From Across the Pond, a Nation of Cat Lovers

The Daily Telegraph sports a collection of photos under the title A nation of cat lovers (favourite British moggies in pictures), including a couple featuring Winston Churchill.

Meeting the rainbow bullies halfway never works because they see their struggle as a new civil rights movement

Yes, the meanings of words can change, agrees Benny Huang; but why is it that they always seem to change just at the moment the Left decides they should? (Update: thanks to Ed Driscoll and to Bird Dog for linking us.)

Gloucester County, Virginia wasn’t expecting to find itself in the midst of the never-ending culture wars when it told a female high school student named Gavin Grimm that she isn’t entitled to use the boys’ facilities just because she suffers from the delusion that she’s a boy. Grimm sued her school with the assistance of the Department of Justice and the ACLU. In a recent 2-1 decision by the 4^th US Circuit of Appeals, Grimm won her case.

In order to find some accommodation for Grimm her high school went as far as installing three single-stall bathrooms throughout the school. I wonder how much those bathrooms cost and what was displaced to make room for them? For that matter, what will happen to those bathrooms after she graduates? This girl’s mental illness sure is a heavy burden on the taxpayers and her fellow students.
 
Grimm refused to use the bathrooms installed just for her because accommodation was never her goal. She wants to be treated like a boy and she will not be satisfied with anything less. Let this be a lesson: Meeting the rainbow bullies halfway never works because they see their struggle as a new civil rights movement. Their aim is absolute victory which necessarily requires your unconditional surrender. “Compromise” is not in their vocabulary; why is it in ours?

 … The bathroom issue can and should be hashed out at the local level because federal law is silent on the matter. The reason that isn’t happening is because control freaks in the Obama Administration won’t allow it. In 2015, the Department of Education issued a policy letter stating: “When a school elects to separate or treat students differently on the basis of sex… a school generally must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity.” The 4^th Circuit found that a lower court failed to give this policy letter its due deference—probably because the policy letter is not the law. President Obama does not have the authority to tack clauses onto existing statutes just because he wishes they were there. That’s what dictators do, not presidents. The policy letter is, at best, a suggestion. Or at least it should be.

This isn’t even the first redefinition of the word “sex” in Title IX to mean something else entirely. Today “sex” can even mean “sexual orientation,” which is almost always code for sexual conduct. It was not interpreted this way until 2016 when a Clinton-appointed federal judge put a new spin on a 44-year old law. Now Title IX is being treated as if it axiomatically applies to “sexual orientation.” In time people will forget that there was ever a time that it didn’t.

Title IX was supposed to be a women’s rights bill but it became a “gay” “rights” bill, then a “trans” “rights” bill because judges decreed it to be so. Some people I know wouldn’t see the problem with this expansion of “rights,” so let me explain. Besides the fact that it goes far beyond the federal government’s enumerated powers, it also sets a problematic precedent. The lesson people will learn is that they don’t have to go through the process of changing laws as long as they have right on their side. And who, after all, believes that they have wrong on their side? No one I know.

If a law similar to Title IX is necessary to protect homosexuals—and I’m certainly not saying that it is—then it can be passed the old-fashioned way through the legislative process. Merely changing the meaning of the operative word in an old statute is cheating and it will surely diminish the rule of law.

Ironically, all of this word-morphing has gotten out of control precisely because people want to hide behind a false “rule of law” façade while advancing the rule of men. The rule of law is the idea that our law is supreme and must be obeyed by all. The rule of men is what exists in most of the world; the population is obliged to obey powerful people simply because they’re powerful. Powerful people are not subject to the law themselves and can change it at their whim. The law is what they say it is.
 
By changing the meaning of words, powerful people can rule by decree while pretending to hold the law in the highest regard. To see how this works in action, let’s look at an example from New York City where a man named Shawn Thomas was fined for using an e-cigarette on a subway platform, which is not actually illegal. Thankfully, Mr. Thomas decided not to take it sitting down.

Vaping is not smoking and the two words cannot be used interchangeably. The very purpose of e-cigarettes is to allow smokers and ex-smokers to get their nicotine fix in places where smoking is not allowed—which happens to be almost everywhere in New York City these days. Predictably, anti-smoking zealots are beginning to show that they are no more tolerant of odorless, harmless water vapor than they are of actual tobacco smoke. I can only conclude that anti-smoking hysteria isn’t and never was about second-hand smoke.

In the case of the People v. Shawn Thomas, the state argued that there was no need to pass a new law against vaping in public places because the old one covering smoking suffices—which confirms my suspicion that existing law was never about second-hand smoke. In any case, the state was asserting its authority to make up laws on the spot through the redefinition of words. That ought to scare anyone, even the most strident anti-smoking crusader.

Fortunately for Shawn Thomas, this argument didn’t persuade the judge who actually seemed to care what the text of the law said. New York defines smoking as “the burning of a lighted cigar, cigarette, pipe or any other matter or substance which contains tobacco.” E-cigs do not contain tobacco and nothing is burnt or lighted. Shawn Thomas won his case—and so did the rule of law.

Smoking is not vaping. One is illegal on the subway and the other one is not. Pretty simple.

