TRUTH IS TREASON IN AN EMPIRE OF LIES

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Posted on 14th May 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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“The problem with telling a lie, or even a succession of lies, is that a very small dose of the truth can sometimes make the whole thing collapse like a house of cards. The State Department’s own foreign service officer Gregory Hicks was in Libya during the attack, so he knew the truth. When threats were not enough to silence him, it was then necessary to try to discredit him.

After years of getting glowing job evaluations, and awards of honors from the State Department for his work in various parts of the world, Mr. Hicks suddenly began to get bad job evaluations and was demoted to a desk job in Washington after he spoke with a Congressman about what he knew. The truth is dangerous to liars.” –Thomas Sowell

QUOTES OF THE DAY

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Posted on 13th April 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

“I have never understood why it is “greed” to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”
―     Thomas Sowell,     Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays    

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”
―     Thomas Sowell

“It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.                      ”
―     Thomas Sowell

“People who pride themselves on their “complexity” and deride others for being “simplistic” should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.”
―     Thomas Sowell,     Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays    

“The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.”
―     Thomas Sowell

“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.”
―     Thomas Sowell

“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”
―     Thomas Sowell

“Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos.”
―     Thomas Sowell

“It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.”
―     Thomas Sowell,     Knowledge And Decisions

“The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”
―     Thomas Sowell

Intellectuals and Race

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Posted on 23rd March 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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By: Walter E. Williams

After reading Dr. Thomas Sowell’s latest book, “Intellectuals and Race,” one cannot emerge with much respect for the reasoning powers of intellectuals, particularly academics, on matters of race. There’s so much faulty logic and downright dishonesty.

Many intellectuals attribute the behavior patterns of blacks to “a legacy of slavery” or contemporary racial discrimination. But when one observes similar behavior patterns among Britain’s lower-class whites, which can’t be attributed to “a legacy of slavery” or discrimination, it calls into question the explanations for black behavior.

It’s lamented that blacks are “the last hired” and, during an economic downturn, “the first fired,” because blacks are terminated before whites. That’s seen as evidence of discrimination by white employers, but white employees are terminated before Asian-American employees. Is that employer discrimination against whites? Intellectuals accept statistical data as showing discrimination when it reinforces existing preconceptions and reject or ignore it when it doesn’t.

It’s the same story in the housing market. Newspapers, television commentators, civil rights leaders, academics and politicians see racial discrimination as the cause for black mortgage loan applicants being rejected more frequently than white applicants. In 2000, black applicants were turned down for prime mortgage loans twice as often as whites; however, white applicants were turned down nearly twice as often as Asian-Americans.

The racial discrimination explanation requires that we believe that white bankers racially discriminate not only against blacks but against whites, as well. It also requires that we believe that black-owned banks are in cahoots with white-owned banks, because they, too, turn down black mortgage applicants more often than white applicants. The true explanation is not rocket science. Lenders prefer to lend to people who will pay them back. Average credit scores are higher among whites than blacks and higher among Asian-Americans than whites.

During the early 20th century, there were mass migrations of blacks from the South. Both the black-owned Chicago Defender and the Urban League offered published advice to their less tutored brethren, such as: “Don’t use vile language in public places.” “Don’t throw garbage in the backyard or alley or keep dirty front yards.” “Do not carry on loud conversations in street cars and public places.” Jews, Germans and Irish made similar appeals to acculturate their ill-mannered cousins.

These efforts produced positive results over the years.

That has changed with today’s multiculturalism vision. Efforts to get minority groups to acculturate to the linguistic, dress and other norms of the larger society are seen negatively by multiculturalists as a form of cultural imperialism. Intellectuals and academics call for celebrating diversity. That means wearing one’s trousers low enough to see one’s butt, men wearing a head full of pigtails, and using poor language that’s sometimes vulgar are part of the liberal’s vision of “celebrating diversity.” Then there’s the “acting white” charge, when black youngsters who conduct themselves according to the norms of the larger society are criticized and often assaulted by their presumably “acting black” peers.

Sowell concludes that our nation is painting itself into a corner when it comes to thinking about racial problems. Whole cities, of which Detroit is a classic example, have been devastated physically, socially and economically by racial problems — which cannot be discussed honestly by elected officials, people in the media or academics, who do not want to become pariahs or, even worse, lose their jobs. This moral paralysis is paid in blood — mostly the blood of black people preyed upon by criminals, though in recent years, there have been violent mob attacks on white people in shopping malls, on beaches, on public transportation vehicles and in other public places. These attacks often go unreported, are minimized or are reported without detail, even though the attackers shouted their hatred for white people. The use of sufficient force to stop these attacks would be called “excessive” in the media and by politicians or “community leaders.”

My own conclusion is that black people waged a successful civil rights struggle against gross discrimination. It’s white and black liberals, intellectuals, academics and race hustlers who have created our greatest hurdle.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

SHOWING THEIR TRUE COLORS

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Posted on 20th December 2012 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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 The children slaughtered in Connecticut by a drugged up mental defective haven’t even been put into the ground yet and Obama is convening a gun banning convention in Washington DC today. Hysterically, the Philadelphia Chief of police is headed down to provide his brilliant insight. Meanwhile, we enter the final week of 2012 and Philly will finish the year with around 330 homicides, the highest since 2007.  Philadelphia has the toughest gun laws in the state. I’m sure if we ban guns, the lowlife scumbags in North Philly and West Philly will abide by the new rules. Maybe a few NO GUNS ALLOWED signs will work. Doctor Sowell does his usual fantastic job poking holes in the left wing liberal storyline. I’m sure he hasn’t been invited to Washington DC for his thoughts on the matter. We wouldn’t want any divergent points of view.

