Marco Rubio, student of Wikipedia lol, suddenly warms to Platonist philosopher and biographer Plutarch

 But what about the welders, Marco?

And even today's Greeks know that Western law is far more Roman than it is Greek. 

Marco is what the Athenians would have called a spermologos:

Some also of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers met Paul. And some said, "What would this babbler say?"

-- Acts 17:18

The MAGA boobeoisie is taking Marco seriously, which is even funnier than Marco himself, but he's still trending way behind International Lesbian Day. 

 

 Rubio Urges Defense Of Western Civilization At Acropolis: "We Choose The Unapologetic Pursuit Of National Power"

... "Many people are surprised to learn that the most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was not an Enlightenment philosopher or political theorist. The most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was Plutarch," Rubio said. "Athens gave us democracy. Plato and Aristotle gave us Western philosophy. Our ideas of law, of virtue, of citizenship and republic and government were shaped in the Greek city-states." ... 

 

Marco Rubio is not far from the kingdom of God

 Secretary Rubio: America Made A "Terrible Mistake" Deindustrializing For Globalization "Fantasy"

The Reagan tax revolution made America ripe for globalization, but you can't explain that to a mouthbreather.

The goal wasn't globalization.  

After all the dotcom malinvestment, the entry of China into the WTO opened a door to a ready, welcome, and fateful solution which became globalization, funded by oodles of low marginal ordinary income tax rates.

We need more philosophers, and fewer Rubios. 

 

 

Good morning, philosophers

 

Andrew Sullivan makes Trump subhuman the way Mark Levin and Michael Savage have made their enemies subhuman, says the American people no longer want to govern themselves

They shoot wild boar in Texas from helicopters, don't they?

 

 The Permanent Stain

 ... Trump is conservatism’s actual nemesis: a wild boar — psychologically incapable of understanding anything but dominance and revenge, with no knowledge of history, crashing obliviously and malevolently through the ruined landscape of our constitutional democracy.

This very Greek tragedy — conservatives killing the Constitution they love because they hate the left more — is made more poignant by Trump’s utter cluelessness: he doesn’t even intend to end the American experiment in self-government and individual freedom. He isn’t that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he knows no other way of being a human being. He cannot tolerate any system where he does not have total control. Character counts, as conservatives once insisted, and a man with Trump’s psyche, when combined with his demagogic genius, is quite simply incompatible with liberal democratic society. Unfit. ... 

I recall that when I first wrote that I didn’t believe Trump would concede an election he lost, and thereby provoke a constitutional crisis, I was also told I was hyperventilating. But it happened. And Americans rewarded it four years later by re-electing the man who tried to destroy their democracy. That’s exactly as the ancient political philosophers predicted: as democracies enter their late, chaotic stage, the people want an autocrat. They yearn for one. And in America, they voted for one twice. The forces we are up against are far beyond Trump. They’re called the cycles of history and a critical mass of the American people, who no longer want to govern themselves, who are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise. ...

 

Andrew Sullivan intimately knows all about not governing oneself. If only the Democrats did, who relentlessly persecuted and prosecuted Trump while in office and out. That's why we are here.

In education news, the once great Indiana University has turned its back on Western civilization and purged its traditional degree programs because the children of the barbarians don't enroll in them anymore

 A victory for the mouth breather, Marco Rubio, fellow servant of Mammon.

 

 

Populism means speaking fifty words of English: Pete Hegseth joins Marco Rubio in his own more welders, less philosophers moment

Take courage people!

You too can become populists just like Pete and Little Marco. Just get your degrees from Princeton and Harvard and the Universities of Florida and Miami.

 

 

CNBC ramps up pro-Biden stories, trots out professors of philosophy, religion, and sociology, who directly depend on the student loan pipeline, to rationalize forgiveness for me but not for thee

The chutzpah of these people sometimes all the time. Get a haircut and get a real job.

In the investment world, we call this "talking up your book", about which CNBC knows a lot.

 Why student loan forgiveness sparks anger: A philosopher, attorney general, sociologist and religious thought expert weigh in 

 

 

Black intellectual philosopher Cornel West goes after the Hamas vote in Michigan lol

 Politico.

A lot goin' on in that one.

