Why you should always buy the men’s version of almost anything - Re-Blog

Radio Flyer sells a red scooter for boys and a pink scooter for girls. Both feature plastic handlebars, three wheels and a foot brake. Both weigh about five pounds.

The only significant difference is the price, a new report reveals. Target listed one for $24.99 and the other for $49.99.

The scooters' price gap isn't an anomaly. The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs compared nearly 800 products with female and male versions — meaning they were practically identical except for the gender-specific packaging — and uncovered a persistent surcharge for one of the sexes. Controlling for quality, items marketed to girls and women cost an average 7 percent more than similar products aimed at boys and men.

DCA Commissioner Julie Menin, who launched the investigation this summer, said the numbers show an insidious form of gender discrimination. Compounding the injustice, she said, is the wage gap. Federal data shows women in the United States earn about 79 cents for every dollar paid to men.

“It’s a double whammy,” Menin said, “and it’s not just happening in New York. You see in the aisles the issue is clearly applicable to consumers across the country.”

A Target spokesperson said the company lowered the price of the pink scooter after the report was released Friday, calling the discrepancy a "system error."

When asked about the price differences of other gendered toys — like the Raskullz shark helmet ($14.99) and the Raskullz unicorn helmet ($27.99) or the Playmobil pirate ship ($24.99) and the Playmobil fairy queen ship ($37.99) — the representative pointed to a company statement, declining to elaborate: "Our competitive shop process ensures that we are competitively priced in local markets. A difference in price can be related to production costs or other factors."

Researchers for the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs pored over toys, children’s clothing, adult apparel, personal care products and home goods sold in the city. The largest price discrepancy emerged in the hair care category: Women, on average, paid 48 percent more for goods like shampoo, conditioner and gel. Razor cartridges came in second place, costing female shoppers 11 percent more.

Walgreens, for example, peddled a blue box of Schick Hydro 5 cartridges for $14.99. The Schick Hydro “Silk,” its purple sibling, was priced at $18.49.

Across the New York sample, women’s products carried higher price tags 42 percent of the time, while men’s products cost more 18 percent of the time.

Boosting prices according to who's buying is nothing new. Hairdressers often charge women more. Nightclubs sometimes demand more cash from men for admission.

Price discrimination on the whole tends to be worse for women, though. A 1994 report from the State of California found they pay an annual “gender tax” of $1,351 for the same services rendered to men.

Women spend an average of 25 percent more on haircuts (that require the same amount of labor as a men’s style) and 27 percent more for the laundering of a white cotton shirt, a 2002 DCA study showed.

Another analysis from the University of Central Florida found women’s deodorants typically cost 30 cents more than the same product for men. Wrote the authors,“The only discernible difference was scent.”

The pricing differences extend beyond basic services and goods. Until courts knocked the practice down, insurance companies in Europe charged women more because women live longer. Under the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies in the United States cannot factor gender into cost.

New York City law has banned gender discrimination the pricing of services since 1998. Businesses cannot legally charge more for haircuts or dry cleaning, for example, based on the patron’s sex. They must instead offer gender-neutral rates by labor intensity.

That doesn’t mean local companies always follow the rules. DCA inspectors issued 129 violations for gender pricing of services this year, compared to 118 in 2014.

California and Florida's Miami­Dade County also prohibit selling the same services to men and women at different prices. No federal law, though, requires businesses to set gender­-equal prices on products. New York City’s report was released to heighten consumer awareness, Menin said, and to publicly shame companies with glaring disparities.

Of the 24 retailers in the New York City report, the worst gender pricing disparity surfaced at Club Monaco, where women’s clothing cost an average of 28.9 percent more than men’s clothing, according to an independent analysis by economist Ian Ayres. Urban Outfitters trailed with a 24.6 percent gender premium, followed by Levis with 24.3 percent.

The retailers did not respond to the Post's request for comment.

In 1991, Ayres, a professor at Yale Law School, sent men and women to car dealerships across the Chicago area. He learned white women were charged 40 percent more than white men, supporting the stereotype that dealers assume women knew less about car values.

Gender equality has improved considerably since Ayres’s paper was published — so why do blatant price disparities persist today? “One contributing factor is profitability,” he said. “You’re pulling an extra dollar out of a certain group of consumers.”

Companies might be exploiting the idea that female shoppers are willing to spend more money than their male counterparts, he said.

Of course, a woman’s sweater might be crafted with nicer fabrics. A man’s sweater might be stitched with cheaper polyester. But that often isn't the case. Frequently, the only difference between two products is color.

“Those prices aren’t being driven by costs,” Ayres said, “but just because you take advantage of certain groups but not others.”

Ravi Dhar, director of the Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management, said how we perceive “women’s” products could help explain why gender markups persist in the marketplace.

“Many men's products are not seen as men's products,” he said. “They might just be seen as products in the category.”

Which makes the “pink” version a specialty product, he said. "His" and "hers" items might stem from antiquated gender roles, but our appetites for personally tailored goods might have kept the distinction alive.

“People see a greater fit between the product and their tastes," Dhar said, "and may be willing to pay more."

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source:
Why you should always buy the men’s version of almost anything
By Danielle Paquette

Six Reasons Libertarians Should Reject the Non-Aggression Principle - Re-Blog

Six Reasons Libertarians Should Reject the Non-Aggression Principle
A stringent application of the non-aggression principle has morally unacceptable implications.

Many libertarians believe that the whole of their political philosophy can be summed up in a single, simple principle. This principle—the “non-aggression principle” or “non-aggression axiom” (hereafter “NAP”)—holds that aggression against the person or property of others is always wrong, where aggression is defined narrowly in terms of the use or threat of physical violence.

From this principle, many libertarians believe, the rest of libertarianism can be deduced as a matter of mere logic. What is the proper libertarian stance on minimum wage laws? Aggression, and therefore wrong. What about anti-discrimination laws? Aggression, and therefore wrong. Public schools? Same answer. Public roads? Same answer. The libertarian armed with the NAP has little need for the close study of history, sociology, or empirical economics. With a little logic and a lot of faith in this basic axiom of morality, virtually any political problem can be neatly solved from the armchair.

On its face, the NAP’s prohibition of aggression falls nicely in line with common sense. After all, who doesn’t think it’s wrong to steal someone else’s property, to club some innocent person over the head, or to force others to labor for one’s own private benefit? And if it’s wrong for us to do these things as individuals, why would it be any less wrong for us to do it as a group – as a club, a gang, or…a state?

But the NAP’s plausibility is superficial. It is, of course, common sense to think that aggression is a bad thing. But it is far from common sense to think that its badness is absolute, such that the wrongness of aggression always trumps any other possible consideration of justice or political morality. There is a vast difference between a strong but defeasible presumption against the justice of aggression, and an absolute, universal prohibition. As Bryan Caplan has said, if you can’t think of counterexamples to the latter, you’re not trying hard enough. But I’m here to help.

In the remainder of this essay, I want to present six reasons why libertarians should reject the NAP. None of them are original to me. Each is logically independent of the others. Taken together, I think, they make a fairly overwhelming case.

