Have the Awful Climate Change Deniers Turned a Cartoonist?!

For a cartoonist living in a period of unprecedented™ global warming, Wiley Miller sure doesn't seem to be showing a lot of responsibility in his choice of subjects!

The Big, Existential Question on Our Campuses

How Come So Much of What Honest Abe Spoke of 150 Years Ago Seems Relevant Today?

Today is the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address (thanks to Duncan Hill).

This brings us to a post from five years ago:

How come so much of what Abraham Lincoln spoke of 150 years ago seems relevant today?

A careful reading of Abraham Lincoln's speeches seems to bring up pertinent comments on or about: the stimulus, the ever-increasing debt and deficits, the arguments for reforming (and ditching) the Constitution, the Democrats' double standards, and the caricature made of the Republican Party and their members (such as Sarah Palin) and like-minded people (such as the tea partiers) contrasted with the heroic image bestowed upon the Democrats and progressives' standard-bearers (such as Barack Obama), and the élites of the East Coast, the Ivy League universities, and Hollywood.

Incidentally, Dan Greenberg's and my graphic novel biography of Honest Abe, The Life & Times of Abraham Lincoln, is slated for publication later this year…

Doesn't Abraham Lincoln's Speech in the Illinois Legislature on the State Bank (January 11, 1837) sound somewhat like the sub-prime mess, the stimulus, and the search for ever-larger deficits?

It is an old maxim and a very sound one, that he that dances should always pay the fiddler. Now, sir, in the present case, if any gentlemen, whose money is a burden to them, choose to lead off a dance, I am decidedly opposed to the people's money being used to pay the fiddler …

These capitalists generally generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people, and now, that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people's money to settle the quarrel.

… I make the assertion boldly, and without fear of contradiction, that no man, who does not hold an office, or does not aspire to one, has ever found any fault of the Bank. … No, Sir, it it the politician who is the first to sound the alarm, (which, by the way, is a false one.) It is he, who, by these unholy means, is endeavoring to blow up a storm that he may ride upon and direct. It is he, and he alone, that here proposes to spend thousands of the people's public treasure…

Doesn't Abraham Lincoln's June 20, 1848, Speech on Internal Improvements (first para below) and his February 13, 1848, letter to a Josephus Hewett (second para) sound like he is talking to those who wish to ditch or at least reform the Constitution and the Electoral College?

I now wish to submit a few remarks on the general proposition of amending the constitution. As a general rule, I think, we would much better let it alone. No slight occasion should tempt us to touch it. Better not take the first step, which may lead to a habit of altering it. Better, rather, habituate ourselves to think of it, as unalterable. It can scarcely be made better than it is. New provisions, would introduce new difficulties, and thus create, and increase appetite for still further change. No sir, let it stand as it is. New hands have never touched it. The men who made it, have done their work, and have passed away. Who shall improve, on what they did?

I was once of your opinion … that presidential electors should be dispensed with; but a more thorough knowledge of the causes that first introduced them, has made me doubt. Those causes were briefly these. The convention that framed the constitution had this difficulty: the small states wished to so frame the government as that they might be equal to the large ones regardless of the inequality of the population; the large ones insisted on equality in proportion to population. They compromised it, by basing the House of Representatives on population, and the Senate on states regardless of population; and the executive on both principles, by electors in each state, equal in numbers to her senators and representatives. Now, throw away the machinery of electors, and the compromise is broken up, and the whole yielded to the principle of large states. … Have you reflected on these things?

Doesn't Abraham Lincoln's 1854 Fragments on Government sound like he is (re)asserting what true Americans stand for — belief in the individual and the common man?

Most governments have been based, practically, on the denial of equal rights of men … ours began, by affirming those rights. They said, some men are too ignorant, and vicious, to share in government. Possibly so, said we; and, by your system, you would always keep them ignorant, and vicious. We proposed to give all a chance; and we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant, wiser; and all better, and happier, together.

Moreover, with regards to Washington politicos trying to submit every part of society (and their allegedly ignorant, vicious members) to government control:

This is a world of compensations, and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves.

Doesn't Abraham Lincoln's Speech on the Sub-Treasury at Springfield (December 26, 1839) sound somewhat like he is refuting what the holier-than-thou Democrats insist is the difference between themselves and the greedy, flawed, treacherous members of the demonized opposition party?

Mr. Lamborn [a prominent Democrat] insists that the difference between the Van Buren party [the Democrats], and the Whigs [to a certain extent, the forerunners of the Republicans] is, that although, the former sometimes err in practice, they are always correct in principle — whereas the latter are wrong in principle — and the better to impress this proposition, he uses a figurative expression in these words: "The Democrats are vulnerable in the heel, but they are sound in the head and the heart."

