Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings. —Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals
During the recent Democratic Presidential ‘debates’, the Progressive Element candidates for president reveal just how incongruous Progressive thinking has become. Two of the candidates, Biden and Booker, stated that they want to beat up Trump, inciting the crowd with their aggression. This within the Progressive mindset that publicly denounces bullying and violence. The Communism appropriator Bolshevik Bernie Sanders and Cherokee heritage appropriator Elizabeth “Angry Eyes” Warren push for collectivist health care as a “yuman right” (a “right” that will consume all of your hard-earned property rights). This while the Progressive Element condemns the Trump campaign of Russian collusion. There’s more from these bizarre Progressivists.
CHARLESTON, SC – JANUARY 17: The stage at the Gaillard Center is prepared for tonight’s Democratic debate on January 17, 2016 in Charleston, South Carolina. Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley spent yesterday campaigning in South Carolina in lead up to tonight’s debate. (Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)
Biden offered a new and improved Obamacare, a dismal and expensive failure for the consumer. The other candidates want to ditch him, Obamacare and Obama’s legacy for their own new and improved version of collectivism.
Biden said that healthcare is the most important issue facing voters and Buttigieg says climate change is the most important issue. This while the Progressive Element legalizes full-term abortion, promotes physically harmful sexual activity and travels to a climate confab at Google camp (Sicily) in private jets and mega-yachts.
According to Italian media reports, guests were expected to arrive in an eye-popping 114 private jets.
The Post guesstimated that with 114 flights from Los Angeles to Palermo, the planes would have pumped an astonishing 100,000 kilos of C02 into the atmosphere.
One of the anti-Semitic socialist spice girls, Ocasio-Cortez Spice, has declared that the world will end in twelve years if we don’t do something about climate change. So, I understand the need to confab and to add ‘fuel’ to the narrative before it’s too late. Our betters need to show us a better way.
“Reparation H” Kamala Harris wants you to pay for slavery that didn’t happen on your watch. This from the party of the KKK and Jim Crow. And new age guru Marianne Williamson thinks all you need is love. And that means open borders for the lot of them. This while the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and others under Democrat control for decades are becoming third-world-like hell-hole cities – overrun with the homeless, rats, used needles, human feces and the spread of infectious diseases. This from the Democrat socialists who say they will do socialism better than what history accords. This – their love for humanity knows no dystopian bounds.
Open borders? They are Progressivism’s response to the perceived authoritarianism of the Right. For borders, boundaries, and laws are too legalistic, fundamentalist and not inclusive. So, they will promote lawlessness as a means to an end – diluting the country with illegals who will vote for more “Anything Goes” Progressivism. This while the streets west and south of “Welcoming City” Chicago are swarming with the law-unto-themselves gang members who slaughter at will. This while they treat our laws as a three-year-old girl who decides she is a boy.
Who are Progressives? The Progressive Element? Besides offering a narrative that Progressivism’s vision will make the world a better place while being equally detached from the reality of this world, Progressivist’s ideological worldview has many other unsettling characteristics.
Economist Thomas Sowell in his book A Conflict of Visions, Ideological Origins of Political Struggle, provides background and understanding of Progressivism’s “unconstrained vision”.
In the Summary and Implications section of the Visons of Social Processes chapter, Sowell writes comparing the “unconstrained vision” with the “constrained vision”:
The two visions differ fundamentally as to the sources of human survival and progress. According to unconstrained vision, the patterned behavior of society is successful, just and progressive insofar as it reflects the articulated rationality of man in general and of the most intellectually and morally advanced people in particular. Order – and especially a just and progressive order – is the result of design, backed by the commitment of people dedicated to the general welfare. In broad outline, this is the vision of the “age of reason”, which began in the eighteenth-century France and has spread throughout the Western world and beyond.
In the constrained vision, where man – individually and collectively – lacks both the intellectual and moral prerequisites for such deliberate, comprehensive planning, order evolves historically without design, and more effectively than when it is designed, Language is one example of such order without design and its complexity, subtlety, and effectiveness exemplify the power of systemic processes which tap the experience of all, instead of relying on special wisdom or nobility of any individual or council. A prominent element within this tradition has applied the constrained vision to economics…. given full expression by Adam Smith and is exemplified today in the writings of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.
Sowell goes on to describe the difference of the two visions regarding social processes:
The unconstrained vision tends to judge processes by their results – “Is it right? Is it good? …The constrained vision judges rightness and goodness as process characteristics rather than the results: A foot race is fair if it is run under the proper conditions – regardless of who wins or loses, or how often the same person wins. Justice, in the constrained vision, thus means adherence to agreed upon rules, while in the unconstrained vision, something is just or unjust according the end results.
Progressivism manifests its end result vision with the likes of participation trophies, allowing men to use the women’s locker room and restroom and to participate in women’s sports. Its version of end result equality is a driver for socialism – making every outcome equal. It is also the thinking behind ad hoc justice, which eschews the rule of law, applicable to everyone, and rules on the basis of individual circumstances and narratives rather than behavior and accountability. Progressivism’s ‘justice’, as Sowell describes above, says that the systems and processes produced the criminal. The individual is therefore not accountable for these things. This feeds the narrative that our betters must be in control to produce better people.
To produce equal outcomes, though, requires control of individuals and processes. And that is what the Democrat candidates are proposing in various ways. They want your times in their hands.
To gain control Progressives paint a dystopian future without them in power. Per them, the world will end if we don’t act, democracy will end if they are not given control, and rights, such as slaughtering the human in your womb and men disguised as women appropriating women’s concerns, will be taken away by the Right. Hence the calculating narrative described in my previous post, Manipulated to Follow the Course of This World. The blatant irony of the narrative is that it does not invoke the Age of Reason”. Rather, it invokes a mercenary army of passions to fight for the Progressive narrative.
Reading these ideological vision characteristics one can begin to see that the Progressive Element sees its members, its candidates, as your betters, as Anointed Ones. It was not long ago that one of the “Anointed Ones”, Hillary Clinton, gave the world her “unconstrained vision”:
“It Takes a Village offers a universal, unifying message. It captures perfectly Clinton’s vision of a multicultural America working toward a constructive goal. So hopeful and forward-looking.” —The Washington Post
More could be said but I’ll end here. I’ve written several posts about the Progressive Element with a desire to inform the reader of its diabolical ways. Though proclaiming a roadmap that is just and fair and caring it acts in just the opposite ways. They make excuses for their behavior while condemning and persecuting those who do not serve its narrative. They pronounce good “evil” and evil “good”. Their means to ‘equality’ is to bring others (males, whites, the rich…) down and to say that two things that are not equal are equal (male-female marriage and homosexuality). They become enraged when gendered pronouns are used. Coercing language and humans into confusing nonsense is characteristic of Progressives and certainly of the Evil One and his minions.
The values the Progressive Element extols, couched in humanist and even Christian terms, comes from the father of lies. There is no truth in the Progressive Element. The road map these false prophets propose is the “wide way” Jesus talked about (Matt. 7:13-15. Progressives “come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.”
Therefore, I will not put my life in their hands. Rather, I submit to the One True Narrative…
My times are in your hand;
deliver me from the hand of my enemies and persecutors. -Psalm 31: 15
Without a doubt, this past year you’ve heard the Bernie Sander’s mantra “a just wage”. When Bernie wasn’t chanting, Bernie railed against the 1 %, Wall St., corporations and just about anyone who made money (except those on the Left making money (i.e. George Soros, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett)).