1. Prohibits All Pollution – As I noted in my last post, Rothbard himself recognized that industrial pollution violates the NAP and must therefore be prohibited. But Rothbard did not draw the full implications of his principle. Not just industrial pollution, but personal pollution produced by driving, burning wood in one’s fireplace, smoking, etc., runs afoul of NAP. The NAP implies that all of these activities must be prohibited, no matter how beneficial they may be in other respects, and no matter how essential they are to daily life in the modern industrialized world. And this is deeply implausible.
2. Prohibits Small Harms for Large Benefits – The NAP prohibits all pollution because its prohibition on aggression is absolute. No amount of aggression, no matter how small, is morally permissible. And no amount of offsetting benefits can change this fact. But suppose, to borrow a thought from Hume, that I could prevent the destruction of the whole world by lightly scratching your finger? Or, to take a perhaps more plausible example, suppose that by imposing a very, very small tax on billionaires, I could provide life-saving vaccination for tens of thousands of desperately poor children? Even if we grant that taxation is aggression, and that aggression is generally wrong, is it really so obvious that the relatively minor aggression involved in these examples is wrong, given the tremendous benefit it produces?
3. All-or-Nothing Attitude Toward Risk – The NAP clearly implies that it’s wrong for me to shoot you in the head. But, to borrow an example from David Friedman, what if I merely run the risk of shooting you by putting one bullet in a six-shot revolver, spinning the cylinder, aiming it at your head, and squeezing the trigger? What if it is not one bullet but five? Of course, almost everything we do imposes some risk of harm on innocent persons. We run this risk when we drive on the highway (what if we suffer a heart attack, or become distracted), or when we fly airplanes over populated areas. Most of us think that some of these risks are justifiable, while others are not, and that the difference between them has something to do with the size and likelihood of the risked harm, the importance of the risky activity, and the availability and cost of less risky activities. But considerations like this carry zero weight in the NAP’s absolute prohibition on aggression. That principle seems compatible with only two possible rules: either all risks are permissible (because they are not really aggression until they actually result in a harm), or none are (because they are). And neither of these seems sensible.
4. No Prohibition of Fraud – Libertarians usually say that violence may legitimately be used to prevent either force or fraud. But according to NAP, the only legitimate use of force is to prevent or punish the initiatory use of physical violence by others. And fraud is not physical violence. If I tell you that the painting you want to buy is a genuine Renoir, and it’s not, I have not physically aggressed against you. But if you buy it, find out it’s a fake, and then send the police (or your protective agency) over to my house to get your money back, then you are aggressing against me. So not only does a prohibition on fraud not follow from the NAP, it is not even compatible with it, since the use of force to prohibit fraud itself constitutes the initiation of physical violence.
5. Parasitic on a Theory of Property – Even if the NAP is correct, it cannot serve as a fundamental principle of libertarian ethics, because its meaning and normative force are entirely parasitic on an underlying theory of property. Suppose A is walking across an empty field, when B jumps out of the bushes and clubs A on the head. It certainly looks like B is aggressing against A in this case. But on the libertarian view, whether this is so depends entirely on the relevant property rights – specifically, who owns the field. If it’s B’s field, and A was crossing it without B’s consent, then A was the one who was actually aggressing against B. Thus, “aggression,” on the libertarian view, doesn’t really mean physical violence at all. It means “violation of property rights.” But if this is true, then the NAP’s focus on “aggression” and “violence” is at best superfluous, and at worst misleading. It is the enforcement of property rights, not the prohibition of aggression, that is fundamental to libertarianism.
6. What About the Children??? – It’s one thing to say that aggression against others is wrong. It’s quite another to say that it’s the only thing that’s wrong – or the only wrong that is properly subject to prevention or rectification by force. But taken to its consistent extreme, as Murray Rothbard took it, the NAP implies that there is nothing wrong with allowing your three year-old son to starve to death, so long as you do not forcibly prevent him from obtaining food on his own. Or, at least, it implies that it would be wrong for others to, say, trespass on your property in order to give the child you’re deliberately starving a piece of bread. This, I think, is a fairly devastating reductio of the view that positive duties may never be coercively enforced. That it was Rothbard himself who presented the reductio, without, apparently, realizing the absurdity into which he had walked, rather boggles the mind.

There’s more to be said about each of these, of course. Libertarians haven’t written much about the issue of pollution. But they have been aware of the problem about fraud at least since James Child published his justly famous article in Ethics on the subject in 1994, and both Bryan Caplan and Stephan Kinsella have tried (unsatisfactorily, to my mind) to address it. Similarly, Roderick Long has some characteristically thoughtful and intelligent things to say about the issue of children and positive rights.

Libertarians are ingenious folk. And I have no doubt that, given sufficient time, they can think up a host of ways to tweak, tinker, and contextualize the NAP in a way that makes some progress in dealing with the problems I have raised in this essay. But there comes a point where adding another layer of epicycles to one’s theory seems no longer to be the best way to proceed. There comes a point where what you need is not another refinement to the definition of “aggression” but a radical paradigm shift in which we put aside the idea that non-aggression is the sole, immovable center of the moral universe. Libertarianism needs its own Copernican Revolution.

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source:

Six Reasons Libertarians Should Reject the Non-Aggression Principle on Libertarianism.org
by Matt Zwolinski, April 8, 2013

Re-Blog: "This Hitler Nonsense"

I am not an expert on Hitler. But my father is.

He toured post-war Germany extensively in 1957 and ’58 as a child performer. And he often recounts the stories. He befriended  teenage Lebensborn children (if you don’t know what Lebensborn children are …well …before you post anymore about Hitler you should read about them). He visited an SS widow and got a peek at her husband’s uniform and Luger (that he’d committed suicide with), she had stored in an old trunk, in the attic.

These and other intense experiences in Germany sent my father on a life-long quest to understand this sociopath (Hitler) and the country that allowed itself to be dragged into one of the darkest chapters in world history. My dad is a Hitler/Nazi buff the way Indiana Jones’ dad was a Holy Grail buff.

Re-Blog: "A Thought Experiment About Republicans"

The left has done a stellar job of demonizing Trump supporters and Republicans in general. Their excellent persuasion involves conflating the bad apples with the entire group. Both sides do it. The right calls everyone on the left selfish snowflakes, and the left calls everyone on the right racists. They do it because it works. The brain likes to conflate things. And if the shiniest object in our view involves headlines about racists, or lefty rioters, those images stick in our minds and taint our impressions of the entire group.

So let’s try this thought experiment.

Let’s say there is a group of Trump-supporting racists – the violent kind that I have never met – that starts terrorizing an African-American neighbor of yours. And let’s say it turns into a violent confrontation between the racists and the victim family. The neighborhood hears some commotion and pours into the streets. The racists have weapons and they are about to kill the family that was just minding its own business. The police are on the way, but not in time. Violence is about to happen.

Suddenly a shot rings out. A bullet goes through the back of the scariest racist’s head and hollows out his skull. He drops like a rock. The other racists drop their weapons and flee.

Who fired the shot that saved the African-American family? Was it a Republican or a Democrat?

One of the most underrated qualities of Republicans is that they police their own ranks. If you have a problem with a violent Republican racist, call some Republicans. They’ll solve it for you.

But don’t call a Republican if you are simply offended by another person’s opinion. In that situation you want to call some Democrats to ridicule and physically attack the person with the objectionable opinion.

By the way, I’m not a Republican. This is just an observation. I’ve been watching Democrats not police their own ranks – after the Berkeley violence for example – and it occurred to me that you don’t see that on the Republican side. Republicans generally appreciate free speech, but if someone attacks your family, your country, or your freedom in some physical form, keep some Republicans on speed dial.

Try it. You’ll be surprised how well it works.

Are you bothered by the fact that I am making sweeping and unsupported generalizations about Democrats and Republicans? If so, call a Democrat. I await your combined ridicule and physical violence.

---

source:
Scott Adams
A Thought Experiment About Republicans
Posted February 5th, 2017
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156850873521/a-thought-experiment-about-republicans

49 abominable facts about Hillary the media won't tell you - Re-Blog

If you listen to the news, the only real reporting being done about Hillary Clinton has to do with her email scandal. Even though she violated the Espionage Act, the FBI refused to prosecute. Her family’s foundation is under heavy scrutiny. But did you know these other important points about Hillary’s life-long run to the White House?

Saul Alinsky

1. During her college years at Wellesley, Hillary Clinton formed her political ideology as a close friend and confidant of Saul Alinsky, the Marxist firebrand who resurrected the “Communist Manifesto” and urged young liberals to agitate and create unrest to establish communist ends.
2. Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis at Wellesley College was locked at her husband’s request during his time as president. The 92-page thesis was about Alinsky, with whom Clinton shared a mentor/apprentice relationship.
3. According to NBCNews, David Brock called Hillary “Alinsky’s daughter” in his 1996 biography, “The Seduction of Hillary Rodham.”
4. Hillary Clinton wrote in her thesis, “Much of what Alinsky professes does not sound ‘radical.’” This, coming from the man who dedicated his book, “Rules for Radicals” to Lucifer, “the first radical.”
5. To read a more in depth article about Hillary and Saul Alinsky, read, “Alinsky’s Daughter: Here’s the truth about Hillary the media won’t tell you.”

Leftist Law Firm

6. After college, Hillary searched for a leftist “movement” law firm and secured a spot at Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein.
7. Treuhaft was a former Communist Party member who defended the Black Panthers and other radical leftist groups.
8. Walker was an avowed Communist until the day she died, and was notorious for successfully defending Angie Davis, a California Communist, on conspiracy murder charges. Davis purchased two firearms two days prior to an armed takeover of a county courthouse. While governor, Ronald Reagan barred Davis from teaching at any California University because of her militant communist beliefs. Walker made a living defending Communists against the Smith Act.
9. Burnstein was a defender of leftist radical protesters, taking the side of the Communists in Vietnam.
10. Hillary claimed to work on a child custody case only at the radical firm, but others recall differently. “We did a lot of conscientious-objector work,” during the Vietnam War.
11. Why did Hillary go to Treuhaft, Walker, and Burnstein? Carl Bernstein quoted Treuhaft as saying, "The reason she came to us, the only reason I could think of because none of us knew her, was because we were a so-called Movement law firm at the time.