But for people who want to fine their fellow citizens for doing nothing illegal the distinction presents something of a problem. These people unilaterally change the meaning of the verb “to smoke” and then demand that others respect “the law.” What they really want others to respect is their power to issue diktats.

If words have no objective meanings then they are nothing more than tokens of power. Powerful people can change their meanings as they please—and change them back just as easily. As liberals like to whine, “The meanings of words can change!” Yes, I suppose that’s true. But why do the definitions of words only change when leftists want them to? Who died and made them the final arbiter of the English language? The rest of us need to stop letting them get away with this nonsense. 

Do the Rich Not Pay Their Fair Share?

… retribution is a poor rationale for taxation

writes The Economist.

Nor is the current pattern of contribution to the public purse obviously "unfair": the richest 1% of Americans pay more than a quarter of all federal taxes (and fully 40% of income taxes), while taking less than 20% of pre-tax income.

Man's Best Friend

The Daily Telegraph presents 15 photos of Man's best friend: heartwarming old photos of Brits and their dogs.

Fascinating early photographs of London

The Daily Telegraph presents some Fascinating early photographs of London…

Won't Americans be lucky, won't Americans be happy, when Bernie will finally be able do for the USA what Hugo did for Venezuela?!

My God!

After two and a quarter centuries of unabashed suffering, of weeping and gnashing of teeth, of constantly being in the wake of the forward-looking and more advanced Europeans (with the Europeans' second-to-none intelligence, with the Europeans' second-to-none compassion, with the Europeans' second-to-none intelligence, with the Europeans' second-to-none tolerance, with the Europeans' second-to-none intelligence, with the Europeans' second-to-none humanism), the American people have finally found leaders who will bring about what the suffering masses have always dreamt of, what the masses have been pining for for 240 years:

"Fundamentally transforming the United States of America" so that it is no longer the capitalist country, the nightmarish hellhole that Europe's élites have been generously warning us (and especially their own people) of since… Since when? Well, since the American Revolution, no less.

Thanks to Bernie (as well as Barack), Americans are finally at a stage to see their country leave barbarism behind and go boldly forward to a new degree of civilization and enjoy:
• as many taxes as the Europeans;
• as many laws, as many rules, and as many regulations as the Europeans;
• and as many officials, as many functionaries, and as many bureaucrats as the Europeans.

Won't Americans be lucky, won't Americans be happy, when Bernie will finally be able do for the USA what Hugo and Nicolas (gracias por Ed Driscoll) have done for Venezuela (gracias por Instapundit)?

If only Barack and Bernie could do for the USA what Hugo and Nicolas have done for Venezuela

At least in South America, money doesn't reign (anymore).

Wouldn't Americans be lucky, wouldn't Americans be happy, if only (Barack and Liz and) Bernie could do for the USA what Hugo and Nicolas (gracias por Ed Driscoll y por Pájaro Perro) have done for Venezuela?

Six Further Controversial Bible Verses Are Tackled by a Believer

Jeff Sanders treates us to a further Six Controversial Bible Verses the Skeptics Love to Hate (thanks to brother Ed Driscoll). Here is one of the six:

Should you cut your hands off or pluck your eyes out if you sin? (Matthew 5:29-30) 

Jesus uses pretty strong language here, commanding His disciples to pluck out their eyes or to cut off their hands if those parts of the body cause them to sin. But no, Jesus is not commanding self-mutilation. Nowhere do any of His disciples ever do this, and the cause of sin is not the eye or the hand. We sin because of what is going on inside us, in our minds (which Jesus is careful to point out in all four Gospels).

Jesus is just using normal everyday hyperbole to get his point across. We exaggerate often ("I've told you a million times to stop!"). Here He is merely telling His people in rather charged language to do whatever it takes to stay away from sin. Sin has extreme consequences, so go to extremes to stay away from it.

And again, we get interesting information from the Instapundit comments section, just like last week.

Related: Bible Verses That May Not Be as Extreme or as Immoral or as Ridiculous as Initially Thought

Double Standards: The left's activists and their “our money good, their money bad” propaganda

Four hundred protesters associated with the Democracy Spring movement were arrested in Washington, DC last week after demonstrators descended upon the US Capitol

writes Benny Huang.

They spoke out against money in politics, the Koch brothers, and the Citizens United ruling that overturned key provisions of campaign finance law. The demonstration was clearly a statement against corporate influence in politics.

The protesters aren’t entirely wrong. Yes, political influence is unequally distributed because money begets power and vice versa. A guy who changes oil for a living doesn’t have as much pull as a guy who owns an oil company. But what can be done about it?

Societies that have experimented with radical egalitarianism have yielded horrific results—and none of them can even claim to have achieved their purported goal of leveling the playing field for everyone.

We’re left to ponder why efforts to equalize political power always fail. Could it be that even those who demand equal voices in government don’t really want it? From observing Democracy Spring in action I can only conclude that the answer is yes. They’re neither class warriors nor small-“d” democrats; they’re just hacks.

Take, for example, Democracy Spring’s fixation on the libertarian Koch brothers, the Left’s new Emmanuel Goldstein. I’m sure that Democracy Spring would have you believe that they simply want the Koch brothers to butt out of politics because their substantial fortune buys them outsized influence; but that can’t be the real reason because they don’t want all filthy rich political donors to butt out. Tellingly, there’s no Two Minutes Hate against George Soros.

