This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.
A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong.
And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”
– Hannah Arendt
So I did some digging since I came across this post by RILBC, this author/philosopher is new to me — I think. I may have come across her in the past, mentioned by an author I was reading in the past, but below are some quotes and media.
The Banality of Evil: How Ordinary People Do Terrible Things?
In this deeply thought-provoking video, we explore the disturbing concept of ‘the banality of evil,’ coined by philosopher Hannah Arendt after witnessing the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann. Arendt’s work forces us to confront the truth that even ordinary people can commit monstrous acts when they surrender their critical thinking and moral compass. We’ll examine how systems can corrupt, the dangers of blind obedience, and the importance of cultivating empathy, questioning authority, and maintaining our individual responsibility in a complex world.
Nine months after the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann died at the end of a noose in Israel, a controversial but thoughtful commentary about his trial appeared in The New Yorker. The public reaction stunned its author, the famed political theorist and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). It was February 1963.
Arendt’s eyewitness assessment of Eichmann as “terribly and terrifyingly normal” took the world by surprise. Her phrase, “the banality of evil,” entered the lexicon of social science, probably forever. It was taken for granted that Eichmann, despite his soft-spoken and avuncular demeanor, must be a monster of epic proportions to play such an important role in one of the greatest crimes of the 20th Century.
“I was only following orders,” he claimed in the colorless, matter-of-fact fashion of a typical bureaucrat. The world thought his performance a fiendishly deceptive show, but Hannah Arendt concluded that Eichmann was indeed a rather “ordinary” and “unthinking” functionary.
How callous! A betrayal of her own Jewish people! How could any thoughtful person dismiss Eichmann so cavalierly?! Arendt’s critics blasted her with such charges mercilessly, but they had missed the point. She did not condone or excuse Eichmann’s complicity in the Holocaust. She witnessed the horrors of national socialism first-hand herself, having escaped Germany in 1933 after a short stint in a Gestapo jail for “anti-state propaganda.” She did not claim that Eichmann was innocent, only that the crimes for which he was guilty did not require a “monster” to commit them.
How often have you noticed people behaving in anti-social ways because of a hope to blend in, a desire to avoid isolation as a recalcitrant, nonconforming individual? Did you ever see someone doing harm because “everybody else was doing it”? The fact that we all have observed such things, and that any one of the culprits might easily, under the right circumstances, have become an Adolf Eichmann, is a chilling realization.
As Arendt explained, “Going along with the rest and wanting to say ‘we’ were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible.”
Eichmann was a “shallow” and “clueless” joiner, someone whose thoughts never ventured any deeper than how to become a cog in the great, historic Nazi machine. In a sense, he was a tool of Evil more than evil himself.
Commenting on Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis, philosopher Thomas White writes, “Eichmann reminds us of the protagonist in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942), who randomly and casually kills a man, but then afterwards feels no remorse. There was no particular intention or obvious evil motive: the deed just ‘happened.’”
Perhaps Hannah Arendt underestimated Eichmann. He did, after all, attempt to conceal evidence and cover his tracks long before the Israelis nabbed him in Argentina in 1960—facts which suggest he did indeed comprehend the gravity of his offenses. It is undeniable, however, that “ordinary” people are capable of horrific crimes when possessed with power or a desire to obtain it, especially if it helps them “fit in” with the gang that already wields it.
The big lesson of her thesis, I think, is this: If Evil comes calling, do not expect it to be stupid enough to advertise itself as such. It’s far more likely that it will look like your favorite uncle or your sweet grandmother. It just might cloak itself in grandiloquent platitudes like “equality,” “social justice,” and the “common good.” It could even be a prominent member of Parliament or Congress.
Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, I suggested in a recent essay, were peas in the same pod as Eichmann—ordinary people who committed extraordinarily heinous acts.
Hannah Arendt is recognized as one of the leading political thinkers of the Twentieth Century. She was very prolific, and her books are good sellers still, nearly half a century after her death. She remains eminently quotable as well, authoring such pithy lines as “Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians,” “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution,” and “The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.”
Some of Arendt’s friends on the Left swallowed the myth that Hitler and Stalin occupied opposite ends of the political spectrum. She knew better. Both were evil collectivists and enemies of the individual(see list of suggested readings below). “Hitler never intended to defend the West against Bolshevism,” she wrote in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, “but always remained ready to join ‘the Reds’ for the destruction of the West, even in the middle of the struggle against Soviet Russia.”
With the recent American political hoopla, I figured this clip of political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, would be a fun short listen for the thinker. This is the beginning part of a longer file found here on Philosophy Overdose’s YouTube:
Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: “Things must change—no matter how, Anything is better than what we have.” Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass sentiment, and by organizing it articulate it, and by articulating it make the people somehow love it. They were told before, thou shalt not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very difficult to kill, they do it because it’s now part of the code of behavior. They learn whom to kill and how to kill and how to do it together. This is the much talked about Gleichschaltung—the coordination process. You are coordinated not with the powers that be, but with your neighbor—coordinated with the majority. But instead of communicating with the other you are now glued to him. And you feel of course marvelous. Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another.
Lies
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
Contingency and History
The main characteristic of any event is that it has not been foreseen. We don’t know the future but everybody acts into the future. Nobody knows what he is doing because the future is being done, action is being done by a “we” and not an “I.” Only if I were the only one acting could I foretell the consequences of what I’m doing. What actually happens is entirely contingent, and contingency is indeed one of the biggest factors in all history.
Nobody knows what is going to happen because so much depends on an enormous number of variables, on simple hazard. On the other hand if you look at history retrospectively, then, even though it was contingent, you can tell a story that makes sense…. Jewish history, for example, in fact had its ups and downs, its, enmities and its friendships, as every history of all people has. The notion that there is one unilinear history is of course false. But if you look at it after the experience of Auschwitz it looks as though all of history—or at least history since the Middle Ages—had no other alm than Auschwitz…. This, is the real problem of every philosophy of history how is it possible that in retrospect it always looks as though it couldn’t have happened otherwise?
Facts and Theories
A good example of the kind of scientific mentality that overwhelms all other insights is the “domino theory.” The fact is that very few of the sophisticated intellectuals who wrote the Pentagon Papers believed in this theory. Yet everything they did was based on this assumption—not because they were liars, or because they wanted to please their superiors, but because it gave them a framework within which they could work. They took this framework even though they knew—and though every intelligence report and every factual analysis proved to them every morning—that these assumptions were simply factually wrong. They took it because they didn’t have any other framework. People find such theories in order to get rid of contingency and unexpectedness. Good old Hegel once said that all philosophical contemplation serves only to eliminate the accidental. A fact has to be witnessed by eyewitnesses who are not the best of witnesses; no fact is beyond doubt. But that two and two are four is somehow beyond doubt. And the theories produced in the Pentagon were all much more plausible than the facts of what actually happened.
Jews
The “giftedness”—so to speak—of a certain part at least of the Jewish people is a historical problem, a problem of the first order for the historians. I can risk a speculative explanation: we are the only people, the only European people, who have survived from antiquity pretty much intact. That means we have kept our identity, and it means we are the only people who have never known analphabetism. We were always literate because you cannot be a Jew without being literate. The women were less literate than the men but even they were much more literate than their counterparts elsewhere. Not only the elite knew how to read but every Jew had to read—the whole people, in all its classes and on all levels of giftedness and intelligence.
Evil
When I wrote my Eichmann in Jerusalem one of my main intentions was to destroy the legend of the greatness of evil, of the demonic force, to take away from people the admiration they have for the great evildoers like Richard III.
I found in Brecht the following remark:
The great political criminals must be exposed and exposed especially to laughter. They are not great political criminals, but people who permitted great political crimes, which is something entirely different. The failure of his enterprises does not indicate that Hitler was an idiot.
Now, that Hitler was an idiot was of course a prejudice of the whole opposition to Hitler prior to his seizure of power and therefore a great many books tried then to justify him and to make him a great man. So, Brecht says, “The fact that he failed did not indicate that Hitler was an idiot and the extent of his enterprises does not make him a great man.” It is neither the one nor the other: this whole category of greatness has no application.
“If the ruling classes,” he goes on, “permit a small crook to become a great crook, he is not entitled to a privileged position in our view of history. That is, the fact that he becomes a great crook and that what he does has great consequences does not add to his stature.” And generally speaking he then says in these very abrupt remarks: “One may say that tragedy deals with the sufferings of mankind in a less serious way than comedy.” This of course is a shocking statement; I think that at the same time it is entirely true. What is really necessary is, if you want to keep your integrity under these circumstances, then you can do it only if you remember your old way of looking at such things and say: “No matter what he does and if he killed ten million people, he is still a clown.”
Progress
The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good. The good is no longer even being measured.
