Tag: freedom

Moronic Common Core lessons the federal government is imposing on public schools.

9:35 am

Government marches on! Moronic Common Core lessons the federal government is imposing on public schools.

#4 is especially vile, as its whole point is to encourage racial hatred.

I have not written much about the federally mandated education program Common Core, but don’t worry, nothing about it will surprise you. It is like most things the federal government requires these days, poorly thought out, politically motivated, and destructive to our society.

Other than that, it is peachy cream wonderful!

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Dave Barry looks back at 2013.

9:18 am

Dave Barry looks back at 2013: The year of the zombies.

But getting back to the zombies: It wasn’t just people who came back alarmingly in 2013. The Cold War with Russia came back. Al-Qaeda came back. Turmoil in the Middle East came back. The debt ceiling came back. The major league baseball drug scandal came back. Dennis Rodman came back and went on humanitarian missions to North Korea (or maybe we just hallucinated that). The Endlessly Looming Government Shutdown came back. People lining up to buy iPhones to replace iPhones that they bought only minutes earlier came back. And for approximately the 250th time, the Obama administration pivoted back to the economy, which has somehow been recovering for years now without actually getting any better. Unfortunately, before they could get the darned thing fixed, the administration had to pivot back to yet another zombie issue, health care, because it turned out that Obamacare, despite all the massive brainpower behind it, had some “glitches,” in the same sense that the universe has some “atoms.”

Read it all. It will make you wish an actual zombie apocalypse had happened.

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A tea party look at 2013.

10:13 pm

A tea party look at 2013.

In 2013, the five-year old conservative grassroots upsurge has grabbed Washington, D.C. by the collar, tearing the city colloquially known as “Boomtown” in a conservative direction for the first time in decades.

Though the article sees far more success in 2013 for tea party politicians than I think is warranted, I also think it does outline the birth of the future. The left is increasingly old and out of touch. The tea party, small now, has got the right ideas, and will thus grow stronger with time — assuming of course that it stays true to those ideas.

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Insufficiently servile.

10:02 pm

Insufficiently servile.

As he concludes,

So, that was my contact with the DoD police today. At every confrontation, they clearly expected me to respond with the appropriate degree of subservience, and were baffled and angered that I refused to do so. So, they couldn’t let it go. They just kept coming back to my office, as if repeated confrontations would make me more, rather than less, servile. And all this for something that wasn’t any sort of criminal offense.

It says a lot—none of it good—that the police seem to have the expectation of unquestioning obedience. It also says a lot that they seem used to getting it, which is our fault, not theirs.

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The first theorem of government: Government is a racket that benefits the political elite by taking money from everyone else.

9:40 am

The first theorem of government: Government is a racket that benefits the political elite by taking money from everyone else.

He has the data. Look especially at his first graph. And he correctly notes that this has been a bi-partisan effort.

The solution? Vote these bums out of office, repeatedly and often, so that no one has a motive to concentrate power and money in Washington.

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Scientists admit that second-hand smoke causes zero cancer deaths.

9:51 am

Scientists admit that second-hand smoke causes zero cancer deaths.

The article notes that this fact has been known for years.

Jyoti Patel, MD, of Northwestern University School of Medicine said the findings were not new. … “Passive smoking has many downstream health effects—asthma, upper respiratory infections, other pulmonary diseases, cardiovascular disease—but only borderline increased risk of lung cancer,” said Patel. “The strongest reason to avoid passive cigarette smoke is to change societal behavior: to not live in a society where smoking is a norm.”

In other words, the power hungry who have been imposing these regulations on us have been lying about why they want to do it. They aren’t protecting anyone, they are simply trying to impose their will. And succeeding.

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Advice for Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty.

10:23 pm

I posted this Andrew Klavan commentary back in January 2011, shortly after the Tucson shooting when the left was accusing the right of causing the shooting because of the so-called “incivility” of their speech. It was all lies, merely intended to stifle the speech of anyone who dissented from liberal orthodoxy.

I think it bears viewing again, as it provides good advice and council to Phil Robertson and the entire Duck Dynasty family. It also once again outlines quite starkly how oppressive and fascist the American left has become.

As Klavan concludes, “Whatever you do, don’t shut up.”

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Cuba is lifting the limit on the number of people allowed to buy a car.

9:45 am

Freedom in the socialist paradise: Cuba is lifting the limit on the number of people allowed to buy a car.

The government has a monopoly on the sale of imported new and used vehicles, and has required any potential buyer to obtain a special card from the Transport Ministry authorizing the purchase of a car. The cards took months or years to obtain, creating a black market in cards in which holders would often sell them for more than the price of the car itself.

Don’t count your blessings, however. The change is only in place “of new regulations, which would be made public in coming days.”

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The real legal issues surrounding the right to openly carry your pistol.

9:41 am

The real legal issues surrounding the right to openly carry your pistol.

Cooke carefully tears apart the typical but nonsensical arguments of the left against open carry, but then discusses intelligently the problems. As he notes, “The open-carry question is a more complex one than some of its advocates like to admit.”

If only the conversation focused on these issues instead of the absurd fear-mongering of the left.

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The star of cable television’s highest rated show in history has been sacked because he dared criticize the homosexual lifestyle

10:23 pm

The end of free speech: The star of cable television’s highest rated show in history has been sacked because he dared criticize the homosexual lifestyle.

It does not matter whether one disagrees with him or not. He has the right to express these opinions, and should not be punished merely because they are not politically correct in today’s society.

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Reddit bans any skepticism of global warming.

