Look at this–eight years ago, this item was posted, and the topic is still with us. Income equality! Hot dog! Democrats are going to give us Income Equality!
Aren’t we all a bit too old for fairy tales?
https://leeduigon.com/2011/11/23/fantasy-disguised-as-politics/
Is this what happened to the Indus Valley Civilization?
The mayor of Stockton, California–a city that went bankrupt just six years ago–wants to try an “experiment” of doling out a “Universal Basic Income” of $500 a month, “no strings attached,” to certain elements among “the poor” (https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/01/22/stockton-gets-ready-to-experiment-with-universal-basic-income/).
It’s just an “experiment,” mind you. For one year, “several dozen Stockton families would get $500 a month, no strings attached.” The goal is to gather data on the “economic and social impacts of giving people a basic income,” especially the impacts on, well, “self-esteem and identity.” There is also a “hope” that this experiment will be so wonderfully successful, it will “encourage other places to give it a try.”
Coulda fooled me. I thought it might’ve been an experiment to see how many times one city can go bankrupt in a single decade.
Leftids have been hallucinating about a Universal Basic Income for years now. See, they say, nobody’s gonna work anymore anyhow, ’cause robots gonna be doin’ all the work, so why not pay everybody to sit around playing video games or writing cowboy poetry? What could be more sublime than a kind of perpetual infancy–dependent on government handouts all your life? And you better do what Mommy tells you, or you don’t get no goodies!
Can you imagine the first city to make a UBI an actual public program? It will draw illegal aliens like iron filings to a magnet. It will draw every ne’er-do-well for hundreds of miles around.
But what if you can’t live on $500 a month? Wouldn’t that make it just money down the drain? If you hand someone $6,000 a year and he still goes under, what have you gotten for your money?
Shut up, you racist.
I cannot explain why so many people still think Big Government really works.
According to the Census Bureau Supplemental Poverty Measure, one out of five California residents is… poor (https://pjmedia.com/trending/whats-matter-california/).
This in spite of the fact that from 1992 to 2015, the state of California spent over $950 billion on assorted welfare programs. It’s gotta be over a trillion by now.
At least 55 percent of California’s “immigrants,” including multitudes of illegals, receive government benefits. Can’t get by without ’em.
And in 2014, California had 883,000 full-time state and local government employees.
And yet California has the highest poverty rate among all 50 states.
Hmmm… Should they spend even more money? Import even more poor people from poor countries? Hire twice as many government employees? Yeah, that’d work.
One thing you can’t deny: Big Government socialism is a wiz at producing Third World countries. That’s what California’s turning into. This is what happens to places ruled by Democrats.
I just can’t stand it anymore.
Try this on for towering idiocy. The governing body of the city of Stamford, Connecticut, a 40-member Board of Representatives, has voted to get rid of “gender pronouns” like he/she, his/her, in all written regulations, etc., pertaining to members of the board (http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/Connecticut-city-s-elected-body-eliminates-gender-12487367.php).
Why?
“It’s an act to acknowledge the members of the board… cannot always be described as he or she.”
Which brings to mind a line from Ray Bradbury’s classic little horror story, The Jar: “Is it a he, is it a she, or just a plain old it?”
What kind of driveling dolts are they electing in that town?
Posterity will laugh at us for this.
Obviously posed… I think
By now most of you know about the little 5-year-old girl in Britain who set up a sidewalk lemonade stand–only to have the local government go all Starsky & Hutch on her about it (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/five-old-socked-200-fine-154728017.html)
But really, things are bad in the Mother Country and have been bad for a while.
Is Britain Finished? is a magazine article I wrote for Chalcedon some ten years ago (https://chalcedon.edu/resources/articles/is-britain-finished). In it you’ll read of some extraordinary incidents.
*Babies (yes, babies) accused of being racists.
*Man stopped by police for displaying the English flag on his car–in England.
*Four full-time police officers “investigating” a 9-year-old calling another child “gay” on the playground.
I don’t know how to lift the whole article onto the blog, so to read it you’ll have to click the link. I strongly recommend reading it.
Meanwhile, let’s not get all complacent about such off-the-wall things not happening here in our country–because they are. In Our Threatened Freedoms (edited by yours truly), R.J. Rushdoony collected dozens of incidents of government at all levels going completely mad. My favorite was the news report of a little boy Out West selling fishing worms that he dug up himself–with five full-time government agents assigned to “investigate” it.
Government isn’t drunk with power.
It’s absolutely crazed with power.
Totally forbidden gender stereotype!
You’d think there were no real problems to be dealt with anymore, the way governments keep zeroing in on bulls*** like this.
In the United Kingdom, the government’s Advertising Standard Authority has acted to prohibit “gender stereotyping” in ads… because it “might be harmful to people” (http://www.mrctv.org/blog/uk-ban-ads-promote-gender-stereotypes).
How could it be harmful? It could “lead to unequal gender outcomes–” What? what the blazes are they talking about?–“in public and private aspects of people’s lives.” Which is silly, isn’t it, because if the government’s going to step in and regulate some “private aspect” if your life, it isn’t private anymore, is it?
What exactly is a “gender stereotype”? Search me. Any acknowledgement that there are men and women and that they aren’t exactly the same, aren’t interchangeable… but how, then, do you go about creating ads in which “gender stereotypes” do not appear? Sure, you can show people playing bridge, or some other activity in which “gender” is irrelevant. But, see, if you were to show a woman sitting at a sewing machine–well, that would be unforgivable! From now on, you can only show men using sewing machines. Oops–just created a new gender stereotype.
