants and integrating Muslim migrants into Europe by getting them to adopt European values.

It does not occur to them that their plan to save European values depends on killing European values.

The same European values that require Sweden, a country of less than 10 million, to take in 180,000 Muslim migrants in one year also expects the new “Swedes” to celebrate tolerance, feminism and gay marriage. Instead European values have filled the cities of Europe with Shariah patrols, unemployed angry men waving ISIS flags and the occasional public act of terror.

European countries that refuse to invest money in border security instead find themselves forced to invest money into counterterrorism forces. And those are bad for European values too.

But, as Central European countries are discovering, European values don’t have much to do with the preservation of viable functioning European states. Instead they are about the sort of static Socialism that Bernie Sanders admires from abroad. But even a Socialist welfare state requires people to work for a living. Maine’s generous welfare policies began collapsing once Somali Muslims swarmed in to take advantage of them. Denmark and the Dutch, among other of Bernie Sanders’ role models, have been sounding more like Reagan and less like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

Two years ago, the Dutch King declared that, “The classic welfare state of the second half of the 20th century in these areas in particular brought forth arrangements that are unsustainable in their current form.” That same year, the Danish Finance Minister called for the “modernization of the welfare state.”

But the problem isn’t one of modernization, it’s medievalization.

27% of Moroccans and 21% of Turks in the Netherlands are unemployed. It’s 27% in Denmark for Iraqis. And even when employed, their average income is well below the European average.

Critics pointed out in the past that a multicultural America can’t afford the welfare states that European countries have. Now that those same countries are turning multicultural, they can’t afford them either.

Europe invested in the values of its welfare state. The Muslim world invested in large families. Europe expects the Muslim world to bail out its shrinking birth rate by working and paying into the system so that its aging population can retire. The Muslim migrants however expect Europe to subsidize their large families with its welfare state while they deal some drugs and chop off some heads on the side.

Once again, European values are in conflict with European survival.

The European values that require Europe to commit suicide are about ideology, not language, culture or nationhood. But the incoming migrants don’t share that ideology. They have their own Islamic values.

Why should 23-year-old Mohammed work for four decades so that Hans or Fritz across the way can retire at 61 and lie on a beach in Mallorca? The idea that Mohammed would ever want to do such a thing out of love for Europe was a silly fantasy that European governments fed their worried citizens.

Mohammed doesn’t share European values. Nor are they likely to take hold of him no matter how often the aging teachers, who hope he gets a job and subsidizes their retirement, try to drill them into his head. Europeans expect Mohammed to become a Swede or a German as if he were some child they had adopted from an exotic country and raised as their own, and work to subsidize their European values.

The Muslim migrants are meant to be the retirement plan for an aging Europe. They’re supposed to keep its ramshackle collection of economic policies, its welfare states and social programs rolling along.

But they’re more like a final solution.

Mohammed is Fritz’s retirement plan. But Mohammed has a very different type of plan. Fritz is counting on Mohammed to work while he relaxes. Mohammed relaxes and expects Fritz to work.  Fritz is not related to him and therefore Mohammed sees no reason why he should work to support him.

European social democracy reduces society to a giant insurance plan in which money is pooled together.  But insurance is forbidden in Islam which considers it to be gambling. European social democracy expects him to bail it out, but to Mohammed, European values are a crime against Islam.
Mohammed’s Imam will tell him to work off the books because paying into the system is gambling. However taking money out of the system is just Jizya; the money non-Muslims are obligated to pay to Muslims. Under Islamic law, it’s better for Mohammed to sell drugs than to pay taxes.

That’s why drug dealing and petty crime are such popular occupations for Salafis in Europe. It’s preferable to steal from infidels than to participate in the great gamble of the European welfare state.

Mohammed isn’t staking his future on the shaky pensions of European socialism. He invests in what social scientists call social capital. He plans his retirement by having a dozen kids. If this lifestyle is subsidized by infidel social services, so much the better. And when social services collapse, those of his kids who aren’t in prison or in ISIS will be there to look after him in his golden years.

As retirement plans go, it’s older and better than the European model.

Mohammed doesn’t worry much about the future. Even if he doesn’t make it past six kids, by the time he’s ready to retire the European country he’s living in will probably be an Islamic State. And he is confident that whatever its arrangements are, they will be better and more just than the infidel system.

Sweden will take in 180,000 migrants this year. Germany may take in 1.5 million. Most of them will be young men following the Mohammed retirement plan.

Europeans are being assured that the Mohammeds will balance out the demographic disparity of an aging population with too many retirees and too few younger workers. But instead the Mohammeds will put even more pressure on the younger workers who not only have to subsidize their elders, but millions of Mohammeds, their multiple brides and their fourteen child Islamic retirement plans.

Retirement ages will go further up and social services for the elderly will be cut. The welfare state will collapse, but it will have to be kept running because the alternative will be major social unrest.

Among the triggers of the Arab Spring were rising wheat prices and cuts to food subsidies. Prices went up and governments fell as street riots turned into civil wars. Imagine a Sweden where 50 percent of the young male population is Muslim, mostly unemployed, turning into Syria when the economy collapses and the bill comes due. Imagine European Muslim street riots where the gangs have heavy artillery and each ghetto Caliph has his own Imams and Fatwas to back up his claims.

Europe is slowly killing itself in the name of European values. It’s trying to protect its economic setup by bankrupting it. European values have become a suicide pact. Its politicians deliver speeches explaining why European values require mass Muslim migration that make as little sense as a lunatic’s suicide note.

Islamic values are not compatible with European values. Not only free speech and religious freedom, but even the European welfare state is un-Islamic. Muslims have a high birth rate because their approach to the future is fundamentally different than the European one. Europeans have chosen to have few children and many government agencies to take care of them. Muslims choose to have many children and few government agencies. The European values so admired by American leftists have no future.

Europe is drinking rat poison to cure a cold. Instead of changing its values, it’s trying to maintain them by killing itself. The Mohammed retirement plan won’t save European Socialism. It will bury it.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Merkel's Muslim Madness

By On October 20, 2015

German Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted that refusing to take in Muslim migrants is a “danger for Europe.” Merkel as usual had it backward. It’s her program of taking in Muslim migrants that represents the gravest threat to the freedom and future of Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Merkel may have already doomed Germany. The Bild newspaper published a leaked secret government document estimating that the number of migrants invading Europe this year might reach 1.5 million.

And that bad news gets much worse because the document estimates that each migrant will bring in as many as eight family members once they’re settled in, bringing the year’s true total to 7.36 million.

That’s almost 10 percent of the population of Germany. In just one invasion.

And the migrants are mostly young men entering a rapidly aging country whose young male population is under 5 million. Germany’s Muslim population already approaches 5 million. The median age of Germany’s Muslim population is 34, while the median age for the overall population is 46.

Merkel has rapidly sped up the rate at which Germany’s young male population becomes Muslim.

The document predicts up to 10,000 invaders entering every day. It foresees no end to the arrivals even when it gets cold. These words add up to the end of Germany and the end of Europe.

