ReasonTV

Cultural Appropriation Halloween

Published by Papa Giorgio

Curing cancer through cultural appropriation:

REMY:

Just when you thought joyless, whining social justice warriors couldn’t possibly ruin anything else, they’ve now set their sights on Halloween. (H/T to Gateway Pundit)

GAY PATRIOT comments well on the above PC Police stopping “cultural appropriation”

…Another sanctimonious leftist advises on how to lecture people whose costumes are politically incorrect.

  • Among all the tricks and treats, cultural appropriation is an undeniable problem this time of year.

By “undeniable problem” she means “irresistible opportunity for moralistic preening by social leftists.” In this case, she recommends cornering those whose costumes are deemed “offensive” and delivering a stern lecture on the sin of “cultural appropriation.”

“Cultural Appropriation” is a term created by sanctimonious social leftists to attack white people who enjoy partaking of non-white, non-European culture. White entertainers that incorporate elements of African, Caribbean, or Asian influences into their art and music: jazz, for example or Kabuki-inspired costumes, are guilty of cultural appropriation. Note that “Cultural Appropriation” only goes one way; to suggest that Africans should not attempt “white European art” such as ballet or classical music would be racism. “Cultural appropriation” has been extended by the sanctimonious social left to condemn colleges that serve tacos on campus and people who dress up as ninjas or bandidos for Halloween.

In reality, “cultural appropriation” is something privileged leftists made up to lord over other people because they have no real problems and no real morality. There’s also an element of the Baby Boom Left — for whom race sensitivity rivals only hyper-environmentalism as their religion of choice — that needs to keep their pieties from dying out in the Next Generation; even as racism becomes culturally and socially irrelevant.

“The original cultural appropriators”

More on the YALE PROFESSOR

(Young Conservatives have a really good post on this) This comes via Gay Patriot’s commentary on “a generation is raised to believe that they are so wonderful and so special that anything that offends them…”

  • They were mad because a professor said in an email that if someone’s Halloween costume offended them, they should try and act like adults about it. (The longer version can be found here)

SEE MORE HERE

Christopher Columbus – The Left’s Public Enemy #1

Published by Papa Giorgio

Michael Knowles explains the difference between leftist lies and reality, and why Christopher Columbus is the Left’s public enemy #1

To analogize the main point, it would be like taking the political attacks in politics as who a person really is. Here is a great example:

Jefferson called Adams “a blind, bald, crippled, toothless man who is a hideous hermaphroditic character with neither the force and fitness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

The Federalists attacked the fifty-seven-year-old Jefferson as a godless Jacobin who would unleash the forces of bloody terror upon the land. With Jefferson as President, so warned Adams (actually the Connecticut Courant), “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes.” Reportedly New Englanders hid their Bibles for fear that the infidel Jefferson would declare them illegal if elected. In 1828, supporters of John Quincy Adams called Andrew Jackson a murderer and a cannibal.

Two Million Dollar Crapper

Published by Papa Giorgio

John Stossel investigates a New York City park bathroom that cost $2 million to build. For that price you might expect gold-plated fixtures—but it’s just a tiny building with four toilets and four sinks.

New York City Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver says $2 million was a good deal because “New York City is the most expensive place to build.” He estimates that future bathrooms will cost more than $3 million. Commissioner Silver argues that this park, on the outskirts of Brooklyn, will get so much use that it must be built to last, and that can be expensive.

Yet privately managed Bryant Park, in the middle of Manhattan, gets much more use and its recent bathroom renovation cost just $271,000. Since government spends other people’s money, it doesn’t need to worry about cost or speed. Every decision is bogged down by time-wasting “public engagement,” inflated union wages, and productivity-killing work rules. Two million dollars for a bathroom. That’s your government at work.

School Choice (+The Machine)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Below video description) Poor students deserve just as good an education as rich students, right? So why are so many stuck in failing public schools? Denisha Merriweather, who benefited from school vouchers, explains the problem and the solution.

(Take the pledge for school choice! http://www.schoolchoicenow.com) 

(Below video description) Can every child receive a good education? With school choice and competition, yes. The problem? Powerful teachers unions oppose school choice. Rebecca Friedrichs, a public school teacher who took her case against the teachers union all the way to the Supreme Court, explains why school choice is the right choice.

(Below 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.

Farmer Fined $2.8 Million for… Farming (Eco-Fascism)

Published by Papa Giorgio

  • The above is another example of this Eco-Fascism… “…Justice Scalia released the Court’s opinion, with Justices Ginsburg and Alito seperately concurring, that private property and due process trump government “strong-arming of regulated parties.” And it feels so good.” (TOWNHALL)

I think this is an important story posted by HOTAIR. The whole topic of Leftist Eco-Fascism is in fact:

…Out in California, a farmer is facing millions of dollars in fines for plowing a field that he purchased and planting wheat. If that sentence sounds like something out of a George Orwell novel to you, you’re not alone. His supposed crime was to have “disturbed” the Waters of the United States, a term which gained massive popularity under the Obama administration’s EPA rules. In this case, the land that John Duarte purchased and was plowing did not include a river, or even a stream, but rather “seasonal wetlands” which develop swampy areas during the rainy season but then dry up for the rest of the year. (Free Beacon)

A California farmer is facing a $2.8 million fine for failing to get a permit to plow his own field.