And, as you know, Bernie’s answer to income differences was the penumbra of socialism’s cloud by day and a minimum wage increase to provide a home fire at night.
Yet, nothing happens in isolation, Bernie. Griping about unfairness may get you ten thousand followers but it doesn’t feed those followers in a desert economy. A kingdom understanding can and does. So, for starters, ….
Below is an excellent brief discussion about the minimum wage. Samuel Gregg, of the Acton Institute, speaks of a need for awareness on the part of both employers and employees about economic conditions and for each not to be myopic in their concerns.
News Anchor:“Good evening. From our National News Desk…
We start tonight’s broadcast with a report. Chip Block has our report from Denmark.”
Video w/reporter voiceover: “At a recent presidential debate hosted by CNN, presidential candidate Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders brought up Denmark and the surrounding Scandinavian states when asked to describe what “democratic socialism” means to him.
Sanders:“I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway and learn what they have accomplished for their working people. In Denmark, there is a very different understanding of what ‘freedom’ means.”
Video w/reporter voiceover: “The senator’s affinity for the Danish society has stretched back years. In 2013, after hosting the Danish Prime Minister on a tour of his home state of Vermont, Sanders wrote an essay praising their model of government.
Sanders wrote, arguing the U.S. could learn from the way the Danes have “gone a long way to ending the enormous anxieties that comes with economic insecurity.”
Sanders:“Instead of promoting a system which allows a few to have enormous wealth, they have developed a system which guarantees a strong minimal standard of living to all — including the children, the elderly and the disabled.”
Video w/reporter voiceover: “But Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen took strong exception to Sander’s statements recently in a speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.”
Danish Prime Minister:“I would like to make one thing clear, Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”
Video w/reporter voiceover: “But it is a market with many differences from the United States. All Danish citizens have access to child care, state-guaranteed medical and parental leave from work, free college tuition in which students receive a paycheck from the government during enrollment, free health care and a generous pension, all of which Sanders supports.
But “free” is actually the wrong word to describe these services. Danes pay some of the highest taxes in the world, including a 25% tax on all goods and services, a top marginal tax rate hovering near 60%. The top tax rate in the U.S., by comparison, is less than 40%.
But there are aspects to the Danish model that you would never see on Sanders’ policy platform. As a small country heavily reliant on trade, Denmark imposes minimal tariffs on foreign goods. Businesses here are only lightly regulated. The corporate tax rate is much lower than in the United States, which has one of the highest in the world. There’s not even a minimum wage in Denmark, although most workers are paid high salaries in large part due to the strength of labor unions. And in the past few years, Danish voters elected a right-of-center government, which has been instituting reforms that have put tighter restrictions on access to the long-held safety net. And here’s what Lars Christensen, a Danish economist known here as an outspoken critic of his homeland’s model has to say:”
Lars Christensen: “When I hear Bernie Sanders talk about himself as a democratic socialist, it’s a little bit 1970s, the major political parties on the center-leftand the center-rightwould oppose many of the proposals of Bernie Sanders on the regulatory side as being too leftist.”
Video w/reporter voiceover: “Few experts here believe that Denmark can long afford the current perks. So Denmark is retooling itself, tinkering with corporate tax rates, considering new public sector investments and, for the long term, trying to wean more people — the young and the old — off government benefits. One critic of the current system is Karen Haekkerup, the Danish Minister of Social Affairs and Integration:
Karen Haekkerup: “In the past, people never asked for help unless they needed it but now people do not have that mentality. They think of these benefits as their rights. The rights have just expanded and expanded. And it has brought us a good quality of life. But now we need to go back to the rights and the duties. We all have to contribute.”
Video w/reporter voiceover: “In 2012, a little over 2.6 million people between the ages of 15 and 64 were working in Denmark. This represents 47 percent of the total population and 73 percent of the 15- to 64-year-olds.
Yes, you’ve heard correctly. In Denmark, only half of the total population work. Maybe that’s why Danes are so upset with Bernie. While he’s praising a system that has enabled entitlements for an aging and unwilling to work population, Denmark has been hard at work overhauling entitlements, trying to prod Danes into working more or longer or both. Back to you, Todd.”
News Anchor: “Thanks Chip. After the break we’ll take a look at today’s financial headline. Up next: an interview with Sycamore Tree Funds CEO Zacchaeus Pure.”
…
Financial News Anchor: “Welcome back. After markets closed today, the Juxtaposed! ™ News team learned that Sycamore Tree Funds has contracted with Mustard Seed Growth Funds, whose Chief Investment Officer is Jesus.
Now word on the street has it that Sycamore Tree Funds CEO Zacchaeus Pure has, over the years, allegedly skimmed and embezzled thousands of Roman denarius from the fees paid to Sycamore Tree Funds. It should be noted that each denarius is about the equivalent of a day’s wage. If these accusations are true, Sycamore Tree Funds’ clients have much to be angry about.
Our sources also tell us that Sycamore Tree Funds’ board was having second thoughts about having its CEO Zacchaeus Pure solely managing its vast resources, even though the fund’s holdings had grown seven-fold during his tenure as CEO.
Zacchaeus, a well-known and many would say hated member of the financial community had grown Sycamore Tree’s enormous holdings by collecting exorbitant fees from his clients, fees that were well beyond the mandated charges. Sycamore’s clients are forced to pay Zacchaeus due to strict government regulations imposed upon them “to maintain their security.”
Here’s Lacy Hedge with her interview of Sycamore Tree Funds CEO Zacchaeus Pure.”
Lacy:“Zacchaeus, how is it that you contracted with Jesus? When did you first become aware of Jesus?”
Zacchaeus: “I became aware of Jesus when many of my clients began talking about the new money manager in town. Thousands of my clients had attended his seminars. I began seeing my clients carrying “It is More Blessed to Give than Receive” tote bags.
Like many in town I had heard about the just-in-time dinner meal served at two of Jesus’s life management seminars. As I mentioned, thousands of my clients had attended these seminars, so, I decided to get my own take on Jesus. And, as you can see I am a short man. But that has never kept me from going out on a limb and taking a risk. I take pride in my ability to be in the right place at the right time.
So…it happened one day that Jesus saw me in a crowd. He, in fact, called me by name. I was flattered, of course. Jesus requested that we have a power lunch at my home. I accepted. Why not? The rest is, shall we say, history.”
Lacy: “But there is more to the story, isn’t there? Were your clients happy about your meeting with Jesus? ”
Zacchaeus:“At first no. They were not happy! They protested outside my home with signs and shouting, “This man is a crony of the Roman Government!” and “Jesus, have no dealings with this man!”
Lacy: “What happened at your lunch with Jesus?”
Zacchaeus:“I listened mostly. The face to face meeting made all the difference for me. The secondhand knowledge from my clients gave me only a hint of this man’s character. In my world trust is key. And from that one-on-one meeting I learned that I could trust Jesus implicitly. I felt completely secure with turning over Sycamore Tree Funds’ money management to Jesus.
So I contracted with Mustard Seed Growth Funds and made Jesus my Fiduciary for life. I decided to seal the deal with a toast. I announced that I would redeem half my holdings and make a donation to the poor. And, I would refund to all my clients at least half the fees imposed upon them. Of course, when my clients heard this they were relieved. Their protest signs went away. I had regained their trust.”
Lacy: “What did Jesus say about your agreement?”
