A devastating look at the fruit of the “peanut tree” via Larry Elder
Here are my “eulogy” posts on Carter (most are flashbacks):
Author: Papa Giorgio
Jim Jones and His Utopian Goals (+ Jimmy Carter and Harvey Milk)
(UPDATED 2020 and today [2025] – first posted late 2010)
Jim Jones was a hard-core atheist/socialist. It wasn’t a “religious cult,” rather, it was a cult in Marxian ideology. Here is one example from a sermon of his:
HARVEY MILK & Dan White
Remember, as NATIONAL REVIEW makes the point, “Willie Brown, Walter Mondale, and Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter ranked high among his [Jim Jones] supporters.” Continuing with the line of historical connections between “Leftism” and Jim Jones, NR also clearly reports that the media still gets their biased views mixed up with reality:
…But the first draft of history depicted the political fanatics as Christian fanatics, despite the group’s explicit atheism and distribution of Bibles in Jonestown for bathroom use. The words “fundamentalist Christianity” were used in a New York Times article to describe Jones’s preaching. The Associated Press called the dead “religious zealots.” Specials on CBS and NBC at the time neglected to mention the Marxism that animated Peoples Temple.
Beyond the ideology that inspired Peoples Temple’s demise, the media whitewashed the politicians who aided and abetted them.
Learning that San Francisco mayor George Moscone appointed Jim Jones to the city’s Housing Authority Commission, a body of which he quickly became chairman, piqued my curiosity, which led to my writing Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco. This revelation, particularly shocking in light of the fate of his tenants in Jonestown, led me to come across this: Willie Brown, who would become the speaker of the California State Assembly and then mayor of San Francisco, compared Jim Jones to Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Harvey Milk described Jonestown as “a beautiful retirement community” helping to “alleviating the world food crisis.” California lieutenant governor Mervyn Dymally actually made a pilgrimage to Jonestown that led to a gushing reaction typical of ideological tourists.
The politically inspired delusions of San Francisco Democrats proved contagious. Jimmy Carter’s running mate, Walter Mondale, met with Jim Jones in San Francisco in 1976. Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, found Jones so impressive that she campaigned with him, ate with him, allowed him to introduce her during a campaign speech, telephoned him, and put him in touch with her sister-in-law, Ruth Carter Stapleton. Friends in high places suppressed investigations in the United States, misled officials in Guyana into dismissing allegations against the lunatic in their midst, and biased State Department hands into siding with Jones in his fight with outraged relatives of the captives in his concentration camp….
THE CITY JOURNAL has a short review of Daniel Flynn’s book, “Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco.”
…. Among his advocates was Harvey Milk, also a newcomer to San Francisco. Milk, formerly a Goldwater Republican, became politically radical in California and repeatedly sought election to office as an outsider to the political machine. Milk attended services at Peoples Temple dozens of times, and wrote effusive letters to Jones. “Such greatness I have found in Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple,” Milk proclaimed.
Milk wasn’t Jones’s only fan. Many powerful people—Governor Jerry Brown, columnist Herb Caen, and Vice President Walter Mondale, to name a few—sought Jones’s blessings and expressed admiration for his dedication to racial equality and a better world. Flynn does a good job of laying out the social and political landscape of the Bay Area in the late seventies and situating the bizarre respect that the Jones cult received within the general fruitiness of the era. Jim Jones’s Bay Area was the same milieu that gave rise to the Zodiac killer, the lost-in-time Zebra murders, and the depredations of the Symbionese Liberation Army. In that context, a wacky preacher who healed the sick and ran drug-treatment centers while promising a racially unified heaven on earth seemed like a salutary influence by comparison.
While Harvey Milk was a strong advocate for Jim Jones, he was never a member of the cult as such, and Flynn may overstate the comparison between the two figures, though he draws no moral equivalence between them. It’s true that Milk amplified Peoples Temple propaganda, and even wrote letters to President Jimmy Carter defending Jones after disturbing reports of abuse emerged from the Jonestown compound in Guyana. But Milk was essentially just an aggressive municipal official willing to play hardball; he was murdered by a political rival. Jim Jones, on the other hand, was a diabolical lunatic for the ages.
Flynn nonetheless makes a compelling argument about our faulty historical memory of these events. Dan White killed Harvey Milk and George Moscone because he felt stymied and betrayed by them politically, not because Milk was gay or Moscone was friendly to gays. There is no evidence that White was homophobic, but with the help of two Oscar-winning films, Milk has been elevated to sainthood, a martyr to gay liberation.
At the same time, Jim Jones’s connection to mainstream Democratic politics has been suppressed. He and the Peoples Temple, which exalted racial diversity and social justice, have been cast as harrowing examples of Christian religious extremism, though Jones preached atheism and ordered his followers to use the Bible as toilet paper. A roster of leaders who remain dominant figures in California politics today embraced Jones publically. Jerry Brown, then and now governor of the state, approvingly visited the Peoples Temple, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, who ascended to the mayoralty upon Moscone’s assassination, joined the Board of Supervisors in honoring Jones. Willie Brown, longtime speaker of the California state assembly, a mayor of San Francisco, and the mentor of Senator Kamala Harris, was especially lavish in his praise of Jones, calling him “a combination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Chairman Mao.” ….
The SAN FRANCISCO WEEKLY had an article critiquing the popularization of the myth that this killing of Harvey Milk was over struggles of sexual identity: “Dan White’s Motive More About Betrayal Than Homophobia“
….. The film’s production company has kept Big Love writer Dustin Lance Black’s script under tight wraps, but SF Weekly was able to obtain a recent draft. The story focuses primarily on Milk’s life before his election and does an impressive job of capturing his compassion, charm, strength, and prodigious ability to inspire.