The first branch of the figure, that the Democrats are vulnerable in the heel, I admit is not merely figuratively, but literally true. Who that looks but for a moment at their Swartwouts, their Prices, their Harringtons, and their hundreds of others [who have also handled the nation's purses in, uh, less than an honest way], scampering away with the public money to Texas [then an independent republic], to Europe, and to every spot of the earth where a villain may hope to find refuge from justice, can at all doubt that they are most distressingly affected in their heels with a species of "running itch."

It seems that this malady of the heels, operates on these sound-headed and honest-hearted creatures, very much like the cork-leg, in the comic song, did on its owner: which, when he had once got started on it, the more he tried to stop it, the more it would run away. At the hazard of wearing this point thread bare, I will related an anecdote, which seems too strikingly in point to be omitted.

A witty Irish soldier, who was always boasting of his bravery, when no danger was near, but who invariably retreated without orders at the first charge of an engagement, being asked by his Captain why he did so, replied: "Captain, I have as brave a heart as Julius Caesar ever had; but some how or other, whenever danger approaches, my cowardly legs will run away with it." So with Mr. Lamborn's party. They take the public money into their hand for the most laudable purpose, that wise heads and honest hearts can dictate; but before they can possibly get it out again their rascally "vulnerable heels" will run away with them.

Seriously: this proposition of Mr. Lamborn is nothing more or less, than a request that his party may be tried by their professions instead of their practices. Perhaps no position that the party assumes is more liable to, or more deserving of exposure, than this very modest request.

Doesn't Abraham Lincoln's demonstration of the Democrats' double standards in the 1852 election between his party's Millard Fillmore and the Democrats' Franklin Pierce remind you somewhat of the clueless-Palin-vs.-dream-candidate-Obama double standards during the campaign?

O ho! Judge [Douglas]; it is you, is it, that thinks a man [or a woman] should furnish proof of superiority of statesmanship, before he [or she] is looked to as a candidate for the first office? Do please show us those proofs in the case of your "gallant and honest man, Frank Pierce." Do please name a single one that you consider such. What good thing, or even part of a good thing has the country ever enjoyed, which originated with him? What evil thing has been averted by him? Compare his proofs of statesmanship with those of Mr. Fillmore, up to the times respectively when their names were first connected with presidential elections.

Doesn't Abraham Lincoln's "few words" defending maligned Republicans and conservative principles "to the Southern people" during his Cooper Union speech of February 27, 1860, sound like he is speaking about principled Republicans and earnest tea partiers to today's Democrats, élite Easterners, university professors (and students), Hollywood bigwigs, and other self-declared liberals and progressives?

You consider yourselves a reasonable and a just people; and I consider that in the general qualities of reason and justice you are not inferior to any other people. Still, when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us a reptiles, or, at the best, as no better than outlaws. You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to "Black Republicans." In all your contentions with one another, each of you deems an unconditional condemnation of "Black Republicanism" as the first thing to be attended to. Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable prerequisite — license, so to speak — among you to be admitted or permitted to speak at all. Now, can you, or not, be prevailed upon to pause and to consider whether this is quite just to us, or even to yourselves? Bring forward your charges and specifications, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny or justify.

And — mournfully — this from Abraham Lincoln January 27, 1838, Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield:

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

Mourning "all lives lost to gun violence" is like calling the people murdered on 9/11 victims of “airplane violence”

If only france had sensible gun control laws, the Paris attacks of November 13^th would not have happened

writes Benny Huang acidly, with irony galore.

Okay, everyone knows that isn’t true. france has gone way beyond “sensible” gun control laws and has, for all practical purposes, banned civilian ownership of firearms. It didn’t stop last week’s surreal carnage—and it won’t stop the next attack either.

Freelance reporter David Axe explained on the Daily Beast how fully automatic rifles have come to contaminate la République française. … As David Axe explains, it isn’t particularly difficult to obtain an AK-47 in france today—provided you have the proper underworld connections. The underworld, by definition, is the domain of the criminal class, so it should come as no surprise that bad guys can get their hands on serious firepower without much difficulty.

The problem is getting worse. In 2012, a young Muslim shot up a Jewish school in Toulouse, killing a teacher and three students. In January, a team of Muslim terrorists attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a left-wing satire magazine that regularly mocked religion—and didn’t spare Islam. There was also the attempted shooting spree in August of this year by a Muslim terrorist onboard an Amsterdam-to-Paris train that was thankfully thwarted by an American trio.

And that’s just the terrorism! France also suffers from ordinary violent crime, centered in its immigrant ghettoes, of course. The city of Marseille in the south of France has become something of a war zone in recent years, earning it the ignominious title “the most dangerous city in Europe.” Turf wars are fought with the same full-auto Kalashnikovs used in the most recent Paris attacks. “Marseille is sick with its violence,” then-Interior Minister Manuel Valls said in 2013.