Zacchaeus:“Well, he said that he was very happy to get my commitment and to see me begin to recover the trust I had lost. He said Sycamore Tree Funds’ turnaround had already begun. He also stated Mustard Seed’s mission statement: ‘to seek and to save lost coins.’ I’m all in.”
Lacy: “Back to you, Todd.”
Financial News Anchor: “Thanks Lacy. Stay tuned. After the commercial break, today’s winning lottery numbers.”
“Good evening. From our National News Desk, our top story tonight…”
“The Bernieverse: Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign:”
Video w/voiceover:“. On Sunday night the chant from thousands in the stands was certainly loud, clear and heartfelt: “Bernie, Bernie, Bernie!””
Sanders:“Real freedom includes economic security. That was Roosevelt’s vision 70 years ago. It is my vision today. It is a vision that we have not yet achieved, and it is time we that we did.”
Video w/voiceover: “Sanders went on to speak of Medicare for all, tuition-free public college, a $15 minimum wage – a host of ideas intended to help America’s poor and middle class. Ideas that define his vision of socialism, a vision he says that will require top down centralized government with him as president to produce the desired outcomes.”
Sanders:“The only way we bring about real change is to create a political revolution where millions of people stand together and say loudly and clearly that this country belongs to all of us.”
“And in international news…”
“Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has placed Venezuela under a “State of Exception and Economic Emergency.”
“Maduro, also president of The United Socialist Party of Venezuela, has blamed capitalism for speculation that is driving high rates of inflation and creating widespread shortages of staples. He has often said that he was fighting an “economic war”, calling newly enacted economic measures “economic offensives” against political opponents that he and loyalists state are behind an international economic conspiracy.
Video w/voiceover: On Tuesday, a state-funded news service reported Maduro’s threat to dissolve the national legislature, which the opposition party won in a landslide election last December. “The National Assembly has lost political validity,” Maduro told reporters. “It’s a matter of time before it disappears.”
But Maduro is probably beyond saving. At this point, only 15 percent of his fellow citizens approve of his government. Political protests roil the streets, and normally law-abiding citizens have resorted to looting to get their hands on basic necessities. The government has responded with force.
Venezuela’s hospitals lack not only medicine but even soap, and cannot keep patients — especially at-risk infants — alive amid constant blackouts. Infant mortality rose by a hundredfold in 2015 from its 2012 levels, and five times as many women now die in childbirth. When his political opponents passed a law allowing foreign aid to prop up Venezuela’s hospital system, Maduro blocked it, calling Venezuela’s healthcare system the envy of the world.
Government agencies are now open only two days a week, as a cost-saving measure. The economy is in collapse, in the midst of its second straight year of double-digit contraction. Everyday items, including food, have long been difficult to buy in Venezuela, but they are now becoming impossible to find. Government-imposed price controls, combined with an astounding 700 percent inflation rate, have made toilet paper so scarce that it’s more valuable by the square inch than the Venezuelan currency one must use to buy it.
“Venezuela has been ranked as the top spot globally with the highest misery index score in 2013, 2014 and 2015. In 2014, Venezuela’s economy entered a recession.”
“After the commercial break, we take a look at this country whose future you won’t believe.”
Supermarket staff work next to partially empty shelves of toilet paper in Caracas May 16, 2013. Supplies of food and other basic products have been patchy in recent months, with long queues forming at supermarkets and rushes occurring when there is news of a new stock arrival. The situation has spawned jokes among Venezuelans, particularly over the lack of toilet paper. The government announced this week it was importing 50 million rolls to compensate for “over-demand due to nervous buying.” REUTERS/Jorge Silva (VENEZUELA – Tags: POLITICS BUSINESS) – RTXZPIP
Video w/Voiceover: “Venezuela Reaches the Final Stage of Socialism: No Toilet Paper””
“And at ten o’clock, our special report “Soda-less Socialism.””
Video w/Voiceover:“Sugar shortage forces Venezuela to stop producing Coca Cola as country struggles to fight crippling recession. Venezuelans struggle to get food, toilet paper, medicines.”
…Kulaks to conquer, Kulaks to enslave in Clay, property to plunder…
THIS JUST IN!!
A mysterious beam has been focused on Earth’s citizens. It is sucking the wealth out of people! The ray is said to be coming from the dead planet Marx. But wait. Professor Zharkov had miscalculated. The deadly beam is coming from the planet Ruling Class.
It seems that there is a new emperor in town: Marx the Ideologically Merciless! And he is using a powerful integrated Collectivist Ray against the people of earth. The deadly Supreme Socialist Ray or SSR is focused directly on Earth’s citizenry and right on their property. The citizens of earth are fleeing, taking their possessions and hoping not to feel the burn.
I am being told that the wicked Queen Hillary Azura has formed a partnership with the evil emperor Marx the Merciless on planet Ruling Class. This witch’s powers include the ability to transmute people into figures of living clay, condemning them to live in darkened caves. She employs the incense of forgetfulness to subdue her enemies. She is hated and feared by the country class.
Marx the Merciless has also allied himself with other nefarious characters and groups: the Red Hammer of Sanders organization, the unscrupulous Queen Rubia E. Warren, BHO the shape shifter and the Carnage Corporation. With his life altering ray focused directly on you, Marx the Merciless hopes that “individual economic actions and individual property, rights will be altered and abridged” forever.
—Reporting for the Daily Altoid, this is Happy Hapgood’s daughter Snappy Hapgood.
(Snappy has video of the Ruling Class Planet’s attack on the Country Class Planet and the valiant efforts being made to stop Marx the Merciless in his tracks…)
<<<>>>
“In any event the Commission is convinced by its interpretation of available empirical data that the actually integrating economy of the present day is the forerunner of a consciously integrated society, in which individual economic actions and individual property, rights will be altered and abridged.”
“Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies, Carnegie Corporation, 1934.”
The Supreme Socialist Ray’s unearthly effects are being directed at your children in the classroom…
“8. Under the molding influence of socialized processes of living, drives of technology and science, pressures of changing thought and policy, and disrupting impacts of economic disaster, there is a notable waning of the once widespread popular faith in economic individualism; and leaders in public affairs, supported by a growing mass of the population, are demanding the introduction into economy of ever wider measures of planning and control.
9. Cumulative evidence supports the conclusion that, in the United States as in other countries, the age of individualism and laissez faire in economy and government is closing and that a new age of collectivism is emerging. “
Earth must find a way to destroy Marx’s Socialist ray before the Earth is doomed!!!
Caution: A Faraday shield will only protect your electronic gadgets from Electromagnetic Pulses (EMPs). It won’t protect you from Egregious Redistribution Impulses (ERIs)!!!
Who are these Ruling Class Orcs? Who are these aggressive scavengers and opportunistic Kulakovores? They are Ruling Class America and the minions who do their hunter-gatherer bidding. They are the Democrats and Republicans who accrue power unto themselves; they are the political parties that refuse to elect a person of principle. They are the un-elected: the bureaucrats, the administrative state, the regulators, the social engineers, the ones whose careers are dependent on the government. They are the ones who have no boundaries but will set boundaries for you. They are the ones with secret servers, the ones who call themselves “saviors of the planet” and those in the confident “know”.