With numbers like these it’s no wonder that Merkel is frantically trying to shift the burden, berating Eastern European countries for their nationalism and failing to learn from history even though as a former Communist and a German leader, she represents the two political forces that historically did the most to deprive these nations of their national rights and their independence.

Merkel invokes the Berlin Wall to claim that fences don’t work. But the Berlin Wall kept people from leaving. The fences that Hungary has built are constructed in self-defense, not to keep Hungarians in, but to keep invading Muslims out. It’s Merkel whose EU totalitarianism represents a new Berlin Wall that mandates open borders for Muslim migrants while preventing countries from leaving the EU.

When Merkel states, “The refugees won’t be stopped if we just build fences. That I’m deeply convinced of, and I’ve lived behind a fence for long enough,” she is not only deliberately mangling the moral difference between a fence that keeps invaders out and a fence that keeps people in, but her own complicity in these fences. East Germany needed a fence because people wanted to flee its totalitarian regime. The European Union needs political fences to keep countries from escaping its political regime.

The choice isn’t between open borders and the Berlin Wall. Rather the open borders that Merkel advocates are another form of the Berlin Wall. Communist countries don’t make immigration difficult. They make emigration impossible. Free countries make immigration difficult, but emigration easy.

That’s how democracy is supposed to work. It allows the people of a nation to decide who can enter while allowing anyone to leave. Merkel’s EU brings back the USSR’s ‘Prison of Nations’ where everyone can enter, but no one can leave.

Merkel warns European countries that refusing Muslim immigrants is “not negotiable.” This is the type of language that totalitarian regimes use.

Europeans are told that they will lose their credibility if they don’t take in Muslims. “Who are we to defend Christians around the world if we say we won’t accept a Muslim or a mosque in our country?” she asks. “That won’t do.”

But taking in Muslims has prevented Germans from defending Christians even in their own country, not only in the Middle East.

Christian refugees in Germany report being persecuted, threatened and beaten by Muslims. An Iranian Christian refugee spoke of death threats from Syrian Muslim migrants. An Iraqi Christian family was beaten and told, “We will kill you and drink your blood.”

A Lutheran pastor says that he is asked by refugees, “Will we have to hide ourselves as Christians in the future in this country?”

That question is better addressed to Angela Merkel and her mad Muslim vision for Germany.

Islamizing Germany will not enable it to defend Christians in the Middle East. Instead it will make the government even more vulnerable to terrorist blackmail and political pressure from Muslims. And if Merkel were really concerned about Christians, she wouldn’t be fighting European countries that want to take in Christian refugees instead of Muslim migrants. Not only hasn’t her appeasement of Muslims done anything to help Christians in the Middle East, but it has endangered Christians in Germany.

Despite resistance from her own party, Merkel continues doubling down. She has seized control of refugee policy from her own interior minister, who was skeptical of her action and who may have helped leak the Bild document, and she continues to ignore calls for refugee limits from her own party.

Meanwhile Muslims in Germany are vocal about refusing to accept any limitations of Muslim immigration.

Merkel isn’t really an open borders fanatic. She’s a political hack who made a tragic mistake and is desperately trying to dump it on the rest of Europe. After originally taking the correct line, Merkel folded and rather than admit that she made a mistake whose implications will destroy her country, she is desperately manufacturing one ridiculous excuse after another to defend her actions.

Her calls for sharing the burden amount to dumping the consequences of her unilateral policy on the rest of Europe. It’s exactly the type of behavior she condemned from Greece, only to hypocritically practice a version of it that is far more disastrous, both from the standpoint of security and economics.

Merkel’s plan is to unilaterally demand that the rest of Europe “share” in the welfare, crime and terrorism of the Muslim migrants that she chose to take in. And there’s nothing fair about that. But the Eurocrats can’t wrap their heads around the idea of border fences. The closest they can come to the idea is to hypocritically plead with Turkey to secure the borders that they refuse to secure.

The Turkish solution still requires Europe to take in another 500,000 Muslims from Turkey in exchange for its tyrannical Islamist ruler agreeing to secure its borders. This means outsourcing European border security to a hostile Muslim country whose ruler dreams of reviving the Ottoman Empire and boasted, “The mosques are our barracks, minarets our bayonets, domes our helmets, the believers our soldiers.”

That’s the sort of man that Europe will be turning over its security too. Meanwhile those 500,000 Muslims will also have to be “shared” all across Europe.

Merkel claims that the migrants “present more opportunities than risks.” What opportunities are these exactly? Half the Muslim “youth” in Germany are already unemployed.  Barely a third of Muslim immigrants earn a living through professional employment.

What opportunities will adding millions of Muslims to the welfare rolls accomplish except to create more jobs for the government bureaucrats who sign their welfare checks?

Merkel’s allies claim that she deserves the Nobel Prize. She certainly does. Hitler and Stalin were both nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. And Merkel has done more damage to Germany and Europe than any leader since these two worthy gentlemen before her had.

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Israel Must Deport the PLO

By On October 17, 2015
On September 13, 1993, Arafat and Rabin shook hands over the Oslo Accord in the Rose Garden. At the end of this September, the PLO’s Abbas finally officially disavowed the Oslo Accords.

The only reason the 80-year-old dictator of the PLO has a new $13 million palace, even while claiming to be short of funds, a $100 million bank account and a 1,000 member presidential guard is because of the same agreement with Israel that he just disavowed.

The PLO repeatedly violated that agreement by waging war against Israel. Its leaders, Arafat and Abbas, made a mockery of the negotiations. They sabotaged every opportunity to reach an agreement making it clear that they did not want a settlement and they did not want to negotiate.

Now Abbas has made it official. He disavowed the accords and set off a new intifada in which Muslims hack at Rabbis with meat cleavers or sink knives into the necks of teenage girls. Abbas lights the match and then plays the victim. He praises the "martyrs" who shoot toddlers and then his representative demands UN action.

This isn't going to get any better. It can only get worse. The PLO has only one trick up its sleeve and it's the same trick. There is zero chance of that changing or of the diplomats who keep the PLO in business finally recognizing that despite all the sunk cost, the PLO state can only destabilize the situation and inspire more violence. There is no solution here. Just dissolution.

There’s only one thing left for Israel to do. It’s time to deport the dictator, who barely controls half the population that he claims to represent, his 1,000 member presidential guard, his 57,000 member Presidential Security Force and the rest of his 150,000 employees who get paid retirement at fifty and many of whom have not reported to work since 2007.

It’s time to deport them all.

America, Europe and Japan have spent billions of dollars paying the salaries of terrorists who don’t even bother pretending to work. Last year their salaries amounted to around $2 billion. Those who do work spend time processing the $130 million a year that the PLO pays to convicted terrorists in Israel.

The PLO’s Palestinian Authority has a Central Elections Commission even though it has no elections. American taxpayers have invested $4.5 billion in promoting democracy in the PA in the last twenty years and there is now less democracy than there was when we first started throwing money at terrorists.