John Duarte bought 450 acres of land near Modesto in 2012 and is now being sued by the federal government for plowing near areas the government considers to be “waters of the United States.”

The case will head to trial in August. The government claims that Duarte violated the Clean Water Act because he did not obtain a permit to work near the wetlands.

USA Today has all the details here but it’s reminiscent of other cases brought against landowners in the past. One of the major sticking points is that farmers are supposed to be exempt from these rules. But the government is claiming that the “ripper” blades he used while plowing were “discharging material” into “wetlands.” And for that he’s being fined millions of dollars.

Duarte never even got to harvest the wheat that he planted because the government was all over him. Keep in mind that we’re not talking about dumping chemicals into a stream or building some sort of permanent structure. The guy was plowing. He was literally moving dirt a foot or so to the side so he could plant his crops….

(read the rest)

The State of the Union ~ RPT has Decided NOT to Vote Trump

Published by Papa Giorgio

The Trump people are very similar to the social justice warriors (like #trigglpuff) that drown out reasoned discussion in the arena of free speech. In one call into the Medved Show (on my YOUTUBE CHANNEL) a Trumper said if there were a brokered convention (which gave us Lincoln BTW) he would resort to violence. As society becomes more secular and moves away from a classical type of education that teaches people “how to think well,” we will see more emotive reasoning thrown behind opinions. One person told me Cruz did not have “compassion.” I mentioned that acting compassionately with government has gotten us our ever-growing unconstitutional nanny-state. I could care less if Cruz likes me… As long as he is doing his duty according to the document that runs our country and has a plan to curb it’s growth to date (for instance, his flat tax program, whereas Trump said he will raise taxes). Plus this gentleman was wrong (see the FEDERALIST for instance). My view is that if Ted is following and acting oon the spirit of the Constitution… which may, to the modern feminized society seem uncharitable (un loving), it will be in fact the MOST compassionate thing Ted Cruz could do.

I hope another (if it is not Cruz) will be supplemented at the Convention. It is in the hands of the delegates.

Dennis Prager speaks to “American Philosophy” and then has the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory at the Georgetown University Law Center where he teaches constitutional law and contracts, and is Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution–Randy Barnett–on:

“If we are to be mothered, mother must know best…. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. They ‘cash in.’ It has been magic, it has been Christianity. Now it will certainly be science…. Let us not be deceived by phrases about ‘Man taking charge of his own destiny.’ All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of others…. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be.”

[….]

“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. But to be punished, however severley, because we have deserved it, because ‘ought to have known better,’ is to be treated as a human persons in God’s image.”

C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2002), 292.

This disconnect is amazing to me. What this exchange did for me was solidify that I cannot vote for Trump. Period.

Malcolm Muggeridge (a British journalist, author, satirist, media personality, soldier-spy and, in his later years, a Catholic convert and writer)said it best:

  • “If God is ‘dead,’ somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Heffner.”

Ravi Zacharias, The Real Face of Atheism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2004), 32.

Here is a great interview with Professor Randy Barnett:

Here is the video description from REASON.ORG:

In his forthcoming book Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People, Randy E. Barnett, the intellectual leader of a consciously libertarian legal movement that has hugely reshaped how courts interpret the law, lays out his case for “judicial engagement,” in which judges actively challenge and invalidate laws and policies that infringe on individual rights and freedom. Our Republican Constitution is a powerful rebuke to democratic majoritarianism, which holds that legislators have b

A professor at Georgetown Law School, Barnett has also been at the center of two major Supreme Court cases in the 21st century. He was the lead in 2005’s Raich case, in which the Court ruled that Congress’ power under the Commerece Clause was immense. And, as he recounts in gripping and compelling fashion in his new book, Barnett helped to create the nearly successful (and in his telling, partly successful) challenge to the individual mandate at the heart of President Obama’s controversial health care reform.

Born in 1952, Barnett grew up in the Chicago area, attended Northwestern as an undergad (he majored in philosophy), and went to law school at Harvard, where he was a classmate of Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland. Garland, he says, is a smart, nice guy who would be terrible from a libertarian perspective because of his reflexive deference to lawmakers under virtually any circumstance. “As a matter of judicial philosophy,” says Barnett. I think he would not be a good justice for us to have”. In the early 1970s, he was associated with the Center for Libertarian Studes and economist Murray Rothbard, whom he says continues to shape his thinking in important ways.

An alumnus of the Institute for Humane Studies and an active participant in the Federalist Society, Barnett is the author the highly regarded and controversial academic books The Structure of Liberty (1998) and Restoring the Lost Constitution (2004). Intended for a general audience, Our Republican Constitution is simultaneously intellectually rigorous and a real page-turner, filled with dramatic anecdotes that illustrate Barnett’s powerful and provocative argument that routine deference to elected legislators is the wrong way to interpret the Constitution or create a rich and flourishing society.

