Check out this video from the BillWhittleChannel

Watched it? Then consider this question. What is government? When the average Liberal hears a Conservative complaining about big government, how does that Liberal respond? Doesn’t the Liberal usually respond with an accusation: “You hate government.” What Whittle points out is that what Conservatives detest is not government, its welfare and entitlement programs. What do welfare and entitlement programs have to do with governing a nation?

The term “entitlement” is in fact nothing more than a euphemism. What we call an entitlement involves nothing more than taking money out of one person’s pocket and putting it into another person’s pocket.

You say you are “entitled” your Social Security and Medicare? The money that was suppose to be set aside for those programs was spent by buying yours and other people’s votes. Government never saves any money; government spends every cent it gets. So you already got your entitlement. If you want Social Security and Medicare too, then you have to rob your children and grandchildren.

H/T to Thinking in Christ via this post, Worth Reading: Election Edition.

Don’t Trust Your Instincts

By John Stossel (Archive) · Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Simple answers are so satisfying: Green jobs will fix the economy. Stimulus will create jobs. Charity helps people more than commerce. Everyone should vote.

Well, all those instinctive solutions are wrong. As Friedrich Hayek pointed out in “The Fatal Conceit,” it’s a problem that in our complex, extended economy, we rely on instincts developed during our ancestors’ existence in small bands. In those old days, everyone knew everyone else, so affairs could be micromanaged. Today, we live in a global economy where strangers deal with each other. The rules need to be different.

Hayek said: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” (continued here)

Reblogged from PWC Education Reform Blog:

On the lists of “What’s in / What’s out” that I saw at the end of the year, education trends seems to be consistently missing. One trend in particular, group learning, was conspicuously absent. From Susan Cain, author of “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.” in her op-ed The Rise of the New Groupthink: Our schools have also been transformed by the New Groupthink. Today, elementary school classrooms are commonly arranged in pods of desks, the better to foster group …

Just a few comments on this great post (See Independent Learning is Out – Group Think is In, the post mentioned above.).

One thing I like to do is define my terms.

group·think
[groop-thingk] noun
1. the practice of approaching problems or issues as matters that are best dealt with by consensus of a group rather than by individuals acting independently; conformity.
2. the lack of individual creativity, or of a sense of personal responsibility, that is sometimes characteristic of group intereaction.

Obviously, the term groupthink has a bad connotation. However, Liberals and other big government folk want collectives. Collectives remove individual responsibility. In fact, as far as some are concerned, collectives have the virtue of making somebody else responsible.

The other thought? If we know groupthink is bad, why would there be a disproportionate push for collectives? Because we form collectives out of necessity, to get things done that one person cannot do alone, we have to have collectives. Thus, the virtue of collectives is obvious. Moreover, the people who head collectives have both the incentive and the resources to laud the virtues of collectives. The introverts who enjoy working quietly by themselves, on the other hand, have little incentive and no resources to praise the virtues of solitude. At best, someone might write an article or pen a song and speak of being alone with their thoughts. Yet rarely does anyone speak well of that experience.

Therefore, accountants praise the cost savings of open-plan offices, and collective officials (both government and corporate) praise conformity, realizing if they are ever to exercise full control, they need as their subjects the most subservient of conformists.

Nonetheless, the Bible tells us that there is virtue in being alone with our thoughts.

Psalm 46:10 King James Version (KJV)

Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.

ENVY AND JEALOUSY

Envy is one is one of the seven deadly sins. Whereas Wikipedia says jealousy should not be confused with envy, the Catholic Encyclopedia considers them synonymous. Here is what the Catholic Encyclopedia has to say about jealousy.

Jealousy is here taken to be synonymous with envy. It is defined to be a sorrow which one entertains at another’s well-being because of a view that one’s own excellence is in consequence lessened. Its distinctive malice comes from the opposition it implies to the supreme virtue of charity. The law of love constrains us to rejoice rather than to be distressed at the good fortune of our neighbour. (continued here)

 What distinction does Wikipedia make?

Oftentimes envy and jealousy are confused and used interchangeably, which is inappropriate. While jealousy involves people, the target of envy is people’s possessions. For example, if your neighbor buys a brand new SUV you are going to lust over their new car and wish that you could buy a brand new SUV as well. The possessions involved in envy include not only material items, but other possessions in the form of psychological states, such as, utility, happiness, or superiority. (from here)

Wikipedia is essentially correct. Although Dictionary.com speaks of envy and jealousy as synonyms, it also notes that the terms are very close in meaning and provides a similar explanation of the differences in meaning. 

So what does the Bible say?  Using yet a third related term, “covet”, the 9th Commandment describes envy as a sin.

Exodus 20:17 King James Version (KJV)

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.

James described the extent of the problem.

James 4:1-2 Amplified Bible (AMP)

1 WHAT LEADS to strife (discord and feuds) and how do conflicts (quarrels and fightings) originate among you? Do they not arise from your sensual desires that are ever warring in your bodily members?

2 You are jealous and covet [what others have] and your desires go unfulfilled; [so] you become murderers. [To hate is to murder as far as your hearts are concerned.] You burn with envy and anger and are not able to obtain [the gratification, the contentment, and the happiness that you seek], so you fight and war. You do not have, because you do not ask. [I John 3:15.]

From On High

Except for the expression ”class envy”, most political blogs make little use of the term “envy”. Jerry Fuhrman, the resident blogger at From On High, uses the term a bit more than most.