Hannah Arendt (1964) – What Remains? (Full Interview with Günter Gaus)
An interview with Hannah Arendt about her life and work in 1964 with Günter Gaus. This is a version of an upload from the previous channel. The translation is my own, but parts also come from the published version by Joan Stambaugh. Note, this is actually the complete interview. For whatever reason, the other one with English captions on YouTube is missing almost 15 minutes, including what I take to be some of the most interesting parts, like the discussion of truth and the parts from her book the Human Condition. That’s the main reason I originally decided to put it up to begin with…plus I think my own translation is somewhat better and more accurate. The audio and video have also been improved.
The reason for bringing two older posts (2022 and 2021) together and combining them with this Forbesarticle about Trump’s promise is simple… the Republican base wants less government interference – that is me, the GOP base. The Democrat base wants increased government interference in our daily lives.
Why this “adding of the FORBES article” as a preface of these other posts?
I was asked on the way out of a gathering by a family friend over this past weekend “why I [she] should vote for Trump?” I believe the question COULD HAVE BEEN asked for varying reasons, and as I write a couple of them, keep in mind the opposite could be true:
She is a diehard Democrat who is honestly is trying to understand the opposing view of almost half of the voting public. (Alternatively, she thinks that there is no foundation or good reason to vote for Trump and is trying to show the superiority of being “anti-racist” [in modern parlance] or progressive to the point that her vision of caring for the downtrodden is a way to “show up” [so-to-speak] the other side by being on the side of angels.);
She is a life-long Democrat who sees the attacks on things such as free-speech and gender and is dismayed on how quickly the political culture of her party has changed and is struggling with where her vote should land. (Alternatively, she supports these agendas, whether in good faith or not [based on false agendas and political propaganda] and is dismayed by the Republican Party — which is defined with these ideas in mind:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he [Trump] has lifted them up.”
Etc, etc.
I think, as human beings – me included – are as complicated as the day is long and we battle many influences and experiences and habits… it would be in some measure a combination of all of the above and much more. I carry many prejudices and experiences that I try to temper with faith, accountability, and checking myself through reading and discussion [putting my viewpoint out in the public to be peer reviewed – sorta].
The largest difference I can point out between her political and economic viewpoint vs. my demographic of religiously conservatarianism is that she thinks mankind and men/women in general are good people… and I believe they are corrupted and fallen in the real sense of original sin.
These two opposite views come out in different senses, say, economics by way of example. Keynsian Economics, the guiding principle founder of much of the Democrat Party’s direction of their economic planning:
John Maynard Keynes hailed the Soviet Union in a 1936 radio interview as,
“engaged in a vast administrative task of making a completely new set of social and economic institutions work smoothly and successfully.”
And in a preface he wrote to the 1936 German edition of his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Keynes stated that his economic theory,
“is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state” than to “conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.” (this quote and the above is from James Bovard’s book Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen, pp. 14,20,21)
Another Keynes quote lets the individual in on the result of his theories, which most nations use (i.e., central banking; e.g., the Federal Reserve Bank):
“By a continuous process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some . . .. The process engages all of the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner that not one man in a million can diagnose.” (Partially quoted from Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History, by Noble Prize holder in economics, Milton Friedman.)
This last quote is what happens with Keynesian economics! An unseen taxation of citizens, on top of normal taxation.
Versus
According to Adam Smith, it is when the businessman “intends only his own gain” that he contributes— via the process of competition— to promote the social good “more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.” Smith added: “I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.”
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), p. 423; from, Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (New York, NY: basic Books, 2007), 57.
I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolutionary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations: generations who, as one terrible moment now reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will see the massacres, the faked trials, the deportations, to be all ineffaceably real, an essential part, his part, in the drama that has just ended: while the future Utopia had never been anything but a fantasy.
C.S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night, p. 131.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
S. Lewis, God in the Dock, p. 292.
My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause [the French Revolution], but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter of January 3, 1793, The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 465; from, Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (New York, NY: basic Books, 2007), 29.
Simply put, one side thinks mankind can qualitatively guide by elitism our economy and lives, whereas the other side does not. “The larger the government the smaller the individual.”
So, with this unnecessarily long introduction, let us get into the FORBES article:
Bookending four years of its infamous one-in, two-out requirement for issuing significant new regulations, the Trump administration quietly just released its status roundup called “Regulatory Reform Results for Fiscal Year 2020.”
According to the administration, agencies in the 2020 fiscal year issued 145 deregulatory actions and 45 significant regulatory actions, for an out-to-in ratio of 3.2 to one.
Of those deregulatory actions, 58 were deemed “significant” by agencies and the administration. Comparing significant-in to significant-out still gives a ratio of 1.3 to one.
[….]
The overall ratio for the entire four-year stretch is 2.5 to one. And since rules considered non-significant may be used to offset significant rules added per E.O. 13,771, the ratios are actually better, as each year’s respective roundup at the White House shows.
We are not engaging here the debates over whether the cuts in regulations are genuinely highly significant or overblown. Employing different methodologies, the Council of Economic Advisers for its part estimated far more savings from a separate set of Trump-era reforms than the OMB’s year-end reports have claimed.
But nor does this survey address the warning signs of Trump’s own regulatory actions taken, sometimes of the sort that do not appear in White House Office of Management and Budget compilations. Examples include antitrust regulation, regulation of online content (or the pursuit of it), federal guidance on artificial intelligence, trade restrictions and more. These are capable of swamping regulatory savings.
Note also that E.O. 13771 did not apply to non-significant rules added (although in the year-end updates and in the new Unified Agenda editions, these “Regulatory” actions were also identified). Nor did the Trump order apply to rules mandated by Congress as opposed to ones driven by agency discretion; nor to rules from the so-called independent agencies like the Federal Communications Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
In any event, the leading edge of the one-in, two-out has been the claimed capping of spending rather than the ratio of cuts to additions. Criticisms notwithstanding, other presidents have not implemented a program as ambitious as Trump’s.
We know the generation of new regulations dropped significantly under Trump. But in terms of rollbacks, it would naturally become harder for an administration acting alone (with no help from Congress) to pick the “significant deregulatory action” fruit over time capable of generating rapid rule and cost rollbacks. Major rollbacks like those involving Clean Power Plan and Waters of the United States rules entail years of public consultation, writing, and legal challenges.
So, for the record and for posterity, Table 1 below presents the inventory of the significant regulatory actions eliminated by the Trump administration per E.O. 13,771, broken down by agency as derived from the administration’s fiscal year 2020 chart. Table 2 presents the significant regulations added….
So, was it as “successful” as Trump said or hoped it to be.
No.
Sounds like a politician or contractor to me – no surprise there.
Was it successful in shrinking control over the American business man/woman?
Yes….
which leads into why we should all want to shrink the role of government in our every-day lives:
TWO OLDER POSTS
Here are the two articles mentioned in the below audio by Armstrong and Getty (Hour 1 Thursday, and Hour 3 – same day):
America’s Welfare State Is on Borrowed Time — Biden has fully embraced the mad goal of giving 98% of the population lavish benefits at no cost. (WALL STREET JOURNAL | THE RED LINE [no pay wall])
Democrats Are Killing the American Dream — Joe Biden’s American Families Plan replaces individual striving with middle class entitlements. (WALL STREET JOURNAL | BLACK REPUBLICAN)
Since the start of the Covid crisis, the American economy has been turned on its head. Times are good for the big guys — Big Business and Big Government. But what about for the small business owner, the personification of the American dream? Carol Roth discusses Crony Corporatism/Capitalism and is the author of, “The War on Small Business: How the Government Used the Pandemic to Crush the Backbone of America“
Even though Bill Maher is anything but a conservative, he has been pushed by the Left to the center. I will again post the TWIX by Elon — CLICK TO ENLARGE:
Here is a recent monologue by Bill discussing the sexualization of our children… something I [and others] have been noting for many years.
LANGAUGE WARNING:
Bill Maher – It turns out for pedophiles in Hollywood
On the Patrick Ben-David Podcast, Chris Cuomo fails to grasp Candice Owens main point, which was that if you compare Joe Biden to any world leader [the most recent example she used was of Tucker Carlson’s interview with dictator Vladimir Putin] in a side-by-side speaking comparison, you will notice a stark difference. Cuomo merely rejects that argument by making a wholly unrelated assumption about what Candice was saying. And taking his totally unrelated interpretation and putting it forward as if it were a cogent response to Candice. But even that misrepresented response by Cuomo – if – put side-by-side with Biden, would make Biden look like a preschooler.
The original Patrick Ben-David Podcast can be found here
This is an excellent time to update a long series on my site[s], which is the psychological benefits of the Judeo-Christian faith and the political/economic outlook of conservatism. I will update the topic as well as reach back into older posts.
A new study published in Nature on Jan. 15 by Harvard researchers and scientists from the University of Chicago, Oxford University, and Yale University claims that slower-moving climate change factors have a negative impact on mental health.
According to The Harvard Crimson, previous research focused on short-term disasters, but the researchers claim this is the “first comprehensive look at mental health and these slower moving climate change factors.”
