Did natives die? Actually, quite a lot, on the island of
Hispaniola, where Columbus first landed—but not from warfare. They died of
infectious diseases. It turns out that, back almost half a millennium before
medical science discovered the causes of infectious diseases under a
microscope, what you don’t know can hurt you. What would have been a mild cold
to a group of people used to certain germs could be catastrophically life
threatening to a group of people never introduced to those germs.
It’s hard to hold someone accountable for something they had
no way of knowing about nor could they have anticipated.
Also, while there has been war, there has never been anything in the way of policy or practice
that could accurately be called genocide against native peoples in this
country.
Another thing that’s not true, as Crowder puts it, is that
natives
lived in harmony with the environment until Columbus arrived,
and European settlers destroyed the land with their evil technology.
Truth? Not only did the Natives brutally take out PEOPLE, but
they took out entire forests and hunted species to extinction.
And one more myth that’s not true: that natives lived in pacifistic
harmony until Western civilization introduced war. Not so. As Crowder tells it,
The truth is... not so much. When Columbus arrived, the
islands were inhabited by two main tribes: the Arawaks, who were passive and
friendly, and the Caribs, who were vicious cannibals. The Arawaks actually lived
in fear of the Caribs for—you guessed it—the reasons being that they hunted
them down to enslave them and eat them. Yes—eat them. Ironically, we get the
name “Caribbean Islands” from those famous people-eaters.
The only way settlers were able to conquer this land was
through the help of Native Americans who teamed up with them to settle the
score with other tribes who were even bigger jerks than they were!
That’s not even to mention the populations in Central and
South America, famous for ritual human sacrifice. You think Cortes was able to
command and conquer with only 500 or so Conquistadors? Of course not! It took
50,000 screaming, ANGRY allied natives who’d had it up to here with being
tortured, enslaved and forced to carry gold for the other native Aztecs. At
some point, they decided to roll the dice and go with the guys sporting funny
beards and metal hats.
So why do we get told about Columbus and the evil he supposedly
committed? Good question:
Columbus is not the issue here, and never was. This whole
“Indigenous Peoples Day” charade is about teaching your children to despise
Western civilization and anybody who dare defend it.
The next logical question, of course, is, Why do people
teaching our children these things so despise Western civilization? And the
answer to that—which is beyond the scope of this particular PragerU video—is
that certain people use a misguided but common self-disparagement disguised as
humility as a manipulation tool to get weaker, immature minds to submit to
assertions of power over them.
I wrote a fuller discussion (including a lot of PragerU
videos that day too) in “Self-Hatred Isn’t Virtuous,” from August of this year.
Last year I also spent Columbus Day debunking some of the
myths, probably also worth reviewing, here.
Truth is always a good way to celebrate this historically
memorable day, and every day.
In the last post, “Evil Is Real,” I linked to a video about
Operation Underground Railroad, the organization founded by Tim Ballard that
rescues children from human trafficking. If you followed that link, you found
that there are several additional connected documentaries. In the second one, "Finding Light in the Darkness," Ballard recounts the story of finding two young children in
Haiti, a brother and sister, and his story of adopting them.
I heard him tell this story in person a couple of years ago,
in a setting where he was fully able to express his religious beliefs, and how
that is key to the story. Much of that also comes through in this documentary.
He met the two children, and they were on his mind the
following night, when he was coming down from the adrenaline rush, after the
arrests of the perpetrators were made and the children were safe. Usually when
he would feel these strong emotions, he would pray to have relief from them, so
that he would be able to carry on with the work. If you get too emotionally
attached to every child in every raid, you can’t move on and focus on the job
that needs to be done. This time, however, the prayers didn’t bring relief. The
feelings intensified. He ended up calling his wife in the middle of the night,
and telling her what he was going through.
She said, “You want to adopt those children!” which was
beyond any thought he had formed. They had six kids of their own already.
Adopting children was a crazy idea. No, he just wanted relief, but he couldn’t
get it. Would she come and help him? She said, no, she didn’t need to come. She
also felt like they should adopt the children, and he just needed to start the
paperwork.
It took four years to accomplish that task. Most of the
first year was spent trying to locate them. Because he was a foreigner, not
from Haiti, he was not allowed to know where they had been sent; he was just
assured that they were safe.
There were many trips back to Haiti, preparing for and
performing other missions. Each time he continued his search for these
children, but he couldn’t find them. There was one person in the government who
could override the rule preventing him from getting the information he needed,
and he had tried unsuccessfully several times to meet with her. There was one
last day. He asked his wife to gather the children to be on their knees praying
for him at an exact hour, when he would enter the government building hoping to
get the information he needed.
The part of the Ballard family that went to Haiti to pick up
the adopted brother and sister are about to introduce them
to the rest of the family.
screen shot from "Finding Light in Darkness"
He and a friend arrived slightly early. Tim waited before entering,
because he wanted to be sure his timing coincided with the family’s prayer.
