Bob's Blog

MOTUS links to an article written in Alpha News on April 6 by 26-year-old Alyssa Ahlgren.

My generation is becoming the largest voting bloc in the country. We have an opportunity to continue to propel us forward with the gifts capitalism and democracy has given us. The other option is that we can fall into the trap of entitlement and relapse into restrictive socialist destitution. The choice doesn’t seem too hard, does it?

I’m sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of Democratic candidates calling for policies to “fix” the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around. I see people talking freely, working on their MacBook’s, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we’ve become completely blind to it. Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose. These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don’t give them a second thought. We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty. One. Times. Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful.

...My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand, I went to college, let’s just say I didn’t have the popular opinion, but I digress.

Let me lay down some universal truths really quick. The United States of America has lifted more people out of abject poverty, spread more freedom and democracy, and has created more innovation in technology and medicine than any other nation in human history. Not only that but our citizenry continually breaks world records with charitable donations, the rags to riches story is not only possible in America but not uncommon, we have the strongest purchasing power on earth, and we encompass 25% of the world’s GDP. The list goes on. However, these universal truths don’t matter. We are told that income inequality is an existential crisis (even though this is not an indicator of prosperity, some of the poorest countries in the world have low-income inequality), we are told that we are oppressed by capitalism (even though it’s brought about more freedom and wealth to the most people than any other system in world history), we are told that the only way we will acquire the benefits of true prosperity is through socialism and centralization of federal power (even though history has proven time and again this only brings tyranny and suffering).

...my generation has ONLY seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn’t live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, or see the rise and fall of socialism and communism. We don’t know what it’s like not to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don’t have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it’s spreading like a plague.

My generation is becoming the largest voting bloc in the country. We have an opportunity to continue to propel us forward with the gifts capitalism and democracy has given us. The other option is that we can fall into the trap of entitlement and relapse into restrictive socialist destitution. The choice doesn’t seem too hard, does it?

Read more here.

The Zman writes,

...democracy inevitably leads to some form of authoritarian rule, based in the urban areas. That’s where we are now in modern America. The illusion of democracy has disguised the deep contempt the ruling elite has for the people, but that contempt is becoming more obvious. At some point, they will simply stop pretending.

...This collapse of legitimacy results in a Congress that does very little. Instead, it relies on the Executive to do what it asks. The vast federal bureaucracy that Trump is struggling to operate is the real government of America. The FBI sedition scandal is a good example of the contempt with which the New Class holds the political class. They have no fear of either party in Congress, as they know they are powerless. Proof of that is the parade of people lying to Congress and never facing the consequences.

...What we have today is rule by a surprisingly small number of people. At the top is the global pirate class that owns the media, technology and finance. Under them are the lesser elites that rule over the academy, mass media, politics and foreign policy. This is the New Class, an elite within the bureaucracy that has a free hand in running the state, as long as they don’t anger their paymasters. At most there are a few thousand people controlling a few million person bureaucracy that runs the global empire.

Read more here.

David Greenfield writes,

The media’s focus has been on whether Trump would accept the results if he loses. Yet a better question might be whether Hillary Clinton would accept her defeat.

Even when it came to the battle for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton refused to concede defeat until the bitter end and then past it. Not only did Hillary refuse to drop out even when Obama was the clear winner, while her people threatened a convention floor fight, but she insisted on staying on in the race for increasingly bizarre and even downright disturbing reasons.

In South Dakota, Hillary explained that there was no reason for her to drop out because somebody might shoot Barack Obama, "We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California."

There’s something disturbing in the revelation that Hillary was basing her decision to stay in the race in the hope that her rival would be assassinated.

Obama’s spokesman said that her remark “has no place in this campaign”. But it had a place inside Hillary Clinton’s very warped brain which preferred to see Obama die than concede the election to him.

If that’s how Hillary felt about a fellow Democrat, imagine how she feels about Trump.

...It’s not as if the Obama side was any better. It was arguably worse. Governor Wilder, an Obama ally, threatened a return of the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention riots if Hillary won. "If you think 1968 was bad, you watch; in 2008, it will be worse,” Wilder warned.

Unprecedented. Outrageous. Beyond the pale. Except this is how Democrats act even to each other.

...Does anyone really believe that Hillary Clinton, who couldn’t even graciously concede to Obama will graciously concede to Trump?

And, given the fact that Hillary won the nomination by using the DNC to rig the process, leading to the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, are Trump’s concerns of a rigged election illegitimate?

...Why should Republicans assume that she’ll treat them better than she treated Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders?