If the recent Paris attacks prove anything it’s that mass shootings are not a uniquely American phenomenon. Some people will surely argue that the US still leads the world in violent rampages and that any comparison between us and them would be a false one. Of course, I don’t mean to imply that the US, when compared to Western Europe, has an equal number of spree killings, or even a proportional number of spree killings, but I will posit that the explanation for the disparity has little to do with differences in our laws.

The second amendment to the Constitution has been the law of the land since 1791. For the better part of two hundred years Americans managed to keep and bear arms with very few instances of people “going postal.” But then things began to change.

People were shocked when, in 1966, a man named Charles Whitman climbed the clock tower at UT-Austin and began sniping at students below. Stuff like that just didn’t happen in those more innocent times. In the decades that followed, the situation only worsened. The killing seemed to be everywhere in the 1990s—Jonesboro, Arkansas, Springfield, Oregon, and Paducah, Kentucky. The levy broke in 1999 when two teenagers in Colorado laid siege to their high school, killing thirteen people before committing suicide. Since then the massacres have all become a blur—Newtown, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, Charleston, the Sikh Temple. It never seems to end.

Liberals have indicted guns. They believe that banning them would be a quick fix and it’s what they strongly imply we should do—usually before issuing heated denials that anyone wants to trample your second amendment rights. They just want a few “common sense” controls to make sure guns don’t fall into the wrong hands, or so they say. But of course they want to ban guns and that’s why they look to European nations like France as their model. Spree killings just don’t happen there—except when they do.

Contrary to gun control propaganda, Europe has not escaped the modern scourge of spree killings. Norway’s tough gun control laws didn’t stop the monstrous Anders Brevik from killing 77 people, mostly children, in 2011. Germany’s tough gun control laws didn’t prevent Robert Steinhäuser from killing sixteen people at an Erfurt high school in 2002, nor did they prevent Tim Kretschmer from killing sixteen people “for fun” at a Winnenden secondary school in 2009. The Czech Republic’s gun control laws didn’t stop a gunman from shooting up a popular restaurant in 2015, killing nine. And of course France’s tough gun control laws didn’t stop the most recent attacks, the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the foiled train shooting, the Toulouse Jewish day school shooting, or even armed street crime.

Banning guns won’t get to the root of the problem, it will only disarm the victims. But just what is the problem? I would argue that we have two.

The first of these problems is a creeping darkness of the soul. I believe Mike Huckabee summed it up well when he remarked, in the aftermath of the Oregon community college shooting that “We have not so much a gun problem, we have a problem with sin and evil.” His remark did not sit well with liberals who were leery of his religious overtones. Also, they don’t want to admit that the revolutionary changes that have swept through society since the 1960s have been anything but positive. Instead they talk about guns. They would have us believe that the roots of our problem are as old as our Constitution and the bitter-clinger frontiersmen who built this country. To them it’s not evil, it’s “gun culture.”

 … The other problem is even more difficult to talk about. It’s called jihad. This unholy “holy war” is responsible for not only the Paris attacks but also the Fort Hood massacres and the military recruiting station shootings in Chattanooga and Little Rock.

If liberals are loathe to discuss the sin and evil problem, they are even more reluctant to talk about jihad because it feels like racism. Take for example the recent tweet from Moms Demand Action, a Michael Bloomberg-funded gun control group which advocates European-style gun control here in America. You’d think they’d keep quiet at a time when their preferred policies failed so miserably but they just couldn’t resist. “We are united in mourning all lives lost to gun violence” they proclaimed. Gun violence? Oh, I suppose that some of the people in Paris were killed with guns—and others with bombs—but none were killed by “gun violence.” They were killed by crazy-ass Muslim violence. Why can’t they bring themselves to say it?

This unwillingness to talk about radical Islam in connection with terroristic violence does us all a disservice because it lets the perps off the hook. It would be like calling the people murdered on 9/11 victims of “airplane violence.” Yes, airplanes played a role in what happened that day but no one was killed by a 747. They were killed by Mohammad Atta and eighteen of his buddies, all Muslims.

Guns are liberals’ favorite patsy, the inanimate objects they like to blame when they can’t—or won’t—account for what really ails us.