Then he went through the gate and bumped into a woman on her way out. Because
of the timing, he said, “Who are you?” It turned out she was one of the rare
English speakers he could have bumped into. When he told her what he was trying
to do, she asked the name of the children. He told her, and she started jumping
up and down and saying, “Praise Jesus!” over and over. So he joined her in
that. And then he asked what she was praising Jesus for.
She ran an orphanage; it was one of several that the
children from the raid so many months before had been sent to. The brother and
sister had been sent to her orphanage; she had them. It was well across town.
She was only in this government building to handle some paperwork that day. And
if he had come in a minute earlier or later, they would not have run into each
other.
To Tim Ballard, this was a direct and obvious answer to
prayer. That’s a much more reasonable explanation than that it was just an odd
coincidence.
I’m telling this story, because I’ve been listening to the debate between Jordan Peterson and atheist Sam Harris, from this past June.
Jordan Peterson’s view of religion comes at it from an evolutionary
psychologist’s point of view. It’s interesting, but it’s cerebral in its
approach to what is transcendent of the intellect and reason. Sam Harris’s view
is that religion is actually harmful, and the better approach to finding the
best way to live a life would be to use pure reason.
Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris debate, Bret Weinstein moderates
screen shot from here
Peterson is often reticent to give a direct answer to
whether he believes in God, because he doesn’t like all the attachments to the
answer that other people make. But he does say he lives his life as though
there is a God, and that he has evidences that lead him to believe that is the
right way. But as a scientist, more so in this discussion than in some others I’ve
heard, he talks about religion as the metaphorical stories making up religion that lead us
to lead better lives.
What Harris takes from that is that metaphors, or stories,
are just fiction, even if sometimes they are useful; you can’t trust a fiction
for guidance to truth, because you know it's fiction. Also, he believes the dogma that surround religions are harmful and evil.
Harris’s view negates the religious point of view because of
an a priori premise that religion is
about belief in something pretend, an invisible being who doesn’t exist.
But he fails utterly to grasp the experiential evidence such
as Tim Ballard’s story. Ballard’s story is dramatic, and clearly shows God’s
hand. And he has a number of other stories—many involving his wife and her
uncanny ability to follow promptings that she knows are from God, and that lead
to important good outcomes for the children and the family and others. My personal stories may be less dramatic or convincing for others, but they are no less real for me.
I’m also not satisfied with Peterson’s explanation. It
starts with an assumption about evolutionary science that I don’t totally buy
into. In fact, I start with my belief in God, which is a truth that I believe I
have received enough evidence for. And while I do not know how God went about
creating us as the fully formed intelligent, self-aware beings that we are, I
use the evolutionary science more as a metaphor to describe that some things,
and some creatures, are simple and others complex—rather than as a map of how one
thing progressed from another, which we don’t actually know.
I do think there’s something to the idea that archetypal stories
are metaphors we use to understand things that are true. But my religious
experience leads me to believe that God often uses metaphor and symbolism in stories that
are also factually true. It would have been a stronger response to Harris’s
arguments to say that God is not only metaphorically factual, but actually
factual, and Harris' personal lack of evidence does not negate the personal evidence of billions of other humans.
Harris uses the most heinous elements of some religions to
claim that religions in general are bad: human sacrifice, genocide of infidels,
execution of apostates. My hypothesis is that these are corruptions of
religion. They do not honor a God who created us and loves and cares for us. Nor do they honor life, family, truth, or property. Such religions lack the
necessities of civilization.
So what Harris is referring to isn’t religious truth; it’s a
distortion, a corruption—which implies that there was something whole that they are distortions and corruptions from.
Moreover, he looks at reason as the source for truth and
goodness. This fails to notice a couple of things. For one thing, reasoning,
or logic, only works if you start with the right assumption. One example
provided in the PragerU video "Where Do Good and Evil Come From?" (included below) is that criminals plan a heist
using reason. Reason helps them carry out a successful theft without it causing them to realize the wrongness of the theft. So, in order for
reason to lead to moral truth, it needs to start with a moral assumption.
Where can reason get that? It gets it from a milieu of
morality. It’s logical to see that dealing honestly and truthfully with others
is morally good, if you live in a society where that is normal. If you live in
a society where master have their slaves serve them, and that is all you’ve known, it is
logically reasonable to see that as the right way, and perfectly moral—which most
of the societies on earth have done. That reasoning doesn’t make it morally
true. But true religion—which tells us humans are created by God and have a divine
nature—tells us that enslaving a human being is morally wrong.
In other words, Harris believes he gets to moral truth
through reason, when he’s really benefiting from living in a civilization with
a religious moral legacy.
Peter Kreet lists and refutes the various sources for
moral truth proposed by atheists,
There’s a hypothetical question Peterson and Harris consider: If you were to do an
experiment in which you take a religious people to settle one isolated frontier,
and reasoning atheists to settle another completely separate isolated frontier,
which society would more likely become a thriving civilization? Harris believes
it’s obvious the reasoning one will do better.