George Soros is exactly the kind of unscrupulous hedge fund manager that the Left should despise by default—and yet they don’t. Gee, do you think it’s because he’s their sugar daddy? A 2010 report from Opensecrets.org contrasting the Koch brothers’ contributions to Soros’ contributions revealed that both sides dump money into politics by the truckload. Trying to calculate who spends more is difficult because they spend differently.

"Ever since Americans were old enough to crawl in front of a television set," adds Kyle Becker,

they’ve been told that Republicans are the party of rich white guys, and Democrats are the champions of the poor. Prepare to flip that thinking upside down. … 20 of the top 32 donors lean Democrat, while only 6 lean Republican. The rest are on the fence. … if you factor in all the indirect benefits the Democrat Party gets from the non-profit sector, left-wing activism, public and private sector unions, Wall Street banks, universities, and superfund contributors, it has been estimated by Dr. David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin in their book The New Leviathan that the Republican Party is outspent in politics by a factor of 7-to-1by a factor of 7-to-1. Bear this in mind when the left goes off on a tirade about the Koch Brothers bogeymen, who come in 59th on a list of top contributors. Public and private sector unions leave the Koch Brother’s measly $18 million over 25 years in the dust.

Benny Huang continues:

But Democracy Spring, while claiming that it only wants to eradicate money’s corrupting influence, doesn’t mention Soros’s substantial contributions. Is it because Soros is funding Democracy Spring? Campaign Director Kai Newkirk says Soros hasn’t “given us a dime,” but the same cannot be said of its supporting organizations. Democracy Spring’s website boasts of endorsements from more than one hundred groups, some of which are funded with Soros money. The political titan MoveOn.org, for example, is listed as a Democracy Spring endorser and has received funding from Soros. Other endorsing groups that have taken Soros money include People for the American Way and Demos.

One endorser, an organization calling itself The Other 98%, even has a handy infographic on its website to explain why the billionaire Koch brothers are bad but billionaire George Soros is good. I could find no evidence that The Other 98% is funded by George Soros though its infographic wreaks of agitprop. It depicts Soros as a public-minded philanthropist and the Koch brothers as greedy, evil tycoons who use their money to advance the devil’s agenda. It’s more “our money good, their money bad” propaganda—and that is why these people lack credibility. Despite their rhetoric, it’s not “We the People” versus the corporations, nor is it the 98 percent versus the super-rich 2 percent. It’s their favorite billionaire against yours.

Once you understand the endorsing organizations’ support from (and for?) George Soros it suddenly becomes clear why these crusaders against money in politics don’t protest his influence-peddling. Even if the leaders of this Democracy Spring movement are completely sincere in their desire to drive all the big donors from politics (and I’m not sure that they are) their endorsing organizations are not. There’s almost an unspoken agreement—the endorsing organizations will continue to support Democracy Spring as long as their own donors are shielded from criticism. Democracy Spring accepts this condition because it wants their support.

If Democracy Spring wants to end the corporate corruption of our democratic process they might want to focus their efforts on the troubling trend of corporations threatening states with economic sanctions. This tactic appears to work well because large corporations can inflict real pain upon the populations of states that refuse to do their bidding.

For example, the Walt Disney Company recently threatened Georgia that it would pull all film production from that state if the governor signed a religious freedom bill. The bill, which really shouldn’t be necessary in a country that already has the first and thirteenth amendments, protects private business owners from homosexuals who want to make them unwilling participants in same-sex weddings.

 … Why are these anti-corporate activists not raising hell? Disney is an enormous, out-of-state media conglomerate that issued an ultimatum to a state governor to veto a bill that was passed overwhelmingly by the people’s elected representatives—and the governor complied. A huge corporation said ‘jump’ and a Governor Deal said ‘how high?’ Sadly, I think nearly all of our state governors would have done the same.

I can hear the objections now—that the bill was terrible, awful, discriminatory, practically Jim Crow all over again. That’s nonsense of course, but it’s also irrelevant. What matters is that the people of Georgia wanted that bill and presumably still do but they can’t have it because the corporations sounded a resounding “No!”

The Left’s support for these corporate boycotts tells me that they don’t always side with the people against the corporations. When the people are “bigots” they like to see corporations thrash them into line. They can’t say unequivocally that the will of the people should prevail when it collides with the will of corporations. It depends, really. Are the corporations progressive? Are the people backwards hicks? These details matter.

If that’s your position you are neither anti-corporate nor pro-democracy. You’re not leading a People’s movement against corporate interests. Stop lying to yourselves and the rest of us. Hacks like you don’t get to claim lofty ideals because you don’t have any. You have an agenda, nothing more.

Other states have had fights with corporations over other bills, most of which involve protecting people of faith targeted by homofascist bullies. That’s because homosexuals, far from being the underdogs they pretend to be, are well-organized, well-connected, and extremely well-funded. When people try to defend themselves the homofascists unleash the corporate hounds. Works every time.

