Archive for September, 2019

Abortion is anti-life, anti-liberty, and anti pursuit of happiness

Posted: September 12, 2019 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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Abortion violates every component of the most often quoted sentence from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

Abortion is anti-life because abortion is murder.  It is a particularly heinous form of murder because the unborn child is the most innocent example of life you could possibly ever encounter.   Every individual is endowed by their creator with unalienable rights because all are endowed by God with a soul at conception.  Most genocides have occurred after a government has denied that certain individuals do possess a soul, abortion is another one of those genocides. 

I’ve been told by many self-identified libertarians that true libertarians must support the right of everyone to choose an abortion.  This is the position maintained by more than a few libertarian websites and organizations.  Many individuals have told me that I am not a libertarian because I believe abortion is murder, therefore, no one has a right to an abortion.  This happens even though I agree with those libertarians on every other key philosophical point.  If all libertarians had a proper understanding of the terms libertarian and liberty they would see that there is one correct philosophical side to the abortion debate, and that is the side I occupy.

A libertarian is someone who believes that the ideal of liberty should be their guiding principle, and the guiding principle at all levels of government in the United States.  That was precisely the guiding principle of the founding fathers of this nation. 

A great many believe that liberty is the freedom to do as you please.  They are mistaken.  Liberty is the freedom to do as you want as long as you do not hurt others or interfere with the rights of others.   Liberty is freedom with the responsibility to do no harm to others.  The responsibility portion of liberty was stressed by the founding fathers of the United States.  Because the fetus is murdered it is greatly harmed during the abortion. 

The fact the fetus is harmed during the abortion is a violation of the entire concept of liberty.   As a result of the abortion the rights of the fetus are destroyed which is also a violation of liberty.  Because all of the concepts of liberty are violated, abortion violates the entirety of the libertarian philosophy.

When it comes to libertarians who are strongly pro-life I’m in good company.  Here are two quotes from Dr. Ron Paul:

Abortion on demand is the ultimate State tyranny; the State simply declares that certain classes of human beings are not persons, and therefore not entitled to the protection of the law. The State protects the “right” of some people to kill others, just as the courts protected the “property rights” of slave masters in their slaves. Moreover, by this method the State achieves a goal common to all totalitarian regimes: it sets us against each other, so that our energies are spent in the struggle between State-created classes, rather than in freeing all individuals from the State. Unlike Nazi Germany, which forcibly sent millions to the gas chambers (as well as forcing abortion and sterilization upon many more), the new regime has enlisted the assistance of millions of people to act as its agents in carrying out a program of mass murder.

As an O.B. doctor of thirty years, and having delivered 4,000 babies, I can assure you life begins at conception. I am legally responsible for the unborn, no matter what I do, so there’s a legal life there. The unborn has inheritance rights, and if there’s an injury or a killing, there is a legal entity. There is no doubt about it.

Abortion being anti pursuit of happiness is obvious, an aborted unborn child will never be able to pursue any form of happiness.

Israel’s Jews Mugged by Reality

Posted: September 12, 2019 by datechguy in crime, culture, Israel, middle east

The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality. Thus if you had been trying to damn your man by the Romantic method…you would try to protect him at all costs from any real pain; because, of course, five minutes’ genuine toothache would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were and unmask your whole stratagem.

C.S. Lewis Screwtape 13

General Calvet: I have soup with every meal because I remember when I had no soup

Sharpe’s Siege 1996

There was a fascinating piece in the NYT about a movie called Born in Jerusalem and Still alive and how the perspective given in that film reflects the politics of Israel today.

The opening scene of “Born in Jerusalem and Still Alive,” which just won the prize for best first feature at the Jerusalem Film Festival, catches the main character grimacing as he overhears a glib tour guide. When she describes downtown Jerusalem to her group as “beautiful,” the “center of night life and food for the young generation,” Ronen, an earnest man in his late 30s, interrupts.
“Don’t believe her,” he tells the tourists in Hebrew-accented English. “You see this market? Fifteen years ago it was a war zone. Next to my high school there was a terror attack. Next to the university there was a terror attack. First time I made sex — terror attack.” One of the tourists sidles over, interested. “Yes,” Ronen tells her, “we had to stop.”
No single episode has shaped Israel’s population and politics like the wave of suicide bombings perpetrated by Palestinians in the first years of the 21st century. Much of what you see here in 2019 is the aftermath of that time, and every election since has been held in its shadow. The attacks, which killed hundreds of Israeli civilians, ended hopes for a negotiated peace and destroyed the left, which was in power when the wave began. Any sympathy that the Israeli majority had toward Palestinians evaporated.