But it isn’t obvious. And history tells us that atheistic
societies (which all the socialist/communist ones are) are much more likely to savagely massacre huge portions of the population. What he’s assuming is that he’ll take the reasoning of people who
already benefit from the experience of living in civilized societies—which are
based on moral principles—and carry on with everyone being moral simply because
the good outcomes are rational.
Good doesn’t come from nothing. In fact, good itself is a moral judgment. If that judgment is based on current reasoning, it can change, depending on how individuals or
groups think at a given time. There’s no moral absolute there, because there’s
no source of absolute moral good, or moral truth.
You only get that if there is a transcendent source. As
Professor Kreet says in the video:
Just as a design suggests a designer, moral commands suggest
a moral commander. Moral Laws must come from a moral lawgiver.
Well, that sounds pretty much like what we know as God.
The consequence of this argument is that whenever you appeal
to morality you are appealing to God whether you know it or not; you’re talking
about something religious, even if you think you’re an atheist.
That’s similar to what I’ve heard Jordan Peterson say
elsewhere, in a Q&A after a lecture:
Everything you act out is predicated on your implicit axioms.
The system of implicit axioms that you hold as primary is your religious belief
system. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an atheist or not. That’s just surface
noise….
It doesn’t necessarily have to do with your voluntarily
articulated statements about whether or not you believe in something like a
transcendent deity. So, what you act out is much more what you are than what
you say about yourself. And what the hell do you know about what you believe,
anyways?
We know that evil is real, because we experience it. We also know that good exists, because we experience it. We know these things and
act on them, even before we know how to identify and articulate our beliefs.
So good is real.
And that means God is real—the source and definer of ultimate good. If that is
so, then we are better off living our lives in search of God’s truth, gaining
experience with Him, and from Him. You don’t get that by experimenting with
living a life that excludes God; you get that by seeking Him, through study,
faith, and practice at choosing good even when bad is easier and possibly appears more rational.
God has a better view. And civilizations
thrive when enough people within them live God’s guiding principles, as
articulated in the Ten Commandments: honor God, life, family, truth, and
property.
Maybe you remember from junior high or high school, the girl
(maybe it was you) who believed all kinds of negative things about herself: her
thighs were fat; her tummy bulged, her hair was stringy (or too curly or
frizzy); she had a gap between her teeth that she thought everyone was aware
of; she wasn’t smart enough; her clothes never fit right, or looked cool
enough. The list goes on. But you looked at her and wondered where this was
coming from, because what you saw was a girl who was pretty enough, maybe even
very pretty. And she was friendly and sweet and thoughtful of others. And you
had to wonder where all that anti-self negativity was coming from.
It's not uncommon among early teens, girls especially. There
may be attached to it an erroneous belief that it’s not right to like yourself;
that means you’re conceited and narcissistic. So putting yourself down is only
proper. But you, looking from the outside, can see she’s not only wrong; she’s
harming herself and limiting the good she could do in the world, if only she
stopped worrying about her flaws and started growing herself and sharing her
potential with the world.
Even this cute girl (our daughter, Social Sphere)
had a few brief moments of not realizing
how beautiful she was, but we got her over
that using some reality.
The cure seems to be growing up, gaining confidence, and
getting a clearer picture of self. And maybe cutting out the comparisons of
only her personal flaws with only the admirable qualities of her peers.
In other words, she’s wrong, and she needs to come to learn
that. Because tearing herself down is just making herself miserable with no
good purpose.
If you’re any kind of friend, or even a decent person, you
do what you can to get her to see herself more accurately and to stop tearing
herself down.
So, how does this relate to the Spherical Model and what we
talk about here?
Take a look at this quote of yesterday from New York Governor
Andrew Cuomo: “We're not going to make America great again. It was never that
great."
And can we forget that former first lady Michelle Obama who,
in 2008, said, “For the first time in my adult life, I’m proud of my country”?
That was, of course, related to her husband’s election to fundamentally transform
the most free and prosperous country in human history into—something else.
It’s symptomatic of a rather large segment of our society
that looks at the United States and doesn’t see what Reagan metaphorically
called the “shining city on a hill.” Instead they see a dung heap. A garbage
dump. A deteriorating ghetto. We should be more like Sweden. Or Finland. Or Denmark.
Or almost anywhere else.
Are they right? I believe they’re like that middle school
girl, thinking it’s virtuous somehow to denigrate their own country—seeing only
bad here, while seeing good everywhere else but missing their bad. So, no,
they’re not accurate. And they’re not more virtuous for being “open-minded”
enough to “see” their country as flawed.
Of course there are flaws. But they aren’t the flaws these
people claim. And their blindness to the astounding good in "this greatest
nation on God’s green earth,” as Michael Medved says on his show every day, is
so dense as to be willful.
In the spirit of teenage girl magazines, maybe it’s time for
a self-assessment quiz, to determine whether you (or a friend or frenemy you’re
assessing while reading this) are suffering from this self-disparagement
syndrome.
1.T
of F: The Founding Fathers were a bunch of racist old slaveholders, so that
means the country they founded is fatally flawed to begin with.
2.T
or F: The phrase in the Constitution about slaves being counted as 3/5ths of a
person was to institutionalize and endorse racist slavery.