Things to remember from the week that was, Sep 19-26, 2020, and none of it is about COVID-19

Democrat Senator Chucky Schumer tweeted on Feb 22, 2016: Attn GOP: Senate has confirmed 17 #SCOTUS justices in presidential election years. #DoYourJob.

But now that they're about to do just that, he's saying Ruth Bader Ginsburg "must be turning over in her grave up in heaven". RBG is actually on ice right now, until her burial this week at Arlington. The Senate Minority Leader, like a lot of Democrats, has problems with spatial, temporal, dimensional and proportional imagination, not to mention the American idiom.  

Democrat Senator Harry Reid tweeted on Nov 21, 2013: Thanks to all of you who encouraged me to consider filibuster reform. It had to be done.

In 2013, Reid was then asked if he was worried the GOP could change the filibuster on #SCOTUS, too. His response: "Let 'em do it".

So Mitch McConnell did, sooner than Reid was imagining.

The cannibal Reza Aslan was so hungry for human BBQ he called for the whole thing to be burned down if the GOP replaced RBG, who died at home and "lied in state" according to NBC News. That's one way of putting it. Democrats threatened riots if they didn't get their way, like that was something new.

Like the George Floyd protests which were mostly peaceful, except for the $1-$2 billion in damages caused so far, most of the fires out west recently have been wild except for at least four major ones caused by 13 people arrested for arson.

Ann Coulter tweeted that Amy Coney Barrett would be a "disastrous pick" for the Supreme Court because Barrett has stated that her Catholicism would require her to recuse herself on e.g. immigration and death penalty cases. Yes, what are we paying you for? Not to recuse yourself but actually to issue opinions. Plus it would set a terrible precedent for an appointee to add to the prohibition on religious tests such a prohibition of religion itself from the public square, as if religion has no legitimate contribution to make to our public life. 

This must come as quite a shock to the Catholic integralists of the "right" who seek an explicit Catholic hegemony over the Americas, because Amy is not their man, so to speak. It's probably more disappointing to such Catholics than to the millions of US Protestants who still don't have one justice on the court, completely dominated by Catholics and Jews as it is, even though Protestants still constitute the largest, though splintered, Christian group in America.

Ann Coulter also said Trump would lose if he picked Amy Coney Barrett to fill the vacancy of RBG. I say, only if they let her talk in public. The woman's a bot. And a Karenbot to boot. I don't think she's going drinking with Brett Kavanaugh.

The New York Times is playing fast and loose with its own so-called 1619 Project, stealth-editing-out its claims that the "true founding" of America was in 1619, not 1776, after taking sustained in-coming from critics about it.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is in re-election trouble according to the polling. The guy flaps his gums about many things and so gets caught flipping and flopping quite a bit, which apparently is wearing thin down there.

Democrats like David Axelrod are basing many of their arguments for and against everything these days on what has the "popular vote" and what doesn't, saying things which don't have the popular vote create a tyranny of the minority.

In a republic like America the popular vote has always been subsidiary in order to prevent the tyranny of the majority. Representation in a republic means that you can have a voice to persuade, not a guarantee that you can get your way and impose. But rather than argue the principle head on, of course, they'd rather assert the claim that the majority wants this, the majority hates that, is what counts, as if all the republican institutions and the republican framework itself have no legitimacy any longer, almost as if they don't even exist. This is the ideological habit of mind in action: Denial of reality.

The reality is Trump won in 2016. His position in the Senate strengthened in 2018 and the impeachment trial failed in 2020, which means the voters have already expressed their assent to the president's prerogative to make judicial appointments and to Republicans' Senate role in approving or disapproving of those appointments.

The filibuster issue, however, is a fraught matter.

Some are saying about the issue of filling the current Supreme Court vacancy that the Court's legitimacy is on the line. Many of us already thought the Court lost its legitimacy in 1973 in Roe v Wade. We thought that again in 2003 in Lawrence v Texas. We thought that again in 2012 in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. We thought that again in 2013 in United States v Windsor. We thought that again in 2015 in Obergefell v Hodges. We don't think that in 2020 per se, but I mean, look at the thing. It's a mess. Liberals are only upset because for the first time in decades their ability to impose their undemocratic will on the American people is in jeopardy.

Meanwhile it's good to remember in the first place that RBG was appointed to the Supreme Court by a president who received just 43% of the popular vote. Talk about a tyranny of the minority, eh David Assholerod?