Do they have nothing more serious with which to occupy their time?
We don’t have a bunch of commissars in charge of advertising in our country–not yet we don’t. But even these dorks in Britain could surely find something more important to do, if they really put their minds to it: presuming they have minds. How about coming down on blatantly false advertising, eh?
But no–these are the whoopee crowd, our betters, the enlightened ones: and by thunder, they’re going to tell us what to say and what to think, and they are going to re-mold our culture in their own little know-it-all hands and bring forth Social Justice if it kills us…
As C.S. Lewis once pointed out, the robber will reach a point where he’s satiated; but the self-righteous do-gooder will never reach that point, will never have enough of meddling in other people’s lives. And if his ministrations are actually killing them, he will be quite unaware of it.
The Ontario Human Rights Commission website has changed a little since I last visited it a few years ago, and I couldn’t find the same quotes that appalled me back then: but they’re still crazy, still committed to “a vision where everyone feels they are an important part of the community…” Note the word “feels.” We are about to dive into the wonderful world of regulation based on people’s feelings.
Anyhow, here are a few quotes from OHRC’s official site (http://www.hireimmigrants.ca/2012/07/18/human-rights-in-the-ontario-workplace-what-you-need-to-know/).
The tricky part is when “intent is not required” in cases of discrimination, which you can be guilty of “even if he or she doesn’t mean to…” This would be “constructive adverse discrimination” which “might not be intentional.” It’s so hard to avoid breaking the law when you really don’t know what the law is.
And so the orcs from ORHC see it as their mission to regulate “policies, practices, and patterns of behavior and attitudes (including organizational culture)…” They are careful not to define, exactly, “organizational culture,” which, five years ago, included “interpersonal relationships.” In other words, they claimed the authority to tell you whom your friends should be. I couldn’t find that particular language there today, but I would be surprised to learn that the spirit of it has been abated.
So there you have it–a vision of government control over practically every little nuance of human life.
Somehow a heaven designed by sinful human beings always winds up looking like a hell.
There’s fake news that’s done on purpose, and then there’s fake news that just happens because people make mistakes.
This weekend, the world almost went to war because of a cock-up by a couple of nooze agencies ( http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-14/chinese-media-almost-sets-world-war-3-erroneous-north-korea-headline ).
North Korea was having its annual “Day of the Sun” parade, honoring the depraved homicidal maniacs who run the place: this after repeatedly declaring they were going to test a nuclear weapon, breaking an international treaty, and threatening to bomb America’s allies and military bases. So that made a lot of people nervous.
Well, they haven’t set off the nuke yet. What they did was to trot out their new improved long-range missile for the parade.
First China’s Xinhua news agency reported–oh, boy!–“North Korea Fires Projectile.” Shoulda been North Korea displays projectile. America’s Bloomberg news agency picked up the Chicoms’ fumble and ran with it, full speed to the wrong goal line. And it seems there was a bit of a military scramble started until someone sorted out the error before anyone could start shooting.
Remember, in Jaws, Roy Scheider sees the giant monster shark and tells Robert Shaw, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat”? And Shaw doesn’t listen to him, does he–and his boat gets wrecked and sunk and he gets eaten by the shark.
We need a bigger boat than the one designed and built by what passes for human wisdom.
God is the only one who has such a boat. Reminds me of a boat He once lent to Noah and his family…
No, this is not an April Fool story. Yesterday all the Democrats in the Montana state legislature voted against a bill to ban Muslim sharia law in their state ( https://lynx.media/2017/03/31/montana-democrats-vote-bill-banning-sharia-law/ ).
All the Republicans voted for it, so the bill passed, 56-44. But now it will go to Montana’s governor, another Democrat. I will be amazed if he signs it.
A nut-case in the legislature said any measure banning the use of foreign legal systems in Montana would send a “dangerous message to minority groups.”
What? You mean competing legal systems would be a cool thing to have in your state? Including the Muslim system that calls for oppressing women and putting homosexuals to death? Do Democrats really, truly, think that would be a good idea?
I guess they do. Which means they’re crazy. Sure, let’s have a nice hefty dose of sharia in our state! That ought to lead to some really interesting jurisdictional squabbles. Along with some deaths.
The sooner this insane political party gets put out of business forever, the better. Because now they’re not only a perpetual annoyance, but a threat to public safety.
The country that proudly bills itself as having “the world’s first feminist government” has made it mandatory for students at all its universities to take courses in “men’s violence against women” ( http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/03/28/sweden-male-violence-women-university/ ).
Daft old Sweden, where last winter a new “feminist snow removal” policy left the capital, Stockholm, choked with snow and all but impassable, now has an “equalities minister” in the cabinet and indulges in “state-directed changes to higher education.”
By the way, women initiating violence against men–which Swedish sociologists now say happens more often than the other way around (surprised?)–seems to be okay with the feminist government. At least no one’s mentioning it.
For some reason not accessible to any sane mind, Sweden’s feminist government appears to have no problem at all with the country becoming the rape capital of the Western world. Do you want to guess how that happened? Could it possibly, conceivably, have anything at all to do with the mass importation of young, able-bodied, unemployed Muslim males who think it’s virtuous to rape infidel women? I mean, that’s just my wild guess: certainly the feminist government has turned a blind eye to it.
I wonder why the leaders of Western Europe seem bent on national suicide. You’d swear they hate their own countries and want to scuff them out of existence as soon as possible.
But then they don’t call it the Stockholm Syndrome for nothing, do they?