While the piece itself was interesting and hit a nerve with me what really caught my eye were some of the comments. Usually you can count on the NYT comments section to be fairly insane arguments, albeit with excellent grammar and this one was no exception, but it produced a few gems and one of these stood out to me. I quote it in full. (all emphasis mine)

I am 73, and remember this period very well. A few points.

1) The Intifadas don’t come up in conversation in Israel more – or less – than the other wars. They are part of common knowledge. For 3 years I drove my teenage daughter everywhere, even the mall, so she wouldn’t use a bus. I never knew if she was coming back in a new blouse or in a body bag.

2) The numbers (according to B’ Tzelem): 84 Israelis killed in the First Intifada, 1011 in the second. A minority were military and security personnel.

3) What turned off the Left – me included – from any fantasies of a negotiated peace was not the outrages themselves, but the popular celebrations that followed them. “Successful” outrages, such as bus bombings with 20+ dead, were celebrated in Palestine streets with music, dancing, burning cardboard Israeli buses and giving away sweets, like in a wedding. We got it: Oslo was a scam.

4) The two countries we have peace treaties with – Jordan and Egypt – were and are military dictatorships, whose rulers understood that “if you can’t lick’em, sign a peace treaty till you can”. Peace there is top-down. Israeli tourists, businesses, performers, clients, etc. – are not welcome in those countries to this day, decades after the signings.

5) So our only hope for a marginally normal life is to withdraw unilaterally to UN-sanctioned borders (as in Lebanon or Gaza), and always make sure we have enough firepower to prevent anyone from thinking it was an act of weakness.

This is the story in a nutshell. For all their cries of “apartheid walls” and oppression the reality is that if you are a Palestinian who has no interest in killing Jews and just want to live your life neither the Jewish state in general nor individual Jews in general or Israeli’s in particular are a danger to you.

The reverse has not been true and frankly has never been true.

As I’ve written before if Israel wanted the Palestinian’s dead any time in the last twenty years they could have exterminated them with ease (particularly after the fall of their patron the Soviet Union). The difference between Israel and their Arab neighbors is if said neighbors had the power to exterminate the jews they would without hesitation, while the Jews have had this power for decades and choose not to do so, and in fact even provide medical services to them, even when they cheer.

I had to say it. You’re incredible. You take everyone, you treat everyone, no one goes first, no one goes last, you just go in order of who needs help. That’s, like, Mother Teresa stuff. “We’re not saints, we’re just doing our jobs. It’s not easy, I admit. And it gets hard when they cheer when the bodies are brought in.” I looked at her. What did you say? She sighed. “Yes, it gets hard when they cheer.” This was one of the times during my trip when I held up my hands and said, “Stop. Wait.” I turned and walked away to breathe deeply for a minute.

There is an old saying that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. That is a perfect description of the Israeli left. The random slaughter of the intifadas are still in living memory and as long as that memory exists the left’s ability to twist reality isn’t effective.

This is why this film is important and why Bibi keeps winning re-election. The Israeli’s have learned the lesson that the American people in general and American Jews in particular have not and have decided they are not going to commit suicide so people in other countries at cocktail parties can feel good about themselves. They will have to wait until a generation is born that forgets.

#rephrased Joel Gilbert Will Tell the world what we Bloggers already know about Travon Martin

Posted: September 11, 2019 by datechguy in crime, culture, education, media, News/opinion
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Via Instapundit I read with some interest this story of an impending documentary that will infuriate the left:

Gilbert did some serious shoe leather reporting as well. He visited all the relevant Miami-area high schools, the neighborhoods where Martin and his friends hung out, the streets of Miami’s Little Haiti, and the town community where Martin died.
At the end of his research, Gilbert knew Trayvon Martin better than his parents did, literally. As their deposition revealed, they had no idea how Martin’s life had descended into a violent mix of street fighting, guns, drugs, burglary, and sex. Although both parents made good incomes, their separate lives created an abyss where a home should have been, and their once promising son fell straight to the bottom of it.
Unwilling to accept their own responsibility for his demise, they took the bait promised by the family attorneys and sweetened by the media and projected their guilt on to George Zimmerman. Although an Obama supporter and civil rights activist, the half-Hispanic Zimmerman proved to be just white enough to play the “racist” killer role in the unholy melodrama that followed.

He’s talking about the Travon Martin case which was before the Michael Brown case the biggest race card fraud that was played by the left in that it wasn’t at all about race but it was about .

It’s an interesting story, it’s a tragic story but most interestingly it’s a story that we bloggers told you years ago.