Abbas doesn’t bother running for office. He doesn’t bother negotiating with Israel. He doesn’t bother complying with the Oslo Accords. All he does is throw tantrums at the UN. And if he wants to do that on a full time basis while enjoying the best Manhattan restaurants, the terrorist dictator can buy himself a nice condo in the Turtle Bay Towers overlooking the United Nations and homeless bums shooting up heroin in Dag Hammarskjold Park Plaza.

Then he can denounce Israel weekly at the UN.

Or, better yet, give back his $100 million to the people he stole it from and give him a nice sleeping bag and a bench in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza. The drug dealing terrorists on his payroll can supply the heroin.

Deport the Fatah members who have used billions in foreign aid to build themselves a corrupt terrorist empire with fake jobs and foreign aid. Deport the government Imams who screech on its television shows for war with the Jewish “descendants of apes and pigs.” Deport the Palestinian Authority’s terrorist media corps that celebrates every brutal act of Muslim terror and casually calls for genocide.

Deport them all.

The only justification for maintaining this corrupt monstrosity, these tens of thousands of terrorists and the constant calls for mass murder, was the Oslo Accords. Israel had signed an agreement. The PLO violated that agreement every time its terrorists murdered Israelis, every time it called for war with Israel and every time it attacked Israel internationally. But now it has finally disavowed it.

If the PLO is no longer bound by them, Israel isn’t either.

The PLO’s millionaire dictator has given up any legal claims he has to remaining in power and remaining in Israel. He doesn’t hold elections so he isn’t the democratic representative of anyone or anything. He claims a state that encompasses Gaza, but the 1.8 million people living there don’t recognize his rule.

The only reason he was able to have his palace and his billion dollar budgets was that a handful of big countries insisted on pretending that this trainwreck was going somewhere. Now, even as his flag flies over the UN, Abbas has made it clear that it’s going nowhere. He doesn’t want to negotiate with Israel.

He wants the UN to unilaterally impose his demands on Israel. These demands aren’t backed by democratic elections or legal agreements anymore. The dictator just expects to dictate to Israel.

And there’s been enough of that already. Over 1,000 Israelis have been murdered by terrorists. Abbas trained and funded many of the terrorists who killed Israelis. Many of them were part of his presidential guard. Now he demands that the UN force Israel to free his terrorists so that they can kill Jews again.

There’s a better answer. Get rid of them all.

Deport the terrorists, deport their leaders, deport their flunkies, deport their economic advisers who figure out new ways of funneling foreign aid into Swiss bank accounts, deport the police who double as terrorists and deport the paid stone throwers. Deport the entire PLO and Hamas terrorist infrastructure to any country that is stupid enough to take them.

Maybe Cyprus or Tunisia will take them back. Or maybe Japan, which has spent hundreds of millions on funding the PLO, wants them. If not, how about Norway, which made this mess? We know the Saudis and Kuwait doesn’t want them, no matter how much noise they make about their “suffering”.

That just leaves the United Nations. The UN headquarters in New York City is considered international territory. With three buildings full of useless and corrupt bureaucrats, itinerant dictators and their stooges, surely there’s enough room to house the Palestinian Authority government-in-exile.

And the overflow of the Presidential Guard can be dumped in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, though some resistance from the homeless heroin addict population to these new settlers is to be expected.

And if Bill de Blasio’s New York can’t handle all the new homeless terrorists, there’s always Syria.

The PLO and Hamas have spent the past few decades shrieking that they love death and want nothing more than to fight to the death. And then every time Israel takes a whack, they run screaming to hide behind CNN’s skirt. In Syria, they will finally have the opportunity to fight and die like men.

Between ISIS, Iran, Assad, the Russians, US bombing raids and all the different Islamic militias, there will be enough conflicts to chew up and spit out Abbas’ presidential guard, Hamas’ suicide bombers and all the terrorist bureaucrats who haven’t shown up to work since 2007.

Deport them to Syria and let Allah sort out who gets the virgins.

The one thing that Israel should not and cannot do is keep the circus going. Netanyahu has been hoping that at some point the PLO would so thoroughly discredit itself that no one could pretend any longer that a negotiated peace was possible.

But that day will never come.

Abbas disavowed negotiations at the UN and in return, the UN flew his terrorist flag. He refuses to run for office, but the rest of the world pretends that he represents some democratic consensus. His own people accuse him of stealing enough money to keep Arafat’s widow in expensive Parisian handbags for the rest of her life and the international auditors just shrug.

Muslim terrorists can never discredit themselves in the eyes of their Western admirers and supporters. Nothing Abbas does, including his repeated attempts at a unity government with Hamas, will ever convince UN terrorist sympathizers that the failure to achieve peace is the fault of the terrorists.

All Israel can do is wash its hands of the entire business, deport the terrorists and turn them into Syria’s problem. Israel will never convince the UN that it’s right, but it can take the initiative and end the wrong.

The PLO regime has no further legal basis for maintaining its presence inside ’67 Israel. It exists for no other reason except to wage war, military, diplomatic and terroristic, against Israel. It must go.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Democratic Debate

By On October 14, 2015


Anderson Cooper: Can anyone find Syria on a map?

Hillary Clinton: Well Anderson, as a woman...

Anderson Cooper: Can you find Syria on a map?

Hillary Clinton: As a woman...

Anderson Cooper: Syria on a map. Can you find it?

Hillary Clinton: As a woman...

Anderson Cooper: Never mind. Senator Sanders, do you agree with the Secretary?

Bernie Sanders: SYRIA? Why are we talking about Syria when 41 PERCENT OF 99 PERCENT of all the money is going to the 1 PERCENT.

Anderson Cooper: Can you just answer the question.

Bernie Sanders: Syria is CONFUSING. Lots of PEOPLE fighting. Economics is SIMPLE. You just take away all the money from all the people who have the MONEY.

Anderson Cooper: The question is about Syria.

Bernie Sanders: Right NOW the 1 PERCENT are eating BABIES. They have piles and PILES of babies in their MANSIONS and on Wall Street and they're chowing down on them like hungry dogs.

Anderson Cooper: Governor Chafee, you recently suggested making Syrian dictator Assad into the Governor of New Mexico. Do you still stand by that idea?

Chafee: I was always against the Iraq War

Anderson Cooper: This is about Syria

Chafee: I knew the Iraq War was a mistake from the beginning.

Bernie Sanders: I knew the Iraq War was a mistake even earlier. You want opposition to the Iraq War, I was OPPOSED.

Jim Webb: One minute. I was opposed to the Iraq War in 1992.

Bernie Sanders: 1992? I opposed the Iraq War in 1922. I opposed the Vietnam War. I opposed WW2. I opposed WW1. I opposed the Mexican War. I opposed the War of 1812.

Lincoln Chafee: Edward Snowden is a hero. We should make a national memorial to the Rosenbergs. Let's apologize to the British for Bunker Hill.