Israel

12. As a college student, Hillary embraced the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and admired its leader Yassar Arafat, once defending him as a “‘freedom fighter’ trying to free his people from their Israeli ‘oppressors.’”
13. In her run for senator from New York, Hillary claimed she had Jewish roots by bringing up her grandmother’s remarriage to a Jewish man.
14. In reaction to seeing a menorah in a friend’s home, Hillary wouldn’t get out of her car, and friends heard Bill explain, "I'm sorry, but Hillary's really tight with the people in the PLO in New York. They're friends of hers, and she just doesn't feel right about the menorah."

Whitewater Scandal

15. As partners in the Rose Law Firm, Hillary, Bill, and Jim and Susan McDougal participated in a pyramid scheme that used fraudulent real estate loans involving inflated appraisals to circumvent federal law. By the time the FBI investigated, every single person involved was indicted or destroyed except Bill and Hillary. Power Line reported in March 2015:

1. Clinton, working with Webster Hubbell and Vince Foster, stole hard copies of the billing records of the Rose law firm where they were partners. They erased the electronic version of these records. One set of these documents was later found in the White House, just outside Hillary’s private office, by an employee. Another set was found in Foster’s attic by his widow, some years after he committed suicide. Clinton’s time sheets (handwritten, as was the practice back in the day) were never found.

Fighting for Women

16. While an attorney in Arkansas, Hillary defended a child rapist, knew he was guilty, but impugned the character of the 12 year old victim anyway, which would send the now-52 year old woman on a path to a life of drugs and crime. Hillary claimed the girl actively sought out “older men,” and had a reputation as a liar. In an interview, Hillary talked about having the rapist take a lie detector test, which he passed, and laughing, Hillary said, “Which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.”
17. Hillary successfully defended a 300 lb man who obviously beat his girlfriend, and got the case thrown out on a technicality.
18. Juanita Broaddrick claimed she was raped by Bill Clinton, Paula Jones won a $850,000 settlement when she accused Bill of sexual harassment, and Kathleen Willey accused Bill of sexual assault. In each of these cases, and many more, Hillary hired private detectives to dig up dirt on Bill’s accusers in order to destroy their stories, and keep Bill on his path to the White House, as told by biographer Carl Bernstein, former aide George Stephanopoulous, and former Clinton aide Dick Morris.

Black Lives Matter

19. Hillary has said that white people have to, “recognize our privilege and practice humility.”
20. To BLM rioters she said, “We need you. We need the promise of a rising generation of activists and organizers who are fearless in your advocacy and determination.”
21. The Black Lives Matter founder from Worchester, Massachusetts, once complained to Hillary, “Until someone speaks the truth to white people in this country so that we can actually take on anti-blackness as a founding problem in this country, I don’t believe that there is going to be a solution. What in your heart has changed that’s going to change the direction of this country?” Hillary responded, “I don’t believe you change hearts, I believe you change laws. You change allocation of resources. You change the way systems operate,” indicating that she would change government to implement BLM’s demands.

Muslim Brotherhood

22. Hillary backed the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Mursi. Incidentally, on the way to meet with Mursi, Hillary, was pelted with tomatoes while the Egyptians chanted, “Monica, Monica!”
23. Hillary’s top aide, Huma Abedin, has well-established ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
24. Hillary sided with the second official-of-record of the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya and discussed what could be done to hamper Qaddafi. “Hillary’s war,” as identified by U.S Navy Rear Admiral Charles Kubic, ended in destabilizing Libya and enhancing the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS.

Gun Control

25. Hillary believes that Second Amendment proponents are a “minority” of people, and that their viewpoint is “terrorizing” the American people.
26. Hillary not only wants to make gun ownership illegal for many, but would allow gun manufacturers to be sued by those who have been shot by a legally owned gun. This would include those committing crimes on private property.
27. Hillary said that the Supreme Court is wrong about the Second Amendment, referring to District of Columbia v. Heller, which struck down the D.C. gun ban and ruled that individuals have a fundamental right to gun ownership under the Second Amendment.

The First Amendment

28. Hillary has condemned the Citizens United court ruling and wants a constitutional amendment to overturn it. The Citizens United case hinged on the right to free speech and censorship of opposing views. Justices looked at the FEC ban as akin to book burning, and the court ruled that the FEC could not limit political speech.
29. After four American lives were lost in Benghazi, Hillary Clinton blamed Nakoula Basseley Nakoula for a film he made about Islam. Hillary further falsely claimed the attack was in response to said film. To Charles Woods, the father of one of the deceased at Benghazi, Hillary said, “We will make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.” Nakoula was immediately jailed for over a year.
30. She has every intention of using the full power of the federal government to snuff out religious liberty.
31. Hillary has a long history of faulting or trying to ban movies, music, and video games for the actions of criminals.

Abortion

32. Hillary’s view is that people’s religious beliefs have to be changed when it comes to abortion. “Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will,” she explained. “And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”
33. Hillary believes that an unborn child — just hours before delivery — has no constitutional rights, i.e., no right to life.
34. Hillary praised her husband Bill for vetoing a partial birth abortion ban. Partial-birth abortion is exactly what it implies, a child is pulled feet-first out of the mother's womb past the navel and the abortionist punctures the skull of the baby, inserts a powerful vacuum, and suctions the baby's brains which collapses the skull and the child is pulled the rest of the way and discarded. At the time of the veto, the Clintons claimed it was a procedure to protect the health and life of the mother, but a prominent abortion advocate said at the time that the information given to the public was intentionally misleading.
35. Hillary wants more funding to go to the abortion giant and butcher shop, Planned Parenthood.
36. Hillary wants to overturn the Hyde Amendment, which is intended to ban government funding for abortion.

Immigration

37. Hillary’s voter registration leader for her campaign is an illegal immigrant.
38. Clinton wants to increase Syrian refugees coming into America from 1,500 to 65,000.
39. At the Univision Democratic debate in March, Hillary said, “I am committed to introducing comprehensive immigration reform and a path to legitimate citizenship within the first 100 days of my presidency.”
40. Hillary would allow illegal immigrants to obtain health insurance under Obamacare.

Much More

41. Hillary’s first solo legal case was in defense of a canning corporation when a man found the back end of a rat in his pork and beans. Affectionately known as the “Rat’s ass case,” Hillary claimed it would be considered food in some countries.
42. Grateful for Hillary’s help in his presidential run, President Jimmy Carter put her in charge of Legal Services Corporation, a federally funded nonprofit, whose budget under Hillary would swell from $90 million to $321 million. Investigators from the General Accounting Office found that during her leadership, those involved with the LSC were, “uniquely reprehensible.”
43. In 1978 and 1979, Hillary turned a $1,000 investment into $98,540 in less than one year trading cattle futures under the guidance of a Tyson Foods outside attorney. Tyson Foods, under state law, was supposed to dispose of its chicken manure properly, but the state’s governor, Bill Clinton, never enforced the law. Five years later, seepage from the waste contaminated a community’s drinking water and made people sick. It took Bill Clinton 15 months to declare the town a disaster area.
44. In two years, 2013-2015, Hillary made $2.9 million in speaking fees from large corporations including $675,000 from Goldman Sachs.
45. In her commencement speech at Wellesley, Hillary quoted her mother as saying, “You know I’ll always love you but there are times when I certainly won’t like you.” In 1993, in an interview with the New York Times, Hillary attributed that exact quote to her father instead.
46. Hillary was “the first presidential spouse to be subpoenaed. Bill and Hillary Clinton are the first and only first couple to be fingerprinted by the FBI.”
47. Hillary was at the center of “Travelgate” during her time as first lady. The controversy surrounded seven people who were fired in the office and replaced with her cronies.
48. Hillary claimed she came under sniper fire during a trip to Bosnia. That claim was easily debunked by Sharyl Attkisson who was accompanied Hillary’s trip as a member of the press. Hillary twice tried to make the silly suggestion stick before the media caught up with her.
49. Hillary hailed the television channel Al Jazeera and said its viewership was going up in the U.S. “’because it’s real news. You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock.’ She said it was ‘changing peoples’ minds and attitudes. And like it or hate it, it is really effective.’ U.S. news, she added, was not keeping up.”

Hillary is a radical's radical, a compulsive liar, and is intoxicated by the accumulation of wealth and power. Her Marxist ideology and belief that destroying this nation from within is what has motivated and propelled her to become president of this nation. Anyone considering voting for this destroyer should have their heads examined.

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source:
49 abominable facts about Hillary the media won't tell you - By Jen Kuznicki - September 03, 2016

Brutal takedown of CEO wage myth - Re-Blog

THE MISLEADING CLAIM: These 8 CEOs get paid so much that they clearly can afford to raise their worker's wages to $15 per hour.