For the most part, the script is loyal to actual events, but there are a number of factual inaccuracies in the treatment of the story’s villain. In one scene, Milk is challenged by one of his aides, who asks, “What does Dan White do for you? Really? Politically?”
Milk replies that he suspects White is “one of us” (meaning gay), and that he sympathizes with White for living “the daily lie.” While it’s possible that White was confused about his sexuality or was secretly homosexual — though there is no evidence of either — Milk’s scripted response does not answer the aide’s question of what White did for Milk.
The real answer is surprising. According to voting records, newspaper stories, and anecdotal information, White supported Milk’s agenda with his influence, vote, and pocketbook. More than that, Sloan says, White respected Milk and actively sought his friendship.
That is, until the two had a bitter falling-out over a land-use issue in White’s district.
But instead of giving a historical nod to White’s political support of Milk, the film’s script advances the idea that White was struggling with his sexual identity. …..
More from the CITY JOURNAL’s article:
- Mythology As History: The troubled man who murdered Harvey Milk and George Moscone killed them over a petty grievance, not anti-gay bigotry.
…. White delivered the keynote address at the California Coalition for Handgun Control’s 1977 annual meeting. Like Feinstein, he supported gun control (he sometimes carried a firearm himself). As a supervisor, he voted for an aggressive affirmative-action policy that evaluated those in city management by how many minorities advanced under their leadership. On the board, the former cop and fireman essentially served as the representative of the city’s public-employees’ unions. When California’s Proposition 13, a tax-limitation measure backed by Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, passed, White voted for tax increases to protect public employees from threatened cuts. Later, when those threats began to appear more like scare tactics, White voted to rescind the tax increases. The two votes illustrate White’s politics—not particularly ideological, and often inconsistent.
White’s stands on gay rights appear consistently inconsistent as well. The first person White hired in politics was a gay man, who served as his campaign manager and later his chief of staff and business partner. “That was never an issue,” Ray Sloan told me in an interview for Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco. “In coordinating his campaign, I don’t think anyone knew or cared if I was gay. I neither hid it but I wasn’t out participating in any way that would say that. I sort of lived my own life. As time went on, it was clear that he knew. It just didn’t make any difference to him.”
Milk often joined White for coffee or lunch. Unlike other colleagues on the board, Milk attended the christening of White’s son. When Milk introduced the sole legislation authored by him to become law—a sensible ordinance requiring dog owners to clean up after their pets—White seconded it. But after Milk reversed his support for White’s efforts to keep a home for troubled youth from opening in his district, the troubled White reversed his support for a gay-rights measure important to Milk. Milk perhaps never saw White as an ally, but White clearly saw Milk as such, which led to feelings of betrayal.
During White’s brief time in politics, he sided with Milk on the most important issue involving gay rights. He endorsed “No” on Proposition 6, a ballot measure sponsored by California state senator John Briggs seeking to empower local school boards to fire openly gay teachers. White attended the largest gay-rights fundraiser in the history of U.S. politics at the time to mobilize support against Briggs, donating $100 to defeat the anti-gay measure.
About a week after Prop. 6 went down to defeat, White abruptly offered his resignation from the board of supervisors. Then the public employees who had worked hard to elect him let him know, at times angrily, that they objected to his sudden decision. Just as suddenly, the mercurial politician asked for his job back. Moscone initially welcomed White back on the board, but the mayor changed his mind after Milk lobbied him to seat someone else and encouraged political players in White’s district to jettison his attempt to regain his seat.
White felt betrayed. More important, he felt as though he had betrayed those loyal to him. A petty man nursing a petty grievance over a petty office murdered Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.
“I know why Dan White killed Milk,” board colleague Quentin Kopp explained in an interview for Cult City. “Because Milk was lobbying Moscone not to weaken and not reappoint White to the board. That got around.” Dianne Feinstein, a fellow Democrat who nevertheless disagreed with Kopp on much, agrees with him here. “This had nothing to do with anybody’s sexual orientation,” she reflected ten years ago. “It had to do with getting back his position.” ….
Dianne Feinstein: Harvey Milk’s Death Political, Not Over Sexual Orientation
17th Century American Genocide | Iroquois
“If anyone in seventeenth-century America can be considered genocidal,
it should be the Iroquois, rather than the French or English.”
~ Jeff Fynn-Paul ~
The Brutality of Ancient American Tribe – The Iroquois and what tactics did they employ? This video explores the historical Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the Haudenosaunee, and their formidable strategies in warfare and diplomacy. Join us as we delve into the brutal and sophisticated methods used by the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca tribes, along with the later addition of the Tuscarora.
Thomas Sowell discusses the Iroquois Confederacy.
I did some reading on vacation and wanted to excerpt a very small portion of what I read:
In North America, the history of Indian tribes shows a similar pattern of warfare with little evident “moderation.” On the contrary, victorious tribes often found it expedient to exterminate enemy tribes altogether, so as to avoid the problem of retributive attacks. Women and children of defeated tribes were carted off and enslaved to ensure no continuation of enemy bloodlines and traditions.
Iroquois history begins with the tale of Hiawatha, a semi-mythical leader who was remarkable insofar as he was a peacemaker—the implication being that most other tribal leaders were not. The archaeology of the period before Hiawatha has revealed many warrior skeletons riddled with arrows and/or hacked into pieces, indicating that violent warfare was normative in these regions before contact with Europeans.