Speaking of minorities, RBG had just one black clerk in all those years from 1993-2020. A Jew practicing tokenism? I'm shocked. She was also a eugenicist, like the Nazis: "at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of."

Oh really? 

In 2014 RBG told Reuters she wasn't going to retire because she didn't trust Obama to appoint a true liberal like herself to replace her, but she thought rather that he would appoint a compromise candidate. RBG must have reckoned in 2014 that Hillary would win in 2016, allowing her to retire safely knowing HRC would appoint another true liberal. Says a lot about RBG, but also about Obama, who by the end of 2009 had already alienated the far left. Yet by 2016 the far left supported Bernie, not Hillary.

And they say the Republicans are cracking up. The Democrats haven't finished cracking up.

We learned this last week that in April the USPS and HHS were prepared to distribute 650 million face masks to Americans but that never happened because the Trump administration didn't want to cause a panic. Like we hadn't panicked already.

Senator Chuck Grassley used Twitter to identify the numbers on a tagged pidgin he found dead on his farm. Thank you, Chuck.

Video of RBG warning against court-packing emerged, but you probably won't see that.

As recently as July Ann Coulter was hashtagging #DefeatMcConnell in support of his Democrat challenger in Kentucky. In September she was appealing to McConnell to talk up someone other than Amy Coney Barrett to Trump.

Well make up your mind, lady.

In a September Quinnipiac poll McConnell has a comfortable 12 point lead and appears headed to another term in the Senate representing the Bluegrass State. They should change that to Badass State, in honor of Cocaine Mitch.

McConnell did join Republicans in voting 96-3 to confirm RBG in 1993.

Sad!

In Minneapolis a charter amendment to defund the police failed to get on the ballot. Crime is up dramatically in the wake of the riots . . . because police are afraid they'll be prosecuted for doing their jobs. Maybe next year the reality will sink in: George Floyd wasn't "killed by the police". He was killed by an overdose of illegal drugs he took.

In Seattle the Seattle Times is lying about why 126 businesses have closed downtown. The paper says it's due to COVID when it's really due to the rioters. Looted businesses are boarded up everywhere as law and order has broken down and riff raff own the streets. Who would shop there now?

"Fiery but mostly peaceful protests" has been trending but will be replaced soon by "no evidence of meaningful fraud" in the fall elections. Analysis that's a little bit pregnant from the Mother of Idiots, the media.

After ~17 weeks of $600 federal unemployment checks, a Trump executive order has resulted in follow-up checks for $300 for six weeks. Democrats filibustered a Republican relief bill for the unemployed in the Senate which would have made that superfluous. Another opportunity to make Trump appear small, squandered.

The stock market in the 20 years since the August 2000 peak has underperformed the previous 20 years by almost 68%, so No, this is not a bull market.

Joe Biden said 200 million have died from COVID so far, which makes it a good thing hundreds of millions of Americans in 57 states have Obamacare now. In 1991 he said that he'd probably be dead by 2020. Just pointing out that there's still time . . .

Not to be outdone, Kamala Harris on Friday night said 2Pac is the best rapper alive. This is the second time she's pandered on 2Pac, who was shot and killed in 1996.

Glenn Beck wants 1 billion Americans. We want fewer Glenn Becks.

The Chicoms, who have over 1 billion Chinese, are imposing Xi Jinping thought on private businesses and sending warplanes to buzz Taiwan.

We learned Hunter Biden got $3.5 million from a Putin stooge, but it's still "Trump-Russia!" 24/7.

Robert Curry pointed out that John Locke 'had made what philosophers call a “category mistake.” Property is alienable; unalienable rights are not property'. So among the unalienable rights, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not to be thought of as property of which you can be deprived.

We were reminded that in late August Hillary urged Biden not to accept the election result under any circumstances. Well, if Trump wins and stays in the White House, Trump won't be wrong, but Hillary already is.

An article attempting to tout the benefits of the 2017 tax bill for the middle class contained this unfortunate line: "The average tax liability of millionaires was reduced by roughly $54,000 between 2017 and 2018", which way overtops the 2018 median wage of $32,838.05, meaning your average millionaire saved a minimum of $21,000 more than half the country's workers make in a year.