They are the Progressives, the elitists, the “living Constitutionalists” and those who are a law unto themselves, the “settled science” purveyors, the “green agenda” evangelists, the followers of the Scientism cult, the denigrators of religious convictions as “irrational”, the high priests of secularization, the climate change Inquisitors, the #SJW, #BlackLivesMatter, the LGBT, the gerrymandering, the feminists, the abortionists, the eminent domain Dishonest Johns, the Democratic Socialists, the diviners of what is best for you, the Barbara Boxers, the union bosses, the public school educators, the “It takes a village” people, those offended by “Merry Christmas”, the ones who come between you and your children, the ones who tell your kids what to eat in school, the establishmentarians, the deniers of viewpoints other than their own, the ones who say “Are you kidding?” when questioned about a Constitutional basis for their enacted laws, those who deem “this is for your own good”, those of the Unconstrained Vision, the initiators of unintended consequences, the federal workers, the EPA and DE, the Lois Lerners, the Commissar State, the Saurons, the Sarumans…all those bent over and feeding from the government trough.
What is in said trough? Kulaks. Heaps of Kulaks.
“They called us kulaks because we had a house with a galvanized iron roof and four horses, three cows, and a fine orchard by the house. The first thing in the orchard was a spreading apricot tree, and there would be heaps of apricots on it every year.” From Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s short story Apricot Jam
Kulaks? We have property. Some of us have mansions but most have enough to call home. We marry, have children, raise children, have grandchildren and bury (and not discard) loved ones. We are Pro-life even knowing that life is hard. We push and prod ourselves and our charges to excel, succeed, to grow out of adolescence into maturity. We pray and prepare. We worship our God and we rejoice with others when a sheep is found. We sweat, blister and toil. We provide and protect. We shoot bows and arrows and guns but not at each other. We take off our hats when we see our nation’s flag in a parade. We tear up when America the Beautiful is sung. We thank veterans for their service. We appreciate. We have dignity and values that were not handed down to us from government. We base our decisions on right and wrong and not on what our friends let us get away with saying.
Many of us believe that there are God-given laws and precepts that define our responsibilities and our freedoms. We sing “Amazing Grace” not for money or show but because we know sinning first hand and will admit it in a song and on our knees. Many of us are in the Kingdom of God and some of us are in the Fellowship of the Ring seeking to overthrow the world view of this age. We give thanks. Gratitude defines us. Whining is abhorred by us. We help out neighbor. We utterly detest government’s intrusion into our lives. Aspirations and love move us, not government mandates. We kulaks are the country class.
“Describing America’s country class is problematic because it is so heterogeneous. It has no privileged podiums, and speaks with many voices, often inharmonious. It shares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards inept and haughty. It defines itself practically in terms of reflexive reaction against the rulers’ defining ideas and proclivities — e.g., ever higher taxes and expanding government, subsidizing political favorites, social engineering, approval of abortion, etc. Many want to restore a way of life largely superseded. Demographically, the country class is the other side of the ruling class’s coin: its most distinguishing characteristics are marriage, children, and religious practice. While the country class, like the ruling class, includes the professionally accomplished and the mediocre, geniuses and dolts, it is different because of its non-orientation to government and its members’ yearning to rule themselves rather than be ruled by others…
Nothing has set the country class apart, defined it, made it conscious of itself, given it whatever coherence it has, so much as the ruling class’s insistence that people other than themselves are intellectually and hence otherwise humanly inferior. Persons who were brought up to believe themselves as worthy as anyone, who manage their own lives to their own satisfaction, naturally resent politicians of both parties who say that the issues of modern life are too complex for any but themselves. Most are insulted by the ruling class’s dismissal of opposition as mere “anger and frustration” — an imputation of stupidity — while others just scoff at the claim that the ruling class’s bureaucratic language demonstrates superior intelligence. A few ask the fundamental question: Since when and by what right does intelligence trump human equality? Moreover, if the politicians are so smart, why have they made life worse?” (emphasis added) From Angelo M. Codevilla’s America’s Ruling Class –And the Perils of Revolution. Read it and weep, kulaks.
…
“As long as anyone can remember, our family lived in the village of Lebyazhy Usad in Kursk Province. But then they put an end to the way we thought to live. They called us kulaks because we had a house with a galvanized iron roof and four horses, three cows, and a fine orchard by the house. The first thing in the orchard was a spreading apricot tree, and there would be heaps of apricots on it every year.” …Before they deported us as kulaks, they tried to make us tell them where we had hidden our goods. Otherwise, they said, we’ll chop down your apricot tree. And they chopped it down.” From Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s short story Apricot Jam
…
Here’s government overreaching to binge on you. Chomp, chomp, chomp…
Who are these Kulakovores? They are Ruling Class America and the minions who do their hunter-gatherer bidding. They are the Democrats and Republicans who accrue power unto themselves. They are the un-elected: the bureaucrats, the administrative state, the regulators, the social engineers, the ones whose careers are dependent on the government. They are the ones who have no boundaries but will set boundaries for you. They are the ones with secret servers, the ones who call themselves “saviors of the planet” and those in the “know”, Progressives, the entitled, the “living Constitutionalists”, those that are a law unto themselves, the “settled science” purveyors, the “green agenda” evangelists, followers of the Scientism cult, the #SJW, #LGBT, #BlackLivesMatter, the gerrymandering, the eminent domain Dishonest Johns, the union bosses, the public school educators, the “It takes a village” people…the Hannibal Lecturers.
The power-hungry…
They came for your body parts, your eminent domain:
The Ruling Class Cannibals endorse Planned Parenthood. The slaughter of the innocents provides these Cannibals with body parts to increase their food supply. They care more about the environment.
Warning: the video below is graphic. Watch the first minute if you can’t take any more.
They came for your independence, your guns:
The Ruling Class hates independence. The Collective would rather you meekly join the others in their Solyent Green plant.
Guns, in American history, have been the last resort to thwart tyranny. If I haven’t revealed approaching tyranny to you in these posts then you are a minion of the Ruling Class Cannibals.
Tyranny for Ruling Class Cannibals is not being able to have complete control over your flesh, not being able to cause a thrill go up your leg, not being able to throw you in a boiling pot at will.
Obama gun control extrapolated means that you are to be protected at a whim of the Ruling Class Kulakovores. Good luck with that, dead men walking.
They came for your values (and for your reprogramming):
The Ruling Class Cannibals love to tax people to death before consuming them. But the RCC will never be taxed like their meal tickets. These headhunters have tax havens where they hide their money away from the RCC’s chopping block.
The Ruling Class Cannibals want to determine who lives and who gets eaten alive, whose convictions are deemed worthy and given the “dignity” thumbs up and whose convictions are deemed too morally restrictive and impertinent to an overreaching court and thus requiring a thumb down. Progress and not permanence is of the essence to these fast foodies.
The Ruling Class Cannibals seek to replace the U.S. Constitution and the laws derived from tried and true classical Judeo/Christian/Greco/Roman thought for the International House of Pancakes law. Such an overturning of our legal foundation would allow these flesh-eaters to season the pot by appropriating the multicultural concepts of relativism, nihilism, animism and kulakcannibalism that the rest of the blood and flesh world bring to the table. To wit, Andrew C. McCarthy’s The globalist legal agenda
[U.S. Supreme court Justice Stephen Breyer’s latest book] The Court and the World is similarly a call for judicial supremacy, this time under the guise of international “interdependence.” The courts are once again pitched as an enabling agent of democratic choice, but on a supra-national scale.
The world, though, is a very undemocratic place—though perhaps no more undemocratic than Supreme Court diktats that remove controversies like abortion and “same-sex marriage” from democratic resolution.