The seventeenth century, the first for which we have written records, shows the Iroquois Confederacy maintaining an uneasy truce among its own membership, but only insofar as this enabled them to intensify warfare against their traditional enemies the Huron and the Algonquin. These so-called Beaver Wars lasted for many decades; they witnessed the destruction of the Wendat people, the Neutral Indians, the fabled Mohicans, and many other tribes.
Faced with the threat of what the modern Left should acknowledge as genocidal warfare, many of the Iroquois’ enemies were forced to flee to French, Dutch, and English settlements for protection, where their descendants eventually took up farming, converted to Christianity, or otherwise assimilated into the dominant culture. They gave up their vaunted “traditional” lifestyle because they preferred a peaceful life as a farmer to the omnipresent threat of death by tomahawk. Later in the eighteenth century, a few thousand Iroquois were to visit similar grisly fates on dozens of other neighbors, until only a handful of Native Americans remained in the entire territory circling the Great Lakes.
[….]
The same process occurred farther west in the Great Lakes region, where the Five Nations territory proved to be continuously in flux. The Five Nations group is thought to have been formed only a generation or two before French explorers contacted them, and the early years of French settlement in the region witnessed a number of horrific (dare I say “genocidal”) encounters. In 1649, the Iroquois took advantage of the weakened position of the Huron people to practically wipe them off the North American map.
“About twelve hundred Iroquois came,” a Huron remembered. “They took their anger out on the Fathers: they stripped them naked; they tore their fingernails off. They rained blows on their shoulders with sticks, on their kidneys and stomach and legs and face, and no part of their body was spared this torment.”
In the process of the Beaver Wars, the Iroquois “stole” land from the Hurons and other tribes equal in size to their original territory in New York State. Later on, the Iroquois continued their imperialist campaigns, ranging far to the south and west of their original territories. They destroyed the Erie Indians and the famed Mohicans, and conquered several other tribes. In the years around 1700, they ousted the Sioux Indians from West Virginia and Kentucky, who were forced by Iroquois aggression to vacate the land forever and to settle farther west on more marginal ground. The Iroquois thereafter claimed the Sioux hunting grounds for their own.
By 1780, the Iroquois Nation had stolen the equivalent of at least six times their original territory, all from neighboring tribes. From their original base in New York State, they had emptied much of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and much of southern Ontario of its former inhabitants. Whether or not one ascribes the Iroquois success to the presence of European firearms, the fact is the Iroquois, when given enough power, proved more than willing to permanently extinguish every Indian tribe they could get their hands on—this despite the efforts of the French and English to protect many of the Iroquois’ victims.
If anyone in seventeenth-century America can be considered genocidal, it should be the Iroquois, rather than the French or English. It is believed that the intra-Indian wars of attrition, which resulted in the expulsion of many tribes from the Great Lakes region, so fatally weakened Native populations in the area, that they had little choice but to abandon most of this land to American settler expansion in subsequent decades.
Farther west, groups such as the Apache are famous for displacing and dispossessing dozens of tribes from their ancestral lands within living memory of the whites’ arrival. The Apache are thought by archaeologists to have originated in Alaska and then rampaged southwards. Conquering and intimidating as they went, like a group of New World Huns or Vandals, the Apache finally reached the region of Texas by the time the first Spanish arrived in the early sixteenth century. From the Spanish, the Apaches received horses and guns, which enticed them to give up their semi-agricultural lifestyles and start hunting buffalo full. The irony is that many of these Indians only began hunting riding horses and buffalo because contact with Europeans enabled them to do so.
Meanwhile, shortly after 1700, a push by the Comanches displaced many Apache Indians, who in turn put pressure on the Pueblo Indians, raiding them and despoiling them of their own food supplies. The fierce Comanche went on to displace, assimilate, and/or annihilate dozens of other tribes and smaller groups in a series of well-documented attacks. Neighboring tribes feared them as a merciless scourge, and rightly so: like most other Native American tribes they routinely killed babies, tortured men, raped women, and enslaved children as they conquered.
Jeff Fynn-Paul, Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (Nashville, TN: Bombardier Books, 2023), 141-142, 186-188.
The following video is pretty good. He falters a bit in some history, but the presentation and humor are worth it:
Join me on a journey to uncover the untold story of “The Beaver Wars” in this captivating historical exploration. Together, we’ll delve deep into the tumultuous period of North American history, revealing the causes, consequences, and lasting impacts of this little-known conflict.
During the 17th century, rival indigenous nations clashed in a struggle for control over the lucrative fur trade, igniting what would become known as “The Beaver Wars.” We’ll unravel the socio-political dynamics at play, the strategic alliances formed, and the consequences across the region.
From the initial skirmishes to the full-scale warfare that engulfed the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley regions, we’ll explore the complex web of alliances, betrayals, and shifting power dynamics that characterized this pivotal era.
Together, we’ll shed light on this often overlooked chapter of history, exploring the cultural, economic, and environmental ramifications of “The Beaver Wars.” Gain insight into the legacy of this conflict and its enduring impact on North America.
Don’t miss out on this enlightening journey through history. I encourage you to like, comment, and subscribe to my channel for more fascinating insights into the past. Your support helps me continue to bring these stories to life.
BLACK HILLS
Activists suggest that all “colonized” land should be returned to the previous owners. Is it really that simple? Michael Knowles has thoughts.
Here is a quick blurb by Dinesh D’Souza discussing the American Indian battles over territory (land). Gruesome warfare, rape, pillaging, etc., were all part of these “land-grabs.”