The November 13 attacks targeted activities that are dear to Parisians, symbols of the French joie de vivre

  … reports say at least 129 people died and more than 350 were wounded in last Friday’s attacks 

writes Carine Martinez-Gouhier at the Federalist;

99 people are still in critical condition. Terrorists all carried powerful rifles and suicide bomb vests, which they did not hesitate to detonate. Not only were those attacks the most deadly Paris has known in the past decades, they are likely to tremendously impact the way of life of Parisians and French people in the months to come. …

The Terrorists Chose Specifically French Targets

 … In their statement claiming responsibility for the attacks, ISIS declared targets were carefully chosen in advance. In fact, while the Charlie Hebdo attack aimed to suppress free speech, the November 13 attacks targeted activities that are dear to Parisians, symbols of the French joie de vivre: restaurants where diners were enjoying food and drinks on a Friday night, a soccer game (soccer is France’s favorite sport), and a legendary Parisian concert venue.

The attacks were obviously meant to make as many victims as possible and to change the way the French would go about their life. French President Francois Hollande started this by asking Parisians to stay home. But his recommendation was probably not necessary.

 … By definition, terrorism is meant to create a state of fear in the population. Economically, this is not good for France, of course, which is already struggling to reach an estimated 1.1 percent growth rate for 2015. More worrisome is how the country might be politically impacted by the attacks. The temptation to turn to populist voices may be easy. Although the next presidential election will take place in 2017, results from regional elections next month might give us a hint (supposing people will go out to vote). Marine Le Pen’s far-right Front National Party might end up gaining more support following the events.

Mourn, Then Take Action

What can be done, then?

The French should first give themselves time to mourn their dead. Three days of national mourning started on Sunday, November 15. Emotional reactions to the attacks should then be followed by serious questioning about the effectiveness of several policies.

There are times in life when one wishes to be wrong. Sadly, I can’t say we did not see these attacks coming. Not only had ISIS warned France several times, but it is no secret that some areas of France, and some suburbs of Paris, have become fertile breeding ground for Islamization of young people and weapons trafficking. This problem should be addressed without having to play contortionist to avoid hurting the feelings of anyone.

France has very restrictive speech laws. Forbid people to engage in open debate, and unscrupulous politicians will exploit fears. Open debate would bring additional ideas, probably good and bad, on how to better fight the enemy we are facing. Anyone who opposes the attacks should be able to understand that. To use a popular expression these days, the victims of the attacks received no trigger warnings (no pun intended) before being executed in cold blood. Censoring fears will not help.

A good example would start with debating allowing the French to be able to carry guns to defend themselves and their loved ones, if necessary. Do we need further evidence that strict gun laws do not prevent criminals from obtaining deadly weapons to commit their crimes? The police will never be able to react soon enough to all dangerous situations, not to mention cases like Friday’s attacks, in which the goal is to kill as many people as possible. Someone carrying a gun might not have stopped the attacks, but the death toll might have been reduced. After the November 13 attacks, the French deserve to at least have the opportunity to debate whether gun control has made their livee safer.

The Paris Attacks Are the Work of Islam Itself, Writes Salem Ben Ammar

In the post entitled The Paris Attacks Are the Work of Islam, and the Beginning of the End of Our Humanity, Dreuz's Salem Ben Ammar presents a controversial theory about the Jihadists.

In related news, leftist journalists are quietly scrubbing the pro-refuge tenor of their pre-attack articles…

Revising History: Quietly, Leftist Journalists Are Scrubbing the Pro-Refuge Tenor of Their Pre-Attack Articles

Without warning, without an apology, and without an explanation, the headline of a 14-month-old  France Inter article was changed over the weekend, leading the Dreuz blog to write France Inter insults us, then changes its titles to his its error.


France Inter's September 2014 title read: Réfugiés: le fantasme de l’infiltration terroriste (Refugees: The Fantasy of the Terrorist Infiltration).

Two days after the Paris attacks (see a picture of the Bataclan carnage), "in order to hide the evidence of their incompetence" writes Christian Larnet, the title was changed to Des terroristes parmi les migrants? (Terrorists Among the Migrants?).

Wizard of Id's Advice for a Comedian: How to Play It Safe on Campus

Parker and Hart's Wizard of Id takes on the PC culture.

Saying a Premature Peace Would Be a Worse Disaster, Nobel Peace Prize Winner Preaches War

M. Henri Lafontaine, president of the International Peace and Arbitration Association, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize [two years ago] and is a member of the Belgian Senate, has just left France for the United States, where he intends to conduct a campaign against the propaganda of certain American pacifists in favor of stopping the war. In conversation with a correspondent of the Herald, M. Lafontaine said that he proposes to preach throughout the United States that nothing could be more disastrous to the cause of civilization and justice than the conclusion of a premature peace.

— The New York Herald, European Edition, July 3, 1915

An American Tax Nightmare

The bureaucratic burden of identifying, verifying and reporting has caused many banks to regard American clients, particularly those of moderate means, as more trouble than they are worth 

wrote Stu Haugen in May as the former head for Republicans Abroad in France called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (Fatca) "a massive breach of the Fourth Amendment, which forbids unreasonable search and seizure."