How to explain the difference between progressive pretensions to “activate” liberty—i.e., to vouchsafe “the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning,” as Justice Anthony Kennedy vaporously put it in imposing same-sex marriage on the nation—and progressive judging’s actual affect of curtailing our freedom to live as we choose? This inversion of democracy, it turns out, flows naturally from Breyer’s inversion of the judicial role—a philosophy of judging shared by a working majority of his Court, the bloc of five unelected jurists whose edicts control ever more of what was once democratic space.
“[O]ur American judicial system,” he contends, should “see itself as one part of a transnational or multinational judicial enterprise.” Inconveniently (but, alas, not insuperably), the only “judicial enterprise” licensed by the Constitution, from which federal judges derive their authority, is the protection of Americans from overreach by our government and the remediation of other harms inflicted by third parties in violation of laws enacted by our elected representatives.
Interpreting the law as written—an intellectual challenge that is vital to the rule of law even if not sufficiently stimulating for many a robed social engineer—is not so much an enterprise as a discipline. In our system, it is supposed to be the politically accountable branches that get to do the enterprising. Nor does the discipline of judging take on a “transnational or multinational” character merely because some small percentage of the parties implicated in legal disputes is of foreign extraction—even if, as Breyer rightly observes, modern technology has made the percentage larger by making the world smaller.
What does Breyer see as the objective of this global judicial enterprise? The advancement of “acceptance of the rule of law itself.” This “rule of law,” you’ll no doubt be shocked to learn, bears an astonishing resemblance to the rule of lawyers—in particular, the judges along with the army of equally unelected transnational progressive lawyers who urge them on.
International law is especially fertile soil for growing this empire.
…
Of course the courts are vital, but in their place. That is not the place envisioned by Justice Breyer: global maestro. American courts, however, are a core component of our government and thus the servant, not the master, of our people. They ensure our rule of law. Thus fortified, it is the United States, not a congeries of jurists and international law professors, that remains the indispensable force for good in a troubled and dangerous world.” (emphasis added)
Ruling Class Cannibals will tell you that social justice means that what you own is not yours, it is to be taken from you – create an injustice in order to create social justice. Your delicious ends justify their means.
May I offer you a wafer-thin Kulak, sir?
They came for you as dessert:
A wafer-thin mint for the Ruling Class Cannibals? You will be up-chucked but they’ll take you.
Ruling Class Cannibalism doesn’t fall far from the limb:
Who are these Kulakovores? They are Ruling Class America and the minions who do their hunter-gatherer bidding. They are the Democrats and Republicans who accrue power unto themselves. They are the bureaucrats, the administrative state, the regulators, the social engineers, the ones whose careers are dependent on the government, the ones with secret servers, the “saviors of the planet”, those in the “know”, Progressives, the entitled, the “living Constitutionalists”, the “settled science” purveyors, the “green agenda” evangelists, the #SJW, #BlackLivesMatter, the gerrymandering, the eminent domain Dishonest Johns, the union bosses, the public school educators, the “It takes a village” people…the Hannibal Lecturers.
The power-hungry…
They came for your family:
“The ruling class is keener to reform the American people’s family and spiritual lives than their economic and civic ones. In no other areas is the ruling class’s self-definition so definite, its contempt for opposition so patent, its Kulturkampf so open. It believes that the Christian family (and the Orthodox Jewish one too) is rooted in and perpetuates the ignorance commonly called religion, divisive social prejudices, and repressive gender roles, that it is the greatest barrier to human progress because it looks to its very particular interest — often defined as mere coherence against outsiders who most often know better. Thus the family prevents its members from playing their proper roles in social reform. Worst of all, it reproduces itself.
Since marriage is the family’s fertile seed, government at all levels, along with “mainstream” academics and media, have waged war on it. They legislate, regulate, and exhort in support not of “the family” — meaning married parents raising children — but rather of “families,” meaning mostly households based on something other than marriage. The institution of no-fault divorce diminished the distinction between cohabitation and marriage — except that husbands are held financially responsible for the children they father, while out-of-wedlock fathers are not. The tax code penalizes marriage and forces those married couples who raise their own children to subsidize “child care” for those who do not. Top Republicans and Democrats have also led society away from the very notion of marital fidelity by precept as well as by parading their affairs. For example, in 1997 the Democratic administration’s secretary of defense and the Republican Senate’s majority leader (joined by the New York Times et al.) condemned the military’s practice of punishing officers who had extramarital affairs. While the military had assumed that honoring marital vows is as fundamental to the integrity of its units as it is to that of society, consensus at the top declared that insistence on fidelity is “contrary to societal norms.” Not surprisingly, rates of marriage in America have decreased as out-of-wedlock births have increased. The biggest demographic consequence has been that about one in five of all households are women alone or with children, in which case they have about a four in 10 chance of living in poverty. Since unmarried mothers often are or expect to be clients of government services, it is not surprising that they are among the Democratic Party’s most faithful voters.
While our ruling class teaches that relationships among men, women, and children are contingent, it also insists that the relationship between each of them and the state is fundamental.That is why such as Hillary Clinton have written law review articles and books advocating a direct relationship between the government and children, effectively abolishing the presumption of parental authority. Hence whereas within living memory school nurses could not administer an aspirin to a child without the parents’ consent, the people who run America’s schools nowadays administer pregnancy tests and ship girls off to abortion clinics without the parents’ knowledge. Parents are not allowed to object to what their children are taught. But the government may and often does object to how parents raise children. The ruling class’s assumption is that what it mandates for children is correct ipso facto, while what parents do is potentially abusive. It only takes an anonymous accusation of abuse for parents to be taken away in handcuffs until they prove their innocence. Only sheer political weight (and in California, just barely) has preserved parents’ right to homeschool their children against the ruling class’s desire to accomplish what Woodrow Wilson so yearned: “to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.” — The Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolutionby Angelo M. Codevilla
They came for your children and their “privilege. They came to put them on the menu:
Here is what is going on in social engineering social studies.
Ruling Class Cannibals (RBC) Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump et al, all have a taste for power. And that means that your hard-earned tilled-the-earth money is on the menu so as to whet the appetites of would be RBC voters.
Oh sure, these social warriors will tell you that they want to make things “fair and equal and right”. But, these Kulakovores are bibbed up and ready to devour you and yours at a power lunch trough feeding. Their mere mention of “Wall St.” has already marinated your tender #Occupywallstreet minds.
Raising the minimum wage by coercive law is an injustice done to business owners and stockholders. Such increases steal the owner/investor’s income. Period.
It is immoral for someone to take my wealth and give it to someone else. Only when there is an injustice between two parties should there be restitution. (Being born black is not an injustice unless you are deemed unworthy of being born by the Ruling Class. Welfare and Domination are the perverted restitutions offered by Democrats).
The Ruling Class Cannibals are at the gate!
They came for your… Hold on! Don’t do me like that! Time for a bit of truth telling. The following will give the Ruling Class indigestion!
Envy St. has been the road most travelled from the start. Covetousness and self-deception have been the vehicles of choice. The serpent promised the first couple that they could become like God – their projected 1%.
“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good from evil.” Genesis 3: 4, 5
And so they believed the lie that having the same quality as God would create equality with God. They believed they could transcend their humanity and become Singularity. They democratically voted “Yes,” and bit off more than mankind could chew.