3.T
or F: The imperialist United States stole most of the Southwest from Mexico.
4.T
or F: The rights in the Constitution are granted by government, and they can be
taken away by government if a majority decides they’re not good to have—like freedom
of religion if it’s offensive, or freedom of speech if it’s offensive.
5.T
or F: Racism is every bit as bad today as it was during slavery or the Jim Crow
eras.
6.Which
Superman slogan do you prefer?
a. The original classic, from comic books,
television series, and older movies: “truth, justice, and the American way.”
b. The updated
version (from the movie Superman Returns): “truth, justice, and all that stuff.”
7.Agree
or Disagree: A country that doesn’t provide free health care and free education
through college is out of step with the rest of the world and should step up.
8.Agree
or Disagree: America should never have gotten involved in the war in Iraq—or,
for that matter, Vietnam, or any other war since WWII.
9.Agree
or Disagree: America should intervene with food supplies and anything else to
rescue people in failing economies such as Venezuela.
10.Agree
or Disagree: America is unfair because it doesn’t just open its borders and let
anyone in who wants to come in.
11.Agree
or Disagree: Businesses should be forced to pay their people enough to live on
(housing, food, clothing, transportation) for even an entry-level job.
12.Agree
or Disagree: Inequality is the worst thing about America; money should be taken
from the rich and redistributed to the poor.
13.Agree
or Disagree: People who don’t do as well as others are being oppressed.
Scoring
The T or F questions are all False. So count one point for
each T you answered. (See discussion of answers below.)
If you answered B on 6, count one point. For question 7-13,
count one point for each statement you Agree with.
If you got 0-3 points, pretty good (but if you don’t have 0,
you need to do some soul searching).
If you got 4-7 points, you’re probably suffering from some
bad information in schools and media, and you need to get some better sources.
(See suggestions below.)
If you got 8+ points, you’re an America hater for no good
reason. In fact, your reasons aren’t just random opinions; you have chosen to
buy in to the America hating rhetoric of false history teachings, much of it
based on the history/propaganda of Howard Zinn that has made its way into our
education system. You need to do some de-programming to get yourself in touch
with reality before you harm yourself and others—and your country.
Discussion of Answers
Question 1: While there were slaveholders among the
Founders, they all agreed it was an evil that needed to be done away—something that
was a new idea in world history, since slavery was the norm throughout history
up until the Founders started this nation based on an idea, rather than on a
geography or tribalism. The idea: that all men are created equal, and that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, related to life,
liberty, and property.
Question 2: The purpose of the 3/5 phrase in the
Constitution was to prevent the perpetuation of slavery. The slaveholding
states wanted to count their slaves in order to boost their population and give
them more representation, thus ensuring the continuation of slavery. But the
Founders, including those from southern states who were representing their
states’ interests but were also looking for ways to end the practice, used this
compromise to reduce the power of slaveholding states. PragerU has a good
discussion: “Why the 3/5ths Compromise Was Anti-Slavery.”
Question 3: The Tejanos who fought with the Texians (that
is, the Hispanic people living in current Texas along with the Americans who
immigrated to what was then part of Mexico) fought long and hard for
independence from the tyrannical dictator who had taken over Mexico and
deprived them of their rights. And further, the later war that led to New
Mexico, Arizona, and California becoming parts of the United States—Mexico was
the aggressor, lost, and in fact lost most of what is current Mexico today, but
that was given back, unfortunately for them, because they’d have been better
off joining America. Dinesh D’Souza has a good discussion of this in America:
Imagine a World without Her, pp. 107-119.
Question 4: “Being endowed by their Creator” means being
given by God, and “unalienable,” or “inalienable,” depending on who’s spelling
it today, means that it can’t be taken. Government doesn’t grant those rights;
government is tasked with protecting those rights. The Bill of Rights, which
consists of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, weren’t originally
included, because they were considered so obvious and so well understood, that
they went without saying. But then several states worried that later
generations might not find them so obvious, so they spelled them out and
included them in the Constitution before it was ratified.
There are PragerU videos on a great many other topics as
well, including some economic ones. For other sources with a more America
loving presentation of reality, you might finish Dinesh D’Souza’s book America: Imagine a World without Her,
and also Mark Steyn’s America Alone, Glenn
Beck’s The Real America, and W. Cleon
Skousen’s The Five Thousand Year Leap.
For education, try the free online Hillsdale College
courses. Start with Constitution 101 and 201.
For daily information doses, try podcasts of Ben Shapiro and
Andrew Klavan, and maybe even Michael Knowles.
For some economic truth, you might try anything by Thomas
Sowell. Start with Basic Economics.
Or, if you need to battle some of that social justice dogma, you might try Discrimination and Disparities or Wealth, Poverty and Politics.
At the very least be skeptical of self-hatred. What’s behind
it? Do you really think it’s virtuous to be desperately ashamed of a nation
with so many positives that people around the world want to become Americans? Or
is it a dysfunctional delusion?