If we're going to have a limitation on SCOTUS power by limiting the terms of Supreme Court justices, it had better include limitations on House and Senate power, too, by limiting their terms of office. This hamstringing of the judiciary is in the service of the present Legislative Tyranny, where representatives and senators keep seats warm forever. It is a devious end run aimed really at the executive, which appoints the judiciary, to further weaken it.

Think about it. In 1929 the Congress grabbed power by stopping growth of the US House and limiting it to its then 435 members. In 1947 the Congress grabbed power by limiting the president to two terms. In 2020 Congress wants to limit the term of SCOTUS justices to 18 years.

The Congress does a lot of limiting, except of itself.

We have $27 trillion in debt for crying out loud! Congress has picked our pockets, our children's pockets, and the pockets to the third and fourth generation of them that hate the government of the United States. Debt is servitude. Debt is slavery. Debt is tyranny. And that debt is the secret of the Legislative Tyranny's success.

A tyranny of 218.

Brutus tried to warn us in 1787:

[I]n reality there will be no part of the people represented, but the rich, even in that branch of the legislature, which is called the democratic. — The well born, and highest orders in life, as they term themselves, will be ignorant of the sentiments of the midling class of citizens, strangers to their ability, wants, and difficulties, and void of sympathy, and fellow feeling. This branch of the legislature will not only be an imperfect representation, but there will be no security in so small a body, against bribery, and corruption — It will consist at first, of sixty-five, and can never exceed one for every thirty thousand inhabitants; a majority of these, that is, thirty-three, are a quorum, and a majority of which, or seventeen, may pass any law — so that twenty-five men, will have the power to give away all the property of the citizens of these states — what security therefore can there be for the people, where their liberties and property are at the disposal of so few men?

It will literally be a government in the hands of the few to oppress and plunder the many. You may conclude with a great degree of certainty, that it, like all others of a similar nature, will be managed by influence and corruption, and that the period is not far distant, when this will be the case, if it should be adopted; for even now there are some among us, whose characters stand high in the public estimation, and who have had a principal agency in framing this constitution, who do not scruple to say, that this is the only practicable mode of governing a people, who think with that degree of freedom which the Americans do — this government will have in their gift a vast number of offices of great honor and emolument. The members of the legislature are not excluded from appointments; and twenty-five of them, as the case may be, being secured, any measure may be carried.

The rulers of this country must be composed of very different materials from those of any other, of which history gives us any account, if the majority of the legislature are not, before many years, entirely at the devotion of the executive — and these states will soon be under the absolute domination of one, or a few, with the fallacious appearance of being governed by men of their own election.

The more I reflect on this subject, the more firmly am I persuaded, that the representation is merely nominal — a mere burlesque; and that no security is provided against corruption and undue influence. No free people on earth, who have elected persons to legislate for them, ever reposed that confidence in so small a number. The British house of commons consists of five hundred and fifty-eight members; the number of inhabitants in Great-Britain, is computed at eight millions — this gives one member for a little more than fourteen thousand, which exceeds double the proportion this country can ever have: and yet we require a larger representation in proportion to our numbers, than Great-Britain, because this country is much more extensive, and differs more in its productions, interests, manners, and habits. The democratic branch of the legislatures of the several states in the union consists, I believe at present, of near two thousand; and this number was not thought too large for the security of liberty by the framers of our state constitutions: some of the states may have erred in this respect, but the difference between two thousand, and sixty-five, is so very great, that it will bear no comparison.

California ordained minister, PHD, father, son, sinner, saint, sometimes author, artist, philosopher, 1956 era Republican, not here to win a popularity contest doesn't like clowns

The other white nationalism speaks up.

The country's become more liberal as "moderates" decline 21% since 1992

Gallup reported in January here that the country's moderates have declined from 43% in 1992 to 34% in 2016, a decline of nearly 21%.

At the same time the country's liberals have risen in number from 17% in 1992 to 25% in 2016, an increase of 47%.

Meanwhile conservatives are still stuck at 36%.

This means the country has become more polarized along the conservative-liberal axis as a huge part of the squishy middle has converted to the left.

My hunch is that the real story is that as the older generations have died off, what has been exposed is the more liberal elements of the Baby Boom generation and especially of their children and grandchildren, who were all indoctrinated in liberalism by the public schools, which were gradually taken over by the left after the 1960s.