Walmart, for example, exerted a lot of political pressure on Arkansas’s governor to veto a religious freedom bill in that state. The governor signed a watered-down version. So it’s official—liberals took the side of Walmart over religious freedom. Walmart! Hating Walmart is reflexive for liberals, almost like breathing. The aforementioned Other 98% has even started its own Walmart boycott, though not because Walmart hates religious freedom or because it used its political clout to overrule the will of the people. They’re boycotting Walmart because it doesn’t yet pay its employees $15 an hour. Liberals would rather waterboard a baby seal than shop at Walmart but clearly they don’t hate Walmart as much as they hate Christians. That’s a special kind of hate.

It’s undeniable that people with big checkbooks exert more power than the rest of us. That’s a truism that will probably never change. But the people who complain the most about it should get real and admit that they aren’t really concerned about corporate influence or money in politics. That’s a pose, not a position. What they don’t like is when it’s used against them, to thwart their policy goals and block their legislation. That’s understandable, I suppose, but it shouldn’t be confused with principle.

Isn't Every System of Belief Equally Valid and Don't We Need to Tolerate Diversity?

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

The Science Is Settled

The Science Is Settled (thanks to Ed Driscoll)

Do airline companies assume that terrorists can only afford a seat in economy class?

As a frequent plane passenger I often have to go through the charade of the “security theatre” before boarding a flight

writes Koen de Regt of Johannesburg to The Economist (“No more of the same, please”, November 14th), calling it Play Acting.

I have lost many nail clippers, because everyone knows how dangerous those things are in the hands of a terrorist.

Why then, I wonder, do they still serve dinner with steel knives and forks in business class? Do airline companies assume that terrorists can only afford a seat in economy class?

Ten years ago, incidentally, Koen de Regt was living in Amsterdam.

All socialists claim to be democratic; there are no self-described “undemocratic socialists” or “anti-democratic socialists”

It takes a certain chutzpah to insist that food lines are actually a good thing

notes Benny Huang wryly on Front Page Mag

—but that’s exactly what Bernie Sanders did in 1985 when he was the mayor of Burlington, Vermont. An old video of Sanders, a self-described “democratic” socialist, has surfaced in which he speaks favorably of the Marxist government of Nicaragua. The video was recorded in August of 1985, just weeks after he visited Nicaragua at the invitation of the left-wing junta.

Sanders went beyond decrying American involvement in that nation’s dirty civil war and actually praised the Soviet-supported Sandinistas, their policies, and even their food lines. “You know, it’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food,” said Sanders. “That’s a good thing. In other countries the rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”      

 … The Nicaragua that Sanders visited during the 1980s was distinctly socialist but not particularly democratic. In 1979, the Sandinistas overthrew dictator Anastasio Somoza and instituted rule by decree while promising democratic elections. As time passed, however, it became evident that one dictatorship had replaced another.

  … In 1984 the Sandinistas, under internal and international pressure, allowed the people to vote in an election whose legitimacy has been debated ever since. While some international observers concluded that it was imperfect but fair, others have called it a sham. At very least, we know that the elections took place under a “state of emergency” declared by the ruling Sandinistas in 1982. Basic freedoms such as free speech, press, and assembly were suspended. Independent radio and television broadcasts were banned.

It’s rather difficult to win an election when your opponent won’t allow you to talk, meet, publish, or broadcast over the airwaves. The state of emergency continued until 1988.
Legitimate or not, the Sandinistas were the clear victors of the 1984 election that they had only begrudgingly allowed. They promised another election in 1985, the year Mayor Sanders visited, which they reneged on. It wasn’t until 1990 that the Nicaraguan people were permitted to cast ballots again. This time the Marxists were tossed out.

In the span of eleven years the Sandinistas allowed only two elections, neither of which they actually wanted to hold. One of these elections may have been rigged and the other they lost. Was the “democratic” socialist Bernie Sanders dismayed by the lack of democracy in Nicaragua?

Not in the least.

 … It should be noted here that all socialists claim to be democratic. There are no self-described “undemocratic socialists” or “anti-democratic socialists,” even among those who plainly display authoritarian tendencies. Even the Soviet Union claimed to be democratic, more democratic in fact than our own country. Democracy worked a little differently in their country, you see, because the Communist Party considered itself to be the only authentic voice of the proletariat. If any other party managed to win an election that could only mean that the capitalists/fascists/imperialists had perverted the process. Only Communist Party members were therefore permitted to win elections.

More or less the same rationale is and has been used in all socialist countries. East Germany was actually called the German Democratic Republic, a name that government officials used profusely and without irony. The ruling Socialist Unity Party won elections by absurd margins because the game was rigged. Cubans are still anxiously awaiting the free elections that Castro promised when he came to power in 1959. Even North Korea, the last bastion of Stalinism on earth, calls itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

So what is this thing called democratic socialism? If it exists at all it cannot be distinguished from other varieties of socialism or by the public statements of its supporters. Fidel Castro and Kim Jong-Un would both tell you that they are democratic socialists.

While some news outlets deliberately avoid the subject of Sanders’ socialism, others such as the taxpayer-funded NPR mislead their listeners (perhaps deliberately) about what this serious presidential candidate truly believes. In August 2015, NPR reporter John Dillon explained to his audience that Senator Sanders is actually the good kind of socialist—the democratic kind. Again, show me a socialist who claims to be anything else.