Middle-class Americans living abroad are losing bank accounts and home mortgages and, in some cases, having their retirement savings exposed to debilitating taxes and penalties.

There is no recourse and no appeal process. Those impacted are left with the choice of uprooting their families (including foreign spouses and children), careers and businesses to re-establish a life in the United States; or to make the painful decision to renounce their citizenship.

Without significant and timely changes, that will only be the tip of the iceberg as foreign financial institutions continue their search for unprofitable American accounts. Remember, the vast majority of those renouncing citizenship are not wealthy tax evaders trading their passport for income tax savings; they are middle-class Americans, living overseas, fully compliant with their U.S. tax and reporting obligations.

A week later, the International Chairwoman of Democrats Abroad, Katie Solon, responded:

Stuart Haugen’s article on the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act is an accurate portrayal of Fatca’s failings but gives an incomplete account of nonpartisan efforts to limit its impact to the tax cheats who are the intended targets.

Democrats Abroad and several nonpartisan organizations of Americans overseas have been lobbying for four years for a “Same Country Safe Harbor” proposal to provide relief to law-abiding citizens and lessen the burden on financial institutions without giving cover to those hiding taxable assets in third-country accounts. The Same Country Safe Harbor plan would exempt from Fatca reporting the accounts of American citizens who are legal residents in the country in which the accounts are held.

The Democratic National Committee called for Fatca reform eight months ago. The Treasury Department could implement the exception without legislation, which Mr. Haugen and the sponsors of repeal admit is unlikely to happen in this Congress or the next.

If the Fatca Legal Action lawsuit is ever to succeed, it will take years. Right now, the Same Country Safe Harbor proposal is the best hope for urgent Fatca relief.

Last Leader of DDR: "It was clear to me that I was not really prime minister but administrator of a giant bankruptcy"

In a 25th anniversary article on the fall of the Berlin Wall, the New York Times' Alison Smale asked six Germans from different generations (roughly 25, 50 and 75 years old) to describe their views on the past, present, and future of Germany. Notably Lothar de Maizière, the first (and last) freely elected prime minister of East Germany, had things of interest to say.

Adapting to a New Life

Lothar de Maizière, 75:

The elections [in spring 1990] were not really elections — they were a plebiscite for the unity of Germany, a state ruled by law, a federal system with a social market economy and the Deutschmark. I knew very exactly studies on the state of East Germany economically, so it was clear to me that I was not really prime minister but administrator of a giant bankruptcy. Back then I had 160 clients a year as a lawyer, now I had 16 million clients, full of unbelievable expectations.

Lingering Differences

Mr. de Maizière, 75:

I visited a lawyer friend in Prague three years ago and asked why people there seemed more content than those in Berlin. Two things, he said: We are comparing with earlier, while you still compare with the West. And we are changing, while you were changed.

The Russian Connection

Mr. de Maizière, 75:

The first time [Mikhail S. Gorbachev and I] met in Moscow on April 29, 1990 ... I had brought a piece of the Berlin Wall … as gratitude for his words, “He who comes too late gets punished by life.” And then he said something that I will never forget: “Didn’t we all come too late?” Gorbachev is for me a hero from a Greek tragedy. He wanted to have a humanized form of socialism, and got a shabby capitalism, pretty much the shabbiest. He wanted a democratized Soviet Union, and got its collapse. And yet he remains one of the great saviors of the second half of the 20th century.

Regrets?

Mr. de Maizière, 75:

I always said there was a 10/10 generation — 10 years too long in East Germany to really make a fresh start, and 10 years too young to retire. And that is tragic, because they were the people who for 40 years effectively carried East Germany. And then they were told we don’t need you any more.

Plus Ça Change… A Sherlock Holmes Story from 1891 Proves Prescient

Ann Althouse links to a New York Post story about a bum boasting he makes $200 an hour panhandling (cheers to Instapundit).

Remember the Conan Doyle story about the anguished family who called Sherlock Holmes about the husband/father millionaire who had vanished for days?

In The Man with the Twisted Lip, what was worse was that the police had found a disfigured beggar who was wearing the millionaire's coat, and he refused to testify or explain why he was wearing the man's coat.

Dr Watson's story concludes as Holmes pulls on the beggar's beard, it comes off and it turns out to be the millionaire!

He explains that many years ago, he had lost his job and had had no choice but to turn to begging for a short term.

Here, however, he made a lot more money than he had at his regular, honest job, and so he had turned professional beggar, amassing his fortune over the years.

Stealth is the Left’s watchword: Oh, those stubborn conservatives, when will they ever learn the value of compromise?!