During the study, researchers used participant testimonials to determine “how people are struggling with worries about their future, and the impact of specific ecosystems on communities that rely very intimately on those ecosystems,” Christy A. Denckla, professor at T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a co-author on the paper said.
The paper notes that worrying, grief, and frustration are emotions that are elicited when asked by researchers about chronic climate change.
[….]
In recent years organizations have been stoking the fear of the climate crisis. At the 2023, World Economic Forum summit in Davos Swiss scientist Johan Rockström claimed, “We are now facing something deeper, mass extinction.”
A Canadian study in 2020 revealed that young people believe climate change to be the most serious issue facing their country.
Here are my raw/initial thoughts on the above:
Yes, this is true… but it is true not because climate changes – but because the ideology behind it is manic. They push a fear mongering worse than the most “end-times Baptist preacher” could ever dream of. For example, brainwashing youth from an early age with this crap; pushing it through higher education creates a people frozen in fear and worried about an “Apocalypse” that fills a religious void – never to be satisfied.
The reason is simple, when you abuse children and reinforce it all the way through higher education and the legacy/corporate media emboldens this view based on lies, half-truths, and misinformation — there are consequences. One of them being emotional stability.
Here is more regarding Democrats and climate before I add some other aspects contributing to the decline in health of the Left. This comes from my post where I liken the “doomsday propaganda” pushed on our kids to an end-times street preacher — always going on (27/7) about the end of the world: “The Left vs. Fiery Baptist Preacher“
“‘The trouble with almost all environmental problems,’ says Paul R. Ehrlich, the population biologist, ‘is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you’re dead. … We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.’” —The New York Times, 1969.
“No real action has been taken to save the environment, [Ehrlich] maintains. And it does need saving. Ehrlich predicts that the oceans will be as dead as Lake Erie in less than a decade.” —Redlands Daily Facts, 1970.
“Scientist Predicts a New Ice Age by 21st Century: Air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century. … If the current rate of increase in electric power generation continues, the demands for cooling water will boil dry the entire flow of the rivers and streams of continental United States. … By the next century ‘the consumption of oxygen in combustion processes, world-wide, will surpass all of the processes which return oxygen to the atmosphere.’” —The Boston Globe, 1970.
“The world could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts. … ‘In the next 50 years,’ the fine dust man constantly puts into the atmosphere by fossil fuel-burning could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees. If sustained ‘over several years’—‘five to 10,’ he estimated—‘such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!’” —Washington Post, Times Herald, 1971.
“Dear Mr. President: … We feel obliged to inform you on the results of the scientific conference held here recently. … The main conclusion of the meeting was that a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilized mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon. The cooling has natural cause and falls within the rank of processes which produced the last ice age. … The present rate of the cooling seems fast enough to bring glacial temperatures in about a century.” —Brown University, Department of Geological Sciences, 1972.
“However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing.” – Time Magazine, 1974.
“Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age. Telltale signs are everywhere—from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7 [degrees] F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.” —Time magazine, 1974.
“A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” —Associated Press, 1989.
“Unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return.” —former Vice President Al Gore, 2006.
“The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” —Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), 2019.
What are people who think this failed history has actually been true to think? Anger, fear, wasting time on unimportant things, not starting families [which are a great source of fulfillment and happiness], and the like.
Here are some examples from the corporate media and left leaning orgs:
This is literally child abuse.
TREES AS ONE COUNTER MEASURE
If you watched the above, you may have noticed a fear of wildfires. What they don’t say is that many are started due to man’s negligence. Or that environmental groups curtail better forest management. That is just one fear I explode. Temperature fears are mitigated by the story of trees as well, via a HOTAIR flashback:
According to a study of ancient rainforests, trees may be hardier than previously thought. Carlos Jaramillo, a scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), examined pollen from ancient plants trapped in rocks in Colombia and Venezuela. “There are many climactic models today suggesting that … if the temperature increases in the tropics by a couple of degrees, most of the forest is going to be extinct,” he said. “What we found was the opposite to what we were expecting: we didn’t find any extinction event [in plants] associated with the increase in temperature, we didn’t find that the precipitation decreased.”
In a study published today in Science, Jaramillo and his team studied pollen grains and other biological indicators of plant life embedded in rocks formed around 56m years ago, during an abrupt period of warming called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. CO2 levels had doubled in 10,000 years and the world was warmer by 3C-5C for 200,000 years.
Contrary to expectations, he found that forests bloomed with diversity. New species of plants, including those from the passionflower and chocolate families, evolved quicker as others became extinct. The study also shows moisture levels did not decrease significantly during the warm period. “It was totally unexpected,” Jaramillo said of the findings.
But for the tree lovers, the following will be new information to them surely… and note how the 1990 IPCC graph at the top of this post matches the Chinese one below. This much warmer weather/climate (by three[+] degrees) allowed for higher tree lines in the past:
…3-Degrees Warmer
Tree rings can be counted to date the time of an event, and their summertime width is greater under good growing conditions (warmth, rainfall) than during poor growing seasons (cold, dry). They are limited by the distance back in time researchers can find live trees, dead trees, or buried wood from an earlier time which can be accurately dated to its growth period.
In mountainous northwestern Pakistan, more than 200,000 tree-ring measurements were assembled from 384 long-lived trees that grew on more than twenty individual sites. The 1,300-year temperature proxy shows the warmest decades occurred between 800 and 1000, and the coldest periods between 1500 and 1700.128
Mountain tree line elevations are another sensitive and highly accurate proxy for temperature change. A number of studies of European tree lines testify to the fact that tree lines, farming, and villages moved upslope during the Medieval Warming and back with the Little Ice Age.
A recent study of tree line dynamics in Western Siberia showed that advances in tree lines during the warmer weather of the 20th century were “part of a long-term reforestation of tundra environments.” Two Swiss scientists, Jan Esper and Fritz-Hans Schweingruber, note that “stumps and logs of Larix sibirica can be preserved for hundreds of years” and that “above the tree line in the Polar Urals such relict material from large, upright trees were sampled and dated, confirming the existence, around A.D. 1000, of a forest tree line 30 meters above the late 20th century limit.” They also note, “this previous forest limit receded around 1350, perhaps caused by a general cooling trend.” Thus, the Siberian tree lines testify to the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age well outside of Europe.129
Lisa J. Graumlich of Montana State University combined both tree rings and tree lines to assess past climate changes in California’s Sierra Nevada. The trees in the mountains’ upper tree lines are preserved in place, living and dead, for up to 3,000 years. Graumlich says:
A relatively dense forest grew above the current tree line from the beginning of our records to around 100 B.C., and again from A.D. 400 to 1000, when temperatures were warm. Abundance of trees and elevation of tree line declined very rapidly from A.D. 1000 to 1400, the period of severe, multi-decadal droughts. Tree lines declined more slowly from 1500 to 1900 under the cool temperatures of the Little Ice Age, reaching current elevations around 1900.130
Graumlich’s tree evidence confirms both of the last two 1,500-year cycles: the Roman Warming/Dark Ages climate cycle and the Medieval Warming/Little Ice Age. Severe drought, which has been documented in California during the latter part of the Medieval Warming, obscured the timing of the shift from the Medieval Warming to the Little Ice Age. However, both events were clearly evident.
Cave stalagmite cores confirm the global nature of the 1,500-year cycle found in ice cores, seabed sediments, and trees. Their carbon and oxygen isotopes and their trace element content vary with temperature. Moreover, the stalagmites go back further in time than the tree evidence. One German stalagmite goes back more than 17,000 years. Cave stalagmites have been found in Ireland, Germany, Oman, and South Africa whose layers all show the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warming, the Dark Ages, and the Roman Warming.131 A number of the stalagmites also show the unnamed cold period that preceded the Roman Warming.
In southern Ontario, pollen shows that the warmth-loving beech trees of the Medieval Warming gradually gave way to cold tolerant oaks as the Little Ice Age came on—and then the forest became dominated by pine trees. The oak trees have been making a comeback in Ontario since 1850 and the beech trees can be expected to resurge as the Modern Warming continues in the centuries ahead.132
Remains of prehistoric villages in Argentina were analyzed by Marcela A. Cioccale of the National University of Cordoba to determine where Argentina’s native peoples lived over the past 1,400 years. Using carbon-14 dating, she found that the inhabitants clustered in the lower valleys during the Dark Ages period, and then moved higher up the slopes as the Medieval Warming brought “a marked increase of environmental suitability, under a relatively homogeneous climate.”133 Habitation moved up as high as 4,300 meters in the Central Peruvian Andes around 1000 as the Medieval Warming not only raised temperatures but created more stable conditions for farming. After 1320, people migrated back down the slopes as the colder, less stable climate of the Little Ice Age set in.