Just like the 13-year-old girl who responds to
your compliment with, “Really? But my shoes are awful, don’t you think?” maybe
someone needs to stand her in front of a full-length mirror and let her see how
beautiful she is. Take a look at America; she’s beautiful!
US Embassy in Jerusalem Dedication
May 14, 2018 (image from screen shot)
Israel is a country with a capital city—like pretty much
every other country in the history of countries. Except that in Israel’s case,
people in various countries have been trying to tell them they can’t have their
capital there, where it has historically always been (including thousands of
years ago). Our country and others have given lip service to recognizing
Jerusalem as their capital, and promised to put our embassy in their capital.
But then, on second thought, just left it in Tel Aviv, even though the
government buildings and officials and their meetings are in Jerusalem.
So, when President Trump promised to move the embassy, as at
least the past three presidents have promised, we just sort of say, “We’ll see.”
But he said it would happen in six months. That means putting a plan of action
in place.
And it happened.
If you’ve read here for long, you know I did not support
Donald Trump in the election. (I, of course, did not vote for Hillary either;
that was unthinkable.) His personality and character are not what I would
prefer. And his record as a Democrat, and no particular ideological shift to
conservatism, meant I had no particular reason to trust him to do right things
for our country. So every time he does something really right, I’m pleasantly
surprised. I hope that keeps happening.
Anyway, respecting our strong ally Israel by recognizing
their capital by our actions is a good thing.
I watched the full ceremony, and I’m including that
recording below. There are good things said there, and there’s a sense of
goodness and honor about the whole thing. I felt respect for those involved,
including the president’s daughter and her husband, because they were so respectful
toward our Israeli friends. (The ceremony starts about 22 minutes in.)
If you followed the news, then you know there were
protesters at the gates. The media would have you believe these were unarmed
protesters, appearing in response to the embassy dedication. Not really true.
There were protesters as there always are. There may have been more at this
time of heightened media attention. Also, they were not exactly unarmed. Some
were trying to send airborne fires in hopes of burning down the city. These
Hamas-led terrorists (a more apt word for them than protesters) were despicable
enough to place someone in a wheelchair in the line of fire in their ongoing
effort to make the Israelis look like the bad guys.
My guess is that there has never been a country that went so
fully out of their way to keep their enemies safe while they were defending
themselves from those enemies.
If you need a refresher, there many PragerU videos; here are
three.
Did I ever mention that I was once a cartographer? It’s what
I did as a summer job, putting myself through college. This was back before AutoCAD,
so we created overlays by hand. Fun times. It’s always been kind of a family
joke, because I’m not good with directions (that’s an understatement). In a
city the size of Houston, flat enough not to have directional clues on the
horizon, it’s helpful that we now have GPS systems wherever we go.
Anyway, I’ve always been kind of fascinated by maps. I’ve
come across some recently that are for different purposes, but imply some
correlation. Those red spots are urban areas. I think that's cities with over 100,000.
This next one shows that information by counties. Essentially half of the US population lives in those densest counties, including Alaska and Hawaii. The blue "half" includes 146 counties out of a total of over 3141. That's about 4.6% of counties.
Here's a map of where the most murders take place. According to the commentary accompanying this map, "The worst 1% of counties have 19% of the population and 37% of the murders. The worst 5% of counties contain 47% of the population and account for 68%of murders. Over half of murders occurred in only 2% of counties."
You’ll need to use your imagination to overlay all four maps. But
what you see is likely this:
·Urban areas cover a relatively small part of the
land.
·A relatively small part of the land contains
half of the population.
·The urban areas coincide with high murder rates, and possibly other cultural differences from the less populated areas.
·The urban areas tend to vote Democrat,
while the less densely populated areas tend to vote Republican.
The maps may not show this, but people who live outside the
relatively few densely populated areas think differently, on the whole, than
people who live in urban areas.
It may be that people self-select. Maybe cities make
people think that government control is the answer to all their needs. Or maybe
people who think that gravitate toward cities, and maybe more self-reliant
types live in the suburbs and rural areas.
Maybe people who are born in cities inherit the ways of
thinking that surround them. And people who live outside cities think in ways
the people around them think.
Maybe people in these different settings have different
needs based on their surroundings. For example, if you live in a small
apartment with very little storage, you can’t keep a lot in your pantry and
refrigerator—and you probably don’t have a deep freeze in your garage (which you probably don't have). So you
would have to shop for just a few items at a time, frequently. Or eat out a
lot.
But if you have to drive half an hour to the larger grocery
stores, you probably stock up once a week, have supplies on hand to make
various recipes. And you probably eat at home more often than city dwellers do.
If you live in a suburban setting, you might do more
shopping around, and your stocking up or eating out may have more to do with
your family’s schedule than location of stores or home storage limits.
If you live in a city, public transportation is widely
available, and you may be used to it. You may not even own a car, which is
expensive to garage, expensive to park, and inconvenient to get around town in.
If you live in a rural area, you’re used to driving long
distances for everything: food, school, entertainment, work. Having your own
transportation is essential.