Supporters of Houston’s “Equal Rights” Ordinance (HERO) are predictably crying foul after voters resoundingly rejected their ballot measure last week

notes Benny Huang.

Apparently it lost only because bigots poisoned the debate with “misinformation.” Sore losers that they are, its proponents can’t accept that the voters understood what was at stake and voted accordingly.

 … Particularly galling to HERO supporters was the opposition’s succinct slogan: “No Men in Women’s Bathrooms.” Once voters understood the issue in those terms the ordinance was doomed. HERO’s supporters count the slogan as one of the most egregious “lies” told in a vicious smear campaign. The only problem is that it happens to be true.

 A little background on HERO would be appropriate here. The original HERO legislation debated in the Houston City Council in 2014 explicitly stated that any person would be allowed to use “public” restrooms consistent with his or her “gender identity.” In plain English that means that dudes would be allowed into ladies’ rooms—provided that those dudes believe in their heart of hearts that they were born with incorrect body parts…or simply claim to. Women changing into their sweats at a Curves gym might look up and see a guy standing there in all his naked glory; and as long as that guy proclaims himself to be a woman, the law would indulge his delusion.

 … Both sides know HERO is about bathrooms but only one side wants to talk about it. Stealth is the Left’s watchword.

Predictably, the Houston Chronicle also ran an article bemoaning the intransigent opposition. The subtitle of the article shouted: “Compromise suggested for city ordinance not enough for some GOP, faith leaders.” Oh, those stubborn conservatives, when will they ever learn the value of compromise?
 
Perhaps conservatives didn’t want to “compromise” with the homofascist mayor because she’d already admitted that the exclusion of bathroom language didn’t alter the law one iota. A compromise without concessions from both sides is no compromise at all. That’s just caving. And why should HERO opponents cave when they have the voters behind them?

It should come as no surprise that the Houston Chronicle endorsed HERO twice. … Jayme Fraser … knew that Mayor Parker’s compromise was bogus and yet she still wrote a ludicrous article implying that the anti-HERO camp was stubbornly refusing to meet HERO supporters halfway.

Liberals are generally pretty bad at compromise and the homofascist subset is absolutely incapable of it. This is the Civil Rights Movement all over again and you’re Bull Connor. Ergo, they get everything and you get nothing. They don’t always get their way because sometimes they just lose; but they never settle for half a loaf and they absolutely never give up.

On occasion, they’ll offer a faux compromise of the variety that Parker proposed. Other times they try the incrementalist approach—“settling” for a partial victory, only to return shortly thereafter wanting to renegotiate the deal. After three or four partial victories they find that they’ve achieved everything they wanted. But most of the time the LGBTQXYZ activists don’t even do that. They concoct phony hate crimes, they riot, they sue, they get people fired from their jobs, and occasionally they even murder people. When they finally taste sweet victory they run the rainbow banner up the flagpole and declare #Lovewins!

Be sure to read Benny's description of "the pickle that suburban Palatine, Illinois has found itself in trying to accommodate a delusional high school student who thinks he’s a girl."

Intolerable! Everyone must be forced to believe the Big Lie. This is a “civil rights issue” and nothing less than total capitulation will suffice. We wouldn’t meet Jim Crow supporters halfway, would we?

We lost the last war with the homofascists because we tried to accommodate them. We thought we could offer them civil unions—all the benefits of marriage without the word. They weren’t satisfied. We thought we could let them do their thing and it would never affect us, but soon they were forcing us to be unwilling participants in their sham weddings, demanding to use church-owned property for their ceremonies, and dismantling long-standing codes of conduct for teachers at religious schools. There is no “live and let live” with these people. It’s absolute servility or pitched battle, nothing in between.

Related by Benny Huang: • Every media outlet has chosen to share Lila Perry’s delusion that he’s a girl, which explains why noone can find the teen’s real name anywhere

• "No One Is!" Leftists and Their Calculated Lies Intended to Pacify the Bitter Clingers

• Ranger School: Everything in the Obama administration is make-believe and subordinated to the agenda—even truth

• That’s what nondiscrimination laws are—involuntary servitude laws

• Diversity compels society give up its traditions, its sacred rights, and even its basic decency

Free speech is dying a death of a thousand exceptions

"This is not a free speech issue!" Or so goes the slogan of the crusading censor.

Benny Huang is enthusiastic about the new book by the author of There is No Such Thing as a Free Press.

Mick Hume, free speech advocate and author of Trigger Warning (Is Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?) daftly disassembles the arguments of the shut-your-piehole crowd. Hume argues that the expression of controversial ideas is becoming nearly impossible in the West despite its professed adoration for free speech.