Bernie Sanders: I was opposed to Bunker Hill. I said back then that the Revolution is all about putting money in the pockets of the 1 percent like Paul Revere and George Washington... WHO EAT BABIES!

Martin O'Malley: I need to say something very important here... in a slow sonorous voice... as if I'm trying to sell you car insurance... over the phone. Somewhere in the audience... is Paul Bigmann who fought in the Iraq War. After the war... he couldn't get a job... until I paid him to come here and applaud my speeches... if I am elected president... I will pay all Iraq War veterans to come and applaud everything I say. For America.

Anderson Cooper: The question is about Syria.

Martin O'Malley: Syria is a very serious issue... very serious. That's why I'm committed to making all the electricity green by 2050.

Anderson Cooper: No one even knows what that means.

Martin O'Malley: We need to rip all the ugly dirty fossil wires out our walls and replace them with clean green wires made by a company that gave me a lot of money... So this never happens again.

Anderson Cooper: Does anyone have anything to say about Syria?

Hillary Clinton: I know all about Syria. I personally negotiated a ceasefire with Assad that ended the war. Because I get things done. I'm a progressive moderate who is consistently changing her views like any normal person who hides private email servers in a bathroom in the Fuhrerbunker.

Anderson Cooper: There's no ceasefire in Syria. The fighting is still going on.

Hillary Clinton: When I flew into the Damascus airport under fire, I remembered what my late mother told me...

Anderson Cooper: None of that ever happened

Hillary Clinton: I had already negotiated an end to the fighting in Israel, Ireland and Yugoslavia...

Jim Webb: No, you didn't.

Hillary Clinton: And so I said to Assad, cut it out. Stop killing all those people. Because that's what real leadership is. And I'm a real leader. As a woman...

Bernie Sanders: SHUT UP. Look, this is real simple. Assad is the 1 percent. We kill all the 1 percent and there will be WORLD PEACE. We kill the 1 percent in America and Syria and all over the world in some sort of...

Anderson Cooper: International worker's revolution?

Bernie Sanders: Exactly, for the middle class, which is the backbone of our country. Until we DEBONE them and put them in GULAGS.

Chafee: I support twice as many gulags as Senator Sanders. And make them twice as cold.

Martin O'Malley: Under my leadership, we actually made gulags in Maryland. I passed the Right to Gulag Act and we had overflowing gulags. Except we called them prisons and they were full of black people and green electricity.

Anderson Cooper: Alright, what the hell. Secretary Clinton, do you believe we should send the middle class to Gulags.

Hillary Clinton: Anderson, as a woman and a leader who is respected by donors around the world, I believe that we need to come together around solutions that work. Gulags for the middle class are just not realistic. I appreciate Bernie's passion for Gulags. I know he loves Gulags from my time working with him in the Senate. And I know many people think we need Gulags.

Anderson Cooper: Are you for or against sending the middle class to Gulags?

Hillary Clinton: It's not a simple issue. I believe we can get the same effective results as Gulags without the Gulags by raising tax rates for everyone whose last name isn't Clinton to 100 percent, abolishing the Constitution and forcing everyone to move to Madison, Wisconsin.

Anderson Cooper: The audience isn't applauding. It seems to want Gulags.

Hillary Clinton: As I've always said, I'm for Gulags, but we can't get the Gulags done without experienced leadership and no one has more experience with Gulags than I do. I've seen Gulags in North Korea and China and I believe we can do better. We don't just need Gulags, we need Smart Gulags. We need Gulags that will be role models for our children as they are raised by the Gulags.

Bernie Sanders: TALK, TALK, TALK. A Bernie Sanders administration isn't going to talk about sending political dissidents to GULAGS. It's ACTUALLY going to do it. Bernie Sanders will fight to Gulag everyone opposed to his policies. Bernie Sanders will Gulag Wall Street. Bernie Sanders will Gulag the Wall Street Journal. Bill Sanders will Gulag you, if you don't vote for him.

Anderson Cooper: Do you really think that sending everyone to Gulags is an electable platform?

Bernie Sanders: HELL YES. We just need millions of people coming together to Gulag everyone who doesn't want to give them free college, free pot and free Gulags. RIGHT NOW there are 100,000 community organizers at centers around the country drawing up lists of who to Gulag.

Anderson Cooper: Do you see any obstacles to this plan to put 50 percent of the country in arctic prison camps?

Bernie Sanders: Global Warming. If the ice melts, how are we going to keep them in the Gulags?

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

How Buying Guns for Oppressed Jews Built the American Jewish Establishment

By On October 13, 2015
Ben Carson’s comments that armed Jews might have saved lives in the Holocaust by resisting Nazi terror have been met with condescending mockery from the left. The Jewish establishment, a network of wealthy non-profit organizations that claim to represent Jews without ever being chosen by them and while working against their interests, has reacted in the same way as their liberal brethren.

But this establishment has forgotten that it was built on providing guns to Jews.

Historical revisionism is what the left does best. American Jewish history in the last century is a revisionist history in which the heroes are the “establishment”. The truth lies buried in old papers and lost documents. And it’s a deeply compelling truth of how the left suppressed Jewish self-defense.

The Jewish Defense Association was the first time that uptown establishment German Jews and downtown Eastern Jewish immigrants came together. The JDA’s goal had little in common with the empty rubber chicken dinner agendas of what the establishment that grew out of it would become.

Instead the Jewish Defense Association’s mission was simple. Buy guns for Jews.

Its agenda, as reported by the New York Times was, “New massacres are preparing. Our people must be possessed of arms to defend themselves and their honor.” 

The year was 1905. The slow bloody beginning of the Russian Revolution was underway. Much like the Syrian Civil War, brutal militias aligned with different factions from the left to the right would arise out of the violence. Like the Christians in Syria, the Jews were an isolated minority. Xenophobia allowed both Communists and Czarists to score populist points by massacring the Jews in violent pogroms.

The Jewish Defense Association responded with a call to arms. Its motto took a part of Hillel’s credo, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me.” Its membership encompassed the left and the right, Zionists and anti-Zionists, religious and secular Jews.

A march of 200,000 Jews to Union Square included 5,000 former Russian soldiers, the volunteer Zion Guards in blue uniforms carrying rifles and the young men of the Manhattan Rifles, begun in the Lower East Side’s Educational Alliance as the Alliance Cadets, which had been formed in imitation of the Jewish Lads Brigade, a group that had put thousands of Jewish boys in the UK through military training.

The final resolutions declared that, “Eternal vigilance is the price of the Jew's life, and that we urge our people to take up arms against their assailants, and if need be to sell their lives most dearly.”

It concluded with the ringing challenge, "We call Jews everywhere toward the defense of the Jewish people."

In the words of the New York Times, "A ripple went through the crowd like wind rising to a hurricane which roared "Aye!"

It was undoubtedly the most heavily armed Jewish rally in American history. The sight of all those guns, not to mention early versions of the Israeli flag, would give any modern establishment leader a fit.