THE REALITY: As we'll demonstrate below, the math proves this claim is questionable, at best.

JC PENNY:
• 114,000 employees [1]
• CEO pay: $4,629 per hour per the meme.
Each employee could get a $0.04 per hour raise if the CEO's pay were entirely eliminated.

CHIPOTLE:
• 53,090 employees [2]
• CEO pay: $13,489 per hour per the meme.
Each employee could get a $0.25 per hour raise if the CEO's pay were entirely eliminated.

Note, part of why Chipotle's CEO (Steve Ells) is so highly compensated is because he holds TWO positions, rather than just one, also serving as Chipotle’s chairman. [3]

Another interesting point? Chipotle ALREADY pays its workers more than comparable fast food outlets, such as Taco Bell, Chick-fil-A, McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger King. [4]

DUNKIN DONUTS:
• 260,000 employees [5]
• CEO pay: $4,889 per hour per the meme.
Each employee could get a $0.01 (technically 0.018) per hour raise if the CEO's pay were entirely eliminated.

DOMINOS:
• 11,000 employees [6]
• CEO pay: $3,571 per hour per the meme.
Each employee could get a $0.32 per hour raise if the CEO's pay were entirely eliminated.

WENDY'S:
• 31,200 employees [7]
• CEO pay: $3,465 per hour per the meme.
Each employee could get a $0.11 per hour raise if the CEO's pay were entirely eliminated.

WAL-MART:
• 2,200,000 employees [8]
• CEO pay: $2,704 per hour per the meme.
Each employee could get a $0.00 (technically 0.001) per hour raise if the CEO's pay were entirely eliminated.

STAR-BUCKS:
• 191,000 employees [9]
• CEO pay: $10,285 per hour per the meme.
Each employee could get a $0.05 per hour raise if the CEO's pay were entirely eliminated.

MACY'S:
• 166,900 employees [10]
• CEO pay: $7,904 per hour per the meme.
Each employee could get a $0.04 (technically 0.047) per hour raise if the CEO's pay were entirely eliminated.

CONCLUSION:
Considering that this meme took annual CEO pay and simply divided it up into 40 hour work weeks despite the fact that CEOs of top firms routinely work over 40 hours a week [11], it already was guilty of significantly over-inflating CEO's hourly wages. But even if one takes the meme's inaccurate estimates at face value, it's conclusion proves to be entirely false, never the less. You could literally eradicate 100% of CEO pay from each of these companies and never even come close to a 50 cent per hour raise for workers, never mind nearly doubling minimum wages to $15 per hour. This claim is demonstrably false.
----------------------
ADDENDUM:
Before one protests that our counter-argument is off because we counted ALL employees rather than focusing only on those paid under $15, understand that this point - while valid - raises only a very small discrepancy.

It wouldn't matter if one adjusted the math to apply it to half or even one-third the workforce, because one would still struggle to add a dollar to worker's pay.  For instance, take Wal-Mart for example. Their pay increase would each be a (rounded down) 0 cents per hour raise if applied to all workers, but if we adjusted the figures to distribute the CEO's pay amongst workers presently earning less than $15, as to bring it up to the hypothetical $15 minimum, it still wouldn't be more than a few cent raise.  Therefore, even though our rebuttal is a rounded off estimate, it's one that is so significantly far away from the original misleading claim that it becomes obvious Occupy Democrats was very wrong.
---------------------
Sources:
[1]
http://www.macroaxis.com/invest/ratio/JCP--Number_of_Employees

[2]
http://www.macroaxis.com/invest/ratio/CMG--Number-of-Employees

[3]
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-05-15/chipotle-investors-slam-executive-compensation-at-annual-meeting

[4]
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-fast-food-jobs-pay-2013-7#!I5stQ

[5]
http://www.bostonjobsource.com/dunkin.html

[6]
http://www.macroaxis.com/invest/ratio/DPZ--Number-of-Employees

[7]
https://www.macroaxis.com/invest/ratio/WEN--Number-of-Employees

[8]
http://news.walmart.com/walmart-facts/

[9]
http://www.macroaxis.com/invest/ratio/SBUX--Number-of-Employees

[10]
http://www.macroaxis.com/invest/ratio/M--Number-of-Employees

[11]
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/mobile/top-executives.htm

---

source:

https://www.facebook.com/WeAreCapitalists/posts/437519359752945:0

Blog-Repost: Republicans and Democrats Did Not Switch Sides On Racism

As a result of unrelenting efforts by Democrats to shift their racist past onto the backs of Republicans, using the mantra: "the parties switched sides", a lot of people have requested an article addressing this issue.

It does not make sense to believe that racist Democrats suddenly rushed into the Republican Party, especially after Republicans spent nearly 150 years fighting for black civil rights. In fact, the racist Democrats declared they would rather vote for a "yellow dog" than a Republican because the Republican Party was known as the party for blacks.

From the time of its inception in 1854 as the anti-slavery party, the Republican Party has always been the party of freedom and equality for blacks. As author Michael Scheuer wrote, the Democratic Party is the party of the four S's: slavery, secession, segregation and now socialism. Democrats have been running black communities for the past 50+ years, and the socialist policies of the Democrats have turned those communities into economic and social wastelands.

Journalist's admission a step to legitimizing pedophilia - Re-blog

In my youth, I tended to devour any popular fiction (books, films, etc.) that depicted themes so bizarre and personally challenging that they defied the protagonists’ ability to retain any semblance of humanity throughout the course of the story. Such fare was all the more plausible when the story’s hero was a young person who was still in the process of developing his or her value system.

When such circumstances materialize in the world in which we actually live, I cannot say they hold quite the same allure.

About a month ago, I wrote a column detailing a prediction that in its ongoing efforts to debase society, the political left would soon see fit to begin legitimizing pedophilia. To this end, pedophiles would form activist groups as the North American Man-Boy Love Association did in the 1970s and 1980s – but this time, they would have prominent, deep-pocketed supporters.

Liberal in name only - Re-Blog

Do you support free speech, individual liberties and protections for private property? You must be a liberal.

Did that last sentence cause you to do a double take? I’m not surprised.

I’ve been reading a new book, “The Closing of the Liberal Mind,” and it shows that much of what passes for liberalism today is, historically speaking, anything but. Moreover, many who call themselves conservative today would have been considered “liberal” if they lived in the time of the Founding Fathers.

This distinction isn’t mere semantics, however. The shift I’m describing goes right to the heart of the political and culture wars that rage around us today. Author Kim Holmes demonstrates why the authoritarian stance adopted by many liberals today - as exemplified by speech codes, trigger warnings, boycotts and shaming rituals - is in fact more accurately described as illiberalism.

Re-Blog - "The Ugly Truth About A $15 Minimum Wage"

The Service Employees International Union spent 2015 expanding its campaign for a $15 minimum wage to other industries. In recent nationwide protests, the union focused again on its original target: Fast food companies, and McDonald's in particular.

I worked for the company for three decades, and served as its USA President for 13 years. I can assure you that a $15 minimum wage won’t spell the end of the brand. However it will mean wiping out thousands of entry-level opportunities for people without many other options.

The $15 minimum wage demand, which translates to $30,000 a year for a full-time employee, is built upon a fundamental misunderstanding of a restaurant business such as McDonald’s. “They’re making millions while millions can’t pay their bills,” argue the union groups, suggesting there’s plenty of profit left over in corporate coffers to fund a massive pay increase at the bottom.

In truth, nearly 90% of McDonald’s locations are independently-owned by franchisees who aren’t making “millions” in profit. Rather, they keep roughly six cents of each sales dollar after paying for food, staff costs, rent and other expenses.

Do the math

Let’s do the math: A typical franchisee sells about $2.6 million worth of burgers, fries, shakes and Happy Meals each year, leaving them with $156,000 in profit. If that franchisee has 15 part-time employees on staff earning minimum wage, a $15 hourly pay requirement eats up three-quarters of their profitability. (In reality, the costs will be much higher, as the company will have to fund raises further up the pay scale.) For some locations, a $15 minimum wage wipes out their entire profit.

Recouping those costs isn’t as simple as raising prices. If it were easy to add big price increases to a meal, it would have already been done without a wage hike to trigger it. In the real world, our industry customers are notoriously sensitive to price increases. (If you’re a McDonald’s regular, there’s a reason you gravitate towards an extra-value meal or the dollar menu.) Instead, franchisees can absorb the cost with a change that customers don’t mind: The substitution of a self-service computer kiosk for a a full-service employee.