...the same behavior that is virtuous when Democrats do it becomes an unpardonable sin when Republicans take it up.

That’s a pernicious double standard that cannot and should not be allowed to stand.

When Democrats warn of voter disenfranchisement, the media backs them up. When Republicans complain about voter fraud, they are accused of voter suppression. When Democrats fight elections past the point that they’re lost, then they are courageous. But when Republicans do it, they are a threat to democracy.

But democracy does not mean Democratic Party rule. That’s just the mistake that the media makes.

Whatever rules we have, run both ways. Any practices, new or old, also apply to both sides. If challenging election results is legitimate, then it is so for both sides. Whatever options were available to Gore and Hillary cannot help but be available to Trump.

That is how democracy, rather than Democratic Party rule, works.

Read more here.

Pat Buchanan writes in The American Conservative about the hysterical reaction in the media to Trump's comments about whether or not he will accept the election results.

What explains the hysteria of the establishment?

In a word, fear.

The establishment is horrified at the Donald’s defiance because, deep within its soul, it fears that the people for whom Trump speaks no longer accept its political legitimacy or moral authority.

It may rule and run the country, and may rig the system through mass immigration and a mammoth welfare state so that Middle America is never again able to elect one of its own. But that establishment, disconnected from the people it rules, senses, rightly, that it is unloved and even detested.

Trump is “talking down our democracy,” said a shocked Clinton.

After having expunged Christianity from our public life and public square, our establishment installed “democracy” as the new deity, at whose altars we should all worship. And so our schools began to teach.

Half a millennia ago, missionaries and explorers set sail from Spain, England, and France to bring Christianity to the New World.

Today, Clintons, Obamas, and Bushes send soldiers and secularist tutors to “establish democracy” among the “lesser breeds without the Law.”

By suggesting he might not accept the results of a “rigged election,” Trump is committing an unpardonable sin. But this new cult, this devotion to a new holy trinity of diversity, democracy, and equality, is of recent vintage and has shallow roots.

For none of the three—diversity, equality, democracy—is to be found in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers, or the Pledge of Allegiance. In the pledge, we are a republic.

The establishment also recoiled in horror from Milwaukee Sheriff Dave Clarke’s declaration that it is now “torches and pitchforks time.”

Yet, some of us recall another time, when Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote in “Points of Rebellion”: “We must realize that today’s Establishment is the new George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution.”

Baby-boomer radicals loved it, raising their fists in defiance of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew.

But now that it is the populist-nationalist right that is moving beyond the niceties of liberal democracy to save the America that they love, elitist enthusiasm for “revolution” seems more constrained.

What goes around comes around.

Read more here.

Stuart Schneiderman writes,

...In a functioning democratic nation people live by the rule of law and respect the verdict of the ballot box. They treat each other with respect, courtesy and decorum. They do so every day. It takes more than a purple finger to create a functioning democracy.

One does well here to distinguish between the freedom to cast ballots and the freedom to function in the marketplace. They might seem to be the same, but they are not.

As agents working and consuming in a free market, individuals make free decisions all the time. Thereby they allow capital to be allocated more efficiently and more effectively than any central planner has ever been able to do. But, that is the rub. Free enterprise is the ultimate rebuke to central planners, but free enterprise and democracy are not necessarily the same thing. And they do not necessarily coexist.

...One notes with Hannan that the happiest countries are democratic. Among them are Norway, Australia and Switzerland. They are also relatively homogeneous. They are not brimming with diversity, as the saying goes.

And yet, China is today’s rising global superpower. Surely, it has become a model of free enterprise, but it has not allowed people very many democratic freedoms and human rights. When developing nations look around the world do they want to become more like China or more like America?

I do not know how well Chinese people rate on a happiness scale, but they have certainly, over the past 35 years, gained more confidence and more swagger. You might believe that they are miserable for having been deprived of their right to vote. Yet, many of them recall the Maoist past where millions of people starved to death and the rest lived in extreme poverty. And yet, the rulers of China turned it around without allowing anyone to vote.

When it comes to debates over democracy, China is the problem. Of course, China does not have a democratic tradition that goes back two millennia. It has no real notion of human rights. And yet, it allows the free market to function in a relatively unfettered fashion and has moved fromf extreme poverty to ascending world power.

But, China is run by an elite. It is run by leaders of what is still called a Communist party. Before it was run by a group that Mao called capitalist roaders, it was also run by an elite, by Mao and his henchmen. Today’s elite has allowed the people to make relatively free decisions as actors in the marketplace. Mao never imagined such a thing. When Deng Xiaoping and his band took over China in 1976 the first thing they did was to privatize agriculture, to roll back the central planners’ communized agricultural policy. They did not hand out ballots. They freed people to function in the market.