I experienced this first hand in my high school in the early 1970s. I remember how two new young teachers freshly minted from college stuck out like sore thumbs compared with the old guard of my teachers. They wasted no time and immediately introduced us to the work of such luminaries as the Marxist Bertolt Brecht and the gay counterculture revolutionist Charles A. Reich, a teacher of both Bill and Hillary Clinton at Yale. Meanwhile I learned useful things from my lunkhead economics teacher, like how to do my taxes, but the textbook for the other parts of the class was the socialist Robert Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers. Fortunately for me, my American History teacher loved America and the US Constitution. His name was Walt Anderson. I think now he saved me.

I survived to become a conservative, but obviously, most of you didn't.    

Kurt Andersen in The Atlantic projects his now-rejected experience of libertarianism onto all of the GOP and conservatism

Unfortunately for Kurt, he thinks recovery means doing some cherry-picking of his own, exchanging one insanity for another. It never occurs to him that while Paul Ryan found his life's inspiration in a novel, millions of young Americans today derive theirs from film. If forced to choose, I'll take active insanity anyday over passive. Kinda makes you miss the "Jesus is my favorite philosopher" president, doesn't it? And how could anyone still seriously speak of an anti-psychiatry "craze"? I must have missed that in my "Man from U.N.C.L.E." years.

In other words, it takes a kook to know a kook. In his own words Andersen expresses the affinity which exists between the insane, the left and libertarianism.

Here:

Relativist professors enabled science-denying Christians, and the antipsychiatry craze in the ’60s appealed simultaneously to left-wingers and libertarians (as well as to Scientologists) ... Another way the GOP got loopy was by overdoing libertarianism. I have some libertarian tendencies, but at full-strength purity it’s an ideology most boys grow out of. On the American right since the ’80s, however, they have not. Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: Let business do whatever it wants and don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish; and don’t mention Ayn Rand’s atheism. Libertarianism, remember, is an ideology whose most widely read and influential texts are explicitly fiction. “I grew up reading Ayn Rand,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has said, “and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are.” It was that fiction that allowed him and so many other higher-IQ Americans to see modern America as a dystopia in which selfishness is righteous and they are the last heroes. “I think a lot of people,” Ryan said in 2009, “would observe that we are right now living in an Ayn Rand novel.” I’m assuming he meant Atlas Shrugged, the novel that Trump’s secretary of state (and former CEO of ExxonMobil) has said is his favorite book. It’s the story of a heroic cabal of men’s-men industrialists who cause the U.S. government to collapse so they can take over, start again, and make everything right.

Goodbye libertarian moment, we hardly knew thee: "Man has a proclivity for safety, not liberty"

James E. Miller at Takimag, here:

Man has a proclivity for safety, not liberty. Human history is littered with war after war, conflict after conflict. Whatever liberty we eke out of our constant warring state is always in danger of being lost. As philosopher John Gray noted, “To think of humans as freedom-loving, you must be ready to view nearly all of history as a mistake.”

As the ancients maintained but we never seem to remember, even when we study them:

WAR IS THE FATHER OF EVERYTHING.

Is English a second language for Marco Rubio?

Recently Rubio flubbed "more" and "fewer", saying "more plumbers welders and less philosophers".

 

 

 

 

But now he also shows his ignorance of "between you and me":

"The bottom line is there isn't that big a difference between [Cruz] and I on how to approach immigration," Rubio told CBS News on Sunday.

I expect rednecks from Michigan to say "between you and I" but not US Senators, but then again neither Barack Obama nor Donald Trump seems to know it's "secretaries of state", not "secretary of states".

Meanwhile Byron York above shows rather convincingly that it was Ted Cruz voting for stronger border amendments to the Gang of Eight bill in 2013 and Rubio voting against them.

Sorry Marco, they can fact check your stupidity: philosophers make more than welders

And arguably, we're already producing plenty of welders relative to philosophers, at least 16 times more, but it would be nice if the welders, and the politicians, could at least speak English correctly, as in "more welders, fewer philosophers", instead of "more welders, less philosophers". 

From the BLS, here:

Senator Marco Rubio: We need more welders and less philosophers

Oh boy, they ate that up in Milwaukee.

Go less miles . . . use fewer gasoline.