In higher-cost European countries, these kiosks are already the norm. In 2011, the company ordered more than 7,000 of them to replace entry-level employees. They’ve been tested successfully in a number of markets in the U.S., and now the company is even testing self-serve McCafe kiosks where a customer can prepare and customize their own coffee beverage.

Hurting young workers

If you’re tempted to shrug your shoulders at this brave new world, don’t. Over four million people in the U.S. are employed at “limited service” restaurants, a descriptor which includes companies like McDonald’s. If even one out of every four jobs was automated, that’s one million fewer job opportunities in a country where the youth unemployment rate is more than three times the overall unemployment rate. (In urban markets such as New York City and Washington, DC, the youth unemployment rate averages 30%.)

These young adults who face long spells of unemployment now are at a long-term disadvantage relative to their employed counterparts. One study released by the Employment Policies Institute found that high-school seniors with part-time work experience earned 20% more per year on average, 6-9 years after graduating, relative to their fellow students who didn’t work. Ironically, today’s minimum wage mandate for higher pay will be condemning young adults to lower-paid and less-successful futures.

I suspect that the labor organizers behind this campaign for a $15 minimum wage are less interested in helping employees, and more interested in helping themselves to dues money from their paycheck. They’re unlikely to succeed in their goal of organizing the employees of McDonald’s franchisees, but they may well succeed in passing $15 into law in other sympathetic locales. You’ll see their legacy every time you visit the Golden Arches, where “would you like fries with that” is a button on a computer screen rather than a phrase spoken by an employee in their first job.

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source:
The Ugly Truth About A $15 Minimum Wage by former president and CEO of McDonald's USA, Ed Rensi - 4/25/2016 Forbes

Re-Blog - This is Not a Day Care

This past week, I actually had a student come forward after a university chapel service and complain because he felt “victimized” by a sermon on the topic of 1 Corinthians 13. It appears that this young scholar felt offended because a homily on love made him feel bad for not showing love. In his mind, the speaker was wrong for making him, and his peers, feel uncomfortable.

I’m not making this up. Our culture has actually taught our kids to be this self-absorbed and narcissistic. Any time their feelings are hurt, they are the victims. Anyone who dares challenge them and, thus, makes them “feel bad” about themselves, is a “hater,” a “bigot,” an “oppressor,” and a “victimizer.”

I have a message for this young man and all others who care to listen. That feeling of discomfort you have after listening to a sermon is called a conscience. An altar call is supposed to make you feel bad. It is supposed to make you feel guilty. The goal of many a good sermon is to get you to confess your sins—not coddle you in your selfishness. The primary objective of the Church and the Christian faith is your confession, not your self-actualization.

So here’s my advice:

If you want the chaplain to tell you you’re a victim rather than tell you that you need virtue, this may not be the university you’re looking for. If you want to complain about a sermon that makes you feel less than loving for not showing love, this might be the wrong place.

If you’re more interested in playing the “hater” card than you are in confessing your own hate; if you want to arrogantly lecture, rather than humbly learn; if you don’t want to feel guilt in your soul when you are guilty of sin; if you want to be enabled rather than confronted, there are many universities across the land (in Missouri and elsewhere) that will give you exactly what you want, but Oklahoma Wesleyan isn’t one of them.

At OKWU, we teach you to be selfless rather than self-centered. We are more interested in you practicing personal forgiveness than political revenge. We want you to model interpersonal reconciliation rather than foment personal conflict. We believe the content of your character is more important than the color of your skin. We don’t believe that you have been victimized every time you feel guilty and we don’t issue “trigger warnings” before altar calls.

Oklahoma Wesleyan is not a “safe place”, but rather, a place to learn: to learn that life isn’t about you, but about others; that the bad feeling you have while listening to a sermon is called guilt; that the way to address it is to repent of everything that’s wrong with you rather than blame others for everything that’s wrong with them. This is a place where you will quickly learn that you need to grow up.

This is not a day care. This is a university!

Dr. Everett Piper, President

Oklahoma Wesleyan University

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source:
http://www.okwu.edu/blog/2015/11/this-is-not-a-day-care-its-a-university/

Classically liberal

RE-BLOG: Classically Liberal

There is a lot of poor thinking going on when it comes to poverty. I hear more absurd or irrational statements made about poverty than almost anything else except, perhaps, the environment.

Here are a couple of common errors about poverty and why they are wrong.

The cause of poverty myth: This one is found in statements that usually begin with “Poverty is caused by....” Now it really does not matter how you fill in the blank. Poverty is not caused. It is the default nature of man. It is like asking: “What causes nudity?” Nothing! We are born naked.

As the saying goes we come into this world with nothing and we leave with nothing. Poverty is the natural state of existence while wealth is artificial. Wealth is created. Wealth, like clothes, has a cause where poverty does not. The proper question to ask is what causes wealth not what causes poverty?

If you understand the wealth creation process then you can see ways to end poverty. And when you realize that wealth creation is a process you can investigate what blocks it. Almost without exception the process is blocked by force. That force can be from marauding gangs who pillage
production or governments who tax it.

The block can be naturally caused or man-made. But roadblocks exist that have to be torn down. People want to make exchanges because through exchange they maximize wealth even when no new wealth is created. If I trade an orange for an apple I am ‘wealthier” by my own standards and so is the person who got the orange. That is because I only make the exchange because I value the apple more than the orange and my trading partner only does so when he values the orange more than the apple. We each walk away from the exchange with an increase in our own well being according to our own values.

But if someone comes along and prevents or inhibits the exchange then both traders are worse off. If they ban the trade, because my partner lives within one set of imaginary lines drawn on a map, and I live within another set, it matters not. We are still worse off. If they forbid the exchange because they don’t like my race or nationality there is still a reduction in well being.

Or if they come in and tax the exchange we are still worse off than we would be. All uses of force to interfere with voluntary exchange, by definition, substitutes the values of the one who uses the force for those of the traders. That inhibits wealth creation. And when this is inhibited the natural state of poverty either continues or the state of things revert. Wealth is man-made, poverty is natural. And that means wealth, once made, must be preserved as later interference with the process can cause poverty to reassert itself. When the process is stopped things revert to their default state.

The "equality matters" myth: If Bill Gates get richer I am supposedly worse off. But I have never heard anyone explain how this is the case. This is called relative poverty. I may be well off but if you are better off then I am relatively impoverished compared to you.

That’s like calling someone who is 6’ tall “relatively short” because someone else may be 6’4”. A person who weighs 150 lbs is “relatively” fat compared to a person who is anorexic.

This concept of “relative poverty” is absolutely irrational. It tells us nothing. You can make almost any case you wish by using a “relative” comparison. I could argue that the average American is “relatively poor” if I use the wealth of the top 10% of the population as my point of comparison. Or I can argue they are “relatively rich” if I compare them to the average income of people in the developing world.

And the Left, who are notorious at stripping words of any rational content, does this all the time. If they want to attack capitalism and make Americans feel “exploited” and envious they will compare the average working income to that of the average CEO. From this they conclude that Americans are made worse off by capitalism because “relative poverty” or wealth inequality is growing.

But when they want to make the average worker feel as if he is an exploiter, and appeal to his guilt, they compare the same income to that of poor people. One day you can be “too poor” and the next day you can be “too rich” simply by shifting the goal posts.

Such concepts add nothing to a discussion. But they are not meant to. They are used precisely because they allow one to make any argument anytime.

The poor as a static group myth: This has two variations. One is that there are X number of poor people in nation in one year, and then X number later down the road, indicating that no progress has been made. The assumption is that the people, who were poor, say in 1990, are the same people who are poor in 2005.

In fact people who are “poor” in any one year are mostly a changing group. A university student can be poor in his 20s because he is a part-time employee while studying. But with a valuable degree he may become one of the rich 20 years down the road. The category “poor” is not necessarily static but may be a changing one.

Another variation of the static concept is to define “poor” as some arbitrary percentage of the population. A popular definition of poverty is one where the “poor” are defined as anyone in the bottom 10 or 20 percent when it comes to income. The problem is that this definition means it is impossible to eradicate poverty. Even in a community of millionaires someone will be in the bottom percentage.

While this is a static definition it really is a fallacy that is similar to the first one discussed - that of “relative poverty”. This is so because the bottom percentage is always determined in relation to the income of others. This is a popular theory with some special interest groups because you cannot eradicate poverty since you cannot abolish the bottom percentage no matter what you do. It is always there. And that justifies the existence of the antipoverty group or its programs for eternity. That appeals to them.

Just clearing up the poor thinking around poverty can do a lot to clarify what needs to be done, or needn’t be done, when it comes to wealth creation. And poverty will only be ended when wealth creation is allowed to flourish.