...Moreover, when the Chinese look to America and the West, they do not just see the glory of democracy. They see the madness that democracy can unleash. Do they really want to spend their time debating transgender restrooms? Do they really want to spend their time trying to integrate women into the combat infantry? Do they really want their people to be rioting in the streets, shooting the police and burning down their neighborhoods in the name of free expression?

And that's just America. What do they see when they look to democratic Europe. Do the Chinese want, out of an excessive concern for equal rights and for democratic freedoms, allow their nation to be overrun by refugees who will molest women and to rob, pillage and murder? How is democracy working out in Europe these days?

When members of its own Muslim population decided to try their hand at terrorism, the Chinese authorities cracked down on them, even to the point of suppressing their ability to practice their religion. Those who were deemed responsible for terrorism were not represented by an army of law professors. They were not sent to prison while their cases awaited appeal. They were put on trial, convicted and taken out and shot. China does not have a very significant terrorism problem these days.

...If democratic rights contribute to prosperity and social harmony, other peoples in other parts of the world might find them worth emulating. If they seem to be leading great nations to doom, other peoples will not.

Read more here.

Kevin Williamson makes the point in National Review that lying liars lie habitually. He is referring to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Does Hillary owe Trump and the nation an apology for falsely claiming that ISIS is using Donald Trump's statements as recruitment tools. Yes!

...Never mind what this says about Herself’s fitness for the presidency: We all know that she is morally, ethically, and intellectually unfit for the job. She’s unfit to manage a Walmart in Muleshoe, Texas. She’s unfit to have a route delivering the Buck County Courier Times. From cattle futures to bimbo eruptions to Internet auteurs inspiring terror attacks in Benghazi, anybody who is paying any attention understands that Herself’s relationship with the truth is a lot like her relationship with the Big Creep: all politics, a marriage of convenience.

This isn’t about Herself. This is about democracy.

It used to fall upon the news media to police this sort of thing, but they are today utterly incapable of doing so. So-called fact-checking sites such as PolitiFact are nests of intellectually dishonest partisan hackery, and even journalists who want to do the right thing have a very difficult time doing so in a world of infinite media choices. Cognitive bias is very powerful: When people have decided on a certain model of how the world is, they tend to take to heart stories that reinforce that view and to discount those that challenge it. That is one of the reasons why the Washington Post is retiring its “What Was Fake?” column dedicated to exposing popular hoaxes. You cannot reach the unreachable or educate the ineducable, especially those who do not want to be educated.

Unfortunately, that leaves those of us who want to see an honest and rigorous debate about public affairs largely dependent upon the moral character of politicians and other people in public life. It’s not working out too well: The reality of economic life in the early 21st century is incomprehensibly complex, and the real-world policy factors involved are myriad. But in the rhetoric of Bernie Sanders, this all comes down to two words: “rigged economy.” That isn’t an oversimplification — it’s a lie, and Sanders knows better. But he also knows that this stuff gets real hairy real quick — having seen the man in action, I very much doubt that he could explain to any informed person’s satisfaction what a derivative is or how a synthetic CDO comes into the world. His enthusiasts couldn’t, either. But it’s easier to traffic in conspiracy theory — which is what “rigged economy” is — than to deal with reality.

...If we want to have authentic democracy, then we have to insist that people in public life be truthful about the events and personalities of the real world. We have to tell the truth about the people who are running for president. We also have to tell the truth about bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki, Omar Abdel-Rahman, Timothy McVeigh, O. J. Simpson — and even Donald Trump.

Of course Mrs. Clinton owes Trump an apology. She owes the rest of the country an apology, too.

Read more here.

David Harsanyi writes at Real Clear Politics about how some pundits are attempting to smear Ted Cruz by calling him an isolationist.

Marco Rubio has also called Cruz an isolationist. Having watched the debate, though, I think, as Donald Trump might complain, it is unfair. What I heard was not a case for isolationism but one against Middle Eastern democracy building -- a project that's been a persistent and bloody failure, one that's sidetracked foreign policy from its "first" task, which is defeating the enemy.

...But Iraq is not 1945 Germany. Syria is not Japan. Libya is not South Korea. Asking the theocratic thugs in Saudi Arabia or the strongmen in Egypt and Pakistan to "stand aside" for democracy would almost certainly manifest in anarchy, widespread violence and more radicalism. If we trust Pew Research Center's study of the Muslim world -- and everything recent history has shown us -- it's clear that most Islamic-majority nations would be unlikely to embrace anything resembling Western democracy.