~~~
Man as Singularity – Freddie Kruger voters: “Since the end of the second world war…a new ethic has, astonishingly, come into being, according to which envious man is altogether acceptable. Progressively fewer individuals and groups are ashamed of their envy, but instead make out that its existence in their temperament proves the existence of “social injustice,” which must be eliminated for their benefit. Suddenly it has become possible to say, without loss of public credibility and trust, “I envy you. Give me what you’ve got.” (emphasis added) Helmut Schoeck, sociologist
~~~
The Day Democratic Socialism Died:
In his final semester, Trevor had earned enough credits to graduate. Trevor had worked long and hard. He would graduate in the top 1% of his class. And, as expected, Trevor’s school loan would come due a year from graduation. Trevor would need to find work. But.
Trevor, a student of required Karl Marx readings, was told that 90% of his credits now must be redistributed to other classmates who were lacking credits. Trevor was taught that socialism is the way of the future and that he must submit.
Trevor, now, would need to apply for another student loan to earn more credits to graduate. And though tenured professors did not have to redistribute their years of teaching to create tenure for other teachers (some people being more equal than others), Trevor accepted his plight….by saying, “Hell no!”
~~~
The push for equality through Democracy, equality tied to a certain feature of your neighbor’s life, is not unlike an out of control spender charging every purchase to a credit card to keep up with the Joneses or the Kardashians or the Real House Wives of Orange County and then paying the minimum due every month.
~~~ “And it is a good thing that many ideas have a relatively short shelf-life. Some because they are bad, even pernicious ideas: the Master Race, the class struggle, the Oedipus complex, and Socialism are four bad ideas with wretched consequences that come immediately to mind.” “Being an anti-capitalist and hence being able to blame capitalism—often known more simply as “the system”—for any failure I might encounter through my own lack of talent or absence of energy not only provided me with a fine fallback position, but permitted me to view anyone who labored at a workaday job in the system with a rather lofty contempt.”
― Joseph Epstein, A Literary Education and Other Essays
~~~
More required reading. Credit applies to graduating with honors in saying “No” to socialism:
“This Presidential election looks more like an election in Europe than one from America. On the Democratic side you have a 74 year old self-avowed socialist and a 68 year old progressive. On the GOP side you have forgotten the message of Reagan where Government was the problem, now it’s just badly managed. At the GOP debate last week you had a debate over whether Obama is incompetent or an ideologue.”
“What Keynes succeeded in doing was to provide a rationale for what governments always like to do: spend other people’s money and pander to special interests.”
“When leftists fantasize about Northern Europe, the first thing they think of is the region’s enormous public spending and its overly generous welfare state. However, as with all dreams, the time is coming to wake up. Along with several other social services, Sweden’s iconic “free” healthcare system’s days are numbered.”
What happens when a pulse is no longer found on your wrist? That is an indication that your heart stopped pumping blood.
What would happen if income inequality stopped pulsating throughout the economy? That would be an indication that the beating heart of business is no longer pumping.
Income inequality is to be expected whenever growth occurs. To not grow is to be moribund.
~~~
The collapse of an economy is brought about by throttling the pulse of income inequality in order to create flat line “equality.” Immobility, as opposed to upward mobility, happens when wages become stagnant or “equalized” to a zero Gini Coefficient. Socialist economies, past and present, have been choked to death or near to death by those who promote the end of “income inequality!”
And while I see income inequality as a good healthy thing, opportunity inequality is not. But keep in mind that equal opportunity does not equate to or guarantee income. An individual response to opportunity is what matters. And, that is why leftists want to force the equal income issue – they know that people are by nature lazy and will respond to handouts of other people’s income.
Only effort tied to skills that increase in value over time will likely result in greater income. And here it should be noted that Progressives hate competition. The dynamics of supply and demand in the job market are anathema to them. They want to invoke their own economic “Nudge.” That is why they will push “Participant” trophy mindsets over competition.
Progressives consider most things to be of equal value (except their opinion). Progressives do not want you to even compete against yourself, to better yourself – “You are worth what we tell you are worth.”
But competition and pressure are necessary to proper functioning. As with your body, there would be no blood pressure if there wasn’t some resistance imposed by blood vessels. The vessels provide constriction necessary to maintain pressure. Proper blood flow feeds all veins and capillaries with life-sustaining oxygen.
So it is with competition. It constricts and channels the pressure in the form of your effort to those parts of your life that require sustainability, which is every part.
~~~
What are the causes of “income inequality!”? Is “income inequality!” the “fault” of Wall St. “fat cats”? Is shaking down Wall St. and the 1% the answer? Here is an excerpt from a recent book about the origins of inequality, a diagnosis that is spot-on:
“The distribution of income cannot be boiled down to one mechanism such as supply and demand in the labor market, nor can it be measured by a single measure of inequality like the Gini Coefficient. It is the result of many different processes working together. History matters, as do the market, politics, and demography.”…
“Over most of the past century, Americans have been acquiring more education, so that the supply of skill to the labor market has increased. If nothing else happened, this chain of events would have reduced the value of education and driven down the gap in wages between those with and without a college degree. Yet the gap has risen, not fallen, and it has done so particularly rapidly since the late 1970’s. When price rises even though supply has risen, we know that demand must be rising even more rapidly. Economists attribute this rise to the relentless increase in the skills required to work with new, information-based technologies. They believe that the acceleration in the skill biased technical progress over the past thirty years is the main engine driving increased inequality in earnings.” (emphasis added)- Angus Deaton, “The Great escape: health, wealth and the origins of inequality.” (Angus Deaton, in 2015, “was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare.”
The demonizing of Wall St. and the rich is the Marxist ranting of the Left. “Income inequality!” is created by a multiplicity of factors just as your good health is dependent a multiplicity of factors – the environment, your intake of nourishment, your exercise, etc. Blaming Wall St. for “income inequality!” is like blaming the existence of restaurants, those who trade in food, for those “fat cats” who eat more than others.
Do you blame restaurants for your poor physical health and not the choices you’ve made? If you do you must be a Blamocrat.
Blaming Wall St. is “Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!”
What other factors cause “income equality!”?
-Fiscal and monetary polices limit the flow of wealth and create hyper-“income inequality!”
The fiscal policies of Barack Obama’s administration, like those of a Marxist economy, have sown seeds of uncertainty. Investors, the economy’s job creators and the demonized ones of Wall St., are wary of investing due to the unknowns of government regulations and of taxes, specifically. The risk of investing any money is made considerably greater by government’s visible hand in the till.
The effect: we have had sub par 3% GDP for the last several years under Barack Obama. And, even though today’s job numbers are better than usual they are sub par also. The labor participation rate is still terrible. I know of four people who are currently struggling. Two of them have been out of work and/or underemployed for years. The other two have recently lost their long time jobs. There are men between the ages of 25 and 54 sitting on the couch at home eating Twinkies and watching ESPN. Obama’s fiscal policies have created “income inequality!” for millions of black and white lives, as if they didn’t matter.
The Keystone Pipeline project would provide significant jobs but the Obama administration has kept it from happening. The cult of climate change creates extensive “income inequality!”
And, with a zero percent interest policy the FED is pushing asset valuations up in the stock market. This is due to the fact that investors sensibly want to earn a return on their money. And since the FED has created no incentive to save with its zero percent interest rate investors must look to other financial vehicles for a return.
As investors buy into the market asset valuation climbs by pushing prices up. Hence investor wealth grows, at least on paper. Investors seek such havens to grow their wealth. This makes utter sense to me as an investor as opposed to accepting stagnation and even loss of income to due to today’s unspoken real inflation.