If you live in a suburb, your access to public transportation may be spotty. And getting where you need to go, among many
directions and choices, is a lot more convenient—even essential—in your own
vehicle. Plus, you can carry a lot more in a car, or maybe an SUV, than you can
on a bus.
Whether it's causal or not, people in urban centers tend to think differently from people outside urban centers. And, because they're surrounded by so many people who think like them, they may think that is the only right way to think. They may not even question what they think.
If we go back 230 years, when the Founders worked out the
Constitution, a main concern was that argument about population or state power.
Why would a small state like Rhode Island go along with a plan that would
forever give all the voice to a large state like Virginia? People in powerful, populated areas thought differently from those in smaller and/or less populated areas.
The Founders came up with a great compromise: two houses of representative
government—one determined by population, the other determined by state.
The United States is not a democracy. And that’s a good thing. In a
democracy, all you need is half the people plus one to want something, and that’s
what you get. If half plus one decide you don’t deserve the money you earn—because
of your beliefs, or your looks, or because that many people just dislike you—then
they “legally” take your money. If half the people plus one decide people like
you shouldn’t own property, or shouldn’t get certain educational opportunities,
or some other freedom we take for granted, the mob rules, and you lose that
freedom.
That's tyranny of the majority. Back then, the Founders knew better than to want mob rule democracy. Do we
still know better?
After the last election, especially, there’s been a push to
do away with the Electoral College, which is the representative way we actually
choose our president. The Electoral College is based specifically on that
compromise between power by population and power by the various states.
Here's Robert Reich insisting that, since the election didn’t
go the way of the population majority, the results were wrong, and this should
never be allowed to happen again, so he’s offering a plan to thwart the
Electoral College without all the bother of amending the Constitution. It’s
called National Popular Vote, or NPV. And it’s getting enough traction that you’d
better be aware of it.
Let’s be clear. Rule by popular vote intentionally and forever
disenfranchises voters everywhere but in the urban centers.
Look at those maps again. What you see is that, if we
elected a president by population, the efficient way to campaign would be to
win voters only in those most densely populated areas. Win those, and ignore
the rest of the country. Always. And forever. Go ahead and ignore the needs and
wants of the whole rest of the country, because you don’t need their votes.
Getting rid of the Electoral College—or any other scheme
that grants power based solely on population—and you get the mob rule the
Founders worked hard to prevent.Tyranny of the urban centers, we could call it.
PragerU has a brief video explaining why the Electoral
College is a much better idea than the popular vote, and why NPV is such a bad
idea:
Here’s one more graphic* to illustrate the value of the
Electoral College to everyone outside the East Coast, the West Coast, Chicago,
plus a few other cities.
______________________________________________________ * Found on Facebook. I don't know the original source.
There was a Politico story earlier this week, investigative reporting by Josh Meyer. It hasn’t gotten a lot of attention in
regular media, as you might expect from such a big story, probably because it
doesn’t portray Obama and his administration in a positive light. I heard of
it, instead, from conservative commentators Hugh Hewitt and Ben Shapiro.
The piece, titled “The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook,” is very long—about 14,500 words, which looks like more
than 40 pages, even with a lot of the illustrations removed. I recommend reading
it in full, but I’m going to quote just a few bits, enough so I can make a
couple of comments about it.
Here’s the intro:
In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the
Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting
drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it
was funneling cocaine into the United States.
Project Cassandra, as it was called, was launched in 2008,
under Pres. Bush:
Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret
DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and
informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and
foreign security agencies.
They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to
West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela
and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was
laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them
to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents
traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and
its state sponsors in Iran.
But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of
the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly
insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way,
Here’s an example of things looking really bad:
Lebanese arms dealer Ali Fayad, a suspected top Hezbollah operative
whom agents believed reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a key
supplier of weapons to Syria and Iraq, was arrested in Prague in the spring of
2014. But for the nearly two years Fayad was in custody, top Obama
administration officials declined to apply serious pressure on the Czech
government to extradite him to the United States, even as Putin was lobbying
aggressively against it.
Fayad, who had been indicted in U.S. courts on charges of
planning the murders of U.S. government employees, attempting to provide
material support to a terrorist organization and attempting to acquire,
transfer and use anti-aircraft missiles, was ultimately sent to Beirut. He is
now believed by U.S. officials to be back in business, and helping to arm
militants in Syria and elsewhere with Russian heavy weapons.
We’re all supposed to believe that President Trump, as a
candidate, colluded with the Russian government to “steal” the 2016 election.
There’s no serious evidence to that effect, despite a massive FBI
investigation, a Congressional investigation, and a special counsel
investigation initiated by the Department of Justice.
But there is clear
evidence that the Obama administration colluded with the Russian government to
free an Islamic terrorist responsible for the deaths of Americans—all in order
to appease Iran to pave the way for the Obama administration’s surrender to the
burgeoning Iranian nuclear program and Iran’s escalating regional ambitions.
Obama’s team must have their side of the story, right?