Yang Bao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences reconstructed China’s temperature history for the last 2,000 years from ice cores, lake sediments, peat bogs, tree rings, and the historic documents that date back farther in China than in any other country. He found China had its highest temperature during the second and third centuries, toward the end of the Roman Warming. China’s climate was also warm from 800 to 1400, cold from 1400 to 1920, and then began to warm again after 1920.134(See Figure 4.1.)
Figure 4.1: 2,000 Years of Chinese Temperature History
Source [for above figure]: Y. T. Hong et al., “Response of Climate to Solar Forcing Recorded in a 6,000-Year Time-Series of Chinese Peat Cellulose,” The Holocene 10 (2000): 1-7.
[128] J. Esper et al., “1,300 Years of Climate History for Western Central Asia Inferred from Tree Rings,” The Holocene 12 (2002): 267-77.
[129] J. Esper and F. H. Schweingruber, “Large-Scale Tree Line Changes Recorded in Siberia,” Geophysical Research Letters 31 (2004): 10.1029/2003GLO019178.
[130]L. J. Graumlich, “Global Change in Wilderness Areas: Disentangling Natural and Anthropogenic Changes,” U. S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service Proceedings RMRS-P-15-Vol. 3, 2000
[131] F. McDermott et al., “Centennial-Scale Holocene Climate Variability Revealed by a High-Resolution Speleothem 018 Record from SW Ireland,” Science 294 (2001): 1328-331; S. Niggemann et al., “A Paleoclimate Record of the Last 17,600 Years in Stalagmites from the B7 Cave, Sauerland, Germany,” Quaternary Science Reviews 22 (2003): 555-67; U. Neff et. al., “Strong Coherence between Solar Variability and the Monsoon in Oman between 9 and 6 kyr ago,” Nature 411 (2001): 290-93; and Tyson et al., “The Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming in South Africa,” South African Journal of Science 96, no. 3 (2000).
[132] I. D. Campbell and J. H. McAndrews, “Forest Disequilibrium Caused by Rapid Little Ice Age Cooling,” Nature 366 (1993): 336-38
[133] M. A. Cioccale, “Climatic fluctuations in the Central Region of Argentina in the last 1000 years,” Quaternary International 62, (1999): 35-47.
[134] Yang Bao et al., “General Characteristics of Temperature Variation in China during the Last Two Millennia,” Geophysical Research Letters 10 (2002): 1029/2001GLO014485.
S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years (Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 63-66.
SOME MORE TREE EVIDENCES:
Greta’s Thunberg’s Northern Sweden Was 3°C Warmer 9300 Years Ago…Trees once grew where tundra is today:
9300-year old vegetation remnants found under receding glaciers in Northern Sweden show that the trees once grew where tundra exists today, meaning it was warmer (NO TRICK ZONE)
Over the past 120 years the climate has warmed, and so there’s been glacier and ice patch shrinkage. This has unveiled earlier vegetation and life.
The concerned vegetational remnants that were found represent tree exclaves in ice-empty glacier cirques, the study says.
Found were megafossils of pinus sylvestris with signs of being gnawed by beaver (Castor fiber L.) from different sites in northern Sweden which today are tundra.
They age 9500-9300 cal. yr BP and are located 400-700 m above present-day tree lines.
[….]
These exposed megafossil remnants represent former tree stands that were later on extirpated and entombed by snow and ice for many millennia. At -0.6°C/100 m lapse rate, it means it was then over 3°C warmer than now in this region at a time when atmospheric CO2 concentrations were well below 300 ppm.
Liberal Women Tend To Be More MENTALLY ILL & Unhappy According To THE SCIENCE, Vote Democrat. Several Studies show higher rates of mental illness reported and unhappiness among liberals but aprticularly liberal women.
Tucker Carlson was asked several months ago about being called a bigot and he said he has no problem with black people, he has an issue with liberal women. Millennial women tend to vote 70 percent Democrat which over represents to amount who report having a mental illness.
Perhaps the issue is that liberals and democrats don’t read the news and refuse to challenge their world view hence they fall for every possible hoax; Jussie smollett, mike brown, covington catholic, kyle rittenhouse, ukrainegate and russiagate, etc etc
(Dennis Prager Show – Tue, Oct 11, 2022) A psychiatrist writes in the NY Times that she is seeing very confused teenagers. She fails to draw the obvious conclusion: it’s the left that has convinced them that their past is rotten (America is founded on racism), their present is hopeless (gender confusion) and their future is non-existent (the earth is burning up).
B) FEAR OF GOD!
Deborah Keleman studies cognitive development in children and Josh Rottman is a PhD student working with her. In a chapter in “Science and the World’s Religions.” they write:
…religion primarily stems from within the person rather than from external, socially organized sources …. evolved components of the human mind tend to lead people towards religiosity early in life.
In other words, it is natural to believe in God, it is unnatural to suppress that innate evidence. And this is done by societal pressure, the opposite of the narrative we are told by atheists. (See my post, “Believing In God Is Natural ~ Atheism is Not“)
Another aspect that shows the increased natural selective nature of belief and longevity (the opportunity to leave more offspring) is the POSITIVE INFLUENCE OF RELIGION:
Religious Belief Reduces Crime Summary of the First Panel Discussion Panelists for this important discussion included social scientists Dr. John DiIulio, professor of politics and urban affairs at Princeton University; David Larson, M.D., President of the National Institute for Healthcare Research; Dr. Byron Johnson, Director of the Center for Crime and Justice Policy at Vanderbilt University; and Gary Walker, President of Public/Private Ventures. The panel focused on new research, confirming the positive effects that religiosity has on turning around the lives of youth at risk.
Dr. Larson laid the foundation for the discussion by summarizing the findings of 400 studies on juvenile delinquency, conducted during the past two decades. He believes that although more research is needed, we can say without a doubt that religion makes a positive contribution.
His conclusion: “The better we study religion, the more we find it makes a difference.” Previewing his own impressive research, Dr. Johnson agreed. He has concluded that church attendance reduces delinquency among boys even when controlling for a number of other factors including age, family structure, family size, and welfare status. His findings held equally valid for young men of all races and ethnicities.
Gary Walker has spent 25 years designing, developing and evaluating many of the nation’s largest public and philanthropic initiatives for at-risk youth. His experience tells him that faith-based programs are vitally important for two reasons. First, government programs seldom have any lasting positive effect. While the government might be able to design [secular/non-God] programs that occupy time, these programs, in the long-term, rarely succeed in bringing about the behavioral changes needed to turn kids away from crime. Second, faith-based programs are rooted in building strong adult-youth relationships; and less concerned with training, schooling, and providing services, which don’t have the same direct impact on individual behavior. Successful mentoring, Walker added, requires a real commitment from the adults involved – and a willingness to be blunt. The message of effective mentors is simple. “You need to change your life, I’m here to help you do it, or you need to be put away, away from the community.” Government, and even secular philanthropic programs, can’t impart this kind of straight talk.
Sixth through twelfth graders who attend religious services once a month or more are half as likely to engage in at-risk behaviors such as substance abuse, sexual excess, truancy, vandalism, drunk driving and other trouble with police. Search Institute, “The Faith Factor,” Source, Vol. 3, Feb. 1992, p.1.
Churchgoers are more likely to aid their neighbors in need than are non-attendees. George Barna, What Americans Believe, Regal Books, 1991, p. 226.
Three out of four Americans say that religious practice has strengthened family relationships. George Gallup, Jr. “Religion in America: Will the Vitality of Churches Be the Surprise of the Next Century,” The Public Perspective, The Roper Center, Oct./Nov. 1995.
Church attendance lessens the probabilities of homicide and incarceration. Nadia M. Parson and James K. Mikawa: “Incarceration of African-American Men Raised in Black Christian Churches.” The Journal of Psychology, Vol. 125, 1990, pp.163-173.
Religious practice lowers the rate of suicide. Joubert, Charles E., “Religious Nonaffiliation in Relation to Suicide, Murder, Rape and Illegitimacy,” Psychological Reports 75:1 part 1 (1994): 10 Jon W. Hoelter: “Religiosity, Fear of Death and Suicide Acceptibility.” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, Vol. 9, 1979, pp.163-172.
The presence of active churches, synagogues… reduces violent crime in neighborhoods. John J. Dilulio, Jr., “Building Spiritual Capital: How Religious Congregations Cut Crime and Enhance Community Well-Being,” RIAL Update, Spring 1996.
People with religious faith are less likely to be school drop-outs, single parents, divorced, drug or alcohol abusers. Ronald J. Sider and Heidi Roland, “Correcting the Welfare Tragedy,” The Center for Public Justice, 1994.
Church involvement is the single most important factor in enabling inner-city black males to escape the destructive cycle of the ghetto. Richard B. Freeman and Harry J. Holzer, eds., The Black Youth Employment Crisis, University of Chicago Press, 1986, p.354.