Dillon’s entire article takes on the exasperated tone of an intellectual who’s tired of explaining to the ignorant American public that they have nothing to fear from socialism. Americans, you see, have this weird phobia of progressive causes that just won’t die despite years of contrary messaging emanating from Hollywood and the elite media. Dillon Writes: “[Sanders] says the kind of socialism he advocates is the Democratic socialism seen in Scandinavia and other countries in Europe.” Yes, he says that—but if Dillon were a reporter and not a stenographer he wouldn’t take Sanders’ statement at face value. He would look a little closer and see that Sanders never met a red dictatorship he didn’t like. Dillon continues: “Those governments support paid sick leave, universal health care and free higher education.” Dillon doesn’t pose the question of when Sanders stopped supporting the Central American brand of socialism. Nothing in the article suggests that Sanders ever did.

The same article quotes Professor Garrison Nelson of the University of Vermont: "This is not communism; this is not five-year plans, collectivized agriculture and nationalized industry." Not that Sanders would oppose any of that, by the way. That’s what existed in Nicaragua where Sanders went to undercut his country’s foreign policy and bolster the spirits of the Marxists. That’s also what existed in the Soviet Union, where Sanders honeymooned in 1988. It beggars belief to suppose that a hypothetical President Sanders would oppose those policies even here. Would he veto a bill to nationalize, for example, the petroleum industry? Pharmaceuticals? I doubt it.  
 
“Democratic” socialism sounds great to a lot of people because it sounds like free stuff. A critical mass of Americans now votes for what they want rather than working for it. They scoff at the rest of us who see this attitude as the slippery slope to banana republic status. Denmark is their model, they say, not some bankrupt third world backwater. But then the mask slips and we see that this brand of socialism is nothing but old wine in new bottles. Bernie Sanders, the cranky old Sandinista fanboy, is not the wave of the future. He’s the last dying breath of a failed dream that truly deserves its fate because it was ill-conceived in the first place.

Bible Verses That May Not Be as Extreme or as Immoral or as Ridiculous as Initially Thought

Jeff Sanders seeks to explain 6 Controversial Bible Passages the Skeptics Love to Hate (thank ye to brother Ed Driscoll). As he notes, leftists are in the habit of using the more "unusual" passages or commands in scripture

to show that the Bible is ridiculous or anti-women or anti-science or just downright immoral.

Here is just one of his six examples that perhaps ain't as controversial as depicted:

A widow must marry her brother-in-law? (Deuteronomy 25:10) 

This is a passage that teaches "levirate marriage" (which was quite common in the ancient world). "Levirate" comes from the Latin word levir, meaning "brother-in-law." The law states that if a man has a wife, but he dies without an heir, she must marry his brother so that they can have a child to inherit the man's possessions. Sounds terrible to our modern ears, doesn't it?

But in the ancient agrarian world, it was practical and merciful. If a widow did not have any children from her first husband, then the land could be sold off, and she would be left destitute. By marrying her brother-in-law, she would be keeping the property (which she may have brought into the family) within the family. She and her family could lose the property if she married someone from the outside. The brother-in-law could refuse to marry her, but according to verses 7-10 she could go through a ceremony to publicly shame him into marrying her.

In marriage the woman would be financially secure and she would have children to take care of her in her old age. Sounds strange to us today, I know, but that was the "Social Security/Medicare" set-up of the ancient world.

But the InstaPundit comments section also contains information of interest.

Rancher Jack refers to Strong's Exhaustive Concordance to the Holy Bible with Hebrew and Greek Dictionaries while MITM attempts to explain "Turn the other cheek":

The key point [per one New Testament scholar] of turning the other cheek was that in order to strike you again that way, the striker had to treat you as a social equal, rather than as inferior. Thus Jesus, in suggesting this, was standing up for human dignity despite not hitting back, rather than advocating just taking whatever anyone felt like dishing out.

Meanwhile, Terentia picks a further handful of Bible verses to shed light upon:

"An eye for an eye" is not a prescription for revenge. It is a limitation on the fallen human propensity to up the ante. It is a prohibition on escalation.
Caesar is your master? Caesar isn't mine. I pay taxes but that doesn't make Caesar my master. 

Finally, 3Subject points out what is perhaps the main problem with Western leftists who, say, after an nth Islamist attack, hold that the main problem is religion in general and not Islam per se…

According to the Instapundit comments section (which is itself informed by the cottage industry devoted to "explaining" the "real" Islam), the Bible is a book that contains problematic passages that must be explained, historicized, and contextualized. The fact that most Christians don't act on the bizarre and sociopathic messages contained in the Bible is a sign of civilization and sophistication

The Qur'an, meanwhile, is viewed a quasi-magical text whose problematic passages utterly resist interpretation, historicization, and contextualization, and literally compel Muslims to commit violence. The fact that most Muslims don't act on the bizarre and sociopathic messages contained in the Qur'an is a sign that they're not "really" Muslims, or are secretly supporting the fanatics, or that they're engaging in "taqiyyah" while quietly working to undermine all that is right and good in the world.