[Kevin] Lewis, speaking for the Obama administration,
provided a list of eight arrests and prosecutions as proof [that the
administration had taken actions against Hezbollah]. He made special note of a
February 2016 operation in which European authorities arrested an undisclosed
number of alleged members of a special Hezbollah business affairs unit that the
DEA says oversees its drug trafficking and other criminal money-making
enterprises.
But…
Project Cassandra officials, however, noted that the European
arrests occurred after the negotiations with Iran were over, and said the task
force initiated the multinational partnerships on its own, after years of
seeing their cases shot down by the Justice and State departments and other
U.S. agencies.
The Justice Department, they pointed out, never filed
corresponding U.S. criminal charges against the suspects arrested in Europe.
Here’s a bit of the history:
Project Cassandra had its origins in a series of
investigations launched in the years after the 9/11 attacks which all led, via
their own twisted paths, to Hezbollah as a suspected global criminal
enterprise.
Hezbollah, according to John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism
adviser, isn’t just a group of bad guys anymore; they’re an actual party. So we
should respect them. But, in reality, that’s a pretty naive assessment:
“Hezbollah operates like the Gambino crime family on
steroids, and [Safieddine] is its John Gotti,” said [Jack] Kelly [DEA agent
overseeing Hezbollah cases], referring to the infamous “Teflon Don” crime boss
who for decades eluded justice. “Whatever Iran needs, Safieddine is in charge
of getting it for them.”
The connection you need to understand is this one:
Because Hezbollah’s drug trafficking was bankrolling its
Islamic Jihad military wing and joint ventures with Iran, as [David] Asher
[expert on illicit finance, sent from the Pentagon to work on Project
Cassandra] would later testify before Congress, it represented “the largest
material support scheme for terrorism operations” the world had ever seen.
Money Laundering paths, map from here Red = Used cars bought in US, shipped to West Africa, proceeds to Lebanon Yellow = Drugs from Colombia and Venezuela are shipped to the US through Mexico, and to Europe via West Africa Green = Freshly laundered money returned to US to buy used cars
When Kelly couldn’t get the White House to take action on
any of the mounds of evidence they’d compiled, he started asking questions:
Kelly said, he ran into one of the unit’s top prosecutors and
asked if there was “something going on with the White House that explains why
we can’t get a criminal filing.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” the prosecutor replied,
according to Kelly. “Right now, we have 50 FBI agents not doing anything
because they know their Iran cases aren’t going anywhere,” including
investigations around the U.S. into allegedly complicit used-car dealers.
For example:
By the end of 2012, senior officials at the Justice
Department’s National Security and Criminal divisions, and at the State
Department and National Security Council, had shut down, derailed or delayed
numerous other Hezbollah-related cases with little or no explanation, according
to Asher, Kelly, Maltz and other current and former participating officials.
Agents discovered “an entire Quds force network” in the U.S.,
laundering money, moving drugs and illegally smuggling Bell helicopters,
night-vision goggles and other items for Iran, Asher said.
“We crashed to indict” the elite Iranian unit, and while some
operatives were eventually prosecuted, other critically important indictments
“were rejected despite the fact that we had excellent evidence and testifying
witnesses,” said Asher, who helped lead the investigation.
So, to summarize, Obama was so intent on making the Iran nuclear deal, that he was willing to sacrifice pretty much anything to get it.
And what did the US get in the deal? We got a guarantee that Iran would be
facilitated in developing nuclear weapons (in about a decade), we would give
them $150 billion for allowing us to lift the sanctions—the lifting of which
they have not earned—and, as Senator Ted Cruz said, ahead of the disapproving vote from
Congress that Obama ignored,
[I]t will facilitate and accelerate the nation of Iran
acquiring nuclear weapons. There is no greater threat to the safety and
security of America. There is no greater threat to the safety and security of
Israel, than a nuclear Iran. I agree with Prime Minister Netanyahu that a
nuclear Iran poses an existential threat to the nation of Israel. And let me be
clear, when he says existential, he doesn’t mean a bunch of Frenchmen in black
berets chain smoking. He means literally going to the very existence of Israel.
There’s a PragerU video on the Iran deal you might want to
watch as a refresher:
I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that Obama has done more
to harm the United States of America than any president—and arguably more harm
than any other American traitor. It is hard to imagine doing worse.
Is it just because he is short-sighted, ignorant, and
unwilling to see reality? Or is it intentional? I don’t know. In the end, God knows,
and Obama will, in eternity, be held accountable. In the meantime, we live in a
perilous world in which all known paths of corruption and collusion feed efforts
to annihilate civilization.
There’s a term for this type of collusion used in the Book
of Mormon: secret combinations. It means colluding with others, murdering to
get power and money. It’s a grave evil. I was reading a section about it just
this week, where we see the rise and fall of a civilization in a relatively
short book. This is Ether 8, prophesying of our day:
24 Wherefore, the Lord commandeth you, when ye shall see
these things come among you that ye shall awake to a sense of your awful
situation, because of this secret combination which shall be among you; or wo
be unto it, because of the blood of them who have been slain; for they cry from
the dust for vengeance upon it, and also upon those who built it up.