Biblical Scholar Wes Huff Politely Nukes Billy Carson
Joe Rogan Hosts Biblical Scholar Wes Huff After Billy Carson Debate
The debate between Wes Huff and Billy Carson that took place on Oct. 18th 2024 on the Mark Minard Channel. Both Billy and Wes were notified 24hours before that we were scheduled to talk with each other, that it would be in a debate-style discussion format, and that we would be talking about Christianity and the Bible. The topic of discussion that was disclosed to all individuals involved the fact that we would be discussing Billy’s public and widely dispersed criticisms and critiques regarding the Bible and Historic Christianity. This recording is the unedited and unaltered raw footage from that interaction.
Now Billy Carson is suing people involved in this debate!? Crazy!
BTW, some crazy stuff happened behind the scenes after the debate. Wowza! New Age cult “stars” lose horribly when they are exposed.
- This journey has been intense, and I [Mark Minard] chose to stay silent due to legal advice and to avoid unnecessary drama/conflict—especially since we’re neighbors and our families know each other. Your support for me and my family means the world during this challenging time. I am not a perfect Christian nor profess to be. But i do trust that God’s hand is at work, and the truth always comes to light. (YOUTUBE)
Here is my Billy Carson rabbit hole:
- Billy Carson’s MELTDOWN Creates THIS Unexpected Outcome…
- Billy Carson APOLOGIZES After His FANS TURNED On Him
- Billy Carson PANICS and DELETES The 3HR MELTDOWN Video
- Billy Carson Claims To Be GOD And Leads Fans To Witchcraft After Wes Huff Debate
- Wes Huff Regrets Not Saying THIS in Trainwreck Debate
- Wesley Huff DESTROYS Billy Carson on God and Gender (Brilliant Answer!)
Jimmy Carter’s Failed Presidency and After
RELATED:
- Jimmy Carter Lies About His “Tea Bagging” (Flashback)
- Equating Religious Faith To Government Confiscation and Redistribution (Flashback)
The below is with a hat-tip to NEWSBUSTERS. A must read article by NATIONAL REVIEW, titled, “Jimmy Carter Was a Terrible President — and an Even Worse Former President,” can be found HERE. As I saw it when I heard the news, is, we need to deal with Carter Presidency issues.
Which are:
- The giving over the Panama Canal to the Chinese.
- The Department of Education.
- And the mess in Iran.
Those are Carter’s legacies Trump will hopefully address well.
Jimmy Carter Dissected on CNN by Scott Jennings
Here is one topic excerpted from the NR article. Iraq War:
…. In his mostly sycophantic 1998 book on Carter’s post–White House career, The Unfinished Presidency, Douglas Brinkley gave a startling account of Carter’s behavior in the run-up to the 1990–91 Persian Gulf conflict.
Concerned by the looming threat of war after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, Carter pulled out all the stops — and then some — to try to thwart the president, George H. W. Bush. Carter’s efforts started off within the realm of acceptable opposition for a former president. He wrote op-eds, hosted conferences, gave speeches — all urging peace talks as an alternative to repelling Saddam with the use of military force.
But when that failed, he took things to an extraordinary level. Carter wrote a letter to the leaders of every country on the U.N. Security Council, as well as a dozen other world leaders, Brinkley recounted, making “a direct appeal to hold ‘good faith’ negotiations with Saddam Hussein before entering upon a war. Carter implied that mature nations should not act like lemmings, blindly following George Bush’s inflammatory ‘line in the sand rhetoric.’”
As if this weren’t enough, on January 10, 1991 — just five days before a deadline that had been set for Saddam to withdraw — Carter wrote to key Arab leaders urging them to abandon their support for the U.S., undermining months of careful diplomacy by the Bush administration. “You may have to forego approval from the White House, but you will find the French, Soviets and others fully supportive,” Carter advised them.
It is one thing for a former president to express opposition to a policy of the sitting president, but by actively working to get foreign leaders to withdraw support for the U.S. days before troops were to be in the cross fire, Carter was taking actions that were closer to treason than they were to legitimate peace activism.
Carter’s meddling was not limited to the first Iraq War or to Republican administrations. In 1994, there was a standoff between the U.S., its allies, and North Korea over the communist country’s nuclear program. ….
Here is an example of Jimmy Carter’s personal life and that of his professional:
Trump’s Beatitudes (Jimmy Carter Comparison): We Don’t Elect Pastors
A must read article as well can be found at RELIGION NEWS NETWORK. The JERUSALEM POST has an excellent piece on Jimmy:
[….]
Dark obsession with Israel
From a mere misreading of 242, Carter descended into a dark obsession with Israel, casting it as the source of all Middle Eastern instability and a world-leading violator of human rights. His 2004 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, though based on half-truths and outright lies, effectively legitimized Israel’s delegitimization.
Yet, while reviewing the book for the Wall Street Journal, what shocked me so profoundly was Carter’s not-so-subtle antisemitism. He lambastes secular Israelis for abandoning Jewish law and condemns National-Religious Jews for fulfilling it. Whether Right or Left, Jews can do no right by Jimmy Carter. The one-time peanut farmer from Georgia who spent a lifetime repenting for his earlier racism against Blacks, conveniently forgot that the KKK also murdered Jews.
CARTER WASN’T satisfied with merely libeling Israel. His final decades were devoted to whitewashing Hamas and presenting it as an organization opposed to terror and dedicated to peace.
That was the message he conveyed on the op-ed pages of The New York Times and in public appearances worldwide. While shunning meetings with Israeli leaders, he embraced Khaled Mashaal, Ismail Haniyeh, and other terror chiefs.