Attending services at a church or other house of worship once a month or more makes a person more than twice as likely to stay married than a person who attends once a year or less. David B. Larson and Susan S. Larson, “Is Divorce Hazardous to Your Health?” Physician, June 1990. Improving Personal Well-Being
Regular church attendance lessens the possibility of cardiovascular diseases, cirrhosis of the liver, emphysema and arteriosclerosis. George W. Comstock amd Kay B. Patridge:* “Church attendance and health.”* Journal of Chronic Disease, Vol. 25, 1972, pp. 665-672.
Regular church attendance significantly reduces the probablility of high blood pressure.* David B. Larson, H. G. Koenig, B. H. Kaplan, R. S. Greenberg, E. Logue and H. A. Tyroler:* ” The Impact of religion on men’s blood pressure.”* Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 28, 1989, pp.265-278.* W.T. Maramot:* “Diet, Hypertension and Stroke.” in* M. R. Turner (ed.) Nutrition and Health, Alan R. Liss, New York, 1982, p. 243.
People who attend services at least once a week are much less likely to have high blood levels of interlukin-6, an immune system protein associated with many age-related diseases.* Harold Koenig and Harvey Cohen, The International Journal of Psychiatry and Medicine, October 1997.
Regular practice of religion lessens depression and enhances self esteem. *Peter L. Bensen and Barnard P. Spilka:* “God-Image as a function of self-esteem and locus of control” in H. N. Maloney (ed.) Current Perspectives in the Psychology of Religion, Eedermans, Grand Rapids, 1977, pp. 209-224.* Carl Jung: “Psychotherapies on the Clergy” in Collected Works Vol. 2, 1969, pp.327-347.
Church attendance is a primary factor in preventing substance abuse and repairing damage caused by substance abuse.* Edward M. Adalf and Reginald G. Smart:* “Drug Use and Religious Affiliation, Feelings and Behavior.” * British Journal of Addiction, Vol. 80, 1985, pp.163-171.* Jerald G. Bachman, Lloyd D. Johnson, and Patrick M. O’Malley:* “Explaining* the Recent Decline in Cocaine Use Among Young Adults:* Further Evidence That Perceived Risks and Disapproval Lead to Reduced Drug Use.”* Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Vol. 31,* 1990, pp. 173-184.* Deborah Hasin, Jean Endicott, * and Collins Lewis:* “Alcohol and Drug Abuse in Patients With Affective Syndromes.”* Comprehensive Psychiatry, Vol. 26, 1985, pp. 283-295. * The findings of this NIMH-supported study were replicated in the Bachmen et. al. study above.
…A survey of 1,600 Canadians asked them what were their beliefs about God and what moral values they considered to be “very important.” The results of the survey are shown below:
Although the differences between theists and atheists in the importance of values such as honesty, politeness, and friendliness are generally small, moral values emphasized by religious beliefs, such as Christianity, including patience, forgiveness, and generosity exhibit major differences in attitudes (30%+ differences between theists and atheists). (Source)
The strength of the family unit is intertwined with the practice of religion. Churchgoersare more likely to be married, less likely to be divorced or single, and more likely to manifest high levels of satisfaction in marriage.
Church attendance is the most important predictor of marital stability and happiness.
The regular practice of religion helps poor persons move out of poverty. Regular church attendance, for example, is particularly instrumental in helping young people to escape the poverty of inner-city life.
Religious belief and practice contribute substantially to the formation of personal moral criteria and sound moral judgment.
Regular religious practice generally inoculates individuals against a host of social problems, including suicide, drug abuse, out-of-wedlock births, crime, and divorce.
The regular practice of religion also encourages such beneficial effects on mental health as less depression (a modern epidemic), more self-esteem, and greater family and marital happiness.
In repairing damage caused by alcoholism, drug addiction, and marital breakdown, religious belief and practice are a major source of strength and recovery.
Regular practice of religion is good for personal physical health: It increases longevity, improves one’s chances of recovery from illness, and lessens the incidence of many killer diseases.
So we can see that the above are important factors in a healthy, stable, family which would have the highest percentage or chance in a family situation to create “family values.” What about divorce rates and the 2009 data. This is dealt with well at CHRISTIAN ACTION LEAGUE, and shows how Barna and the Government can miss-categorize whole swaths of people and their affiliations:
…Wright did his own research using the General Social Survey; a huge study conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and found that folks who identify as Christians but rarely attend church have a divorce rate of 60 percent compared to 38 percent among people who attend church regularly. More generally, he found that Christians, similar to adherents of other traditional faiths, have a divorce rate of 42 percent compared with 50 percent among those without a religious affiliation.
And his is not the only research that is showing a link between strong faith and increased marriage stability.
University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, concluded that “active conservative Protestants” who regularly attend church are 35 percent less likely to divorce than are those with no faith affiliation. He used the National Survey of Families and Households to make his analysis.
[….]
Glenn Stanton, the director for family formation studies at Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs, Colo., has been writing articles to spread the truth about the lower divorce rate among practicing Christians.
“Couples who regularly practice any combination of serious religious behaviors and attitudes — attend church nearly every week, read their Bibles and spiritual materials regularly; pray privately and together; generally take their faith seriously, living not as perfect disciples, but serious disciples — enjoy significantly lower divorce rates that mere church members, the general public and unbelievers,” Stanton wrote in the Baptist Press early this year.
At issue in Barna’s studies is how he defined “Christian” and to what other groups he compared the “Christian” divorce rate. Apparently, his study compared what he termed “born-again” Christians — those who described their faith in terms of “personal commitment,” “accept as savior” and other evangelical, born-again language to three other groups, which included self-identified Christians who do not describe their faith with those terms, members of other, non-Christian religions and people of no religious beliefs.
Because his second group would have included many Catholics and mainline Protestants, Wright points out that Barna was, in many ways, “comparing Christians against Christians.” No wonder the rates were similar….
In USA TODAY, David Kinnaman, Barna’s president, said that “the statistical differences reflect varied approaches, with Wright looking more at attendance and his research firm dwelling on theological commitments.” Duh! The bottom line seems to be that the more seriously couples take their faith, the less likely they are to get a divorce. That seems like a self-evident truth, but it appears there is also evidence for it. In other words, this is a nominal, vs. committed Christian vs. secular person battle.
I can go on-and-on, but lets shorten what we have learned, and it all revolves around this:
“There’s something about being a nominal ‘Christian’ that is linked to a lot of negative outcomes when it comes to family life.”
I realize that much of this can be classified broadly as “The Ecological Fallacy” — but it is an amassing of stats to show that in fact the committed Christian understands the totality of “family values” and commits to them more than the secular person.
1a) Those who attend church more are to be found in the Republican Party; 1b) Those who do not, the Democratic Party; 2a) Those in the Republican Party donate much more to charitable causes; 2b) Those in the Democratic Party, are much more stingy; 3a) Republicans earn less and give more; 3b) Democrats earn more and give less; 4a) Conservative Christians and Jews (people who believe in Heaven and Hell) commit less crimes; 4b) Liberal religious persons (universalists) have a higher rate of crime; 5a) Regular church attendees have a lower drug use rate; 5b) Irreligious persons have a higher rate; 6a) Moral “oughts” are answered in Christian theism (one “ought” not rape because it is absolutely, morally wrong); 6b) Moral “oughts” are merely current consensus of the most individuals, there is no absolute moral statement that can be made about rape; 7a) Republicans are happier than Democrats; 7b) Democrats are more depressed; 8a) The sex lives of married, religious persons is better/more fulfilling — sex is being shown to be a “religious” experience after-all; 8b) The sex lives of the irreligious person is less fulfilling; 9a) The conservative is more likely to reach orgasm [conservative woman I assume]; 9b) The liberal woman is not; 10a) They are less likely to sleep around, which would also indicate lower STDs; 10b Democrats are more likely to have STDs through having more sex partners; 11a) Republicans are less likely (slightly, but this is so because of the committed Christians in the larger demographic) to have extra-marital affairs; 11b) Democrats more likely; 12a) Republicans over the last three decades have been reproducing more… 12b) Democrats abort more often and have less children through educational/career decisions 13a) Christians are more likely to have children and impact the world; 13b) Skeptics replace family with pleasure and travel.
Many years ago I cam across an excellent post by RIGHT-WING SPARKLE that I have referenced a few times. Here again, mind you, it is dated, but since then evidence has gotten more firm (I will add some stuff to this edition of her post):
A recent discussion on the myths of conservatism got me to doing some research on conservatism. The answers I found didn’t surprise me, but it might some liberals.
The Pew Research Center (more: PDF) did several surveys to determine who was happy. Not surprisingly Republicans were happier than Democrats or Independents. 45% to 30% to 29%. In addition, Republicans have been happier every year since the General Social Survey began taking its measurements in 1972. Also, People who attend religious services weekly or more are happier as well.