For some information on the actual state of American poverty go here.

oh well we know better - Re-Blog

Symposium: “Oh, well, we know better.”
Christopher Green is an Associate Professor at Ole Miss Law.

Near the beginning of the oral argument in Obergefell v. Hodges, Justice Anthony Kennedy caused many observers to think that the Court might allow states to keep traditional marriage definitions after all. These definitions had, Kennedy said, been in place for millennia. “I don’t even know how to count the decimals when we talk about millennia. This definition has been with us for millennia. And it it’s very difficult for the Court to say, oh, well, we—we know better.” Two months later, however, Kennedy surmounted those difficulties. Chief Justice John Roberts puts the point well in his dissent: “If an unvarying social institution enduring over all of recorded history cannot inhibit judicial policymaking, what can?”

Quite unlike the opinion in Roe v. Wade, which frankly acknowledged its ignorance on the status of the fetus, Kennedy repeatedly claims to know better than the preceding millennia about whether same-sex couples are similarly situated to opposite-sex couples with respect to the purposes of marriage. His opinion is suffused with epistemic language. He speaks of what the plaintiffs’ “stories reveal,” of what “new dimensions of freedom become apparent,” of “greater awareness,” of what “psychiatrists and others [have] recognized,” of what is “now manifest,” of “knowledge,” of “new insights and societal understandings,” of “new awareness,” of what is “now clear,” of what “must be … acknowledged,” and of “enhanced understanding.”

The recognition of the need for a reliable factual foundation is perhaps a step up from Roe’s passive-aggressive approach of disclaiming knowledge on the key issue yet resolving the policy question anyway. The Court’s claims of knowledge today, by contrast, are more candidly aggressive. The Court simply announces that “[t]here is no difference between same- and opposite-sex couples” regarding the purposes of marriage.

Unlike Roe, the Court gives us few details of the sociological, psychological, and biological disputes it resolves. As Chief Justice Roberts’s dissent puts it, “The answer is surely there in one of those amicus briefs or studies.” Mere amount of deliberation is enough for the Court: “[M]any of the central institutions in American life—state and local governments, the military, large and small businesses, labor unions, religious organizations, law enforcement, civic groups, professional organizations, and universities—have devoted substantial attention to the question.”

“Substantial attention to the question” is one thing, but what of the answers? These groups have, of course, reached no consensus on whether same-sex and opposite-sex couples (or other arrangements) are similarly situated. Chief Justice Roberts quotes an eerily-applicable 1976 line from then-Justice William Rehnquist: “Surely the Constitution does not put either the legislative branch or the executive branch in the position of a television quiz show contestant so that when a given period of time has elapsed and a problem remains unresolved by them, the federal judiciary may press a buzzer and take its turn at fashioning a solution.”

It is striking to compare Roe’s relative epistemic humility in the face of disagreement over when the human fetus begins to have rights: “When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.” The Court feels no such modesty today.

One of the Court’s few specific scientific claims is particularly striking: “Only in more recent years have psychiatrists and others recognized that sexual orientation is both a normal expression of human sexuality and immutable.” The Court then cites pages 7 to 17 of the American Psychological Association’s amicus brief. Digging into these pages is quite instructive. The APA itself notes at page 7 that “sexual orientation ranges along a continuum,” and claims only that it is “highly resistant to change.” The Court upgrades this to “immutable,” a word the APA itself never uses. The brief reports at page 8 that “only 5% of gay men and 16% of lesbians reported feeling they had ‘a fair amount’ or ‘a great deal’ of choice about their sexual orientation.” That’s a lot more fluidity than the Court acknowledges. At pages 8-9, the amicus brief notes, “Fully 88% of gay men and 68% of lesbians reported that they had ‘no choice at all.’”

The Court’s immutability claim, then, disagrees with thirty-two percent of lesbians’ self-reports, according to the very source on which the Court relies. Among people who take the question seriously, there is surely room for those who agree with the ancients – whether Plato in the Symposium or Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:11 – in recognizing more fluidity to sexual orientation than does the Court. If the Court’s ipse dixit cannot end psychological debate over the extent of the contingency of sexual orientation, its ipse dixits on the general issue of the relevant similarity of same-sex and opposite-sex couples will fare no better.

The citation of authority on the immutability point is an exception, though. For most claims, the Court says little about how it can be so sure about them. I am reminded of the movie Toy Story 2. Asked by Mr. Potato Head, “What makes you so sure?” Buzz replies, “I’m Buzz Lightyear. I’m always sure!” Whatever expressions of diffidence Justice Kennedy might express in late April, by late June he always seems to find a way to summon sufficient confidence. To paraphrase Captain Willard from Apocalypse Now, it’s hard to find much to criticize as unsound about his method, because it’s hard to see much method at all.

The Court’s great confidence about the relevant similarity of opposite-sex and same-sex couples is especially striking when paired with its great skepticism about claims that expansion of the label “marriage” will dilute its effectiveness for traditional applications by severing the connection between natural procreation and marriage. The Court summarily pronounces the idea “counterintuitive” and “unrealistic” and claims that the states had “not shown a foundation” for it. However, the dilution of esteem when a label is expanded was obvious to the Court in its Mishawaka Manufacturing v. Kresge Co. decision of 1942 – the “psychological power of symbols” and the “drawing power of a congenial symbol” could be undermined if trademarks could be freely used by others, following Frank Schechter’s 1926 description of the “gradual whittling away or dispersion of the identity and hold upon the public mind of the mark or name.” For all of Kennedy’s confidence about the social dynamics of meaning, honor, and dignity, it is surprising that he cannot recognize this danger, or even see a reason to stay agnostic about it.

The Court’s unexplained decision that the nation has deliberated long enough contrasts sharply, of course, with its decision eighteen years ago in Washington v. Glucksberg. Under that rule, deliberation continues until the political process has reached a consensus; only outliers against the American tradition of civil liberty will be struck down for violating fundamental rights. Citing the fundamental-right-to-marriage cases—Loving v. Virginia from 1967, Zablocki v. Redhail from 1978, and Turner v. Safley from 1987 – the Court makes “marriage and intimacy” cases a Glucksberg-free zone. Rather than reading those earlier cases to limit Glucksberg’s doctrine, though, it seems much more natural to instead read Glucksberg to refine those cases’ rationales. Loving considered a thirty-four-sixteen majority in favor of the rule it imposed on states – and itself restored a common-law rule—but Obergefell overturns a thirty-four-sixteen majority against it. Limits on child-support-delinquents’ or prisoners’ rights to marry were likewise outliers in 1978 and 1987.

In sum, the Court errs in seeing itself as the only possible source of progress (or guidance on what counts as progress) on civil liberties. The Court claims, “If rights were defined by who exercised them in the past, then received practices could serve as their own continued justification and new groups could not invoke rights once denied.” To the contrary; obviously new groups can invoke “rights once denied” under Glucksberg; they are only prevented from nationalizing those rights until a genuine consensus exists. A tradition- and outlier-based approach to constitutional adjudication need not entail traditionalism for the elected branches. The Court says, “Were the Court to uphold the challenged laws as constitutional, it would teach the Nation that these laws are in accord with our society’s most basic compact.” Not so – not permanently. Even if it had affirmed, the Court could easily have made clear – as the European Court of Human Rights did in Schalk & Kopf v. Austria in 2010 in refusing to require same-sex marriage for all of Europe – that such a consensus might yet emerge in the future. If the Court really had the courage that its conclusions about same-sex marriage can withstand sustained deliberation and contestation, it too would have waited.

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[emphasis added]
source:
Chris Green, Symposium: “Oh, well, we know better.”, SCOTUSblog (Jun. 26, 2015, 4:27 PM), http://www.scotusblog.com/2015/06/symposium-oh-well-we-know-better/

Forgive Us Our Debts - Re-Blog

Imagine I were to give you the following assignment: "I want you to sit down with a non-Christian who knows nothing of the Bible. He has only vaguely heard of Jesus Christ, and he's not even sure there is a God. I want you to explain to him how to become a Christian." Would you be able to do that? Could you sit down with somebody and explain simply what it means to become a Christian?

Many Christians don’t have a clear understanding what we're asking people to do when we ask them to become a Christian. What is it about? It's found in this phrase, "Forgive us our debts." In this phrase there are two profound implications to this simple request.

First, that request implies we have all sinned. Whenever you talk to people about their need for Jesus Christ, you have to begin with sin. Without the bad news, there is no good news. And here is the bad news: there is a God in heaven who has an objective list of requirements, and all of us have fallen short of those requirements. The Bible says, "There is none righteous, not even one... For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:10, 23). Most of us have a hard time believing that we really are in need of forgiveness because we compare ourselves to other people. We think as long as we haven't molested a child or committed murder, we're pretty good. Not perfect, but good enough. Yet the standard God uses to judge us is not other people. His standard is His perfect Son, Jesus Christ. And the Bible says that compared to the perfection of Jesus Christ, we have all fallen short. All of us have sinned.