25 For it cometh to pass that whoso buildeth it up seeketh to
overthrow the freedom of all lands, nations, and countries; and it bringeth to
pass the destruction of all people, for it is built up by the devil, who is the
father of all lies; even that same liar who beguiled our first parents, yea,
even that same liar who hath caused man to commit murder from the beginning;
who hath hardened the hearts of men that they have murdered the prophets, and
stoned them, and cast them out from the beginning.
The hope is that, if we awake to see our danger, we will
turn to God and live. I don’t have a better, or more exact, response to this
piece.
The Spherical Model framework is original, and the opinions
are mainly mine. But there are many others interested in freedom, prosperity,
and civilization and how we get there.
I thought it might be useful today to share some of the many
resources I frequent, in no particular order.
Books
My list keeps growing. There are many that add good
information on specific issues or areas of interest. But these few are
essential for economics, as well as for understanding the interrelationships of
the political, economic, and social spheres:
·The Road
to Serfdom—Friedrich Hayek
·Basic
Economics—Thomas Sowell
·Economics
in One Lesson—Henry Hazlitt
·Liberal
Fascism—Jonah Goldberg
·The
5000-Year Leap—W. Cleon Skousen
Organizations and Education
These are some of the regular places I turn to, or tune in
to:
·Hillsdale College online courses—These are free,
and equivalent to the courses provided to students on campus, if you do the
reading and work with it. Or you can just enjoy the lectures and take the
quizzes (or not). They just redid their original Constitution class, and I’m
looking forward to that. Others include Western Heritage, American Heritage,
Economics, Great Books, The Presidency and the Constitution, The Federalist
Papers, Winston Churchill, C. S. Lewis, Athens and Sparta, Public Policy, US
Supreme Court, and Theology. Each course has 8-10 or so lectures.
·The Heritage Foundation—This organization has
been reliably conservative for decades, some recent leadership changes
notwithstanding. They offer news sources, such as the Daily Signal, There’s an activist group called the Sentinels, with a weekly
phonecall about current legislative action and online and local support. And
they do research and policy work.
·Hoover Institution—The organization has been around a long
time, related to Stanford University, in favor of free market economic policies
and prosperity, and other geopolitical issues. Their Uncommon Knowledge, an interview program with authors and
experts, is a favorite source. I don’t agree with every interviewee, but it’s a
good way to get clarity about their viewpoints.
·The Witherspoon Institute—This organization does research and
education related to the “moral foundations of free and democratic societies.”
They’ve come to my attention because of Ryan T. Anderson, their public
discourse editor, who is the William E. Simon Fellow at the Heritage
Foundation, and is one of the clearest voices writing today in defense of
marriage. This is scholarly information, and often aimed at advanced college
students or professors. But they attempt to write in a way that is accessible,
reasonable, and moral.
·The Ludwig von Mises Institute—This is an organization based on the
Austrian school of economics, emphasizing free market policies.
·Wallbuilders—David Barton is the force behind this
organization. They teach history, mainly American history, with the perspective
that looks at the necessity of a moral people in maintaining our Constitution.
This organization is especially helpful for homeschoolers, which is how I
became familiar with it.
·Texas Home School Coalition—Speaking of homeschooling, THSC is a
good resource on education and parental rights issues. While I’m not still
homeschooling, I still get their newsletters and rely on them heavily for
information during the Texas legislative session.
·Prager University—A collection of 5-minute videos on a wide
array of topics, mainly explaining the conservative (classical liberal) viewpoint.
They’re free, and easy to share. And you can login and take a short quiz to test
your understanding.
News and Commentary Voices
I don’t spend much time going to main stream media sources.
I prefer an admitted bias from someone seeking truth, rather than a claim of
unbiased news from sources that are clearly skewed. Still, it’s a good idea to
get a variety of views. Often when I use a MSM news source, it is to get more
information about an issue I hear about on radio top-of-the-hour news
headlines, or stories linked by friends or various sources. This list isn’t
exhaustive, or even always views I endorse. And this list changes from time to
time. Some I turn to daily or weekly, others only occasionally.
·Townhall—a daily collection of mostly conservative columnists
·The Blaze—and various Glenn Beck shows and
resources (some parts require subscription fee)
·Ben Shapiro and The Daily Wire—the website
includes pieces by various writers, but I mainly tune in for Ben Shapiro’s
commentary and podcast
·Thomas Sowell—economist; he has retired from his
regular column, but he still writes books and does occasional pieces or
interviews
·Walter Williams—economist; I usually get his
columns at Townhall
·PJ Media—I used to watch their videos, but
funding for those ended a year or so ago. I still appreciate, when I find them,
Andrew Klavan, Victor Davis Hanson, and others.
·Matt Walsh—culture blog, found on The Blaze
these days
·Tom Woods—economic and libertarian blog, and good on
education issues as well
·Dennis Prager radio—in addition to the PragerU
videos
·Volokh Conspiracy—legal blog, written by Eugen
Volokh and other law professors
·Greg Mankiw—economic blog by Harvard economics
professor