Drawing on extensive attitude surveys, Schweizer’s “Makers and Takers: Why Conservatives Work Harder, Feel Happier, Have Closer Families, Take Fewer Drugs, Give More Generously, Value Honesty More, Are Less Materialistic and Envious, Whine Less . . . and Even Hug Their Children More Than Liberals,” which comes out this week, says liberals are much more likely than conservatives to think about themselves first and are less willing to make sacrifices for others.
Schweizer, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, writes in his new book “Makers and Takers”:
“Academic studies have found that those on the political left are five times more likely to use marijuana and cocaine . . . Another survey found that Democrats were five times more likely to use marijuana than Republicans . . .
“A study published in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse found that among heavy drug users, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans was more than 8-to-1.”
Yet another survey found a “direct and linear relationship” between liberalism and the use of any illicit drug.
Schweizer, whose other books include “Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy,” observes: “The liberal search for autonomy and the credo ‘if it feels good do it’ have a strong influence on who uses drugs and why. Many liberals denounce drug use as a danger while at the same time engaging in a wink-wink attitude towards its actual use.”
Drawing on extensive attitude surveys, Schweizer also details in his book how liberals are more motivated by money than are conservatives, are angrier than conservatives, give less to charity, and are more likely to believe in ghosts, ESP, and reincarnation.
Some 71 percent of conservatives say they have an obligation to care for a seriously injured spouse or parent, compared with 46 percent for liberals. Asked if they would endure all things for the one they love, 55 percent of conservatives say yes, compared with 26 percent of liberals.
Equally revealing, liberals are far more likely to say they are depressed and to view the world bleakly. Schweizer attributes that to an attitude that they and those around them are victims and helpless unless the government intervenes.
[….]
In fact, Schweizer writes, self-described liberals and Democrats, who profess to be tolerant, are much more likely to embrace stereotypes of Jews than conservatives or Republicans. Some 45 percent of self-described “strong” Democrats or liberals agree with the statement that Jews are inordinately rich and money-driven, compared with 36 percent of strong Republicans and conservatives.
Schweizer cites similar research to show that even when they are in the same income brackets, liberals are far more likely to complain about their jobs, families, neighbors, health, and their relative wealth than conservatives.
Liberals are much more likely to say that money is important to them, according to the surveys Schweizer cites. They are two and a half times more likely to be resentful of others’ success and 50 percent more likely to be jealous of other people’s good luck. Conservatives are much more likely than liberals to spend time with their families, hug their children, and be close to their parents.
Liberals tend to work less hard and are more likely than conservatives to embrace leisure time as desirable. When asked if competition is good, those who defined themselves as very liberal say yes only 14 percent of the time, compared with 43 percent for conservatives.
Liberals are more likely to say that truth is something that is “relative.” When asked if they believe in ghosts, 42 percent of liberals say they do, compared with 25 percent of conservatives. Liberals are more likely to say that’s it’s OK to be dishonest or deceptive, cheat on taxes, keep money that doesn’t belong to them, and sell a used car with a faulty transmission to a family member.
Overall, conservatives are more satisfied with their lives, their professions, and their health compared with liberals of the same age and income level.
[….]
While Schweizer does not address attitudes about national security (the subject of his next book), he says liberals are more concerned about what others think than conservatives. When asked what is most important to prepare a child for life, 40 percent of liberals listed “being popular” among them, compared with 24 percent of conservatives.
On the other hand, conservatives were more likely to say one of their main goals in life is to “make my parents proud.” Presumably, those who are more concerned about what others think are more likely to be concerned about criticism of firm national security policies.
Finally, liberals try to paint conservatives as dumb — Clark Clifford called Ronald Reagan an “amiable dunce.” Schweizer shows that while John Kerry scored in the 91st percentile on a military IQ test, George Bush scored in the 95th percentile. Contrary to misrepresentations in the media, Bush also had slightly higher grades at Yale than Kerry.
Schweizer attributes liberals’ bleaker outlook on life to their deep-seated victim mentality.
This feeds a view that they cannot help themselves and encourages them to be passive. They are far more likely to say that luck or fate plays a role in their lives, as opposed to citing the need to take action themselves.
The victim mentality, in turn, makes them more likely to become depressed, suffer from a nervous breakdown, attempt suicide, be chronically angry, throw something in a fit of anger, seek revenge, and have a bleak outlook on life in general.
In one survey, 34 percent of liberals said the problems of life were just too big to cope with, compared with 19 percent of conservatives.
“Liberals often feel overwhelmed by life’s problems because they are waiting for the government to fix them,” Schweizer says. “When it doesn’t, liberals blame others (and ‘society’) for their misfortune.” Thus, liberalism “often damages its own adherents the most,” Schweitzer says….
Equally revealing, liberals are far more likely to say they are depressed and to view the world bleakly. Schweizer attributes that to an attitude that they and those around them are victims and helpless unless the government intervenes.
The numbers that Longman revealed were striking. In 2002, Utah, where Bush made his strongest showing this year, had the country’s highest fertility rate (the number of births per thousand women of child-bearing age). By contrast, liberal Vermont had the lowest fertility rate that year. Furthermore, 15 out of the country’s 17 most fertile states went for Bush in 2000. The Gore states today have an average replacement rate of 1.89 births per woman — far below the rate of 2.1 necessary to prevent the population from shrinking. (The average rate of the Bush states is 2.06.) These trends are particularly meaningful when you consider that political convictions are often inherited. As Longman notes: “It’s a truism of social science that people wind up having the political and religious orientation of their parents.”
A BYU study also shows that conservatives are more likely than liberals to read opposing points of view.
So let’s summarize. Republicans are happier, give more to the poor, have more children, and have a better sex life.
This explains a lot of the comments I have to delete. Unhappiness brings much bitterness.
I find it amazing that the picture of Republicans that Hollywood and the media try to portray is actually the opposite of reality.
I say to Democrats reading this, all is not lost. The wonderful thing about this country is that we are free to admit when we are wrong and turn things around. It can happen to you.
Victimization is adding to this depression by teaching children [which translates into adulthood] that no matter what they do, they cannot succeed. Here is one such example via Dennis Prager:
Dennis Prager reads from the New York Times article (Can My Children Be Friends With White People?) by Professor Ekow Yankah of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. Basically it is racism 101.
Condoleezza Rice Exemplifies the Bulwark Against #Woke Victimization
CHARITY
Dennis talks Arthur Brooks, professor of public administration at Syracuse University, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism. (Originally broadcast December 28, 2006)
Healthy debate has been replaced by activist hysterics. Speech is declared violence, while violence is excused as speech. Masculinity is condemned as regressive, while men in skirts and heels are celebrated in the public square.
It’s easy to laugh at these outbursts as the ravings of a small but vocal minority, but the compromised health of our body politic is not a trivial concern. A strange, new pattern of psychological dysfunction has infiltrated our most prestigious institutions, our corporate bureaucracies, and the highest offices in the land.
In short, we’re sick. Our society is out of balance. We’ve been consumed by a cluster of disorder that appeals to our worst instincts and deranges our most important social functions.
We need to recover our sanity. But to do so, we must first know exactly what we’re dealing with: the emergence of a Cluster B Society.
This is an old video, but someone just posted it on a Facebook group — what follows is my Facebook response as well as additional thoughts. Here is the video that prompted the below:
On the surface I can understand how someone would FEEL this describes reality. But our body politic is more complex than the above video would like to prescribe as reality. In fact, the video sets up a straw man [something that does not exist], and then attacks it as if it were the case.
Here is my response on Facebook:
FACEBOOK RESPONSE
Hey, I know our system is corrupted… but the video notes at around the 30-second mark:
This axis represents the likelihood of Congress passing a law that reflects any of these ideas from 0% to a 100% chance on this graph, an ideal republic would look like this: if 50% of the public supports an idea, there’s a 50% chance of it becoming law. If 80% of US support something, there’s an 80% chance.
I am sorry. That idea is explaining an ideal Democracy, which our Founders wholeheartedly rejected.
It reminds me of a call of a young black man into the Larry Elder Show where Larry was getting clarification [if he had misheard the young man], or, confirmation [if he had heard the man correctly].
Larry mentioned that “Ferguson is 57% black. What percentage of the arrest should be black people?
The caller responded: “57.”
Larry goes on to make an analogy about the NBA being a majority black players and asks – rhetorically – why the NBA isn’t 70% white? He answers himself by saying that the NBA is based on merit…
Similarly, Larry notes, arrests are based on crime. Not race. Arrests are merit based. So the PERCENTAGES don’t always match population.
Just like in a Republic. You have three forms of “checks and balances” that are supposed to be based in the Constitutional limiting of federal government powers and metering out state control over what is not clearly enumerated for the federal government to act on.
THIS has become corrupted over time, granted, but the “exact percentage” of something “becoming law” [in this video] does not reflect at all – all the variabilities in the struggle to pass something. The Founders didn’t want it easy like 60% says “a” therefore “a” should happen or become law.