Stacy McCain told you about it at the American Spectator blog which we access via the wayback machine:

Either of those incidents could have put Trayvon Martin into the custody of the juvenile justice system. However, because of Chief Hurley’s attempt to reduce the school crime statistics — according to sworn testimony, officers were “basically told to lie and falsify” reports — Martin was never arrested. And if he had been arrested, he might never have been in Sanford the night of his fatal encounter with Zimmerman.

Pam Geller wrote about it:

Not only did the media and law enforcement cover up Trayvon Martin’s criminal record — the attack on Zimmerman and subsequent show trial brought systemic corruption to light and led to the takedown of senior officials.
Much thanks to Andrea Shea King, Pat Dollard and The Last Refuge (who has done yeoman’s work on this case):

the afore mentioned Pat Dollard wrote about it

This new SOP was outlined by a communications directive in 2010 forbidding the sharing of Miami-Dade School Police reports to outside agencies without redaction. Officers had to send any and all requests through the public information officer.
Hence, the furor of Chief Hurley when the Robles article hit the press and cited police reports – Hurley smelled a leaker and launched an investigation.
Ultimately the internal affairs investigation initiated by Hurley led to his own firing, because the officers questioned told the internal affairs investigators the truth of what was going on and outed the scheme.
One of the examples of this in action was the jewelry incident and Trayvon Martin – as accidentally outlined in the Herald report. But the Herald never knew their reporting had launched an internal affairs investigation which led to the collapse of the scheme.

Stacy McCain again (this time at his blog instead of the Spectator)

Part of the reason it was difficult to get that story across was that it wasn’t easy to explain. It’s a complex story and boiling it down to less than 700 words took me several hours, because I had to sort through a lot of stuff and double-check basic background facts. And here is the most important fact of the whole story:
TRAYVON MARTIN WAS NOT FROM SANFORD
The liberal media keep leaving that out, don’t they? And why do you think that is? Because if they told you he was from Miami Gardens, more than 240 miles from Sanford, then the media would have to explain why Trayvon was in Sanford the night of Feb. 26, 2012.
Sometimes, if you pull one thread of a story, the whole narrative unravels and this question — “Why was Trayvon in Sanford?” — is one that the liberal media don’t want to talk about.
This is how you know it’s probably the most important question of all.

Sundance at the Last Refuse did the heavy lifting for most of us:

The connections between the Police Burglary report and the School Report of “found items” were never made because the regular police detective in charge of the Burglary case had no idea the School Police Dept. had filed a “found items” report.
Two differing police departments, and the School Officer, Dunn, intentionally took the criminal element out of the equation – instead preferring “school discipline” and not “criminal adjudication”.
It was only when the M-DSPD Internal Affairs investigation kicked in, and six officers gave sworn affidavits, the manipulative scheme to improve criminal statistics within the School System were identified openly.
School Superintendent Alberto Carvalho gave his hire, Police Chief Hurley, instructions to reduce the criminal behavior of young black males. The chosen strategy between them, to insure optical success, was to stop using the Criminal Justice System to punish black student behavior. Instead they instructed the School Resource Officers to use school discipline in place of criminal justice.

This made a big enough splash that Rush Limbaugh talked about it:

So real crimes would be committed by students, not just Trayvon, and rather than being categorized as such they were just pushed over here into another column on the spreadsheet that said “disciplinary actions.”  So, at the end of the day, these reports made it look like that the school district and superintendent had really started kicking butt on crimes in the schools and had really reduced it, when they hadn’t whatsoever. 
The upshot is that criminal activity wasn’t punished.
It was barely even disciplined.
And so the perpetrators were never held to account, nor did they ever have to come to grips with the severity of their actions. 
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH:  So think about it.  In some schools you get thrown out for a long time for just drawing a picture of a gun.  But in Miami-Dade, you can commit real crimes and the school will cover-up for you to make their stats look better. 

And finally there was my own small contribution to the discussion:

I’m sure the city figured it was just easier to just let things go and I’m sure assuming his parents knew about it, they would have agreed.  A lot less trouble all around.
What could possibly go wrong?
If they did this, and Trayvon Martin still found himself on that fateful night watched by George Zimmerman I’m wondering how different might things have been.  If he had,  say, some kind of probation over his head might Trayvon Martin have   thought: “I don’t like that ass following me but I don’t want to risk any trouble right now.” and instead of turning back to confront George Zimmerman used the more than ample time he had to just go home?
We don’t know any of this but we do know this. If you have a school and police department gaming the system to improve the stats they are selling out the community who they work for, the schools and the kids, both those who got into trouble and those who don’t all for the sake of bragging rights.
How many more kids seeing the system being gained in this way by the authorities for their own gain will look at that, and decide they can do the same? How many will end up someday in trouble, in jail or dead because of it?

