Lawrence O’Donnell admitting he is a socialist:
Rachel Maddow admits she is to the left of Marxist Mao:
(EMAIL) rpt@r-pt.net
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A Starbucks Encounter with Michael Berryman
I love to go to Starbucks, grab a cup of coffee, and read/study my favorite topics in book form. Once and a while I will bump into people well known in pop-culture. Michael Berryman was recently one of those people. Of course, he is best known to me from an 80′s classic,... Read More
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An Ironman Supplement ~ Thin Nothing I
I thought I would post a few items for the average man to engage someone lightly about Genesis. Here I want to focus on larger, easier to defend positions and will also throw in some minutia for the person who is curious about the issue as well. I will give a short reply and... Read More
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Reason and Faith (From An Old Debate-Updated)
Certain words can mean very different things to different people. For instance, if I say to an atheist, “I have faith in God,” the atheist assumes I mean that my belief in God has nothing to do with evidence. But this isn’t what I mean by faith at all. When I... Read More
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BIBLICAL ETHICS ~ Did God Kill Innocent Children in Second Kings 2:23-25?
I was in a recent debate about Biblical cruelty/ethics and the person brought up a verse that has not been brought up in conversation with me yet. It provided a fun learning curve on a specific verse and topic that opened up culture and manners of the early Biblical leaders and... Read More
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The Shallow, Self-refuting, Incoherent, and Illogical Thinking of `Agnositc` ~ Vincent Bugliosi
I was surprised in listening to Vincent Bugliosi in an interview about his book, Divinity of Doubt: The God Question. Surprised because considering his book on debunking pretty much every JFK conspiracy known to man, I would expect him to realize his fundamental mistake that... Read More
Arab Spring Possible Only Because of the Left`s Help
A great article from Time Magazine:
If the Arab Spring was seeded by a liberal insurrection, the Arab Fall has brought a rich harvest for Political Islam. In election after election, parties that embrace various shades of Islamist ideology have spanked liberal rivals. In Tunisia, the first country to hold elections after toppling a long-standing dictator, the Ennahda party won a plurality in the Oct. 23 vote for an assembly that will write a new constitution. A month later, the Justice and Development Party and its allies won a majority in Morocco’s general elections. Now, in perhaps the most important election the Middle East has ever witnessed, Egypt’s Islamist parties are poised to dominate the country’s first freely elected parliament.
In the first of three rounds of voting, two Islamist groups won a clear majority between them: a coalition led by the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) got 37% of the vote, while the al-Nour Party won 24.4%. The Egyptian Block, a coalition of mostly liberal parties, was a distant third, with 13.4%. The FJP is the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, a mostly moderate Islamist group; al-Nour represents more-hard-line Salafis. With momentum on their side, the Islamists are expected to do even better in the second and third rounds, scheduled for Dec. 14 and Jan. 3. (See pictures of Egyptians flocking to the polls.)
Why have the liberals, leaders of the Arab Spring revolution, fared so poorly in elections? In Cairo, as the votes were being counted, I heard a raft of explanations from disheartened liberals. They were almost identical to the ones I’d heard the previous week, in Tunis. The litany goes like this: The liberals only had eight months to prepare for elections, whereas the Brotherhood has 80 years’ experience in political organization. The Islamists, thanks to their powerful financial backing from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, outspent the liberals. The generals currently ruling Egypt, resentful of the liberals for ousting their old boss Hosni Mubarak, fixed the vote in favor of the Islamists. The Brotherhood and the Salafists used religious propaganda — Vote for us or you’re a bad Muslim — to mislead a largely poor, illiterate electorate.
These excuses are all plausible, as far as they go. But they don’t go very far. After all, the Salafis had no political organization until 10 months ago, and they still managed to do well. The liberals were hardly penurious: free-spending telecom billionaire Naguib Sawiris is a leading member of the Egyptian Block. Even if you buy the notion that the generals — themselves brought up in strict secular tradition — prefer the Islamists to the liberals, international observers found no evidence of systematic ballot fixing. (See photos of the recent clashes between police and protesters in Cairo.)
And to argue that voters were hoodwinked by the Islamists is to suggest that the majority of the electorate are gullible fools. This tells you something about the attitude of liberal politicians toward their constituency. And that in turn may hold the key to why they fared so badly.
The Islamists, it turns out, understand democracy much better than the liberals do. The Ennahda and the FJP were not just better organized, they also campaigned harder and smarter. Anticipating allegations that they would seek to impose an Iranian-style theocracy in North Africa, the Islamists formed alliances with some secular and leftist parties and very early on announced they would not be seeking the presidency in either country. Like smart retail politicians everywhere, they played to their strengths, capitalizing on goodwill generated by years of providing social services — free hospitals and clinics, soup kitchens — in poor neighborhoods. And they used their piety to assure voters that they would provide clean government, no small consideration for a population fed up with decades of corrupt rule. Even the Salafis, who openly pursue an irredentist agenda and seek a return to Islam’s earliest days, benefited from the perception that they are scrupulously honest….