• Obama Switches Slogans links to an article by Mark Steyn.  Fuhrman summaries the article as “Resentment and Envy.” 
• Does Obama Even Consider Himself To Be My President Too? links to an article by Peter Wehner at commentary, Obama the Divider.
• Eat The Rich posts an article that Fuhrman wrote for the Roanoke Times, Rising tide.
• In Such Hatred, Fuhrman considers the implications the hate mail he got when he wrote Rising tide.
• Quote of the Day quotes Maureen Dowd, Dowd Unhinged – Again. Dowd is upset that  Republican women are insufficiently demure? And yes. It is about envy.
• Just Goes To Show considers Keith Olbermann’s envy of FOX.
• A Nightmare Scenario takes a look at the institutionalized envy in California.
• Socialism On Display uses an article in the Wall Street Journal to illustrate the problem with Socialism.

So what’s is the latest on the Left’s class envy campaign. That’s Do Nothing Congress? Here is an excerpt.

And the House of Representatives passes a jobs bill that also extends the payroll tax cut and Obama threatens to veto it.

Oh, I see. It doesn’t include a tax increase on those evil wealthy Americans. The ones who have caused all our country’s problems.

How convenient they are to his blame game.

Personal Observation

The House of Representatives is in the midst of a battle over the payroll tax cut extension. Here is how the unbiased, highly objective New York Times is reporting the issue.

A core group of conservative House members, many of them newcomers who provided the Republican majority, have balked all year at short-term spending agreements, proposed legislation to raise the debt ceilingand bills to increase disaster funding. It remained far from clear Monday night how, or whether, the tax cuts would be extended for 160 million workers and millions of unemployed Americans would continue to get jobless benefits next year.

“We are witnessing the concluding convulsion of confrontation and obstruction in the most unproductive, Tea Party-dominated partisan session of the Congress — the most partisan of which I have participated,” said Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in House who has served for three decades, during a news briefing Monday.

The impasse began over the weekend when House Republicans said they would reject the Senate measure, which passed 89 to 10. It would, for two months, extend the payroll tax cut, continue unemployment benefits and prevent a cut in fees paid to doctors who accept Medicare, allowing lawmakers and the White House time to work out their differences on how to pay for a year-long extension.

Many rank and file Republicans have questioned the underlying concept of continuing the tax break — because the payroll tax reduction would reduce revenue to the Social Security trust fund, which would be replaced by payments from the Treasury. But House Republican leaders said on Monday that their objection was not to the tax cut itself, but to the temporary nature of the fix.

“We don’t need to be governing in two-month increments,” Representative Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican and majority leader, said on CNN. “People can’t live their lives like that.” (from here)

The payroll tax cut extension is a sign of national moral decay. The payroll tax cut exposes a lie. Yet very few seemed to have noticed.  

The payroll tax is intended to fund Social Security, which is supposedly a retirement program that the retirees collecting the money funded. Because Congress immediately spent the money that was suppose to go into the Social Security “Trust” Fund, we actually fund payments to retirees Social Security using a hand-to-mouth method. 

• The children and grand-children of the retirees hand over a portion of their paychecks to the government.
• When the payroll tax revenues exceeded payments to retirees, the politicians took a cut to finance other programs. Now, thanks to the Baby Boom, that well has run dry.
• Politician then bribe retirees for their votes with Social Security checks. 

Now, in the name of a tax cut for workers, Congress has no choices except using general revenues to fund Social Security.

More and more dependent on class envy, Obama insists that only the “rich” pay taxes. Yet there are not enough rich people to pay the taxes our spendthrift government requires. Thus, what the payroll tax cut extension is about is yet one more way to pit us against each other.

Instead of paying taxes targeted to the objects of class warfare, we should all be paying the same tax rates.

From time-to-time I visit Boudica BPI Weblog. With respect to certain subjects, boudicabpi will generally have the latest information. Islam is one of the subjects, and here is the latest, LOOK AT THIS MESS, THIS IS OBAMA’S BIG OL’ ISLAMIC TAKEOVER. AKA ARAB SPRING!

Is the Arab Spring more or less predictably fading into an Islamist Winter?

Egypt’s two leading Islamist parties said on Sunday their separate party lists secured about three-quarters of votes cast in the second round of a parliamentary election, extending their lead in the three-stage vote. (continued here)

The latest news seems to indicate as much. Fortunately, with two leading Islamist parties in Egypt, the near future may bring more Islamist on Islamist fighting than Islamist on non-Muslim fighting. Yet if you are an Egyptian Coptic Christian, the Islamist on Islamist fighting may not bring much relief. That is because where Islamists find unity is in their hatred of non-Muslims. Even Time Magazine cannot ignore the Christian persecution in Egypt, Fearing Persecution, Egypt’s Christians Back Parties Most Likely to Beat Islamists. Nonetheless, other sources better describe the full extent of the persecution, Human Rights Activist Tells of Coptic Christians’ Plight in Egypt.

Reading all this I began to wonder: is this the end of Multiculturalism?

mul·ti·cul·tur·al·ism
   [muhl-tee-kuhl-cher-uh-liz-uhm, muhl-tahy-] noun

1. the state or condition of being multicultural
2. the preservation of different cultures or cultural identities within a unified society, as a state or nation.

Looking at the definition, one would think not. Yet that definition hardly explains the question. That is because what we currently practice is blind multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism is great. Blind multiculturalism can get us into trouble.

The missing distinction is mutuality. It’s great to tolerate other religions or ethnic customs if the people following those religions and customs also tolerate ours. It is self-inflicted abuse to tolerate them when they do not tolerate ours. And it is cultural suicide to tolerate a religion that actively tries to undermine or destroy ours. (from here)

So is this the end of Blind Multiculturalism? Probably not. Because our public school system has so ingrained this blindness into so many, the blindness will persist. That’s one we have seen so many articles with this title “The End of Multiculturalism”.

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
Mark Twain

When people report the news, they often report more than they know.