And yet the JDA included key establishment figures like Judah Magnes and Louis Marshall. Branches of the organization quickly emerged around the country from Los Angeles to Cincinnati showing how popular the message of Jewish self-defense was.

"In underlining the word ‘Self’ it expresses its conviction of the futility of all kinds of Jewish demonstration which appeal to others," Rabbi Israel Friedlander, a co-founder of Young Israel who would later be murdered by Communist thugs, wrote.

"The modern Jew, who is otherwise ready to boast of his liberalism… anxiously watches every nod of a king and every smile of a prime minister. The old ‘Shtadlan’ still exists in the form of the ‘influential Hebrew’ who on the backstairs often begs what as a representative of a free nation he ought openly to demand. In times of danger the modern Jews...  appeal to the Spirit of Humanity, Modern Civilization or Brotherhood of Mankind, without themselves moving a finger in their defense."

"Attacks of bloodthirsty beasts cannot be beaten back by appeals to Humanity and Civilization,” he wrote.”Surely the Self-Defense of the Jews will not at once stop all further bloodshed. Some Jews may still be slain, be destroyed and be beaten. But they will certainly not be put to shame. They will meet violence with violence and teach their enemies the value of a Jewish life."

But of course it was not to be.

The “Shtadlans,” the institutional establishment figures who had taken over the JDA, would abandon and dismantle it, recreating its corpse as the American Jewish Committee. The AJC would default to exactly the kind of aimless political begging that Rabbi Friedlander had condemned because that made power brokers like Marshall and Magnes feel important. Their goal was not to empower Jews, but to disempower them. The establishment robbed Jews of their power and offered them a chance to donate to a corrupt network of organizations whose only real purpose was making their leaders feel important.

 Meanwhile the leftists tore apart the JDA by refusing to work with the Jewish “religious and capitalist elements” of the JDA.

Leading the charge against the JDA were the Bund, an anti-Jewish Marxist organization, and the Forward, a radical left-wing paper that continues to spread hate against Jews and Judaism today.

While the Bund and the Forward’s mendacious Abe Cahan had initially supported the JDA in order to take advantage of Jewish outrage over the pogroms, the Bund’s position firmly opposed self-defense along “national lines” as a distraction from class consciousness and class warfare. And armed Jews, especially Zionists, might end up shooting some of the Bund’s favorite “workers mobs” at a pogrom.

Jewish self-defense threatened the Marxist agenda. The Marxists were willing to exploit Jews through front groups, but were determined to deny them any ability to defend themselves. For its Communist collaboration, the Bund earned the dubious honor of being the last non-Bolshevik Jewish organization allowed to operate on Soviet soil. Eventually it was purged and its members were shot. Others found their way into the Yevsektsiya, the Communist Party’s Jewish Section, tasked with wiping out Judaism by shutting down synagogues and Jewish institutions, and organizing the murder of Rabbis and Zionists.

Despite the interference of the Marxists, Jewish self-defense groups in Russia, such as the Giborei Zion (Heroes of Zion), assembled their own weapons or smuggled them in to resist attacks.

The Communist takeover led to the end of Jewish self-defense groups in Russia. Those who stayed behind were shot or sent to gulags. Many others made their way to Israel where they helped defend Jews against Muslim terror and fought for the independence of the Jewish State. Others played a key role in the resistance to Nazi occupation during WW2 in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere.

The self-defense organizations that had failed in Russia, succeeded in Israel. They did it even though the establishment continued to undermine them by entering into a shameful collaboration with the USSR.

The JDC and the establishment spent most of its money on Soviet agricultural colonies in which Russian Jews were supposed to find a “new life” and a “happy future”. Newspapers were filled with glowing accounts of how happy the resettled Jews were. The scam eventually collapsed when the Communists had gotten enough money out of their useful anti-Zionist idiots. Those Jews who had been resettled, were murdered by the Nazis. Local JDC employees were shot or imprisoned.

At a crucial period, the establishment had starved Jewish settlers of funds that could have been used to dramatically transform Israel. But the pro-Communist left had its own agenda. The eagerness of the JDC to collaborate with the Communists could be found in their cover-up of the murder of Rabbi Friedlander.

Rabbi Friedlander, who advocated Jewish self-defense, had been in the Ukraine as a JDC emissary. He and two other Jews were murdered by the Red Army. The Forward feverishly engaged in a cover-up while the JDC stayed silent to avoid offending the Bolsheviks and their fellow travelers at the Forward.

Jewish self-defense was popular with Jews, but unpopular with the establishment and the far left. The establishment wanted Jews to be dependent on their political access, but refused to use that access to protect Jews by challenging the left, whether that meant standing up to the USSR over its persecution of Jews or to FDR over the Holocaust.

The far left had done everything in its power to suppress a “national solution” to the Jewish question. That is still what it is doing today. Its fight against Israel has nothing to do with the fake nationhood of the “Palestinian” terror groups, but is part of a longstanding campaign to shut down any independent Jewish consciousness because that might interfere with its class consciousness and class warfare.

American Jews are blamed for their apathy to the Holocaust or to Israel. But the good intentions of ordinary Jews were hijacked and continue to be hijacked by a corrupt establishment for its own political agendas. The establishment put FDR first and the left put Stalin first. Today it puts Obama first. It is a parasitic entity that hijacked Jewish self-defense and concerns while costing countless Jewish lives.

Armed Jews alone would not have stopped the Holocaust, but the awareness rising in Jewish circles in 1905 could have led to a movement that would have built a secure Israel and evacuated Jews from danger zones long before the Holocaust. Guns are only the final element of self-defense. Self-defense begins with awareness and mobilization. It’s what you do to prepare for the worst that really counts.

Very little has changed today. The establishment continues to undermine Israel, pursuing left-wing causes at Jewish expense, while pretending that it cares about the Jewish State, even as it undermines its efforts at self-defense. The left wants to destroy Israel. And the establishment helps make it happen.

The establishment ridicules the idea for which those 200,000 Jews gathered, armed and unarmed, over a century ago. Such contempt is fashionable in liberal circles. And yet that old message continues to resound today. “Our people must be possessed of arms to defend themselves and their honor.” 

Monday, October 12, 2015

The End of Columbus Day is the End of America

By On October 12, 2015
Columbus may have outfoxed the Spanish court and his rivals, but he is falling victim to the court of political correctness. The explorer who discovered America has become controversial because the very idea of America has become controversial.

There are counter-historical claims put forward by Muslim and Chinese scholars claiming that they discovered America first. And there are mobs of fake indigenous activists on every campus to whom the old Italian is as much of a villain as the bearded Uncle Sam.

Columbus Day parades are met with protests and some have been minimized or eliminated.

In Seattle, Columbus Day became Indigenous People's Day, which sounds like a Marxist terrorist group's holiday.

The shift from celebrating Columbus' arrival in America to commemorating it as an American Nakba by focusing on the Indians, rather than the Americans, is a profound form of historical revisionism that hacks away at the origins of this country.