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2101903,00.html#ixzz1gQMFblyE
Thomas Sowell on Government`s Inability to `Create` Wealth by Controlling Costs (Or, the `Rolls Royce` Fallacy)
Affordability
Many of the cant words of politics are simply evasions of reality. A prime example is the notion of making housing, college, health insurance, or other things “affordable.”
Virtually anything can be made more affordable in isolation, simply by transferring resources to it from elsewhere in the economy, and having most of the costs absorbed by the U. S. Treasury.
The federal government could make a Rolls Royce affordable for every American, but we would not be a richer country as a result. We would in fact be a much poorer country, because of all the vast resources transferred from other economic activities to subsidize an extravagant luxury.
Of course it might be nice to be sitting at the wheel of a Rolls Royce, but we might be sitting there in rags and tatters, and gaunt with hunger, after having squandered enormous amounts of labor, capital, and costly materials that could have been put to better use elsewhere. That doesn’t happen in a market economy because most of us take one look at the price tag on a Rolls Royce and decide that it is time for another Toyota.
The very notion of making things affordable misses the key point of a market economy. An economy exists to make trade-offs, and a market economy makes the terms of those trade-offs plain with price tags representing the relative costs of producing different things. To have politicians arbitrarily change the price tags, so that prices no longer represent the real costs, is to defeat the whole purpose.
Reality doesn’t change when the government changes price tags. Talk about “bringing down health care costs” is not aimed at the costly legal environment in which medical science operates, or other sources of needless medical costs. It is aimed at price control, which hides costs rather than reducing them.
Hidden costs continue to take their toll— and it is often a higher toll than when these costs are freely transmitted through the marketplace. Less Supply, poorer quality, and longer waits have been the consequences of price Controls for all sorts of goods and services, in all sorts of societies, and foi thousands of years of human history.
Why would anyone think that price controls on medical care would be any different, except for being more deadly in their consequences?
One of the political excuses for making things affordable is that a particular product or service is a “right.” But this is only explaining one question-begging word with another.
Although it has been proclaimed that “health care is a right, not a privilege,” this neat dichotomy ignores the vast territory in between, where most decisions are made as trade-offs.
If health insurance is a right and not a privilege— and not even a subject of incremental trade-offs— then the same should be even more true of food. History in fact shows all too many instances of governments trying to keep food affordable, usually with disastrous consequences.
Whether in France during the 1790s, the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik revolution, or in newly independent African nations during the past generation, governments have imposed artificially low prices on food. In each case, this led to artificially low supplies of food and artificially high levels of hunger.
People who complain about the “prohibitive” cost of housing, or of going to college, for example, fail to understand that the whole point of costs is to be prohibitive.
Why do we go through this whole rigmarole of passing around dollar bills and writing each other checks, except to force everyone to economize on the country’s inherently limited resources?
What about “basic necessities”? Shouldn’t they be a “right”?
The idea certainly sounds nice. But the very fact that we can seriously entertain such a notion, as if we were God on the first day of creation, instead of mortals constrained by the universe we find in place, shows the utter unreality of failing to understand that we can only make choices among alternatives actually available.
For society as a whole, nothing comes as a “right” to which we are “entitled.” Even bare subsistence has to be produced— and produced at a cost of heavy toil for much of human history.
The only way anyone can have a right to something that has to be produced is to force someone else to produce it for him. The more things are provided as rights, the less the recipients have to work and the more others have to carry their load.
That does not mean more goods are available than under ordinary market production, but less. To believe otherwise is to commit the Rolls Royce fallacy on a more mundane level.
For the government to make some things more affordable is to make other things less affordable— and to destroy people’s freedom to make their own trade-offs as they see fit, in the light of economic realities, rather than political visions. Trade-offs remain inescapable, whether they are made through a market or through politics. The difference is that price tags present all the trade-offs simultaneously, while political “affordability” policies arbitrarily fix on whatever is hot at the moment. That is why cities have been financing all kinds of boondoggles for years, while their bridges rusted and their roadways crumbled.
Thomas Sowell, The Thomas Sowell Reader (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2011), 73-75.
O.W.S. Appropriating of Funds Turn `Piggish`
From HotAir:
It’s impossible to do this justice through excerpts, so be sure to read it all. However, a couple of points stand out (via Instapundit):
On Sunday, October 23, a meeting was held at 60 Wall Street. Six leaders discussed what to do with the half-million dollars that had been donated to their organization, since, in their estimation, the organization was incapable of making sound financial decisions. The proposed solution was not to spend the money educating their co-workers or stimulating more active participation by improving the organization’s structures and tactics. Instead, those present discussed how they could commandeer the $500,000 for their new, more exclusive organization. No, this was not the meeting of any traditional influence on Wall Street. These were six of the leaders of Occupy Wall Street (OWS).