Second, we owe God for our sin. Because we have sinned against God, we owe God a debt for the sin we have committed. What is that debt? Romans 6:23 says, "For the wages of sin is death." Not just physical death but eternal death, eternal separation from God. We’ve all sinned. But here is the essence of the Christian message: Jesus Christ paid for our sin. When Jesus died on the cross, He paid our debt for us.

Here is the most important issue of your entire life: Who is going to pay for your sin? You have a choice. You can say, "God, I'll try to pay it myself." Then you will spend all eternity in hell trying to pay that sin debt, and it will never be paid off. Or you can choose to allow Jesus Christ to pay your debt for you. That's what He did when He died on the cross. He offered to take care of that debt for you. When you become a Christian, what you're doing is kneeling before a holy God and saying, "God, I know I've offended You. I know I have wronged You. I know I need to suffer for my sin, but I believe Jesus came and paid the debt for my sin in full. And I'm trusting in the name of Jesus to save me." The Bible says when we cry out to God in that way, He takes our faith and exchanges it for His perfect righteousness. That's what we're saying when we pray, "Father, forgive us our debts."

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source:
Forgive Us Our Debts - Pathway to Victory

Auditing Cicero - Re-Blog

O tempora! O mores! When will you stop testing our patience? How long will you mock us? How long must we endure that famous audacity of yours? The people are alarmed — doesn’t that mean anything to you? Even the Senate feels the need to defend itself against you. Don’t the worried faces in this august assembly worry you? Don’t you know that your plans already have been found out? Everyone here knows what you are up to. We know where you were last night, and the night before that, where you met, whom you met with, the schemes you hatched. Didn’t you think we’d find out?
- Marcus Tullius Cicero, In Catilinam

The proximate cause of the conspiracy of Catiline in 63 b.c. was debt: Lucius Sergius Catilina was a Roman nobleman from an ancient and celebrated family, a man of great physical courage and mental acuity, but he was utterly dissolute. Having wasted his fortune and spent himself hopelessly into debt, he assembled a small army of similarly ruined noblemen with the aim of overthrowing the Roman republic, murdering their creditors, and pillaging their rivals. Public debt in Rome was at record highs as the result of an unexpected economic downturn, expensive foreign wars, and a real-estate crisis that saw thousands of foreclosed-upon farmers lose their lands and flee to the city. Private debt was a problem, too, along with unfunded liabilities for veterans’ benefits and social spending. Catiline, a senator, had emphasized the issues of economic stimulus for the poor and more spending on veterans’ programs, which won him the support of the plebs, but it was his own debts that weighed most heavily upon his mind, along with his political future. Wise men long ago learned to be suspicious of very rich men demanding to be invested with political power on behalf of the poor, but that is one of the many lessons that the rest of us keep failing to learn.

In his famous denunciation of Catiline, Cicero described his co-conspirators as the worst sort of riff-raff and lowlifes, but in truth they came from the cream of respectable Roman society: Publius Cornelius Lentulus, known as Sura, had been consul only a few years before, while Lucius Cassius Longinus had served as praetor with Cicero himself. But Lentulus had lost his position because of a political scandal, and Cassius had lost his race for the consulship and was widely regarded as a political has-been. Others who had been frustrated by their lack of political success joined the conspiracy — former senators and the less fortunate sons of illustrious families, men who had, in the words of Sallust, “dissipated their patrimonies by gambling, luxury, and sensuality, and had contracted heavy debts.” Children of privilege up in arms, pursuing their own agenda under color of seeking justice for the masses against the financial elites: Occupy Rome, basically.

One cannot fault Catiline’s strategic analysis: Given the decayed state of the republic — Julius Caesar was elected pontifex maximus that same year, quite possibly through bribery — controlling the levers of political power meant the opportunity to put the machinery of the state to immediate use crushing one’s enemies and rewarding one’s friends, with very little standing in the way of an aspiring tyrant other than what Sharron Angle might have called “Second Amendment remedies,” had she and the Bill of Rights been around at the time. (Cicero was a defender of the right to keep and bear arms, but within limits: “Suppose,” he wrote, “that a person leaves his sword with you when he is in his right mind and demands it back in a fit of insanity — it would be criminal to restore it to him.”) Cicero demanded summary execution of the conspirator — “The senate is aware of these things, the consul sees them, and yet this man lives!” — which may seem a bit excessive, but the alternative was civil war, which was just what the Romans got after Catiline escaped. He died in battle, and Sallust noted with grudging respect that the corpses of Catiline and his men were found with their wounds in the right place: in the front.

Cicero, being a shrewd social analyst, recognized that Catiline’s conspiracy was not the moral failing of one man, or even that of the entire class of ambitious sons of privilege. It was, rather, a comprehensive failure of Roman institutions from the senate and consuls on down to the self-interested veterans and envious plebs. His most famous words were not uttered lamenting the decadence of Catiline but the decadence of the age: “O tempora! O mores!” It is better to have a republic defended by civic virtue than to have one defended by swords and spears.

Catiline was hardly the first rotten apple to fall from the tree of the Roman aristocracy, but he was wildly and enduringly popular with the plebs and with those who presumed to speak for them. He survived in legend as a kind of Robin Hood figure well into the Middle Ages, and beyond: Ibsen’s first play was a sympathetic treatment of Catiline, whom he regarded as a forerunner to the revolutionary movements then under way against the Habsburg empire. Catiline’s crime was not only to plot to kill a few senators and walk away from a few debts: His crime was to render the unthinkable thinkable, that a Roman ruler might set aside all of the hard-won liberty of the uncrowned republic and treat the state as his personal instrument, to become the thing that Romans hated most: a king.

In his De Officiis, Cicero meditated upon virtues that are necessary for political life, those “by which society and what we call its ‘common bonds’ are maintained.” The cardinal political virtue was justice — “the crowning glory of the virtues, and the basis upon which we call good men ‘good’” — which when applied to political questions entailed the ability to distinguish the common good from private interest. “The first order of justice is to keep one man from doing harm to another,” Cicero wrote, “and the next is to lead men to use common resources for the common good, private property for their own.”

Our House of Representatives has a hilariously long-winded and specific set of guidelines for helping members of Congress decide what is private and what is public, published under the heading “General Prohibition Against Using Official Resources for Campaign or Political Purposes.” But it is a very serious matter, which you can learn from the House’s declaration that

the misuse of the funds and other resources that the House of Representatives entrusts to Members for the conduct of official House business is a very serious matter. Depending on the circumstances, such conduct may result in not only disciplinary action by the House, but also criminal prosecution. Moreover, while any House employee who makes improper use of House resources is subject to disciplinary action by the Committee on Ethics, each Member should be aware that he or she may be held responsible for any improper use of resources that occurs in the Member’s office. The Committee has long taken the position that each Member is responsible for assuring that the Member’s employees are aware of and adhere to the rules, and for assuring that House resources are used for proper purposes.

The general principles outlined above are very good ones, and Cicero would have recognized them. Using public resources for private political purposes is not just an ethical violation; it is a crime very similar to bribery: one part extortion, one part abuse of office. And it is a crime for which superiors bear some responsibility for the actions of their subordinates.

No less than the actions of Catiline all those centuries ago, the actions of the Internal Revenue Service are a criminal conspiracy not only against the agency’s particular marked targets but against the republic itself, against the very idea of a republic, predicated upon the abuse of official power for private political gain. Such are the mores of these tempora that this scandal has unfolded as though the main question were how it might affect the 2014 congressional elections, or possibly the 2016 presidential race. But those are short-term considerations. This kind of scandal — from the Latin scandalum, or “stumbling block” — goes to the very heart of whether we remain the sort of people who can be trusted to govern themselves. It is a scandal in both the political sense and the Catholic sense of the word: “Any action or its omission, not necessarily sinful in itself, that is likely to induce another to do something morally wrong. Direct scandal, also called diabolical, has the deliberate intention to induce another to sin. In indirect scandal a person does something that he or she foresees will at least likely lead another to commit sin, but this is rather tolerated than positively desired.” (Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J., Modern Catholic Dictionary)

Already there are suggestions that other agencies, possibly the EPA and the ATF, have similarly abused the power entrusted to them, to say nothing of the worrisome developments at the (possibly misnamed) Department of Justice. The precedent that has been set cannot be undone, and the unthinkable is now thinkable, and everybody will be thinking it every time anybody is audited. The opinions of every crank and conspiracy theorist in the land just got a little bit more respectable. The wrongdoing is widespread and systemic; top managers knew about it and lied about it. The public trust has been entrusted to the untrustworthy. The question is not how much damage this scandal will do to the White House, but how much it will do to the country.