While Hume assures the reader that his book was not written in response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre which occurred just as he was wrapping up the project, he does discuss the hypocrisy of the European elites who suddenly became staunch defenders of Charlie's artistic expression—and acted as if they always had been. Western nations are full of censors, he argues, and many of them are in high places. Banning sentiments that might offend Muslims was fairly pedestrian before the Charlie killings and continued unabated after the fact.

While almost most people claim to support free speech in theory, plenty of people rationalize exceptions to the principle that essentially nullify the sacred liberty. Free speech, he argues, is dying a death of a thousand exceptions. He focuses primarily on his native Britain, where the situation is dire, but warns that even the United States, despite its expansive first amendment, is succumbing to this dangerous trend. Hume obliterates some of the common rationales for censorship, including "That's not free speech, it's hate speech" and Oliver Wendell Holmes's "You can't yell fire in a crowded theater!" His analysis is spot-on.    

Everyone knows that no fault divorce is required to liberate women from being trapped in commitment; Yet change the context to the cost of broken families, and suddenly everyone knows that men are running away from commitment

Everyone knows that traditional marriage is a cruel institution that “traps” women in commitment, depriving them of the romantic love their noble hearts desire

writes Dalrock, satire dripping from his jaws.

Everyone knows that no fault divorce is required to liberate women from being trapped in commitment.

Modern women’s enthusiasm for divorce is hardly a well kept secret. [Not all modern women view divorce as empowerment, but a large enough majority does feel this way, which is why divorce empowerment is ubiquitous in entertainment aimed at women.]  If you are looking at media aimed to women, divorce empowerment is a staple.  This is quite literally a shameless obsession.  As new commenter Anna mentioned recently:

It’s crazy that every time that I find an article about marriage, it’s either about the actual wedding or divorce. As a 26 year old woman that has been married for 6 years, I’m well aware of the pressure for divorcing. There’s always a “5 ways to know that your marriage is over”. This is how I found your website and it all makes so much sense, even though I’m not a christian. I have no idea why society is leaning towards destroying its foundations.

Yet change the context to the cost of broken families, and suddenly everyone knows that men are running away from commitment.  This is especially important when it comes to conservative backing for child support.  In 2005 Phyllis Schlafly laid out what should be the standard conservative position on a government program designed to destroy families in Federal Incentives Make Children Fatherless:

The federal incentives drive the system. The more divorces, and the higher the child-support guidelines are set and enforced (no matter how unreasonable), the more money the state bureaucracy collects from the feds.

Follow the money. The less time that non-custodial parents (usually fathers) are permitted to be with their children, the more child support they must pay into the state fund, and the higher the federal bonus to the states for collecting the money.

The states have powerful incentives to separate fathers from their children, to give near-total custody to mothers, to maintain the fathers’ high-level support obligations even if their income is drastically reduced, and to hang onto the father’s payments as long as possible before paying them out to the mothers…

We can no longer ignore how taxpayers’ money is incentivizing divorce and creating fatherless children. Nor can we ignore the government’s complicity in the predictable social costs that result from more than 17 million children growing up without their fathers.

Yet Schlafly is an extreme outlier among conservatives on this topic.  Conservatives are the strongest backers of the child support system, and this is due to a deeply held belief that broken families are caused by men who aren’t willing to stick around and raise their kids.  This belief is so strong that conservatives end up taking very unconservative positions on the family.  Instead of opposing a law that creates perverse incentives to break up families, they enthusiastically support it.  Instead of supporting marriage, they support the system designed to replace marriage.  Instead of supporting an incentive based structure for production, they are wedded to a crushing soviet style quota system that discourages hard work.

In Order To Solve Problems, It Is Imperative That You Have Problems to Solve

Jim Davis's Garfield does a good job of describing the modus operandi of white-knight politicians in-shining-armor who are eager to come to our rescue.

Ben Carson to the MSM: "The American People Are Waking Up to Your Games"

Ben Carson strikes back at the press:
"You see, what you're not going to find with me is somebody who just is going to sit back and let you be completely unfair, without letting the American people know what's going on."

Challenging Queries from the Mainstream Media

Amazingly enough, this Wizard of Id cartoon appeared in July, over three months before the first Democratic debate.

Hundreds of federal employees, including officials at the State and Justice departments, have been found to hold qualifications from a bogus diploma mill operation

Seen from the Internet, it is a vast education empire

writes Declan Walsh in a major New York Times report:

hundreds of universities and high schools, with elegant names and smiling professors at sun-dappled American campuses.

Yet on closer examination, this picture shimmers like a mirage. The news reports are fabricated. The professors are paid actors. The university campuses exist only as stock photos on computer servers. The degrees have no true accreditation.

In fact, very little in this virtual academic realm, appearing to span at least 370 websites, is real — except for the tens of millions of dollars in estimated revenue it gleans each year from many thousands of people around the world, all paid to a secretive Pakistani software company.