No American state has followed Venezuela's lead in renaming it Día de la Resistencia Indígena, or Day of Indigenous Resistance, which actually is a Marxist terrorist group's holiday, the whole notion of celebrating the discovery of America has come to be seen as somehow shameful and worst of all, politically incorrect.

Anti-Columbus Day protests are mounted by La Raza, whose members, despite their indigenous posturing, are actually mostly descended from Spanish colonists, but who know that most American liberals are too confused to rationally frame an objection to a protest by any minority group.

About the only thing sillier than a group of people emphasizing their collective identity as a Spanish speaking people, and denouncing Columbus as an imperialist exploiter is Ward Churchill, a fake Indian, who compared Columbus to Heinrich Himmler. Ward Churchill's scholarship consists of comparing Americans in past history and current events to random Nazis. If he hasn't yet compared Amerigo Vespucci or Daniel Boone to Ernst Röhm; it's only a matter of time.

The absurdity of these attacks is only deepened by the linguistic and cultural ties between the Italian Columbus Day marchers and the Latino Anti-Columbus Day protesters with the latter set cynically exploiting white guilt to pretend that being the descendants of Southern European colonists makes them a minority.

If being descended from Southern Europeans makes you a minority, then Columbus, the parade marchers, the Greek restaurant owner nearby and even Rush Limbaugh are all "people of color."

Italian-Americans are the only bulwark against political correctness still keeping Columbus on the calendar, and that has made mayors and governors in cities and states with large Italian-American communities wary of tossing the great explorer completely overboard. But while Ferdinand and Isabella may have brought Columbus back in chains, modern day political correctness has banished him to the darkened dungeon of non-personhood, erasing him from history and replacing him with a note reading, "I'm Sorry We Ever Landed Here."

But this is about more than one single 15th century Genoan with a complicated life who was neither a monster nor a saint. It is about whether America really has any right to exist at all. Is there any argument against celebrating Columbus Day, that cannot similarly be applied to the Fourth of July?

If Columbus is to be stricken from the history books in favor of ideological thugs like Malcolm X or Caesar Chavez, then America must soon follow. Columbus' crime is that he enabled European settlement of the continent.

If the settlement of non-Indians in North America is illegitimate, then any national state they created is also illegitimate.

It is easier to hack away at a nation's history by beginning with the lower branches.

Columbus is an easier target than America itself, though La Raza considers both colonialist vermin. Americans are less likely to protest over the banishment of Columbus to the politically correct Gulag  than over the banishing America itself, which was named after another one of those colonialist explorers, Amerigo Vespucci. First they came for Columbus Day and then for the Fourth of July.

The battles being fought over Columbus Day foreshadow the battles to be fought over the Fourth of July. As Columbus Day joins the list of banned holidays in more cities, one day there may not be a Fourth of July, just a day of Native Resistance to remember the atrocities of the colonists with PBS documentaries comparing George Washington to Hitler.

These documentaries already exist, they just haven't gone mainstream. Yet.

We celebrate Columbus Day and the Fourth of July because history is written by the winners. Had the Aztecs, the Mayans or the Iroquois Confederation developed the necessary technology and skills to cross the Atlantic and begin colonizing Europe, the fate of its native inhabitants would have been far uglier. The different perspectives on history often depend on which side you happen to be on.

To Americans, the Alamo is a shining moment of heroism. To the Mexicans who are the heirs of a colonialist empire far more ruthless than anything to be found north of the Rio Grande, the war was a plot to conquer Mexican territory. And neither side is altogether wrong, but choosing which version of history to go by is the difference between being an American or a Mexican.

A nation's mythology, its paragons and heroes, its founding legends and great deeds, are its soul. To replace them with another culture's perspective on its history is to kill that soul.

That is the ultimate goal of political correctness, to kill America's soul. To stick George Washington, Patrick Henry, Jefferson, James Bowie, Paul Revere, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and all the rest on a shelf in a back room somewhere, and replace them with timelier liberal heroes. Move over Washington, Caesar Chavez needs this space. No more American heroes need apply.

Followed of course by no more America.

This is how it begins. And that is how it ends. Nations are not destroyed by atomic bombs or economic catastrophes; they are lost when they lose any reason to go on living. When they no longer have enough pride to go on fighting to survive.

The final note of politically correct lunacy comes from a headline in the Columbus Dispatch about the Columbus Day festival in the city of Columbus, Ohio. "Italian Festival honors controversial explorer with its own Columbus Day parade".

Once the great discover of America, Columbus is now dubbed "controversial" by a newspaper named after him, in a city named after him .And if he is controversial, how can naming a city after him and a newspaper after the city not be equally controversial?

Can the day when USA Today has a headline reading, "Some cities still plan controversial 4th of July celebration of American independence" be far behind?

Thursday, October 08, 2015

How the Left Rebranded as Non-Ideological

By On October 08, 2015
Every time Obama issues another public ultimatum to Congress (before doing what he wants to do anyway) he phrases it in terms like "common sense" or "pragmatic". It's "non-ideological" he insists. The left's ideological agenda just happens to be the common sense pragmatic non-ideological solution.

Obama may be the most radical political figure to occupy the White House, but he is careful to avoid political labels. His leftist allies calculatingly compare him to Reagan or Roosevelt. He's not an ideologue. Just another one of those "Great American Leaders" bent on helping ordinary people.

A big part of the left's latest successes can be attributed to this non-ideological rebranding.

The old left (both old and new) was a political movement that wanted to be understood in terms of its ideology. The post-leftist left wants to be seen as progressive. It emphasizes policies linked to people instead of ideology. The ideology is still there and choking entire university departments to death, but its public face emphasizes an apolitical technocracy of pragmatists and caring social workers.

It's not a new idea. Communists heavily leaned on non-ideological front groups. Its activists were writers or grandmothers even when they were parroting Soviet talking points. They weren't anything political. They were just ordinary common sense folks looking for pragmatic solutions.

But American leftists used to be more like Bernie Sanders and less like Barack Obama. Today Sanders is a strange romantic anachronism which is why he attracts so much of the left. The modern leftist politician follows a left-wing line, but without a lot of the ideological trappings. He does his best to sound like a reformer. He's a political extremist who tries to sound like a moderate.

Bernie Sanders appeals to the left for the same reasons that post-left lefties like Hillary and Obama don't. Hillary and Obama pursue their goals, but Sanders talks their talk. He doesn't pretend to be the voice of a new generation looking to find common ground. He doesn't pretend to be anything except a political extremist convinced of his rightness and unapologetic about it.

But Sanders' only real function is to serve as a stalking horse for Biden, weakening Hillary to enable a third proxy term for Obama. Bernie Sanders is what the left used to be. It's now a collection of political shapeshifters like Obama and Hillary who bury their radicalism beneath a paper thin veneer of moderation and caring. His kind of leftist never sold well and doesn't sell in this type of market.

Americans are suspicious of political agendas. They like their leaders to be common sense apolitical pragmatists who put people ahead of ideology. So that's what the left pretends to be.