Related:
• What Does the Bible Say About Socialism?
• Six Startling Contrasts Between the Bible and the Quran
• Does the Bible Teach the Same Kind of 'Holy War' as the Quran?
• How to Explain the Necessity of Jesus' Death to Muslims

What big corporations hate is freedom of the individual conscience, internally governed families, and churches powerful enough to stand up to the make-believe righteousness of government decrees

Georgia state Senator William Ligon asks but does not answer a question on today's Wall Street Journal op-ed page 

writes Andrew Klavan (thanks to Ed Driscoll):

“Why Are Companies Taking Sides Against Religious Liberty?” The question is raised by the ferocious corporate response to attempts in Georgia and other states to reinforce at the state level religious protections already guaranteed by federal law.

The New York Times, a former newspaper, has scurrilously and dishonestly labeled these "Anti-Gay Laws," because they would prevent priests and pastors from being forced to perform gay marriages against their faiths and consciences.

 … Apparently puzzled by all this, Ligon quotes a study showing "economic competitiveness is stronger in countries with fewer government restrictions on religious liberty."

But what on earth makes him think corporations are interested in competition? Corporations and other successful businesses love big government precisely because it stifles competition. The big guys can pay lawyers to cut through government red tape while the little guy with a better idea and a cheaper price is crushed beneath taxes and regulations.

What big corporations hate is freedom of the individual conscience, internally governed families, and churches powerful enough to stand up to the make-believe righteousness of government decrees. All of these things tend to generate independent action and thoughtful morality which can get in the way of profits. People who think for themselves and pray with others tend to be a little less quick to watch the latest soul-degrading film or half-time show or to buy a product simply because it's the going thing.

Freedom is good for business in general, but it is not good for an individual business that has already made it to the top. Where freedom and competition thrive, prices fall and good ideas rise. Where government coerces, where government pays the freight, where government grants you "rights" to the labor and products of others, prices soar and good ideas that threaten the status quo are trampled under and left behind.

Virtually every founding father declared that American-style freedom could not exist without true religion. "It is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand," as John Adams put it. As true religion fades, as families cease to operate as independent governing units, the power of the powerful to coerce grows stronger. And when the powerful can coerce the powerless, big business profits.

Thus the left — which always accomplishes exactly the opposite of what it says it intends — serves big business with its ethos of "inclusion," which is really an ethos of coercion in disguise. Of course corporations will fight to defend that. It's meat and potatoes to them.

MSM Cartoonist: Wouldn't We All Be Better Off If Men Stopped Acting Like Men?

Wiley Miller's Non Sequitur is far from unfunny, but it hardly veers from (self-serving) cultural PC concepts such as the idea that if only we could have less independent and more compliant men amongst our citizenry (those who act otherwise only encourage the wolves in our midst and/or turn out to be wolves themselves), society would move forward by leaps and bounds…

Talking About Sports Instead

 Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller

Life Without Bacon

Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller

“Marine” Le Pen, her mother once said, “is the absolute clone of her father”; They are both, in their own way, political narcissists

One of the in-depth articles in The Economist's new sister publication, 1843, is the take on Marine Le Pen, l'étrangère by Sophie Pedder, The Economist's Paris bureau chief.

 … The politician who once compared Muslims praying in the streets in France to the Nazi occupation is fast emerging as the scariest, most redoubtable party leader in Europe. On a continent shaken by the double convulsions of Islamist terrorism and the greatest refugee influx in modern history, identity politics is marching back, and Le Pen is in the vanguard. Long before other leaders began to shut the doors and roll out barbed-wire fences, she denounced a borderless Europe and warned darkly of a “giant migratory wave” that would engulf the continent. Today, such troubles play straight into her hands, strengthening her appeal at home and her standing among right-wing nationalists abroad. She believes herself to be on a patriotic mission. She wants to defend a nostalgic version of France from an army of perceived threats – the euro, globalisation, competition, immigration and Islamism. “She is fighting for a sovereign, patriotic, free country,” says Florian Philippot, her closest lieutenant, who came to the party from the nationalist left. In the mind of bien-pensant French, however, Le Pen seeks nothing less than to overturn the liberal order in France and dismantle the post-war project of an integrated Europe. …

Out of the rubble, into a mansion

 … Le Pen shares neither Jean-Marie’s talent for blustery oratory nor his self-destructive narcissism. But her methodical opportunism and street-smart intuition make her a far more fearsome politician. Le Pen père, whose politics dug into a seam of anti-Semitic, ultra-nationalist, Catholic nativism, sought to provoke. His daughter has greater ambitions: to disinfect a marginalised extremist movement and turn it into a serious party ready to govern. “Her father never wanted power, and never tried to achieve it,” says Sylvain Crépon, a political scientist at the University of Tours, who studies the FN: “He avoided responsibility. She on the other hand is building up a network of elected officials, working her dossiers, recruiting experts: exactly what is needed to win power.”

It was not inevitable that she would go into politics. That formative explosion in the bedroom was, she says, a political awakening of “the most violent, the most cruel, the most brutal” sort. It was not just the realisation of her father’s vulnerability that marked her: it was also the shock of discovering the indifference of French officialdom towards her family. No perpetrator was ever caught. No word of consolation came from the local mayor or any government representative, even though at the time Jean-Marie already had behind him a six-year spell as a member of the French National Assembly. His toxic politics meant that his family was ostracised, and the young Marine resented this perceived injustice. She wasn’t just angry; she wanted to rehabilitate the family name and secure the FN the respect she thinks it deserves. “If I’m very honest,” she says today, her tall, broad frame somehow outsized for the tiny sixth-floor office she occupies at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, “at the start of my political career, that was a driving force.”

Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen, known from childhood as Marine, was born in a maternity clinic just outside Paris on August 5th 1968, two months after students started ripping up cobblestones and overturning barricades on the Paris left bank. … Pierrette described their life as “a bit bohemian”, with “friends at all hours of the day or night” dropping by for wine and improvised dinners that usually ended in hearty song, with Jean-Marie blasting out sea shanties learned in his Breton childhood.

 … Two words recur in Le Pen’s recollections of those years, at school in Saint-Cloud and later as a law student in Paris: sacrifice and wound. The FN was on the rise and its leader accused of torture during his time as an officer in the Algerian war (allegations Mr Le Pen has denied). Life at school as Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter involved “a series of little humiliations: the parents of my friends who wouldn’t invite me to their house, or wouldn’t let them come to ours; the brutality of certain teachers.” Did this influence her decision to go into politics? Her gaze is unblinking: “We are all the children of our wounds.”

The politics of victimhood

The outsider is a popular pose among politicians. Many try to strike it: think George W. Bush and his Texan reinvention, or even François Hollande, a graduate of the elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration who ran for the presidency from a faux-humble post as leader of the council of rural Corrèze. David Cameron (wisely) does not even try. Only a few, among them Angela Merkel (a physicist raised in the former East Germany and, like Le Pen, a woman in a conservative, patriarchal party), carry conviction.

 … Despite her dynastic position and her family mansion, the overwhelming impression she leaves is of a politician driven by the angry energy of the authentic outsider. Polite Parisian society certainly sees her that way – and, in a country governed by a tight, self-protecting elite, her status gives her particular power over the political imagination.

Her childhood was decidedly peculiar. Her mother walked out when she was 16, took up with a journalist, who had been researching a biography of Jean-Marie and ended up seducing his wife. Le Pen did not see her mother for 15 years: “My world fell apart.” Huguette Fatna, a Martinican who is godmother to Le Pen’s second daughter, told me that her mother’s exit “tore her apart”. And that was not the end of it. In 1987, after a bitter divorce case, Jean-Marie gave an interview in which he declared of his wife with characteristic bombast, “If she hasn’t got money, she could always become a cleaner.” Pierrette’s response was to pose for Playboy in a skimpy French maid’s outfit. The girls were shattered. Le Pen wrote: “It was an act of unbelievable psychological violence that she inflicted on us.”

 …  “What she lived through when she was young, and then the three babies and the divorce, all reinforced her will to fight,” says Fatna, who helped her at the time. Le Pen puts it this way: “It takes a lot to destabilise me.”

What is so intriguing is that the battle she has chosen to fight is the same as her father’s. This was not a given. If there was one daughter who everybody thought would take up the Le Pen struggle, it was the eldest sister, Marie-Caroline. She was the first to go into local politics, standing as a young FN candidate at her first election in 1985 against Nicolas Sarkozy, then the mayor of Neuilly. Marie-Caroline was later elected a regional councillor in the Paris region, a post she held for 12 years. “Marie-Caroline was far more politicised,” says Edouard Ferrand, who knew the Le Pen girls at the time and is now an FN member of the European Parliament: “And Yann took charge of organising the big political events. But Marine was completely apart from all of that.”

For a while, “she didn’t think about politics”, says Gilbert Collard, a lawyer who represented Le Pen’s mother against Jean-Marie in their divorce case. Le Pen was set on a career as a lawyer, having studied at the University of Paris-Assas and then entered the Paris bar. “She was a very good lawyer. She had conviction and courage and a desire to win,” says Collard, who is now a far-right deputy. Le Pen was not up all night with just her books. She was also known for heavy partying, chain-smoking, and as a bon vivant: “laddish” is the word she uses, unapologetically. “She wasn’t at all uptight,” says Edouard Ferrand, a member of her social circle at the time, with a blush.

“I WANTED TO DO OTHER THINGS,” SAYS LE PEN: “BUT POLITICS IS A VIRUS.
IF YOU HAVE IT, YOU CAN NEVER GET AWAY FROM IT”

 … In the competition for a place on the FN’s national executive, she was up against traditionalist old-timers calling for “Tous sauf Marine” – anybody but Marine.

Yet there is a single-minded ruthlessness about Le Pen, which also explains the calculated charm and professional smile that she can turn on and, just as abruptly, off. When she stood for the FN leadership in 2011, determined to forge a more respectable party, it was against Jean-Marie’s preferred heir, the ultra-nationalist Bruno Gollnisch. Her decision to run stemmed from an unbending faith both in the project and in her capacity to bring about the dédiabolisation (de-demonisation) which her father had systematically resisted, by distancing the party from his anti-Semitic and xenophobic outrages. Over the years, father and daughter had repeatedly rowed about the direction to take the party. “Believe me, he was not at all happy when I decided to run,” she says. In the end, he swung behind her, but only weeks before the vote. “All his life – and he has led this party for over 40 years – he has found it difficult to step back,” Le Pen says. His view, she suggests, was simple: “the FN, c’est moi.”