In a pure Democracy however, the percentages would match. This video is made during a time where the Dems were [and still believe] pushing for the Electoral College to be abolished. This would effectively be a main driver to getting us to a pure Democracy. Something no one should want:
James Madison (fourth President, co-author of the Federalist Papers and the “father” of the Constitution) – “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general; been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
John Adams(American political philosopher, first vice President and second President) – “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
Benjamin Rush (signer of the Declaration) – “A simple democracy… is one of the greatest of evils.”
Fisher Ames (American political thinker and leader of the federalists [he entered Harvard at twelve and graduated by sixteen], author of the House language for the First Amendment) – “A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will provide an eruption and carry desolation in their way.´ / “The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness [excessive license] which the ambitious call, and the ignorant believe to be liberty.”
Governor Morris(signer and penman of the Constitution) – “We have seen the tumult of democracy terminate… as [it has] everywhere terminated, in despotism…. Democracy! Savage and wild. Thou who wouldst bring down the virtous and wise to thy level of folly and guilt.”
John Quincy Adams (sixth President, son of John Adams [see above]) – “The experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived.”
Noah Webster (American educator and journalist as well as publishing the first dictionary) – “In democracy… there are commonly tumults and disorders….. therefore a pure democracy is generally a very bad government. It is often the most tyrannical government on earth.”
John Witherspoon (signer of the Declaration of Independence) – “Pure democracy cannot subsist long nor be carried far into the departments of state – it is very subject to caprice and the madness of popular rage.”
Zephaniah Swift(author of America’s first legal text) – “It may generally be remarked that the more a government [or state] resembles a pure democracy the more they abound with disorder and confusion.”
Take note that as well Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution reads:
“The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government…“
Not “republican,” as one “political party, the GOP,” but as a “form” of government. So what is an example of the corruption of the “Consent of the Governed”?
[….]
Having discussed issues FOR YEARS with those on the other side of the aisle, I knew the response would still be similar to the caller into the Larry Elder Show. There is a “disconnect” on the Left that just doesn’t pick up simple underlying ideas. Here is the response as well as me responding…
[….]
…END OF MY FB RESPONSE… adding more info for my reader.
An important phrase in my mind’s eye is the phrase, “Consent of the Governed.” That is found in the Declaration of Independence. Here is an excerpt of the idea/phrase via the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Here are two large excerpts about this from THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION that I wish to share so the reader understands that the topic isn’t as “neat and tidy, or, simple” as the OP video makes it out to be with simple percentages.
[CONSENT]
…Part of the reason for the Constitution’s enduring strength is that it is the complement of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration provided the philosophical basis for a government that exercises legitimate power by “the consent of the governed,” and it defined the conditions of a free people, whose rights and liberty are derived from their Creator. The Constitution delineated the structure of government and the rules for its operation, consistent with the creed of human liberty proclaimed in the Declaration.
Justice Joseph Story, in his Familiar Exposition of the Constitution (1840), described our Founding document in these terms:
We shall treat [our Constitution], not as a mere compact, or league, or confederacy, existing at the mere will of any one or more of the States, during their good pleasure; but, (as it purports on its face to be) as a Constitution of Government, framed and adopted by the people of the United States, and obligatory upon all the States, until it is altered, amended, or abolished by the people, in the manner pointed out in the instrument itself.
By the diffusion of power–horizontally among the three separate branches of the federal government, and vertically in the allocation of power between the central government and the states–the Constitution’s Framers devised a structure of government strong enough to ensure the nation’s future strength and prosperity but without sufficient power to threaten the liberty of the people.
The Constitution and the government it establishes “has a just claim to [our] confidence and respect,” George Washington wrote in his Farewell Address (1796), because it is “the offspring of our choice, uninfluenced and unawed, adopted upon full investigation and mature deliberation, completely free in its principles, in the distribution of its powers uniting security with energy, and containing, within itself, a provision for its own amendment.”
The Constitution was born in crisis, when the very existence of the new United States was in jeopardy. The Framers understood the gravity of their task. As Alexander Hamilton noted in the general introduction to The Federalist,
[A]fter an unequivocal experience of the inefficacy of the subsisting federal government, [the people] are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America. The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the Union, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world.
Several important themes permeated the completed draft of the Constitution. The first, reflecting the mandate of the Declaration of Independence, was the recognition that the ultimate authority of a legitimate government depends on the consent of a free people. Thomas Jefferson had set forth the basic principle in his famous formulation:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
That “all men are created equal” means that they are equally endowed with unalienable rights. Nature does not single out who is to govern and who is to be governed; there is no divine right of kings. Nor are rights a matter of legal privilege or the benevolence of some ruling class. Fundamental rights exist by nature, prior to government and conventional laws. It is because these individual rights are left unsecured that governments are instituted among men.
Consent is the means by which equality is made politically operable and whereby arbitrary power is thwarted. The natural standard for judging if a government is legitimate is whether that government rests on the consent of the governed. Any political powers not derived from the consent of the governed are, by the laws of nature, illegitimate and hence unjust.
The “consent of the governed” stands in contrast to “the will of the majority,” a view more current in European democracies. The “consent of the governed” describes a situation where the people are self-governing in their communities, religions, and social institutions, and into which the government may intrude only with the people’s consent. There exists between the people and limited government a vast social space in which men and women, in their individual and corporate capacities, may exercise their self-governing liberty. In Europe, the “will of the majority” signals an idea that all decisions are ultimately political and are routed through the government. Thus, limited government is not just a desirable objective; it is the essential bedrock of the American polity.
[CHECKS AND BALANCES]
A second fundamental element of the Constitution is the concept of checks and balances. As James Madison famously wrote in The Federalist No. 51,
In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to controul the governed; and in the next place oblige it to controul itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary controul on the government; but experience has taught mankind necessity of auxiliary precautions.
These “auxiliary precautions” constitute the improved science of politics offered by the Framers and form the basis of their “Republican remedy for the diseases most incident to Republican Government” (The Federalist No. 10).
The “diseases most incident to Republican Government” were basically two: democratic tyranny and democratic ineptitude The first was the problem of majority faction, the abuse of minority or individual rights by an “interested and overbearing” majority. The second was the problem of making a democratic form of government efficient and effective. The goal was limited but energetic government. The constitutional object was, as the late constitutional scholar Herbert Storing said, “a design of government with the powers to act and a structure to make it act wisely and responsibly.”
The particulars of the Framers’ political science were catalogued by Madison’s celebrated collaborator in The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton. Those particulars included such devices as representation, bicameralism, independent courts of law, and the “regular distribution of powers into distinct departments;’ as Hamilton put it in The Federalist No. 9; these were “means, and powerful means, by which the excellencies of republican government may be retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided.”
Central to their institutional scheme was the principle of separation of powers. As Madison bluntly put it in The Federalist No. 47, the “preservation of liberty requires that the three great departments of power should be separate and distinct,” for, as he also wrote, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
Madison described in The Federalist No. 51 how structure and human nature could be marshaled to protect liberty:
[T]he great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department, the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others.
Thus, the separation of powers frustrates designs for power and at the same time creates an incentive to collaborate and cooperate, lessening conflict and concretizing a practical community of interest among political leaders.
Equally important to the constitutional design was the concept of federalism. At the Constitutional Convention there was great concern that an overreaction to the inadequacies of the Articles of Confederation might produce a tendency toward a single centralized and all-powerful national government. The resolution to such fears was, as Madison described it in The Federalist, a government that was neither wholly federal nor wholly national but a composite of the two. A half-century later, Alexis de Tocqueville would celebrate democracy in America as precisely the result of the political vitality spawned by this “incomplete” national government.
The institutional design was to divide sovereignty between two different levels of political entities, the nation and the states. This would prevent an unhealthy concentration of power in a single government. It would provide, as Madison said in The Federalist No. 51, a “double security. .. to the rights of the people.” Federalism, along with separation of powers, the Framers thought, would be the basic principled matrix of American constitutional liberty. “The different governments;’ Madison concluded, “will controul each other; at the same time that each will be controulled by itself.”
But institutional restraints on power were not all that federalism was about. There was also a deeper understanding–in fact, a far richer understanding–of why federalism mattered. When the delegates at Philadelphia convened in May 1787 to revise the ineffective Articles of Confederation, it was a foregone conclusion that the basic debate would concern the proper role of the states. Those who favored a diminution of state power, the Nationalists, saw unfettered state sovereignty under the Articles as the problem; not only did it allow the states to undermine congressional efforts to govern, it also rendered individual rights insecure in the hands of “interested and overbearing majorities.” Indeed, Madison, defending the Nationalists’ constitutional handiwork, went so far as to suggest in The Federalist No. 51 that only by way of a “judicious modification” of the federal principle was the new Constitution able to remedy the defects of popular, republican government.