Wrong about immigration, Marco Rubio joins the mouth-breathers dissing the education which helps keep us free

From the story here:

Earlier this month, addressing the issue of student debt, Sen. Marco Rubio joked that students ought to know in advance “whether it’s worth borrowing $40,000 to be a Greek philosophy major. Because the market for Greek philosophers is tight.” His remarks echo North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, who in 2013 mocked liberal-arts courses and said, “I don’t want to subsidize [a major] that’s not going to get someone a job.” Gov. Rick Scott of Florida and former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas have passed legislation encouraging students to major in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines rather than the liberal arts. ...

Thomas Jefferson recognized that a broad education could ensure the survival of the new democracy. He recognized that “even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” To defend against this threat, Jefferson wanted “to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts, which history exhibiteth, that, possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purpose.” ...

Considered in light of Jefferson’s argument, Mr. Rubio’s choice of Greek philosophy as a useless major seems especially inapt.

What do liberals and libertarians have most in common this week?

What do liberals and libertarians have most in common this week?

The almost giddy pleasure they take in ridicule of religious founders and their followers.

That this ridicule of religion has animated liberalism for a long time in America is a given. Just ask any devout Christian, if you can still find one, how Serrano's Piss Christ made him feel.

But conservatives, on the other hand, have always believed above all in self-restraint, without which there cannot be any such thing called limited government. As Oswald Spengler reminded us in the 1930s but everyone seems to have long since forgotten, Christianity is renunciation and nothing else. The exploding ignorance of this knowledge had already gone hand in hand with the development of totalitarian forms of government in Spengler's own time, and has only gotten worse since. The world is now dominated as a consequence by two forms of fascism which ended up winning against communism, one of the left and one of the right: the one is in China and the other in the United States. The reason? Fascism is more successful at production and consumption than communism, which is all there is to materialist philosophers. To them self-restraint is as much of an enemy as it was an opiate to Marx. 

The most uncomfortable example of self-restraint for our own time has been self-censorship, which is nothing more than the recognition of the existence of the evil inclination inside of every human being, a recognition only made possible by an openness to a moral vision of the universe. That moral vision says that that evil inclination must be restrained by the free choice of the self if civilized society is to survive. But our supposed political allies today in conservatism and libertarianism want nothing to do with that. They have together more in common with liberalism than with the transcendent world of which I am writing. 

Self-censorship in fact used to be seen as a virtue in America, when it was a more religiously informed country. "Let what you say be simply 'Yes' or 'No'; anything more than this comes from evil", said the founder of our religion. The idea was to live and let live because the evil and the good had to grow up together until the harvest. Otherwise the wheat would be lost with the tares. Accordingly, to be wise meant often to hold your tongue and keep your peace, even when you knew you were right, and to forgo arguments especially over religion because you were free to go to your church or to no church at all, and I was free to go to mine. "Strive for peace with all men", said another of our authorities. If Christians have been given their own form of jihad, that has been it, but they have failed miserably at it.

It must be stated plainly, nothing distinguishes what is different about Islam from us more than its opposition to peaceful coexistence, however poorly we have lived up to our own ideals. Islam means submission to its law, its prophet and its God. A Muslim is "one who submits". Peace only exists between the two of us when we submit to them. Which is why it follows that inviting Muslims into Christian countries is a recipe for conflict.

All around us this week so-called conservatives are urging us to join them in unloading a barrage of invective against Islam's founder, Muhammad. They do not want to live in peace. They want a war, which threatens to destroy us all.

Here's Roger Kimball at Pajamas Media:

"Were I (per impossible) editor of The New York Times, I would run those cartoons of Mohammed on the front page of the paper every day for a month." 

Here's Ralph Peters at Fox News:

"Even if those terrorists are tracked down and killed - and I hope they are killed and die miserably - the end result of this is going to be we're going to continue to self-censor."

"The correct response to this attack, by all of us in journalism ... if we had guts, those cartoons would be reprinted on the front page of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times tomorrow. They won't be."

And here's a local libertarian in Michigan, one Steve Gruber:

It was blood thirsty little pieces of crap-spawned from the repugnant womb of modern Islam that murdered a dozen innocents inside an office for a French satirical magazine. Screaming glory be to Allah while executing 10 staff members and two police officers the vile nature of modern Islam was on display for all to see once again. Why did they attack the magazine? Because the magazine routinely skewered just about anyone and everyone and had the courage to publish cartoons making fun of Mohammed. Well too damn bad. ... In the spirit of America let me say to hell with Mohammed and any of his followers if they think it proper to murder cartoonists or anyone else in the name of Allah.