He supported the Goldstone Report that condemned Israel for committing war crimes during the 2008-09 conflict with Gaza and accused Israel of systematically starving Gaza’s civilian population. The terrorists’ attempts to bore under Israel’s border were, in Carter’s telling, “defensive tunnel[s] being dug by Hamas inside the wall that encloses Gaza.”
Sanctimonious and prideful, Carter was never popular among his successors, Democratic and Republican alike, who generally shunned him. A story told me by an Israeli official who participated in the Camp David talks summed up the reasons for this aversion.
Visiting Israel in the ’80s, well after Begin’s resignation and physical decline, Carter asked this official to arrange a phone call. The conversation lasted a few minutes, at most, the ex-official told me, during which Carter talked endlessly and Begin said nothing.
That did not prevent Carter from immediately going to the press and reporting on how he and Begin discussed the peace process and other Middle East affairs. “It was a total lie,” the official told me. “A fiction.”
A tarnished legacy
That, unfortunately, is how many Israelis will remember Jimmy Carter, a person for whom the truth, especially about Israel, was easily discounted. A person who expressed not the slightest gratitude for the Israeli medical technology that successfully treated his melanoma or for the Israeli prime minister who assured him, inaccurately, “that you’ve inscribed your name forever in the history of… the people of Israel.”
Not a Cyrus nor a Truman, in the end, Jimmy Carter, but a Nebuchadnezzar who befriended Haman.
“35 years worth of oil left” ~ Jimmy Carter (1976)
Jimmy Carter Flashback: Originally posted February 17, 2016
From the September 23, 1976 Presidential debate between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. (H/T Gay Patriot)
- “We’ve got about 35 years worth of oil left in the whole world.” – Jimmy Carter in a 1976 presidential debate.
Equating Religious Faith To Government Confiscation and Redistribution
Some Carter Flashbacks: Originally posted November 18, 2013
— Some Updated Material at the end —
This is a posted pic from FaceBook, and here is my response to this all too often used mantra:
My (or others smarter than myself) two cents.
Programs initiated as part of the War on Poverty account for roughly 70 percent of all public assistance programs today. Estimates of the total cost of the War on Poverty over fifty years range between $15 trillion and $19.8 trillion in today’s dollars. This substantial investment appears to have yielded minimal benefits for poverty reduction. On the day Johnson introduced the war on poverty, the poverty rate in the US stood at roughly 14 percent. It is now approximately 16 percent and has never fallen below 11 percent. (Cornell University)
Also, this from a very old post of mine back when my blog was on a free site instead of my current .com
If you can remember back to the 2000 election here in the U. S. and the blue state, red state scenario of which voted for Gore and which voted for Bush, I’m sure you do, even if another country. Once in a while stats are done to see which part of the country (which states in fact) give more to charity per-capita than other states. Do you know which of the top twenty states gives the most to charity? You got it, Bush country! Every single one of the red states in that top-twenty are the middle-income fly-over states. Guess how many red-states got the lower twenty of giving? Two. Eighteen States that were in the lowest giving ratio to charity were Gore states. This is even more interesting with a few recent poles. Just under 66-percent republicans go to church one-to-two times a week. Just fewer than 66-percent democrats do not even go to church once a week. DRAT those nasty/greedy religious/conservatives!
So the question becomes this for the ineffable — damn near anti-Semitic — person pictured above… what does he consider Christian? 90% of one’s income to go to the government for redistribution? 80%? 70%? When does one stop being a Christian? Kinda a sliding scale (income giving) for those who define what being a Christian is… I mean, what is “is”?
And a civics 101 lesson, our government was set up to grind to a halt… the whole “checks and balances thingy.” I would hate for the parties to get along.
An after thought.
Keep in mind as well that every dollar given to, say, the Salvation Army, about 82-cents gets to the person in need. The exact opposite it true for government. About 30-cents of every dollar spent makes it to the needy individual.
So, would reducing the charitable giving write-off from 39.6% to what Obama would like to see (28%):
a) hurt the poor,
or b) help the poor?
Using Carter’s formula, then, would you be more of a Christian if you wanted to keep the status-quo, or, less of a Christian if you wanted to drop it to twenty-eight percent?
SOME UPDATES
Was Jesus a Socialist? | 5 Minute Video
Did Jesus support socialism? Do the teachings of Jesus Christ condemn the accumulation of wealth while pushing for the equal distribution of resources? Lawrence Reed, president of the Foundation for Economic Education, explains the misconceptions surrounding one of history’s greatest figures. (Read his eBook titled, “Rendering Unto Caesar: Was Jesus A Socialist?” — for free)
FEE notes this in an article
- Jesus did not even suggest a distribution. Instead, he warned against greed while declining to play the busybody.
Some Myths About the Rich and Taxes | Medved
(FLASAHBACK) A caller challenged Michael Medved on the “system” backing the rich… to which Michael responded with some counter-points. The conversation turned to taxes, and I learned a bit about the flat-tax and the “graduated” aspect of even it. Great call and great learning curve of a response.
“The Party of the Rich” (The GOP) | Prager
(FLAHBACK) This is an old audio*. Dennis Prager deals squarely with a mantra you often hear from the left. Enjoy.
- *My Vimeo account was terminated, this is a recovered audio from them. To wit, what is nice is that Vimeo — while noting I did not meet their clear marks of content — did send a list of videos with links to download them. With over 1,200 videos though… it will be a task (many are already on YouTube… so I just need to weed through them). But I still think that was VERY NICE of Vimeo. I would still recommend them for church’s who are looking for places to upload sermons and other original content.