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Auditing Cicero | National Review Online by Kevin D. Williamson - June 17, 2013

Rs vs. Ds - Questionist - Re-Blog

re-blog post of The Questionist... some formatting and all emphasis are mine... no edits of content.

Every once in a while a post comes along that shines a very bright spotlight on just how profoundly insulated some people's personal echo chambers are. This one is mind boggling in its contempt for reality. Before I deconstruct this fantastical narrative, I need to clarify that this is NOT a defense of Republicans, nor is it an indictment of Democrats.

Claim #1:
Democrats are responsible for 65 straight months of economic growth.
Facts: The economic collapse of 2008 resulted in economic indicators that reach 75 year lows. These numbers were so far from average that the chances of them improving were near 100%, no matter what the government did or who was in charge. This results from a statistical phenomenon called “regression toward the mean.”
One famous example of this phenomenon in action is the “Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx.” Athletes or teams that are featured on the cover are chosen only following extremely good performances. Regression toward the mean all but assures that their performance will not be as good as the exceptional performance responsible for getting them on the cover. The same phenomenon holds true for any variable metric.
The economic growth that we have realized is much smaller and slower than expected, and the evidence that Democratic policies are responsible is non-existent, especially considering more than half of that growth was realized under a Republican House.

Claim #2:
Democrats are responsible for record 56 months of private sector job growth.
Facts: See #1.

Claim #3:
Democrats are responsible for unemployment falling from 10.1% to 5.9%.
Facts: Both the Employment to Population Ratio (also called simply the employment rate) and the Labor Force Participation Rate have dropped to 30+ year lows.
The unemployment rate of 5.9% that we see on the news does not give us the entire picture. If you add those actively seeking employment + short term discouraged workers + long term discouraged workers + part time workers who want to work full time, the number is closer to 23%. And if we used the same unemployment measurement we used prior to 1994, unemployment would be around 18%.
Add to this that people who are reentering the labor force are getting jobs with lower wages and fewer hours, and add to this that income inequality is increasing, and add to this that wages are not keeping pace with inflation; and the 5.9% unemployment rate we see in the headlines is not particularly meaningful. And... See #1 – regression toward the mean.

Claim #4:
Democrats are responsible for the budget deficit being reduced by two-thirds.
Facts: This one is more complicated, and I'm not going to pretend to understand all the reasons for this. What we do know from looking at revenue compared to spending is that spending has largely leveled off, and revenue has slowly increased since a $500 billion dip following the collapse; so part of this reduction is due again to regression toward the mean. Spending under Bush increased at a faster than normal rate due to increased military spending and, because for most of his term, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. Any time the same party is in control of both the executive and legislative branches, spending increases.
I'll conclude that this claim has some truth to it, but keep in mind that the National Debt has increased from $10.7 trillion to $18 trillion under Obama. In terms of debt as a percentage of GDP, it has increased under Obama from 65% to over 100%. As a comparison, under Bush it increased from 55% to 65%. This is a long term trend that has little to do with who is President or who is in control of Congress, but it is a distinctly unhealthy trend.

Claim #5:
Democrats are responsible for fewer Americans in harm's way in war zones.
Facts: The reduction in troops in Iraq was the direct result of the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement signed by Bush in 2008.
Yes, there are fewer troops overseas, but what Americans wanted and expected when they voted for Obama was a drastic reduction in military interventionism, not just the number of troops on the ground.
What we did NOT want or expect was hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan, an invasion of Libya, American citizens killed in Yemen, 17,000 residual forces, diplomats, and defense contractors left in Iraq, and 10,000 troops left in Afghanistan after the end of 2014.
As recently as September of 2012 Obama said. “We are bringing our troops home from Afghanistan. And I've set a timetable. We will have them all out of there by 2014. And when I say I'm going to bring them home, you know they're going to come home.” This is clearly not the case.
We did not want or expect an escalation in Iraq that included renewed airstrikes. We did not want or expect a new war in Iraq and Syria.

Claim #6:
Democrats are responsible for zero attacks by al Qaeda on US soil.
Facts: I'm not sure how Democrats are responsible for this, and there are far too few data points to draw any conclusions about which party is better or worse at preventing terrorist attacks.

Claim #7:
Democrats are responsible for record stock market growth.
Facts: This is perhaps the most clear example of regression to the mean. A stock market at rock bottom has nowhere else to go but up. In addition, the Federal Reserve dumped 16 trillion printed US Dollars into the market in 2008-2009, and has continued to pump 85 billion printed US Dollars into the market ever since. There is no possible way that the stock market could NOT have gone up under these conditions, and the negative effects are a dramatic increase in wealth inequality, a huge stock market bubble, and economic growth that is supported almost exclusively by debt. Despite the record stock market numbers, the US economy is very sick in a very real and long term sense.
Again, this has nothing to do with which party is in power, and much to do with short-sighted monetary policy on the part of the Federal Reserve. Almost all politicians focus on short term solutions with complete disregard to long term effects. This cliff will be very difficult, if not impossible, to retreat from.

Claim #8:
Republicans are responsible for two economic recessions.
Facts: Recessions are largely the result of natural economic fluctuations, and the only influence that politicians can hope for is to reduce the effect or shorten the duration. The recession of 2002 was a direct result of the bursting of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.
The collapse of 2008 was the result of several factors, none of them having anything to do with which party was in power. The precipitating factor was the collapse of the housing bubble which was, in turn, precipitated by artificially low interest rates by the Federal Reserve and ridiculously easy lending terms which resulted in millions of people getting mortgages that were above their abilities to maintain.
Another factor was the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which separated commercial and investment banking. This allowed commercial banks to, effectively, gamble with our money. The repeal of this act was supported by both Democrats and Republicans, and signed by Bill Clinton.

Claim #9:
Republicans were responsible for the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression.
Facts: See #8.

Claim #10:
Republicans were responsible for the worst terrorist attack in history.
Facts: This claim is probably the most disconnected from reality of any of the claims on this list. One only needs to read exactly what Osama bin Laden himself explained as the reasons for the attack. [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver]
Among the motivations stated by bin Laden for the attack were: long term US aggression in the Middle East, US attacks on Somalia, US support for Russian atrocities in Chechnya, Guantanamo Bay, the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, immorality of Americans (including the President), US support for Israel, and US sanctions against Iraq. (People seem to forget that Clinton was bombing Iraq throughout his term on a regular basis.)
None of these alleged provocations had anything to do with which party was in power, although the most immediate of them (and infuriating for bin Laden) happened on Clinton's watch.
Another possible motivation for the 9/11 attack offered by terrorism experts is that bin Laden wanted to provoke America into a war that would incite a pan-Islamist revolution. Considering what is currently happening with the Islamic State, one can only conclude that this strategy has been largely successful.

Claim # 11:
Republicans were responsible for the two longest wars in US history.
Facts: This claim regarding the war in Iraq is mostly true. This happened on Bush's watch with fabricated claims made by his administration, and a large majority of Republicans supporting the Iraq War Authorization. Note that a majority of Democratic Senators also voted in favor of the resolution.
This claim regarding the war in Afghanistan is, however, completely false. Only three members of Congress did not vote in favor of this, one Democrat and two Republicans.

Claim #12:
Republicans are responsible for the worst record of job creation since Herbert Hoover.
Facts: It is true that job creation under Bush was the worst since Hoover, and a certain amount of blame can be placed at the feet of Republicans. Another factor is (you guessed it) regression to the mean. After the dot-com boom, employment was exceptionally high, and it was a statistical near certainty that job creation would slow down or decrease.
Another factor is that the forces that led to the 2008 collapse were working against the economy well before the actual collapse itself. It's also worth a reminder that governmental actions have limited effects on job creation, and what small effects there are can lag several years behind the action.

Claim #13:
Republicans are responsible for a complete collapse of the stock market.
Facts: See #8. (It's interesting that three of the seven claims against Republicans are essentially the exact same claim. I could have come up with a lot more legitimate complaints against Republicans.)

Claim #14:
A budget surplus turned into a trillion dollar deficit.
Facts: It's true that Republican led spending on military intervention added to the deficits experienced under Bush. But yet again this can, to a large degree, be explained by regression to the mean. The 1990s saw an unprecedented information revolution, and a dot-com bubble that was further inflated by a badly timed reduction in capital gains taxes (which was supported by both Democrats and Republicans and signed by Clinton).

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