What these individuals, were they conservatives, should be calling for is separation, keeping Muslims at a distance from Christian civilization, because the two are fundamentally not reconcilable until Muslims undergo a reformation of their own which renounces the inspiration of Koranic surahs legitimating violence against infidels. I predict it will be a cold day in hell before that happens because the so-called conservatives cannot see that the so-called innocents were anything but. They were as much the enemies of what made the West the West as the Muslims are.

Instead all that these ideologues of ours offer is ridicule of Islam, but from the safe distance of an increasingly less intact West. They call this courage, but shrink from what real courage requires: The courage that doesn't need to justify itself in the face of mortal danger, but which freely and quickly acts to excise the cancer and banish it, as well as abolish the tenuous economic cords made of petroleum from which it profits. Libertarian devotion to first principles of freedom of movement, trade and the like all work together to sabotage this doctor from performing the necessary surgery. All they can do is insult, and retreat to the safety of the drone war against an implacable enemy, ala John Galt.

Having grown up in a Christian denomination which held very dim views of everyone else's religion but was convinced everyone else was worth converting to our way of thinking because Christ died for them too, I find the overt lack of charity toward a whole religion and its founder a sign of profound decadence in our own civilization, criminal acts by religious fanatics notwithstanding.

We have to live together in the same world, but it were better if we grew in separate gardens to the extent that that is possible. The only constructive policy with Islam going forward is utter disengagement with its worst elements, and repression of those when called for, such as now in Yemen. Unfortunately for the West, this means withdrawing from Muslim lands, especially Arabia, and actively choosing to promote independence in energy to the extent that whether Islam reforms or does not reform, we can live without them and prevent them from harming others.

We cannot continue to serve God and mammon. Otherwise we are no different than them.

Anita Dunn's Inspiration: A Monster Whose Excellence Was Killing Millions

Dunn, now 54, served Obama in 2009

"The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers: Mao Zedong and Mother Teresa — not often coupled with each other, but the two people I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point which is: you're going to make choices; you're going to challenge; you're going to say why not; you're going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before. But here's the deal: These are your choices, they are no one else's. In 1947, when Mao Zedong was being challenged within his own party on his plan to basically take China over. Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Chinese held the cities, they had the army, they had the air force, they had everything on their side. And people said, 'How can you win? How can you do this? How can you do this, against all of the odds against you?' And Mao Zedong said, you know, 'You fight your war, and I'll fight mine.' And think about that for a second. You don't have to accept the definition of how to do things and you don't have to follow other peoples choices and paths. Ok? It is about your choices and your path. You fight your own war, you lay out your own path, you figure out what's right for you. You don't let external definition define how good you are internally, you fight your war, you let them fight theirs. Everybody has their own path".

Red Guard member Wang Jiyu, 60, confessed killer

“The children now don’t know what happened. We are choosing to forget. We should not let them forget and everyone should know what happened to this country. Some people still miss and praise those years – let them go to hell.” (quoted here, Sept. 27, 2011)

"'I think the most terrible thing, when I recall that period, the most terrible thing that struck me was our indifference,' said Gong, today a 38-year-old graduate student at Harvard researching her own history. ...

"[D]ramatic new figures for the number of people who died as a result of Mao Tse-tung's policies are surfacing, along with horrifying proof of cannibalism during the Cultural Revolution.

"It is now believed that as many as 60 million to 80 million people may have died because of Mao's policies--making him responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin combined.

"Gong said killer is not a strong enough word to describe Mao. 'He was a monster,' she said." (Beth Duff-Brown in The LA Times here, November 20, 1994)

The ignorance of some is willful. 

'Wasteful Spending Will Always Rise To The Level Of Revenues'

So says Arthur Laffer in support of Newt Gingrich in The Wall Street Journal, here:

Mr. Gingrich's flat tax proposals—along with his proposed balanced budget amendment—would put a quick stop to overspending and return America to fiscal soundness. No other candidate comes close to doing this.

Here is a corollary I learned from a Harvard-trained philosopher, PJWM:

'Work expands to fill the time allotted.'