Do the Rich Pay Their Fair Share? | 5 Minute Video
Do the rich pay their fair share of taxes? It’s not a simple question. First of all, what do you mean by rich? And how much is fair? What are the rich, whoever they are, paying now? Is there any tax rate that would be unfair? UCLA Professor of Economics, Lee Ohanian, has some fascinating and unexpected answers.
Jimmy Carter Lies About His “Tea Bagging” (Flashback)
Some Carter Flashbacks: Originally posted December 2, 2010
NewsBusters has a story about a recent interview on NPR (11-30-2010) where Jimmy Carter said he never criticized the Tea Party:
REHM: Last question, very briefly, what do you think of the Tea Party movement?
CARTER: You know, I never have criticized the Tea Party movement because, strangely enough, I capitalized on the same kind of situation politically that has made the Tea Party successful — that is, an extreme dissatisfaction with what was going on in Washington. Because I came along right after Watergate and right after the Vietnam lost and right after the assassination of the two Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr., and so I capitalized on that, and I was elected over some very wonderful people who were U.S. senators and immersed in the Washington scene.
In case you didn’t catch it, the interview/video at the top refutes this NPR interview.
So what about those signs that Brian Williams mentions? Not a lot of people realize this, but most of the signs with connections of Obama to Hitler are actually from what I term as a political cult. It just so happens this cult is a Democratic one. For instance, as a reminder, remember this exchange?
So, since most of these sign wielding nuts are actually Democrats, where does that leave Carter’s critique?
In 1979, LaRouche formed a Political Action Committee called the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC). LaRouche has run for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States seven times, beginning in 1980….
Read more at newer links: My Updated Post | Slate
What are all those signs about? Is there some sort of study of them done to find out if there is a percentage of them that are racially tinged?
UCLA study: Most tea party signs not racist
A study conducted by a UCLA grad student at the 9/12 taxpayer march on Washington contains some bad news for one of the mainstream media’s favorite narratives: the old ‘racist teabaggers’ meme.
Conversely, quantitative observation showed that the alleged racism was not prominent at the rally, at least not as far as signage is concerned. And to think Obamacrats wasted all those race cards for nothin’.
[….]
The investigation showed only 25% of signs expressing antagonism towards the President himself, only 5% touching on the President’s ethnicity or faith, and a piddly 1% promoting ‘Birtherism’.
I presume the 1% was newly anointed ‘birther’ Jake Tapper, respected journalist of ABC News – or once respected until he had the temerity to mention the President’s long form birth certificate the other day.
The teabag obsessed Obama apologists at MSNBC and the New York Times will no doubt be bitterly disappointed to learn that despite the breathless hype, racism no more typifies the tea party movement than honest unslanted analysis typifies their political coverage.
This study didn’t stop the questionable signs and ask if they were Lyndon LaRouche followers. Here is another story — old news, but needed for this recent news:
NewsBusters reported Thursday, a UCLA graduate student has published a study debunking the myth that the Tea Party is racist.
On Monday, Gretchen Carlson invited the study’s author on “Fox & Friends” to do what every news outlet ought to, namely, tell the truth about what the movement that is radically changing the political landscape is really all about.
[….]
Isn’t it interesting how easily this study was done?
As Carlson asked Ekins, why haven’t any news outlets, apart from Fox News and conservative websites, done any investigation into the allegations of racism within this movement to see if they were at all true?
Yes, that was a rhetorical question, for media have been trying to either dismiss or demonize the Tea Party since its inception.
THE VIDEO IS GONE, BUT THE TRANSCRIPT IS BELOW:
GRETCHEN CARLSON, HOST: Well, Brian, speaking of the Tea Party, the movement has been under attack since it started. Liberal members of the media and politicians have come out calling it racist.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JANEANE GAROFALO: They have no idea what the Boston tea party was about.
KEITH OLBERMANN: That’s right.
GAROFALO: They don’t know the history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And you see folks waving tea bags around.
HOUSE SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI: Carrying swastikas, symbols like that to a town hall meeting on healthcare.
FORMER PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: An overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.
HBO’s BILL MAHER: The Teabaggers, they’re not a movement. They’re a cult.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
CARLSON: But is the racist label accurate? A grad student at UCLA just completed a study on the Tea Party and the signs that are carried at the rallies and she came up with a much different conclusion. Joining me now to share her finding is Emily Ekins. Good morning to you, Emily
EMILY EKINS, UCLA GRADUATE STUDENT: Good to be with you.
CARLSON: So, you went to a rally. You decided to take photographs of about 250 signs, and what did you find out?
EKINS:Well, what I did is I tried to take a picture of every visible sign I could find and I found that over 50% of the signs were about limited government and lower spending. And only about 6% of the signs were controversial in nature.
CARLSON: How tough was it for you to go and take these photos and come up with that conclusion?
EKINS: You know, it was actually pretty straight forward. I’m surprised more people haven’t done this. I just went to the rally, I walked in a systemic fashion, you know, row by row, took a picture of every visible sign and then I categorized them. And I should say that I was very conscientious that any sign that, you know, could be construed as controversial, meaning they had undertones about immigration or race or Islam, you know, I was sure to include those into these controversial categories. But frankly, they just, there weren’t that many, and so it added up to six.
CARLSON: Why do you think that your test results differ from the perception of the mainstream media and those clips that we just saw?
EKINS: Well, honestly, I think it has everything to do with your method and your approach. I think what often happens is people go to these events, these rallies, and they’re either attracted or repelled by various signs. And if you just cover a couple of signs no matter how objective you try to be, you’re just, you can’t generalize everybody that’s there by a couple of signs. And so the method needs to be systematic that when we go to these events we need to look at all the signs. We need to say, we need to see what all the signs are telling us. And I think that method revealed something very different than a method that just looks at a few signs.