The ties that bind

 At the heart of Le Pen’s quest for power is this relationship with Jean-Marie: a constant tension between affection and rivalry, duty andrevolt. “With the father these girls have, either you rebel or you surrender,” says Gilbert Collard: “If you don’t react, if you don’t stand up to him, you disappear.”

 … The decision to expel Jean-Marie, says Nicolas Bay, the FN’s secretary-general, was “a moment of personal courage”. Not everybody around Le Pen thought her capable of it. The last straw was when Jean-Marie repeated his claim that the Holocaust was a “detail” of the history of the second world war. It imperilled Le Pen’s efforts to purge the party. The split with her father “was extremely hard on a personal level”, she says. “Jean-Marie Le Pen is an unreasonable personality, with a histrionic, theatrical side,” says Gilbert Collard. “We couldn’t continue our political struggle with all these discordant notes.” Her team insists that the row was not staged, pointing to the public hurt Jean-Marie inflicted on her when he declared himself “ashamed that she carries my name”, urged her to “marry her concubine” (Louis Aliot and Le Pen are not married) and railed against the “gay lobby” of advisers close to her within the party. Collard suggests that, far from feeling wounded, her father revelled in their break-up: “Jean-Marie Le Pen has lived his life through opposing others. He is at ease with conflict.”

Yet the uncompromising brutality of her decision to expel her father underlines how alike they are. “Marine”, her mother once told a French newspaper, “is the absolute clone of her father.” They share the same strengths, including a canny reading of political space and how to exploit it. Jean-Marie built his protest movement around the Fifth Republic’s demands for a strong party system. Le Pen is trying to exploit the traditional parties’ current fragility and engineer their collapse. They are both, in their own way, political narcissists.

 … Above all, father and daughter share a cold and calculating political instinct. She suffered young from his political choices; he became the victim of hers. Le Pen does not deny the likeness. Of the three daughters, she admits, “physically, I am the one who most looks like him, and the one whose character is the most like his.” After all, she could have chosen to stay out of public life, like her sisters (one of whom went off to work for Club Med for a while), and retreat instead to her suburban house west of Paris, where she has lived since a Doberman belonging to her father killed one of her beloved cats. Yet here she is, like her father before her, back on the campaign trail at the price of inevitable absences from her own teenagers. She recognises that she has chosen to make “enormous sacrifices”, and with her eyes wide open. “The heart either breaks or hardens,” she says, quoting a French proverb: “Mine hardened.”

 … Does she ever worry about her own safety? With a chillingly steady gaze, she replies: “I am impermeable to fear.”

More on Marine Le Pen, notably these:

• The Leader of the Front National, Allegedly France's
Equivalent of the Tea Party's Extreme Capitalists,
Says That “Obama is way to the right of us”…

• The Question Arises: Is the Le Pen Party Extreme Rightist
or Is It Actually a Reincarnation of the Communist Party?

Donald Trump either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the defined boundaries of federal power

Donald Trump’s concept of the federal government’s proper role ought to make any conservative cringe 

writes Benny Huang.

Last week, the GOP’s leading candidate answered a question from an Afghanistan veteran named Robert Kitelinger who asked, “In your opinion, what are the top three functions of the United States government?” Trump listed security, healthcare, and education.

He said something a little different in August 2015 when he listed his top priorities as the military, veterans and jobs. These two statements are not necessarily irreconcilable of course.

 … Perhaps his priorities shifted over the last eight months? That’s possible however unlikely. A better explanation is that he can’t remember what he pretended to believe yesterday much less what he pretended to believe eight months ago. That was then and this is now.

 … Though I’m not certain the questioner intended to put Trump’s conservatism to the test, he did and Trump flunked. Two of those three issues should have nothing whatsoever to do with the federal government. I’m speaking of healthcare and education, neither of which can be found among the federal government’s enumerated powers. According to the tenth amendment, those powers should be left “to the States respectively; or to the People.”

Security is and should be a federal responsibility. The preamble to the Constitution tells us that one of the federal government’s purposes is to “provide for the common defence.” … What’s happening on our southern border can rightfully be called an invasion and no one’s doing anything about it.

So Donald Trump is standing on solid ground with the first of three functions he named. Yet he’s weak even here because there’s reason to believe that he doesn’t mean what he says. Political positions are as disposable to him as wives or that pledge he signed to support the eventual Republican nominee. Nor does Trump strike me as the type of guy who really cares about the tidal wave of third world immigrants—both legal and illegal—crashing on our shores. He is, after all, a member of the employer class which has always sought to reduce the price of labor by increasing its supply. In the past he’s admitted to using illegal aliens from Latin America as landscapers at a golf course he owns in Florida.

 … I suspect Trump’s lying about security, most of all border security, because it’s hard to imagine a man who has benefitted so handsomely from cheap labor actually turning off the immigration spigot. He might do it if only because he will want to be reelected and it will be hard to make people forget the promise he made a thousand times over.

But what about the other two functions of the US government Trump identified? This is where Trump goes off the rails.

 … Donald Trump … either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the defined boundaries of federal power. It’s hard for him to imagine any government being too massive or too powerful as long as he’s at the head of it. That scares me, though not as much as the fact that he’s leading the Republican delegate count with only seventeen states to go.