Again, the FED’s monetary policy of zero percent interest does nothing for middle class savings accounts. Here, again, disparity of incomes between Wall St. and Joe Schmo is created by those in power.
The economics of the Keynesians, the Progressive’s go-to policy makers, is to have government and people spend all their money (consume) in order to make the economy grow. This nonsense, the AGW scientism of economics, is exactly opposite of what is needed to grow the economy and stunts savings and investment.
Both fiscal and monetary policies are political animals chained to the powers that be. And, that is not you, Joe Schmo.
The very people who rail against “income inequality!” during a campaign (Clinton, Sanders, Warren, etc.) are the ones who create the malignant disparity of unequal opportunity when they get into office.
As I write this Hillary Clinton is proposing a $12 minimum wage for federal employees. Yet, no quick fix-it “remedy” happens in isolation.
Do you want to guess who pays for this proposed redistribution? In effect, Clinton is asking taxpayers, those moms and dads who both work, to vote for her (and to reduce what’s left of their disposable income) so she can raise the minimum wage of federal workers, those folks who will vote for her. The bleeding heart liberal’s cure for “income inequality!” is pulse-robbing bloodletting of voters.
The money that comes out of your paycheck to pay for this minimum wage increase is money that you cannot spend in the economy yourself. It is redirected to others and becomes the gateway drug for more redistribution.
To redistribute your wealth as Hillary proposes is like putting a pacemaker in the heart of the flagging economy with a battery that will last only a fraction of an election cycle.
~~~
You don’t need to be a Nobel Prize winning economist to understand that your income changes (creating income inequality over time) by a change in age, from young to old, from inexperience and a wet behind the ears status to well-oiled maturity and grey-haired sagacity. And also by where you live (a tech corridor, for example, and not the Sahara) and by your enhanced skill set. There is no devious little secret behind “income inequality.”
In fact, “income inequality!” drives return on investment. Who would invest if you knew that you would never gain appreciated value in the form of dividends or capital gains (income) over time from your investment? Even non-Wall St. Folk will buy homes believing that a home will appreciate (simple income inequality) over time.
It’s a Hip Hop world kid! Get with the program!
~~~
The following parable provides a Kingdom of God finding on “income inequality!”
What I hope you will note is that “income inequality!” as approved by Jesus (and as recorded by Dr. Luke, Chapter 19) means that those who do not increase what they are given are relieved of what little they may have. Their portion is given to the one who has made a significant (ten-fold) return on investment. As is usual in the Kingdom of God, Jesus’ POV is completely opposite of the world’s POV.
The world under the rubric of “income inequality!” will take from those who have succeeded and give to those who have not made any significant effort. And, the world will do this using Caesar as Divine Redistributor. There is not one mention of Caesar in Jesus’ words.
The Parable of the Ten Talents
“There once a nobleman, “ he said, “who went into a country far away to be given royal authority and then return. He summoned ten of his slaves and gave them ten silver coins. ‘Do business with these,’ he said, ‘until I come back.’ His subjects, though, hated him, and sent a delegation after him to say, ‘we don’t want this man to be our king.’
So it happened that when he received the kingship and came back again, he gave order to summon these slaves who had received the money, so that he could find out how they had got on with their business efforts. The first came forward and said, ‘Master, your money has made ten times it value!’
‘Well done, you splendid servant!!’ he said. ‘You’ve been trustworthy with something small; now you can command ten cities.’
The second came and said, ‘Master, your money has made five times its value!’
‘You too – you can take charge of five cities.’
The other came and said, ‘Master, here is your money. I kept it wrapped in this handkerchief. You see, I was afraid, because you are a hard man: you profit where you made no investment, and you harvest what you didn’t sow.’
‘I’ll condemn you out of your own mouth, you wicked scoundrel of a servant!’ he replied. ‘So, you knew that I was a hard man, profiting where I didn’t invest and harvesting where I didn’t sow? So why didn’t you put my money with the bankers? Then I’d have had the interest when I got back!’
‘Take the money from him,’ he said to the bystanders, ‘and give it to the man who’s got it ten times over!’ (“Master,” they said to him, “he’s got ten times that already!”)
“Let me tell you: everyone who has will be given more; but if someone has nothing, even what he has will be taken from him…”
“We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture, and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work” Roger Scruton
*****
“When a common culture declines, the ethical life can be sustained and renewed only by a work of the imagination.”-Roger Scruton
*****
“Jesus prayed, “This is eternal life, that they may know You . . .” (John 17:3). The real meaning of eternal life is a life that can face anything it has to face without wavering. If we will take this view, life will become one great romance— a glorious opportunity of seeing wonderful things all the time. God is disciplining us to get us into this central place of power.” Oswald Chambers
*****
“No power on earth or in hell can conquer the Spirit of God in a human spirit, it is an inner unconquerableness.” Oswald Chambers
*****
To those who have had no agony Jesus says, “I have nothing for you; stand on your own feet, square your own shoulders. I have come for the man who knows he has a bigger handful than he can cope with, who knows there are forces he cannot touch; I will do everything for him if he will let Me. Only let a man grant he needs it, and I will do it for him.” The Shadow of an Agony,Oswald Chambers
*****
“If we wish to erect new structures, we must have a definite knowledge of the old foundations.” John Calvin Coolidge
*****
Atheism is a post-Christian phenomenon.
*****
If social justice looks like your hand in someone else’s pocket then you are stealing.
*****
“In Sweden, giving to charity, absurdly, came to be considered a lack of solidarity, since it undermined the need for the welfare state.” – Roland Martinsson
*****
“…to love democracy well, it is necessary to love it moderately.” Alexis de Tocqueville
*****
Capitalism seeks to help others through a servce or product it provides. Free Market Capitalism is the most moral and fair economic system available to man. Capitalism augments personal growth, responsibility and ownership. Charity flourishes under capitalism. Charity dies under subjective “fair share” government confiscatory policies. Socialism redistributes ambivalence and greed.
*****
“We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.” G.K. Chesterton
*****
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction. Albert Einstein
*****
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” Flannery O’Connor
*****
“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
*****
“Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).
*****
God’s grace is not about the allowance for sin. God’s grace is about the conversation God allows regarding sin.
*****
From the book of Proverbs: We are not to favor the rich or the poor. We are to pursue justice.
*****
“Always keep in contact with those books and those people that enlarge your horizon and make it possible for you to stretch yourself mentally.” Oswald Chambers
*****
One goldfish says to another, “If there is no God who keeps changing the water?”
*****
“The truth is always there in the morning.”
From Cat On A Hot Tin Roof script – playwright Tennessee Williams
*****
God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be satisfied.
*****
“America’s greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.” John W. Gardner
**
“Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.” John W. Gardner
*****
“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.” Dorothy L. Sayers
*****
“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
G. K. Chesterton
*****
“The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
*****
This is what the LORD says:
“Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.
But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
-The prophet Jeremiah, 6:16
*****
“…our common task is not so much discovering a truth hiding among contrary viewpoints as it is coming to possess a selfhood that no longer evades and eludes the truth with which it is importunately confronted.” James McClendon, Ethics: Systematic Theology, Vol. 1
*****
Cindy Wity 
My Times are Not in Your Hands
August 4, 2019 Leave a comment
Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings.
—Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals
During the recent Democratic Presidential ‘debates’, the Progressive Element candidates for president reveal just how incongruous Progressive thinking has become. Two of the candidates, Biden and Booker, stated that they want to beat up Trump, inciting the crowd with their aggression. This within the Progressive mindset that publicly denounces bullying and violence. The Communism appropriator Bolshevik Bernie Sanders and Cherokee heritage appropriator Elizabeth “Angry Eyes” Warren push for collectivist health care as a “yuman right” (a “right” that will consume all of your hard-earned property rights). This while the Progressive Element condemns the Trump campaign of Russian collusion. There’s more from these bizarre Progressivists.
CHARLESTON, SC – JANUARY 17: The stage at the Gaillard Center is prepared for tonight’s Democratic debate on January 17, 2016 in Charleston, South Carolina. Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley spent yesterday campaigning in South Carolina in lead up to tonight’s debate. (Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)
Biden offered a new and improved Obamacare, a dismal and expensive failure for the consumer. The other candidates want to ditch him, Obamacare and Obama’s legacy for their own new and improved version of collectivism.
Biden said that healthcare is the most important issue facing voters and Buttigieg says climate change is the most important issue. This while the Progressive Element legalizes full-term abortion, promotes physically harmful sexual activity and travels to a climate confab at Google camp (Sicily) in private jets and mega-yachts.
According to Italian media reports, guests were expected to arrive in an eye-popping 114 private jets.
The Post guesstimated that with 114 flights from Los Angeles to Palermo, the planes would have pumped an astonishing 100,000 kilos of C02 into the atmosphere.
A-listers arrive in private jets, mega yachts for climate confab
One of the anti-Semitic socialist spice girls, Ocasio-Cortez Spice, has declared that the world will end in twelve years if we don’t do something about climate change. So, I understand the need to confab and to add ‘fuel’ to the narrative before it’s too late. Our betters need to show us a better way.
“Reparation H” Kamala Harris wants you to pay for slavery that didn’t happen on your watch. This from the party of the KKK and Jim Crow. And new age guru Marianne Williamson thinks all you need is love. And that means open borders for the lot of them. This while the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and others under Democrat control for decades are becoming third-world-like hell-hole cities – overrun with the homeless, rats, used needles, human feces and the spread of infectious diseases. This from the Democrat socialists who say they will do socialism better than what history accords. This – their love for humanity knows no dystopian bounds.
Open borders? They are Progressivism’s response to the perceived authoritarianism of the Right. For borders, boundaries, and laws are too legalistic, fundamentalist and not inclusive. So, they will promote lawlessness as a means to an end – diluting the country with illegals who will vote for more “Anything Goes” Progressivism. This while the streets west and south of “Welcoming City” Chicago are swarming with the law-unto-themselves gang members who slaughter at will. This while they treat our laws as a three-year-old girl who decides she is a boy.
Who are Progressives? The Progressive Element? Besides offering a narrative that Progressivism’s vision will make the world a better place while being equally detached from the reality of this world, Progressivist’s ideological worldview has many other unsettling characteristics.
Economist Thomas Sowell in his book A Conflict of Visions, Ideological Origins of Political Struggle, provides background and understanding of Progressivism’s “unconstrained vision”.
In the Summary and Implications section of the Visons of Social Processes chapter, Sowell writes comparing the “unconstrained vision” with the “constrained vision”:
The two visions differ fundamentally as to the sources of human survival and progress. According to unconstrained vision, the patterned behavior of society is successful, just and progressive insofar as it reflects the articulated rationality of man in general and of the most intellectually and morally advanced people in particular. Order – and especially a just and progressive order – is the result of design, backed by the commitment of people dedicated to the general welfare. In broad outline, this is the vision of the “age of reason”, which began in the eighteenth-century France and has spread throughout the Western world and beyond.
In the constrained vision, where man – individually and collectively – lacks both the intellectual and moral prerequisites for such deliberate, comprehensive planning, order evolves historically without design, and more effectively than when it is designed, Language is one example of such order without design and its complexity, subtlety, and effectiveness exemplify the power of systemic processes which tap the experience of all, instead of relying on special wisdom or nobility of any individual or council. A prominent element within this tradition has applied the constrained vision to economics…. given full expression by Adam Smith and is exemplified today in the writings of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.
Sowell goes on to describe the difference of the two visions regarding social processes:
The unconstrained vision tends to judge processes by their results – “Is it right? Is it good? …The constrained vision judges rightness and goodness as process characteristics rather than the results: A foot race is fair if it is run under the proper conditions – regardless of who wins or loses, or how often the same person wins. Justice, in the constrained vision, thus means adherence to agreed upon rules, while in the unconstrained vision, something is just or unjust according the end results.
Progressivism manifests its end result vision with the likes of participation trophies, allowing men to use the women’s locker room and restroom and to participate in women’s sports. Its version of end result equality is a driver for socialism – making every outcome equal. It is also the thinking behind ad hoc justice, which eschews the rule of law, applicable to everyone, and rules on the basis of individual circumstances and narratives rather than behavior and accountability. Progressivism’s ‘justice’, as Sowell describes above, says that the systems and processes produced the criminal. The individual is therefore not accountable for these things. This feeds the narrative that our betters must be in control to produce better people.
To produce equal outcomes, though, requires control of individuals and processes. And that is what the Democrat candidates are proposing in various ways. They want your times in their hands.
To gain control Progressives paint a dystopian future without them in power. Per them, the world will end if we don’t act, democracy will end if they are not given control, and rights, such as slaughtering the human in your womb and men disguised as women appropriating women’s concerns, will be taken away by the Right. Hence the calculating narrative described in my previous post, Manipulated to Follow the Course of This World. The blatant irony of the narrative is that it does not invoke the Age of Reason”. Rather, it invokes a mercenary army of passions to fight for the Progressive narrative.
Reading these ideological vision characteristics one can begin to see that the Progressive Element sees its members, its candidates, as your betters, as Anointed Ones. It was not long ago that one of the “Anointed Ones”, Hillary Clinton, gave the world her “unconstrained vision”:
It Takes a Village: Picture Book
“It Takes a Village offers a universal, unifying message. It captures perfectly Clinton’s vision of a multicultural America working toward a constructive goal. So hopeful and forward-looking.” —The Washington Post
More could be said but I’ll end here. I’ve written several posts about the Progressive Element with a desire to inform the reader of its diabolical ways. Though proclaiming a roadmap that is just and fair and caring it acts in just the opposite ways. They make excuses for their behavior while condemning and persecuting those who do not serve its narrative. They pronounce good “evil” and evil “good”. Their means to ‘equality’ is to bring others (males, whites, the rich…) down and to say that two things that are not equal are equal (male-female marriage and homosexuality). They become enraged when gendered pronouns are used. Coercing language and humans into confusing nonsense is characteristic of Progressives and certainly of the Evil One and his minions.
The values the Progressive Element extols, couched in humanist and even Christian terms, comes from the father of lies. There is no truth in the Progressive Element. The road map these false prophets propose is the “wide way” Jesus talked about (Matt. 7:13-15. Progressives “come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.”
Therefore, I will not put my life in their hands. Rather, I submit to the One True Narrative…
My times are in your hand;
deliver me from the hand of my enemies and persecutors. -Psalm 31: 15
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Filed under 2019 current events, Culture, humanism, Lawlessness, Liberalism, Political Commentary, Politics, Progressivism, social commentary, socialism Tagged with Bernie Sanders, Corey Booker, culture, Democratic Presidential debate, Elizabeth Warren, humanism, Joe Biden, Kamala harris, liberals, Marianne Williamson, politics, Progressive Element, progressivism