CARLSON. Here was a quote from NAACP Ben Jealous on the Tea Parties. “We take issue with the Tea Party’s continued tolerance for bigotry and bigoted statements. The time has come for them to accept the responsibility that comes with influence and make clear there’s no space for racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in their movement.” I mean, I guess he’s speaking to the 6% of the signs that you found that were questionable, but you still say that’s a tiny percentage in what the overall message was.
EKINS: Yes, I mean overwhelmingly, the message is about limited government. At this particular rally that I, that I did conduct the analysis at.
CARLSON: I know that you want to do further studies, and I find it actually amazing that nobody else has done what you chose to do. So hats off to you. But I’m interested in knowing, you’re at UCLA. What grade did you get?
EKINS: Well, actually I’m a PhD student, so grades work differently there. This is my research for my dissertation, and actually my advisors, you know, they’re very encouraging and seeking academic truth. So they were, they were pleased with kind of the new approach and they’re very encouraging.
CARLSON: Well, that’s very good to hear. Congratulations to you, Emily Ekins, she is a UCLA graduate student. She decided to go to that Tea Party movement and decide see what the signs are really all about. Thanks for sharing your findings with us, Emily.
EKINS: Sure. Thank you.
So, is this merely another nail in the “worst one’s” irrelevance coffin? I say yes, but I am sure there are NPR fans out there that disagree with me.
REASON.COM did a bang-up job in dealing with the issue:
- Video from “Can’t You Read the Signs?“
- See also: “Red America, White Power“
Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the Tea Party movement is “struggling to overcome accusations of racism,” some of which has been perpetuated in its editorial pages. Yesterday’s New York Times, home to the most obsessively anti-Tea Party editorial page in America, was stunned to discover that “at least 32 African-Americans are running for Congress this year as Republicans, the biggest surge since Reconstruction, according to party officials.”
Previously, The Times reported that Tea Partiers are, on average, people with a high levels of education and higher than average incomes. So it would seem that they aren’t, as some editorialists and pundits contend, simply a gang of subliterate militia men or, as actress Janeane Garofalo recently told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, a subsection of the white power movement.
Wandering the recent Tax Day tea party in Washington DC with Reason.tv, we saw some stupid signs — though none that could be considered offensive or racist. We talked to some people that claimed President Obama was both a Czarist and Bolshevik. We spoke to a former star of Saturday Night Live who has previously claimed that president might, in fact, be the anti-Christ. Or a communist. Or both. There were those who fretted that the United States were morphing into a Stalinist state. And there were countless protesters concerned that the Obama administration was spending recklessly, interested in auditing the Federal Reserve, and seething about the General Motors bailout.
So did we find that the Tea Party was motivated by race, by the fact that we now have a black president? Did it seem as if their stated concerns about health care reform and a ballooning national debt simply a smokescreen, designed to concealing a racist agenda? Here is what we found.
Democrats Civil War | Larry O’Connor
Per usual, Democrats have fully telegraphed their plans to try and prevent Donald Trump from being inaugurated as President on the United States on January 20th. This opinion piece in “The Hill” just gave away their entire game plan.
The Unpopular Truth About Electric Vehicles | Mark P. Mills
It is often taken as a given that electric vehicles are friendlier for the environment and that we will all inevitably be driving them in the future. In this short video, Mark P. Mills of the National Center for Energy Analytics questions the government’s push towards EVs, and whether these “givens” are true.
Social Justice Means No Justice | Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell explains how the concept of social justice (or cosmic justice) is wholly incompatible with traditional justice (everyone treated the same) and how the proponents of the philosophy must conflate the two to sell the notion.
Here is a PDF of the original speech in New Zealand, that he mentioned finishing his thoughts in a book form.
The Ethnic Flaw – Part 1 (Affirmative Action Debunked, Race & Racism, Social Justice)
The Ethnic Flaw -Part 2 (Affirmative Action Debunked, Race & Racism, Social Justice)
F.A. Hayek
Called “the most prodigious classical liberal scholar of the 20th century,” Milton Friedman explained his importance:
- “Over the years, I have again and again asked fellow believers in a free society how they managed to escape the contagion of their collectivist intellectual environment. No name has been mentioned more often as the source of enlightenment than Friedrich Hayek’s.” (source)
Fifty years ago, Friedrich Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics. However, the road that got him there was filled with skepticism and unheard warnings. Why were they ignored, and what makes them especially relevant today? Rediscover the ideas of F. A. Hayek and the historical context in which they were developed in this Libertarianism.org documentary.
- 00:00 Introduction | 01:45 Historical Context | 03:06 Hayek’s Early Work | 04:40 Hayek vs. Keynes | 07:44 The Complexity of Society | 09:30 The Knowledge Problem | 11:11 The Road to Serfdom | 13:41 Mont Pelerin Society | 14:31 Hayek & Libertarianism | 16:48 The Nobel Prize | 18:47 Last Years
START EXCERPT
Partial excerpt from my post about the sticker on the back of of my van: “Some of the Economists Pictured On My Van”
F.A. Hayek
(More at Econ Library) If any twentieth-century economist was a Renaissance man, it was Friedrich Hayek. He made fundamental contributions in political theory, psychology, and economics. In a field in which the relevance of ideas often is eclipsed by expansions on an initial theory, many of his contributions are so remarkable that people still read them more than fifty years after they were written. Many graduate economics students today, for example, study his articles from the 1930s and 1940s on economics and knowledge, deriving insights that some of their elders in the economics profession still do not totally understand. It would not be surprising if a substantial minority of economists still read and learn from his articles in the year 2050. In his book Commanding Heights, Daniel Yergin called Hayek the “preeminent” economist of the last half of the twentieth century.