2:57 pm

The certainty of the global warming crowd: Reddit bans everyone from expressing skepticism of global warming.

In a move that has been described by one British academic as “positive censorship”, a Reddit moderator has announced that Reddit is becoming “increasingly stringent with deniers”. The Reddit moderator says climate “contrarians” were too often expressing “uninformed and outspoken opinions”, and so the site decided to adopt a much more “proactive moderation”. Now, whenever a user makes a “potentially controversial submission” on climate change, the moderators issue that user with a “warning”. If the user persists in posting “potentially controversial submissions”, he’s “banned from the forum”.

The worst part of this is the reaction of Reddit’s moderators:

Reddit’s moderators are really happy with the results of their war against the expressers of “outspoken opinions” on climate change. They found that by “negating the ability of this misguided group to post to the forum” (a long-winded way of saying “banning them”), there has been a “change in the culture within the comments”. “Where once there were personal insults and bitter accusations, there is now discussion of the relevant aspects of [scientific] research”, we are told. In short, having expelled outspoken, controversial “deniers” from its forums, Reddit now finds that its discussions of climate change are more measured – that is, on-message, conformist, uncontroversial.

How convenient. You don’t like the opinions of those who disagree with you, so you ban them. Sure solves the problem of winning debates, doesn’t it?

I wouldn’t object if the moderators just banned insulting and offensive comments. I do that here at Behind the Black. What they’ve apparently done instead is to ban all opposing opinions, which is far different.

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More than half the U.S. is covered with snow this November, the most in ten years.

8:08 pm

More than half the U.S. is covered with snow this November, the most in ten years.

The certainty of climate scientists:

Kevin Trenberth, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, agreed the surprising amount of snowfall is a separate issue from climate change. “If you warm up the atmosphere, you can actually get heavier snowfalls in winter,” Trenberth said. “That’s one of the ironic things about global warming. Maybe we can say that without climate change, it would be colder still. [emphasis mine]

In other words, according to Trenberth the increased snow cover and cold temperatures are evidence of global warming.

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Thirteen insane projects funded by our federal government.

9:49 am

Thirteen insane projects funded by our federal government.

I especially like #5: “NASA spends $3 million looking for signs of intelligent life…in Congress.”

These idiotic programs, which certainly only scratch the surface of the wasteful and corrupt spending in Washington, prove once again that the most recent budget deal is a fraud, that there is no reason to support any increase in federal spending, that we probably could cut the budget in half and not notice anything.

Sadly, that budget deal appears about to pass the Senate.

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Leftwing news photographer reveals he is no news photographer, ashamed he broke a big story revealing the ugly side of his hero Obama.

8:54 am

Leftwing news photographer reveals he is no news photographer, ashamed he broke a big story revealing the ugly side of his hero Obama.

This would be funny if it wasn’t so pitiful. Your job is to cover the news, to tell the public the real reality behind the propaganda politicians pump out, no matter what political party those politicians belong to. Instead, this guy wants everyone to look the other way in order to protect his political heroes on the left.

In other words, he ain’t a reporter, he’s a leftwing Democratic Party propagandist, disguised as reporter. Sadly, that description applies to almost all reporters today.

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As deadlines loom and the problems with the Obamacare website continue, the Obama administration has issued a number of illegal extensions to the law.

9:50 am

The law is such an inconvenient thing: As deadlines loom and the problems with the Obamacare website continue, the Obama administration has issued a number of illegal extensions to the law.

I hate the law, as any reader of this website knows. However, the law is the law. Obama and his bureaucratic minions don’t have the legal right to rewrite it at their pleasure, just because it doesn’t work. And they are discovering this, as increasingly insurance companies and state insurance boards are telling them that their so-called changes are invalid and cannot be obeyed.

It appears a growing number of Congressmen also agree: A resolution in the House demands Obama be brought to court for not faithfully executing the law.

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It appears that Senate Republicans will filibuster the Ryan budget deal.

8:56 am

Maybe not so stupid: It appears that Senate Republicans will filibuster the Ryan budget deal.

If the Republicans in the Senate can force some changes, to both the reduction in the sequester cuts over the next two years as well as the procedural change that ends the minority’s ability to block tax increases, then they will have accomplished something.

What I like about this is that they appear to be willing to fight, something Republicans all too often fail to do.

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It is time to start applying the Broken Windows Theory to liberal intolerance.

8:45 pm

Right on! It is time to start applying the Broken Windows Theory to liberal intolerance.

Compare the rude, vicious terms from Obama and his spokespeople, and Senior Democrats such as Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Nancy Pelosi and others, with the gentlemanly behavior of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell. There is plenty of push back and name-calling on both sides at lower levels and on the blogosphere, but it’s qualitatively different when it comes from The White House and the Democratic Party House and Senate leadership. When the leadership of the Republican Party does not push back against the leadership of the Democratic Party for the name-calling and taunts, it’s an invitation to more attacks, and it sets a national tone.

We’ve become punching bags. At dinner and at the highest political levels.

We need to do what Rudy Giuliani did to graffiti artists and squeegee guys, apply broken windows theory. “Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.”

In other words, push back hard every time a liberal spits out an insult or rude comment about conservatives. Don’t back down. Don’t let them get away with it easily.

Well, I agree, but be forewarned. Liberals are all self-righteous about you being polite, but never think such rules should apply to them. (Which isn’t surprising considering how much they like to tell others what do to.) You will lose friends, as I have. I don’t think any of those lost friendships was ever much of a loss, but you should be forewarned.

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