The public face of the left has become non-ideological. No longer even liberal, but progressive. There's no Marxism here, folks. Just science and humanitarian impulses.

The left doesn't talk ideology. It just claims to care about people. It wants illegal alien amnesty, not because it believes in open borders, but because it cares about illegal aliens. It champions gay marriage, not because that's a part of its ideology, but because it cares about gay couples. It wants universal health care, not because it's Socialist, but because it cares about the uninsured.

Its MO is to put a human face on an issue. Then ram through the policy as an "act of love" to pragamtically "solve" a problem. The ideology remains hidden out of sight behind the curtain.

This post-leftist left requires a steady supply of victims as human faces of their latest totalitarian measure. Children are always useful because they're adorable and can be told to say anything. But it also requires a complete embrace of identity politics. And identity politics brings back ideology in the most toxic of ways.

The Social Justice Warrior has revived political correctness and taken it to new lows. While these activists have been key to the left's agenda, they are making it increasingly obvious that there is an agenda and that it's built out of Marxist gobbledygook.

The left wanted its activists to be thought of as people who volunteer to build homes in the Third World. Not the same old angry Marxists clutching pamphlets and screaming slogans filled with terminology no one understands. The SJWs are slightly more diverse than the old Marxists, but they are if anything even more obnoxious and their "problematic" vocabulary is very revealing.

Liberal outlets have been churning out pieces critical of the SJWs (without using that name) because, like the Cultural Revolution, these activists excel at internecine violence and because they risk destroying the left's new brand as a bunch of non-ideological problem solvers.

SJWs operate publicly within the shadow of popular culture. This has given them a certain amount of plausible deniability as they parasite and prey on creative fields, playing critics, commentators and writers, rather than ideologues, but the civil wars within some creative fields are bringing that time of quiet infiltration to an end.

And yet the left created the SJW problem by its apolitical reinvention. It needed a lot of identity groups to take the place of a formal ideology in public. The identity groups were meant to interlink with the technocracy of the left, the consultants, experts and academics who would claim that their demands were pragmatic and scientific. But the SJWs are spinning out of control.

Americans hated political correctness the first time around. Even liberals hated it. And the SJWs with their safe rooms and trigger words, their contention that they should have the right to violently berate and cyberlynch anyone they please without criticism (that's tone policing and punching down) are worse than any 80s sensitivity training course.

Political correctness doomed the public image of liberalism to a bunch of Bernie Sanders', pinch-faced scolds with no sense of humor who were always furiously angry over everything. The brand became so toxic that it had to be abandoned. The new leftist was non-ideological. Like Obama, he was supposed to be a natural comedian. He might show empathy, but he wouldn't be a scold.

But the idea that the left could sustain a non-ideological image while ramming through a radical ideological agenda was always tenuous. Not because Republicans would expose it. That might have happened in the era of Reagan and Goldwater, but we tend to forget that they were already frustrated responses to the failure of Republicans to check the radical agendas of FDR and JFK. An immediate successful Republican campaign against Obama was probably always too much to hope for. 

Conservative movements are notorious for their slow burns as they react to a left that has learned to get around public distaste for its agenda with shameless lies and fake patriotism. FDR and JFK both knew that they had to make their agenda seem like Americanism, inspirational, exceptional and patriotic. Republicans never figured out how to counter them, relying first on legalism, and then searching desperately for compromises. Obama had managed to successfully repeat the same trick.

It wasn't the right that would bring down the left. Historically it's the left that brings down the left.

The Obama era was a brilliant public relations ploy that was made possible by the entire media and the cultural industries turning themselves into a non-stop commercial for it. But its ability to fool enough of the people to stay in power wouldn't last.

Obama's own aggressive ObamaCare bid precipitated the original conservative reaction. His growing aggressiveness after his last midterm election defeat was mimicked by a left drunk on power and echoing his arrogance and contempt.

Sanders is a stalking horse for the Obama agenda, but he's also a symptom of a left that distrusts non-ideological rhetoric and is convinced that the public would embrace its agenda and allow it to accelerate its program of Socialism, mass seizure and abolition of property and rights, if only it was allowed to make the case. Before Sanders, Elizabeth Warren became the darling of the left for her, "You didn't build that" message. It was Socialism, though still cloaked in the non-ideological common sense brand, but the left could taste how close she came to saying it all.

The left has become too successful to sustain its non-ideological brand. What the right hasn't managed to do, the left is doing to itself.

As Lincoln knew, no lie can sustain itself indefinitely. Even when it isn't exposed from the outside, success creates its own internal tensions that will tear it apart. The left needs a right to fight because otherwise it will fight itself. The left is obsessed with purging its own ranks and the SJWs are the mechanism of that purge.

The return of political correctness, of censorship and the culture war, is not only creating new enemies, but exposes the fraud that there is no left, only a non-ideological progressive movement that eschews dogma and just tries to solve problems because it cares about people. The SJW, an angry freak who identifies with as many identities as he/she/it can, is a wailing hub of dogma, a physical embodiment of an ideological power structure-in-waiting that is built on repression and political terror.

Also he/she/it ruins everything.

The SJW reminds everyone that there is a left and that there's nothing progressive about it. That despite its culture heroes, it's a humorless movement whose aim is cultural censorship, and whose claims of caring about people are undermined by its angry hysterical tantrums.

Meanwhile Obama's plan to replace himself with his own LBJ just means that if the Republicans still can't get it together, Biden will be a sitting duck as the non-ideological common sense pragmatic Socialist program really begins coming apart. It was LBJ's failures that really buried the JFK era. Biden will bury the Obama era just as thoroughly when the chickens of a disastrous foreign and domestic policy have really come home to roost.

Tuesday, October 06, 2015

The Tyranny of Idealism

By On October 06, 2015
Of all the Alinsky rules, the most relevant one is, "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." But he simply codified and made pragmatic the most destructive of the left's rules which is, "Make the enemy live up to his ideals." Even if those ideals are often the invention of the left.

Ideals are by definition impossible to live up to. Human societies aren't ideal, they're real. Ideals are absolutes and an unfliching attempt to live up to them destroys individuals and societies. More subtly, the failure to live up to them justifies hatred and self-hatred toward nations and peoples.

People naturally want to think the best of their creeds and cultures, their societies and their states. This is both the best weapon and the best breeding ground of the left. There is nothing that creates leftists and draws them like the accusation that a nation is failing to live up to its ideals.

Absolutes are a goad, but they are not an answer. A nation is not an ideal. It is a structure that allows people to live. A nation pursuing an ideal is a prison. It is the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. It is North Korea. Or it's Europe swamping its cities with Muslims or Israel pursuing a "purity of arms" that its enemies do not abide by. The pursuit of such ideals is a death wish. It's a totalitarian suicide.

Religions embody ideals. Nations do not. A religion is built around a deity that can forgive its worshipers for their flaws. The wheel of sin turns toward redemption. Failure in religion is itself a learning experience that allows for self-improvement. Unless warped, it does not lead to a state of self-hatred, self-destruction and death.