Hayek was the best-known advocate of what is now called Austrian economics. He was, in fact, the only major recent member of the Austrian school who was actually born and raised in Austria. After World War I, Hayek earned his doctorates in law and political science at the University of Vienna. Afterward he, together with other young economists Gottfried Haberler, Fritz Machlup, and Oskar Morgenstern, joined Ludwig von Mises’s private seminar—the Austrian equivalent of John Maynard Keynes’s “Cambridge Circus.” In 1927 Hayek became the director of the newly formed Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. In the early 1930s, at the invitation of Lionel Robbins, he moved to the faculty of the London School of Economics, where he stayed for eighteen years. He became a British citizen in 1938.
Most of Hayek’s work from the 1920s through the 1930s was in the Austrian theory of business cycles, capital theory, and monetary theory. Hayek saw a connection among all three. The major problem for any economy, he argued, is how people’s actions are coordinated. He noticed, as Adam Smith had, that the price system—free markets—did a remarkable job of coordinating people’s actions, even though that coordination was not part of anyone’s intent. The market, said Hayek, was a spontaneous order. By spontaneous Hayek meant unplanned—the market was not designed by anyone but evolved slowly as the result of human actions. But the market does not work perfectly. What causes the market, asked Hayek, to fail to coordinate people’s plans, so that at times large numbers of people are unemployed?
One cause, he said, was increases in the money supply by the central bank. Such increases, he argued in Prices and Production, would drive down interest rates, making credit artificially cheap. Businessmen would then make capital investments that they would not have made had they understood that they were getting a distorted price signal from the credit market. But capital investments are not homogeneous. Long-term investments are more sensitive to interest rates than short-term ones, just as long-term bonds are more interest-sensitive than treasury bills. Therefore, he concluded, artificially low interest rates not only cause investment to be artificially high, but also cause “malinvestment”—too much investment in long-term projects relative to short-term ones, and the boom turns into a bust. Hayek saw the bust as a healthy and necessary readjustment. The way to avoid the busts, he argued, is to avoid the booms that cause them.
Hayek and Keynes were building their models of the world at the same time. They were familiar with each other’s views and battled over their differences. Most economists believe that Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) won the war. Hayek, until his dying day, never believed that, and neither do other members of the Austrian school. Hayek believed that Keynesian policies to combat unemployment would inevitably cause inflation, and that to keep unemployment low, the central bank would have to increase the money supply faster and faster, causing inflation to get higher and higher. Hayek’s thought, which he expressed as early as 1958, is now accepted by mainstream economists (see phillips curve).
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hayek turned to the debate about whether socialist planning could work. He argued that it could not. The reason socialist economists thought central planning could work, argued Hayek, was that they thought planners could take the given economic data and allocate resources accordingly. But Hayek pointed out that the data are not “given.” The data do not exist, and cannot exist, in any one mind or small number of minds. Rather, each individual has knowledge about particular resources and potential opportunities for using these resources that a central planner can never have. The virtue of the free market, argued Hayek, is that it gives the maximum latitude for people to use information that only they have. In short, the market process generates the data. Without markets, data are almost nonexistent.
Mainstream economists and even many socialist economists (see socialism) now accept Hayek’s argument. Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs noted: “If you ask an economist where’s a good place to invest, which industries are going to grow, where the specialization is going to occur, the track record is pretty miserable. Economists don’t collect the on-the-ground information businessmen do. Every time Poland asks, Well, what are we going to be able to produce? I say I don’t know.”
In 1944 Hayek also attacked socialism from a very different angle. From his vantage point in Austria, Hayek had observed Germany very closely in the 1920s and early 1930s. After he moved to Britain, he noticed that many British socialists were advocating some of the same policies for government control of people’s lives that he had seen advocated in Germany in the 1920s. He had also seen that the Nazis really were National Socialists; that is, they were nationalists and socialists. So Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom to warn his fellow British citizens of the dangers of socialism. His basic argument was that government control of our economic lives amounts to totalitarianism. “Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest,” he wrote, “it is the control of the means for all our ends.”
To the surprise of some, John Maynard Keynes praised the book highly. On the book’s cover, Keynes is quoted as saying: “In my opinion it is a grand book…. Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement.”
Although Hayek had intended The Road to Serfdom only for a British audience, it also sold well in the United States. Indeed, Reader’s Digest condensed it. With that book Hayek established himself as the world’s leading classical liberal; today he would be called a libertarian or market liberal. A few years later, along with Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and others, he formed the Mont Pelerin Society so that classical liberals could meet every two years and give each other moral support in what appeared to be a losing cause. …
END EXCERPT
5 of the Most Influential Economists in 5 Minutes
Hayek’s influence for today is key. As an example, FEE notes this regarding his view on Social Justice:
The Impossibility of Social Justice
Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: Is There a Case for Private Property? (1977) (YouTube)
The second part of Hayek’s trilogy Law, Legislation, and Liberty, covers the concept of “social justice”—not without a reason it is called The Mirage of Social Justice. But on this topic, a rare video footage of Hayek is available, namely an episode of William F. Buckley’s discussion show Firing Line.
Here Hayek explains that the concept that a society as a whole can be just or unjust is simply a myth or sometimes even a pretext to expand government competences. Only an individual can be just or unjust in his actions.