To understand what follows, one has to have some familiarity with the organization of OWS. The General Assembly (NYC-GA) nominally makes all the decisions through overwhelming consensus; it requires 90% agreement to approve any decision, including expenditures. Sound groovy? Well, not really; a minority of 11% can essentially block all action, and apparently often do. And you thought the US Senate was bad …
This produced the need for subcommittees, called Working Groups (WG), which try to vet all issues and make recommendations back to the NYC-GA. It also eventually led to the creation of the Spokes Council, thanks to frustration in the Structure WG with the “Finance WG’s monopoly over OWS’ funds[].” To use the UN analogy of the “General Assembly,” the Spokes Council would be the Security Council of OWS. The account by Fritz Tucker shows that the better analogy for the Spokes Council is that of the pigs in Animal Farm. Think I’m kidding?
Daniel, a tall, red-bearded, white twenty-something—one of the six leaders of the teach-in—said that the NYC-GA needed to be completely defunded because those with “no stake” in the Occupy Wall Street movement shouldn’t have a say in how the money was spent. When I asked him whether everybody in the 99% had a stake in the movement, he said that only those occupying or working in Zuccotti Park did. I pointed out that since the General Assembly took place in Zuccotti Park, everybody who participated was an occupier. He responded with a long rant about how Zuccotti Park is filled with “tourists,” “free-loaders” and “crackheads” and suggested a solution that the even NYPD has not yet attempted: Daniel said that he’d like to take a fire-hose and clear out the entire encampment, adding hopefully that only the “real” activists would come back.
Yeah, well, some animals are more equal than others, too.
Rapist Arrested at O.W.S.
Gateway Pundit Reports:
It was a busy day for police at the Occupy Wall Street squatters camp. Several far left protesters were arrested at the Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York City. And, one protester was arrested for rape and sexual assault at the camp.
Police move in to arrest Occupy Wall Street protesters as they staged a sit-down at Goldman Sachs headquarters on Thursday, Nov. 3, 2011 in New York. Protesters marched from Zuccotti Park and delivered statements demanding the financial giant take responsibility for its role in the economic crisis. (AP/Bebeto Matthews)
Occupy Wall Street Protester Tonye Iketubosin or “Tonye Parks” was arrested by New York City police after he allegedly raped one protester and sexually assaulted another.
[....]
The Gothamist has more on the sexual predator.
Beau Sibbing, Wisconsin resident who has been working in the kitchen at Zuccotti Park for the past three weeks, tells us that Iketubosin was known as “Tonye Parks,” and came to work in the kitchen around two weeks ago. “He was a genuinely nice guy…he came to get shit done,” he said. Sibbing had heard rumors of the first assault on Friday, and said that Iketubosin “was adamant that it wasn’t him.”
After word had spread of the alleged assaults, Iketubosin was told not to come to kitchen meetings and to stay away from the park, “but he kept coming.” Sibbing said that around 9 p.m. last night “a whole bunch of people came and made him leave the park. Then the NYPD picked him up. I wasn’t sure if it was for his own safety or if he was being arrested.”
About us
About Papa Giorgio @ RPT:Biased: I have my own interests and personal beliefs in mind when talking to others, spiritually or politically (Prov 21:2; Matt 15:19), because... I am Fallen: I am a sinner and tend towards ~ naturally ~ what is not best for me or others. In other words, I will probably let you down (Rom 3:10; Rom 3:23; Lam 5:16); Sentenced: since I tend towards rebellion and selfishness, I am judged accordingly and righteously (Rom 5:12; Rom 6:23a; Job 36:6); Forgiven: I am justified before God NOT through works but by faith (Eph 2:8-10; Gal 2:16; Rom 6:23b; PS 86:5); Relational: mercy is not getting what you deserve. And grace is getting what you absolutely do not deserve (Heb 4:16; Eph 1:5; Jer 15:19a).
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Top 12 Posts Visited at RPT in 2011
1) The Left/Islamo-Nazis/Homosexuality/Womens Rights/and Contradictions
2) LOVE ~ Mariano (of TrueFreeThinker)
3) Debates About Homosexuality
4) Margaret Sanger and the Racist History of Planned Parenthood (Black Genocide)
5) Some Black and White History (A response to convo elsewhere)
6) Taking Physicist Stephen Barr to Task for His Mischaracterizing Saint Augustine's Stance on the Age of God's Creation
7) Homosexuality-A Christian Ethic?
8) Moving Mountains: Faith in Faith (My First "Sermon” Given 4-15-2010, Tax Day)
9) Thanks Obama $ Company-I have wanted this subject of Foreign Campaign Donations back in the headlines (plus Krauthammers ~ Reptilian Desperation)
10) The Vitamin C Pseudogene Argument Crumbles Slowly
11) The BBC Culture
12) Same-Sex Matters (Race and Gender in Marriage)
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