But the state has no God. It is a bureaucratic idol composed of activist politicians and their clerks. It cannot redeem itself. Only damn itself. When it pursues an ideal, it borrows the narrative of religion without any divine understanding. Fanatics stand at the helm who are corrupt and goaded to extremes by their own failures, made incapable of forgiveness by their own human weaknesses.

The ideal state is a cult. At its head is the cult of personality. It ends with Jim Jones dispensing the Kool Aid. Or Rabin shaking Arafat's hand. Or Merkel opening the borders. Or Obama rattling through another teleprompter speech filled with borrowed inspirations and empty hopes.

The ideal state can only find its redemption in death. The death of states is the grand gesture that inspires leftists to believe that "Imagine" is the anthem of the future. What the state cannot do, the planetary collective will somehow accomplish. And yet the ideal state was the collective that was meant to accomplish what individuals could not do.

A state in pursuit of an ideal must always fail and in its failure discredit itself. The process of failure teaches self-hatred.

Think about how each time that America or Israel struggles to conduct a pure war that kills the fewest enemies possible, it only intensifies the wave of hatred and self-hatred indoctrinated by the left at each failure. It is the pursuit of an impossible ideal that feeds the hatred. The closer we come to an impossible notion of a pure war, the more our failures are used to spread shame and disgust.

In the tyranny of idealism, superior morality is not rewarded, it is punished.

Those closest to the ideal feel the failures most keenly. Those furthest from it are completely immune to them. A nation that genuinely values ideals can be taunted for failing to live up to them. It is the nation's own weakness for exceptionalism that makes it vulnerable. Once the exceptionalism is made conditional on impossible ideals, then it can be goaded to destroy itself by trying to live up to them.

There is nothing that saps morale and clouds decision making like the failure to live up to one's ideals. Once ideals define perspective, then the nation begins the race to the abyss of those ideals.

Functional nations pursue practical goals that are in the interest of their peoples. Ideal states are gulags, concentration camps, where human beings are tools for achieving ideals. A functional nation can be free, but an ideal state must be totalitarian no matter how often it prates about freedom. A nation can only be free when it accepts human flaws and frailties. An ideal state loves freedom, but hates free people. It cannot accept individualism or the wisdom of crowds. It bends them to its ideal.

The only way to escape the tyranny of idealism is for a nation to accept its flaws.

Once a people become susceptible to the tyranny of idealism, they begin to accept that their lives are conditional on the fulfillment of a set of ideals. And that they can therefore be sacrificed to them.

It follows them that America and Israel must accept the death of its people at the hands of terrorists rather than violate some impossible ideal about civilian casualties when fighting terrorists. Scale that moral calculus up to the nuclear and this ideal mandates that nations must die rather than fight back.

Likewise, Europe's refugee idealism demands that it accept hordes of invaders even at the cost of its existence, because its existence is conditional on ideals rather than realities. Survival by violating ideals becomes a fate worse than death. Religious martyrdom becomes a secular national suicide.

In this environment, the left thrives. Every failure of ideals becomes a cause for self-hatred. The peoples of the free world are taught that they violate their own values by living. Even their passive existence is a carbon crime, a volitional act of white privilege, that can never be wiped clean. Every attempt at self-defense, every attempt at existence, deepens their crime. The only escape is death.

Leftist politics pretends to offer ideals it is for, but it most acutely campaigns not for, but against. The leftist activist knows the society that he hates better than the one he loves, he has a much clearer understanding of the world that he wants to destroy than the world he wishes to create.

His politics are not creative, they are destructive. He has been nurtured on the foul milk of self-hatred. It has taught him to love himself by hating others. His arrogance is a contempt for an ordinary mass of people he fancies himself superior to because he wishes to destroy their way of life and remake it along some impossible ideal. The remaking cannot be done, but the destruction is always feasible. The leftist is always destroying someone else to atone for his own failure of ideals.

This is the way of the left. Its leaders and societies are predatory failures, consuming and destroying the life force of their peoples, and then expanding to destroy their neighbors and the world. The collective buck is always passed to some new group of victims and suckers. It will be their job to make the failed ideals of the past viable through sacrifices, self-hatred and self-destruction.

What the leftist does best is teach self-hatred. It is the main course in our educational system today. Its students are taught to despise their family, their culture, their religion, their way of life and their nation for failing to live up to the tainted ideals of the left. And to gain their self-worth through a rejection of these things and the embrace of their destruction. And so the leftist is born.

A set of ideals whose fulfillment requires our destruction reveals either our falseness or their falseness. The answer distinguishes the fanatic from the philosopher. Only the fanatic demands that people pursue ideals which will destroy them, whose terms make their existence impossible.

Our leftist philosopher-kings are not philosophers, they are feudal fanatics who bind peoples to ideals that destroy them because it feeds their twisted madness and their sense of superiority. They are not interested in the terms on which people can actually exist. They are not interested in people at all except as subjects for their gleeful malice and as puppets for their political psychodramas.

The absolute is never the answer except to the tyrant. And only a madman filled with hatred demands that a nation choose between self-hatred and self-destruction.

Human existence is the only possible resistance to the inhuman demands of the ideal state. This is the restating of the Declaration of Independence that governments exist for the life, liberty and happiness of human beings, not for the fulfillment of ideals which would destroy them.

Governments are not meant for angels, but for men. A state exists to enable, first the existence, second the freedom, and third the happiness of human beings, in exactly that order of importance.

A state whose policies destroy human existence has nullified itself. A state may only nullify their freedom if the very question of their existence is in question. And it may only nullify their happiness for their freedom. These are human terms. No other terms are either wanted or acceptable.

Governments are not religions and no political movement can place its pet philosopher in place of God. No man can demand more of other men. Only God can demand the impossible because He can also grant the impossible. No political system can forgive. It can only amass more guilt and sin, more hatred and self-hatred, more madness and destruction. Human beings cannot exceed themselves.

A healthy idealism aspires to a more human state of living. It does not demand absolutes. An idealism that demands absolutes is a trap. It is easy to tell the difference between the two.

Human ideals feel better about themselves as they improve. Inhuman ones feel worse because the ideal is never meant to be reached. An irreligious absolute offers no redemption. Instead the failure to do the impossible becomes the means of breaking people of their human qualities and making them into monsters.

We can only achieve human terms of existence for nations and peoples by accepting our flaws. Perfection is as impossible for a people as it is for a person. And within our flaws, we create an existence that is not based on the collective impossibilities of an ideal, but on the realizable goodness of our human flaws. Instead of seeking to create a perfect state, we individually become better people. Instead of the tyranny of idealism creating monsters, we give ourselves the freedom to be human beings.

Instead of building suicidal ideal states, we create societies in which we have the freedom to be good while refusing to lapse into a self-hatred borne of frustrated idealism which prevents us from seeing the goodness of our fellow men and the evil of our enemies.

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