Barnett sat down with Nick Gillespie at Reason’s D.C. headquarters for a wide-ranging conversation about his experiences working in his father’s laundry, his favorite Supreme Court case (that would be Lochner), how he developed his nascent libertarianism at a time when few people called themselves such, why he thinks a new political party may be a necessity, why he thinks Donald Trump is an authoritarian, and why he believes Ted Cruz understands how the Constitution limits government power.

Why Merrick Garland Should NOT Be on SCOTUS

Published by Papa Giorgio

  • For Reason’s full, hour-long interview with Barnett with downloadable links, go HERE

Georgetown Law’s Randy Barnett says his former Harvard Law classmate, Merrick Garland, is “qualified” for the Supreme Court.

But that doesn’t mean the Senate should confirm him.

Basic qualifications for a seat on the Supreme Court are “necessary but not sufficient,” says Barnett, whose new book, Our Republican Constitution, lays out his case for “judicial engagement,” in which judges actively challenge and invalidate laws and policies that infringe on individual rights and freedom. Our Republican Constitution is a powerful rebuke to long-dominant democratic majoritarianism, which holds that legislators have broad powers to effectively do whatever they want. Judges, in this reading of law, should defer to the wishes of lawmakers and government agencies.

Since the confirmation of recently deceased Antonin Scalia, Senate hearings have rightly focused not just a nominee’s “qualifications,” explains Barnett, but on his or her “judicial philosophy.” And on that score, he says, Garland would be terrible for people who care about limiting and restraining government. “He is a deference guy, par excellence. He defers to the EPA, he defers to administrative agencies, that guy defers like crazy,” says Barnett. “And for that reason, I do not think he would be a good justice for us to have.”

[….]

Reason: We’re going through a kind of a non-confirmation confirmation period. Do you think that—

Randy Barnett: My section mate in law school, Merrick Garland.

Reason: Okay. Well, I was going to ask you—is Merrick Garland Supreme Court worthy and is it wrong to deny him even a confirmation hearing?

Randy Barnett: Merrick Garland who was my classmate was one of the stars of the section. He was one of the gunners in the class that would challenge the professors the entire year. We all looked up to him and a couple of other people who were like in that upper echelon and he’s a very very decent human being. Would be a wonderful adherent to the democratic Constitution. He is a deference guy. Par excellence. He defers to the EPA. He defers to administrative agency. That guy defers like crazy. And for that reason, as a matter of judicial philosophy, I think he would not be a good justice for us to have, so I would be opposed to him. But on character and fitness grounds and ability grounds—

But you see, part of the problem is evaluating justices on the basis of so-called “qualifications.” As long as everybody was in agreement in the democratic Constitution, the post-New Deal understanding of what constitutions should be, which Republicans and Democrats were all in agreement about, then at that point, all you’re interested in is qualifications—how smart are you, how good are you, because everybody basically agrees, but now we have a fundamental disagreement about the Constitution, starting with the Scalia appointment and, I mean, to some extent with Rehnquist, but Rehnquist, then Scalia, then Thomas, we have a disagreement about the Constitution.

Now, qualifications aren’t enough. What you need is what Joe Biden used to say you have to look for and that is judicial philosophy and that gets us back to originalism. That is what a justice should be—an originalist, first and foremost.

Reason: Let me ask this—

Randy Barnett: So let me just say—qualifications are necessary but they’re not sufficient.

Reason: This is a political question, not a legal one or a judicial one, but does it make sense for— Then is it legitimate for the Republican Senate essentially to forestall, to run the clock out on Garland’s appointment or confirmation possibility. Is it legal to do that, and I guess it is, but is it proper to do that simply because you don’t want to give the sitting president a shot at it?

Randy Barnett: It’s every bit as constitutional. I mean, it’s completely constitutional. In fact, I haven’t heard a serious argument. Nobody makes a serious argument that it’s not constitutionally permitted. It’s all an argument about, as you say, whether it’s proper or not and the Senate is as entitled to veto or fail to consent to a nominee as the president is to select somebody. The president did not select me or someone like me, he selected my classmate Merrick, and therefore he discriminated against me and he went with Merrick instead and it’s a perfectly appropriate for the Senate to say we disagree about him and whether there needs to be a hearing or not actually at that point I would say there should not be a hearing because given that we are in the election cycle, given that this appointment’s going to last far beyond this president’s tenure, it’s something that ought to be made an issue at the next election. It’s something that the people as voters, the electorate, should have a say-so in how this Court’s going to look in the future.

(Reason Page 7)

HHS Healthy Young America Video Contest ~ ReasonTV

Published by Papa Giorgio

Via Gateway Pundit:

Because spending $1.1 to $2.6 trillion on Obamacare over the next ten years isn’t enough, the Department of Health and Human Services announced a $30,000 video contest to promote Obamacare. That’s right, you could win fabulous prizes! All you have to do is convince young Americans to sign up for something they don’t want or need (and probably can’t afford)!

Why the push? Without lots of healthy young people buying health insurance they don’t need, Obamacare doesn’t work. That’s why they’ll be forced to enroll.

The good people at Reason submitted this video