That company, Axact, operates from the port city of Karachi, where it employs over 2,000 people and calls itself Pakistan’s largest software exporter, with Silicon Valley-style employee perks like a swimming pool and yacht.

Axact does sell some software applications. But according to former insiders, company records and a detailed analysis of its websites, Axact’s main business has been to take the centuries-old scam of selling fake academic degrees and turn it into an Internet-era scheme on a global scale.

 … In academia, diploma mills have long been seen as a nuisance. But the proliferation of Internet-based degree schemes has raised concerns about their possible use in immigration fraud, and about dangers they may pose to public safety and legal systems. In 2007, for example, a British court jailed Gene Morrison, a fake police criminologist who claimed to have degree certificates from the Axact-owned Rochville University, among other places.

Little of this is known in Pakistan, where Axact has dodged questions about its diploma business and has portrayed itself as a roaring success and model corporate citizen. …/…

Real-Life Troubles

Many customers of degree operations, hoping to secure a promotion or pad their résumé, are clearly aware that they are buying the educational equivalent of a knockoff Rolex. Some have been caught.

In the United States, one federal prosecution in 2008 revealed that 350 federal employees, including officials at the departments of State and Justice, held qualifications from a non-Axact-related diploma mill operation based in Washington State.

The effects have sometimes been deeply disruptive. In Britain, the police had to re-examine 700 cases that Mr. Morrison, the falsely credentialed police criminologist and Rochville graduate, had worked on. “It looked easier than going to a real university,” Mr. Morrison said during his 2007 trial.

In the Middle East, Axact has sold aeronautical degrees to airline employees, and medical degrees to hospital workers. One nurse at a large hospital in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, admitted to spending $60,000 on an Axact-issued medical degree to secure a promotion.

But there is also evidence that many Axact customers are dupes, lured by the promise of a real online education.

Left's Journalism Hero Becomes France's Foremost Anti-Immigration Mayor

In a past life he was France’s leading advocate for journalists, fighting to spring them from dictators worldwide, a fearless defender of freedom of the press on four continents and a hero to free-speech advocates

writes Adam Nossiter in the New York Times.

That was then. Now, Robert Ménard, the man who founded Reporters Sans Frontières — Reporters Without Borders — has become a symbol of right-wing extremism in France.

No longer a journalists’ advocate but the mayor of the largest city under far-right control in France, he says there are too many immigrants in his town, too many veils, too many Muslim children and too much culture that is not French.

Mr. Ménard has ordered the laundry off the window ledges, the satellite dishes off the roofs and Syrian refugees out of public housing. He has counted the Muslim children in schools here — a strict no-no in secular France — and increased police patrols on horseback in this whitewashed old Mediterranean city of 70,000 people, high unemployment, high poverty, narrow stone streets and medieval churches.

“People feel like they are being replaced,” Mr. Ménard said an interview inside the 18th-century City Hall. “Immigration has become massive.”

For the far right in France, his tenure as mayor of Béziers has become a laboratory of sorts, watched with fascination by the country’s media, chagrin by liberal-minded opponents and glee by the National Front party of Marine Le Pen.

 … “We are the avant-garde of change in France,” Mr. Ménard, 62, declared in the interview.

  … to Mr. Ménard, it is all straightforward. He wants most if not all of the immigrants to go somewhere else.

“I don’t want this city to be majority-Muslim, at all,” he said. “There is a majority of the Muslim population that is incapable of living within the norms of this country.”

“I love this country,” he said, ticking off France’s prowess in literature, art and architecture, even its “way of looking at women. I am as attached to them as to my own eyes,” he said.

“The identity of this city is not a Muslim identity,” Mr. Ménard continued. “This is a problem of numbers. When you’ve got two-thirds of the kids in a school with Muslim names — that’s a disaster. Impossible. There’s no way you could want this.”

In September, he strode into public housing here, wearing his tricolor official sash — the French national colors — and accompanied by a retinue of aides, to accost a Syrian refugee wearing a Berkeley T-shirt.

In his carefully enunciated diction, Mr. Ménard told the bemused-looking refugee, “Sir, you are not welcome in this city.”

The episode was filmed and posted on YouTube by the City of Béziers.

 … Mr. Ménard founded Reporters Sans Frontières in 1985 with friends, and until he left it in 2008, was an uncompromising defender of free speech, becoming ever more so as the years went on, and even speaking up against the law silencing French Holocaust deniers like Robert Faurisson.

Mr. Ménard was born in French Algeria and was forced to leave with his family, along with millions of other Frenchmen, when the country gained independence in 1962 — a background critics say explains his hostility toward Muslim immigrants.

More on Robert Menard