Read more here.

Stuart Scheiderman writes at Had Enough Therapy,

The Middle East is falling apart because it failed to modernize, failed to adopt free enterprise solutions to its economic problems and failed to function according to the rules and norms of a liberal democracy.

... Such is the issue in the Middle East, where Israel’s neighbors take its success to be the problem. They would do better to see Israel as a beacon showing them the way to improve their societies and their living conditions.

Now, however, many of these people do not know how to deal with the shame they feel when they see how Israelis live. They believe that Israeli success shows them to be failures and they believe that they must destroy it to restore their self-esteem. After all, this is a culture that believes that best way to restore family honor when a teenage daughter is caught holding hands with a boy is to murder her. They hold to fanatical beliefs, not because they do not feel connected to others within their community, but because the world seems to have passed them by. They cannot accept that their culture and their religion need a serious reformation.

Read more here.

Joel Kotkin writes at Orange County Register,

The Constitution does not need to be scrapped; what has to go is the present leadership of both parties and the whole notion that Washington always knows best. A future shaped by rapid technological change still needs old-school wisdom to maintain our basic democracy and the efficacy of republican government.

Read more here.

Bryan Preston points out that Democrats are advocating for an equal number of Democrats and Republicans on the Select Committee to investigate Benghazi, despite the fact that the Watergate Committee contained more Democrats than Republicans when it investigated the Republican administration's misdeeds on Watergate.

The Benghazi attack could potentially implicate officials in negligent homicide, for their refusal to improve security at the US facility at which four Americans died. The Benghazi investigation could also turn up who decided to blame the attack on a movie, why, and who had the man who made the movie arrested and jailed for a year.

Read more here.

The House has a Republican majority, because that's how the American people voted.

What difference does it make whether you live in a democracy or some totalitarian system? David Warren writes,

If the diktats came down from kings and royal courts, rather than from politicians and departmental bureaucrats, it would make no difference to the citizen’s level of “empowerment.” In either case the influence of the “man in the street” rounds out to zero. The State expects him to do what he is told, promptly; and to take his punishment should he hesitate, or talk back to any government official. In a small kingdom, or a small town, he might represent perhaps a visible power of inertia. Perhaps even in a vast people’s republic there is cellular resistance to being pushed around. But to say that the citizen of a democracy, today, is governed by his own consent — when items of legislation fill ten-thousands of pages in Kafkaesque obscurity, with serious penalties for non-compliance, to be enforced or not enforced at the government’s whim — is at best silly. Should the citizen be charged with any crime, the conviction rate, at least in the United States, approaches that in Stalin’s Russia (to be fair, it is far lower in Canada and Europe), and his only hope is to “confess” and agree to a plea bargain.

This is the normal working of democratic government today. Anyone who has had his taxes audited knows how much power he has against the State, and what kind of people the tax department hires. He knows that his very livelihood depends on their “judgement calls,” and that he had better adopt a cringing subservience before his masters. He knows that “innocent until proven guilty” is a pious fraud, and that unless he has millions in his war chest, no court will help him. Such abuses are of just the sort the old Common Law served to prevent, standing for centuries against the arrogance of power on behalf of the common man. Today, in his terrible anxieties, he can only turn to prayer.

It was a most remarkable development, in the end much like the gimmicks used by property developers and manufacturers of cheap goods. They use poetical terms from a vaguely-remembered past to brand products utterly unlike their descriptions. I remember as a child looking at a fresh suburban street sign which identified “Mountainview Boulevard,” and asking myself where is the mountain. Soon I learnt that the whole point of mass advertising is to associate a product with what it is not; and that “honesty in advertising” is not really obtainable. It is against this background, but also contributing to it, that “representative democracy” has flourished. For in a real democracy, the electors vote directly on public issues which they themselves have framed; whereas, in a “representative” democracy, they do not.

Who can seriously believe that people voting in the mass, to choose between demagogues known to them only through sound bites and the glaze of mass media, will alight upon candidates whose judgement of persons and policies is sound?

We come to think that simply by introducing “democracy,” to a cesspit of conflict, every problem can be solved; and then we are utterly puzzled when the conflict is exacerbated.

Walter Russell Mead details 2013's biggest losers.

The Muslim Brotherhood, The EU, The Obama Administration, Israel, Democracy, Turkey, Brazil, Club Med ((Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece), The Syrians, Argentina.

Go here to read his detailed reason why each of these failed in 2013.