In short the facts that this film is going to discuss are already well known to to conservative writers, conservative thinkers and conservative bloggers as we discussed them half a decade ago.

But to media types who worry that the TV show Friends is too white to be discussed today these were facts to be suppressed and ignored and if you live in the left’s media bubble or only escaped it a few years ago these facts are completely unknown to you.

Why? because the left’s primary strategy in the Obama years was to weaponize race and that took precedence over the good of black youth like Travon Martin or the life of an Obama supporter who was completely expendable for that purpose.

That’s why I think this film the Trayvon Hoax is going to be important and that’s why the media will do all it can to suppress it or if they can’t destroy it.

There Will Be Math

Posted: September 10, 2019 by julietteochieng in Uncategorized
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by baldilocks

Dennis Prager:

Our age loves scientific equations. Here’s one you weren’t taught at college but which affects you as much as the law of gravity:

GI – W = E

Good Intentions (GI) minus Wisdom (W) leads to Evil (E)

Prager uses an example that’s obvious — at least to the sane.

Communism, the greatest mass murder ideology in history, was for almost all its rank-and-file supporters rooted in their desire to do good. (This was rarely true for its leaders, whose greatest desire was power.)

The many millions of people all over the world who supported communism did not think they were supporting unprecedented levels of mass murder and torture or an equally unprecedented deprivation of the most fundamental human rights of a substantial percentage of humanity. They thought they were moral, building a beautiful future for humanity — eliminating inequality, enabling people to work as hard or as little as they wanted, providing their fellow citizens “free” education and “free” health care. They were convinced that the moral arc of history was bending in their direction and that they were good because their motives were good.

That’s why leftists have such moral contempt for those who differ with them. Because those on the left are so good, only bad human beings could possibly oppose them.  (…)

The problem with communists and with leftists who don’t consider themselves communists is not that none of them mean well. It’s that they lack wisdom.

As Thomas Sowell would put it, such people fail to ask this question: “And then what happens?” Should someone ask question, the wisdom-less doer of good will give a rainbow and unicorns answer, and that answer will be a revelation.

Take Robert “Beto” O’Rourke and his promise to institute mandatory “buyback” of AR-15s and other firearms should he become president.

“No. I don’t see the law enforcement going door to door. I see Americans complying with the law. I see us working with gun owners, non-gun owners, local, county, state, federal law enforcement to come up with the best possible solution. I have yet to meet an owner of an AR-15 who thinks it’s OK that we have these kind of mass killings in this country,” O’Rourke said when asked by the Washington Examiner about specifics of his plan.

When pressed further about how he plans to enforce his proposal for those who would not comply, he responded, “How do you — how do we enforce any law? There’s a significant reliance on people complying with the law. You know that a law is not created in a vacuum.”

Got that? He won’t use the enforcers to enforce such a law, but the law will be enforced.

Magically.

Beta Male is an easy target — if you’ll pardon the expression — but it’s clear that his “plan” is a perfect example of Prager’s equation. Does O’Rourke want to do good? I doubt it and think that he and other politicians who would forcibly disarm law-abiding Americans have tyranny as their ultimate goal.

O’Rourke knows that his proposal would lead to lots of dead bodies but he’s too big of  a coward to admit it, much less admit that the body bags would be a feature rather than a bug, from his point of view.

President O’Rourke presiding over a disarmed America would have enormous power.

It’s certain, however, there are some voters who do want to do good and who would vote for him or for one of the other Democrat candidates who promise — as president — to confiscate private firearm property. Such voters want there to be no more mass shooters ever and believe that if the government just takes the tools away, mass shootings will simply stop happening.

Magically.

And it is here where the dearth of wisdom is most glaring among all good-faith advocates of gun confiscation: they think that government can fix humans. This notion has remained pervasive over centuries.

On the contrary, we human beings cannot change our flawed and sinful nature. Politicians can’t. Laws can’t. We can only be mindful of our individual natures and attempt to protect ourselves against those who abandon themselves to their sinful natures, mass shooters being among this number.

Those who are without wisdom believe that humankind is innately good — in spite of the evidence to the contrary that each one of us observes every day.

The perfect sinless, gun-less world that the doers of good say they want is promised by God, but He has conditions which a lot of them aren’t willing to meet. They’d rather let politicians like O’Rourke do the dirty work for them.

And that road will end in the same place it has all the other times.

O’Rourke has no chance of becoming president in 2020, but the front-running Democrats want to take the guns, too.

P minus G equals D. I’ll let you figure out what the variables indicate.

(Thanks to Bearing Arms)

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

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