The view of those who doubted the political efficacy of the new Constitution was that good popular government depended quite as much on a political community that would promote civic or public virtue as on a set of institutional devices designed to check the selfish impulses of the majority As Herbert Storing has shown, this concern for community and civic virtue tempered and tamed somewhat the Nationalists’ tendency toward simply a large nation. Their reservations, as Storing put it, echo still through our political history.[1]
It is this understanding, that federalism can contribute to a sense of political community and hence to a kind of public spirit, that is too often ignored in our public discussions about federalism. But in a sense, it is this understanding that makes the American experiment in popular government truly the novel undertaking the Framers thought it to be.
At bottom, in the space left by a limited central government, the people could rule themselves by their own moral and social values, and call on local political institutions to assist them. Where the people, through the Constitution, did consent for the central government to have a role, that role would similarly be guided by the people’s sense of what was valuable and good as articulated through the political institutions of the central government. Thus, at its deepest level popular government means a structure of government that rests not only on the consent of the governed, but also on a structure of government wherein the views of the people and their civic associations can be expressed and translated into public law and public policy, subject, of course, to the limits established by the Constitution. Through deliberation, debate, and compromise, a public consensus is formed about what constitutes the public good. It is this consensus on fundamental principles that knits individuals into a community of citizens. And it is the liberty to determine the morality of a community that is an important part of our liberty protected by the Constitution.
The Constitution is our most fundamental law. It is, in its own words, “the supreme Law of the Land.” Its translation into the legal rules under which we live occurs through the actions of all government entities, federal and state. The entity we know as “constitutional law” is the creation not only of the decisions of the Supreme Court, but also of the various Congresses and of the President.
Yet it is the court system, particularly the decisions of the Supreme Court, that most observers identify as providing the basic corpus of “constitutional law.” This body of law, this judicial handiwork, is, in a fundamental way, unique in our scheme, for the Court is charged routinely, day in and day out, with the awesome task of addressing some of the most basic and most enduring political questions that face our nation. The answers the Court gives are very important to the stability of the law so necessary for good government. But as constitutional historian Charles Warren once noted, what is most important to remember is that “however the Court may interpret the provisions of the Constitution, it is still the Constitution which is the law, not the decisions of the Court.”[2]
By this, of course, Warren did not mean that a constitutional decision by the Supreme Court lacks the character of binding law. He meant that the Constitution remains the Constitution and that observers of the Court may fairly consider whether a particular Supreme Court decision was right or wrong. There remains in the country a vibrant and healthy debate among the members of the Supreme Court, as articulated in its opinions, and between the Court and academics, politicians, columnists and commentators, and the people generally, on whether the Court has correctly understood and applied the fundamental law of the Constitution. We have seen throughout our history that when the Supreme Court greatly misconstrues the Constitution, generations of mischief may follow. The result is that, of its own accord or through the mechanism of the appointment process, the Supreme Court may come to revisit some of its doctrines and try, once again, to adjust its pronouncements to the commands of the Constitution.
This recognition of the distinction between constitutional law and the Constitution itself produces the conclusion that constitutional decisions, including those of the Supreme Court, need not be seen as the last words in constitutional construction. A correlative point is that constitutional interpretation is not the business of courts alone but is also, and properly, the business of all branches of government. Each of the three coordinate branches of government created and empowered by the Constitution–the executive and legislative no less than the judicial–has a duty to interpret the Constitution in the performance of its official functions. In fact, every official takes a solemn oath precisely to that effect. Chief Justice John Marshall, in Marbury v. Madison (1803), noted that the Constitution is a limitation on judicial power as well as on that of the executive and legislative branches. He reiterated that view in McCullough v. Maryland (1819) when he cautioned judges never to forget it is a constitution they are expounding.
The Constitution–the original document of 1787 plus its amendments–is and must be understood to be the standard against which all laws, policies, and interpretations should be measured. It is our fundamental law because it represents the settled and deliberate will of the people, against which the actions of government officials must be squared. In the end, the continued success and viability of our democratic Republic depends on our fidelity to, and the faithful exposition and interpretation of, this Constitution, our great charter of liberty.
[1]Herbert J. Storing, “The Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” in Joseph M. Bessette, ed., Toward a More Perfect Union: Writings of Herbert J. Storing (Washington, D.C.: The AEI Press, 1995).
[2]Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in United States History (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1922-1924), 3 vols., 470-471.
ALL this plays a role in us getting laws.
As an example of how “judicial activism” changes an outcome of a vote that a stae has a right to vote on (BECUASE the enumerated powers in the Constitution were not clear and thus the states get to decide):
The meaning of marriage.
So a slight majority of California voters voted to say marriage is between a man and a woman. Proposition 8 passed with 52 percent of the vote. One federal judge [Judge Vaughn Walker — himself a gay man] overturned the will of the California people. I think this judge was acting in an “activist” manner, but there is a way to overrule his decision legally… and the percentages to do so were not present, plus the Supreme Court wrongly interfered in this as well — like with Roe v. Wade.
The above is all arguable of course between out varying views of politics — that is not the point.
The POINT IS that this dynamic interferes with “simple math/percentages” idea of those that wish to have a pure democracy.
By way of another point showing the complexity of outcomes not being easily “mathematized,” take the 9th Circuit Upper Court. In 2012, The U.S Supreme Court reversed 86% of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rulings that it reviewed. WOW. That is a clear sign of something going on — like Judicial activism. (And this was the time-period where the Supreme Court was more left leaning than now.)
Now however, the Court has moved less from a “the Constitution is a living and breathing document” idea (the progressives view); to a more originalist idea based in president and the authors intent (a conservative view).
“Trump has effectively flipped the circuit,” said 9th Circuit Judge Milan D. Smith Jr., an appointee of President George W. Bush.
So the outcome of the judicial case regarding such cases like Proposition 8 may end up being much different when in front of the upper courts.
How do you quantify something like that into percentages or fractions?
HINT: You can’t.
So, I noted way up in my Facebook comment that I agree that our form of government is corrupt. I did give an example in my Facebook response that I did not include above — that I will here. And while this example deals with just one aspect, you can apply this to both sides of the aisle in their attempt to distort the will of the people in proper representation in order to aquire power and privilege.
More on this from around the time it was released at REASON.ORG’s post. Here is the video description:
America’s public education system is failing. We’re spending more money on education but not getting better results for our children.
That’s because the machine that runs the K-12 education system isn’t designed to produce better schools. It’s designed to produce more money for unions and more donations for politicians.
For decades, teachers’ unions have been among our nation’s largest political donors. As Reason Foundation’s Lisa Snell has noted, the National Education Association (NEA) alone spent $40 million on the 2010 election cycle (source: http://reason.org/news/printer/big-ed…. As the country’s largest teachers union, the NEA is only one cog in the infernal machine that robs parents of their tax dollars and students of their futures.
Students, teachers, parents, and hardworking Americans are all victims of this political machine–a system that takes money out of taxpayers’ wallets and gives it to union bosses, who put it in the pockets of politicians.
Our kids deserve better.
(With all that in play in the above video… how does that make mathematical equations in outcomes of voting an easy course of action?)
An example of how the corruption in education distorts the will of the people. In a recent survey, 79% of Black parents supported vouchers, 74% supported charter schools, and 78% supported open enrollment. Roughly three in four Black parents (78%) support education savings accounts, which are becoming increasingly popular across the country. This percentage is much higher even than the national average of two-thirds (67%).
You would think that we would already have school choice, however, through the bedfellows of interest groups, unions, and Big-Government (Crony Capitalism, or, Crony Corporatism) — we have outcomes that stifle choice.
Roxanne Beckford Hoge (IMDB), known for her roles in A Different World, Something’s Gotta Give, and more, was on the political left until she started listening to Dennis Prager on the radio. She observed Hollywood increasingly stifling freedom of thought, as a love for liberty and tolerance pushed Roxanne toward conservatism. Now as a parent, she discusses how anti-American curriculum is hurting students, and she urges parents to advocate for their children against this radical agenda.
Growing up in Newport Beach, California, Olivia Jaber looked forward to college as an opportunity to stretch beyond her ideological comfort zone. She chose to attend UC Berkeley, once the epicenter of the Free Speech movement, but found Cal to be an intolerant left-wing echo chamber with no interest in diversity of thought. Emerging from the “conservative closet” after graduation, Olivia founded a publication reflecting her values called THE CONSERVATEUR and encourages young women to be vocal about who they are and what they believe in.
Annabella Rockwell was raised in an America-loving home but became indoctrinated with leftist ideology when she went away to college. But in the summer of 2020, Annabella saw the hypocrisy of her new leftist worldview and sought out a different perspective. That’s when she stumbled on a PragerU video and realized she had been brainwashed.
Upon entering the halls of Harvard in 2018, Julie Hartman found herself going along with the leftist ideology invading academia. But that changed in the summer of 2020. Shocked by the anti-American sentiment and calls to “defund the police” among her classmates and in the media, Julie began to seek alternative points of view. After discovering PragerU and Dennis Prager, she was transformed and found her voice within the conservative movement.