If you had any remaining thought that the Mainstream media in this country was impartial and just journalists reporting the facts, you are badly mistaken. This past week was probably an eye opener for anyone with critical thinking skills. The propaganda and misinformation is being screeched over the airwaves, in Op-Eds and by Cartoonists across the land. The dead children were barely cold before Bloomberg, Obama, and the left wing do-gooder control freaks on MSNBC, CNN and the rest of the liberal propaganda machines began spewing their standard storyline. This tragedy will not go to waste. Maddow, Matthews and Shultz were probably high fiving as the news reports came in. There was a tingle up their legs.

I always knew the press had a liberal bias, but this tragedy has revealed the true colors of these faux journalists. It appears that 90% of the mainstream media has a liberal agenda and is nothing but a mouthpiece for the government assuming more and more control over every aspect of our lives. When it became clear that the murderer was a drugged up psychopath, just like the previous mass murderers, the MSM dutifully trotted out the mouthpieces for the drug industry and the psychology industry to deny that his mental illness and their drugs had anything to do with it. Corporate media helping corporate advertisers helping bought off politicians.

There will be new laws. There will be new regulations. There will be new rules. There will be new paperwork and bureaucrats and police. The mindless sheep will be surveyed and they will beg for gun control. Obama will have a grand signing ceremony surrounded by the families of the dead children. Crime rates will go higher. Homicides will go higher as the criminals will know that their victims won’t be armed. The do-gooders and the MSM will call for more laws to save the sheeple.

And so it goes.

 

Invincible Ignorance

by Thomas Sowell

Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of “gun control” advocates?

The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.

If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.

Places and times with the strongest gun control laws have often been places and times with high murder rates. Washington, D.C., is a classic example, but just one among many.

When it comes to the rate of gun ownership, that is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas. The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks. For the country as a whole, hand gun ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder rate went down.

 

The few counter-examples offered by gun control zealots do not stand up under scrutiny. Perhaps their strongest talking point is that Britain has stronger gun control laws than the United States and lower murder rates.

But, if you look back through history, you will find that Britain has had a lower murder rate than the United States for more than two centuries – and, for most of that time, the British had no more stringent gun control laws than the United States. Indeed, neither country had stringent gun control for most of that time.

 

In the middle of the 20th century, you could buy a shotgun in London with no questions asked. New York, which at that time had had the stringent Sullivan Law restricting gun ownership since 1911, still had several times the gun murder rate of London, as well as several times the London murder rate with other weapons.

Neither guns nor gun control was the reason for the difference in murder rates. People were the difference.

Yet many of the most zealous advocates of gun control laws, on both sides of the Atlantic, have also been advocates of leniency toward criminals.

In Britain, such people have been so successful that legal gun ownership has been reduced almost to the vanishing point, while even most convicted felons in Britain are not put behind bars. The crime rate, including the rate of crimes committed with guns, is far higher in Britain now than it was back in the days when there were few restrictions on Britons buying firearms.

In 1954, there were only a dozen armed robberies in London but, by the 1990s – after decades of ever tightening gun ownership restrictions – there were more than a hundred times as many armed robberies.

Gun control zealots’ choice of Britain for comparison with the United States has been wholly tendentious, not only because it ignored the history of the two countries, but also because it ignored other countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States, such as Russia, Brazil and Mexico. All of these countries have higher murder rates than the United States.

You could compare other sets of countries and get similar results. Gun ownership has been three times as high in Switzerland as in Germany, but the Swiss have had lower murder rates. Other countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand, and Finland.

Guns are not the problem. People are the problem – including people who are determined to push gun control laws, either in ignorance of the facts or in defiance of the facts.

There is innocent ignorance and there is invincible, dogmatic and self-righteous ignorance. Every tragic mass shooting seems to bring out examples of both among gun control advocates.

Some years back, there was a professor whose advocacy of gun control led him to produce a “study” that became so discredited that he resigned from his university. This column predicted at the time that this discredited study would continue to be cited by gun control advocates. But I had no idea that this would happen the very next week in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

December 18, 2012

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page.

 

OBAMA – MASTER OF THE PLAUSIBLE LIE

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Posted on 13th December 2012 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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Fiscal Cliff Notes: Part II

By Thomas Sowell Monday, December 10, 2012

One of the big advantages that President Obama has, as he plays “chicken” with the Congressional Republicans along the “fiscal cliff,” is that Obama is a master of the plausible lie, which will never be exposed by the mainstream media— nor, apparently, by the Republicans.
 
A key lie that has been repeated over and over, largely unanswered, is that President Bush’s “tax cuts for the rich” cost the government so much lost tax revenue that this added to the budget deficit— so that the government cannot afford to allow the cost of letting the Bush tax rates continue for “the rich.”
 
It sounds very plausible, and constant repetition without a challenge may well be enough to convince the voting public that, if the Republican-controlled House of Representatives does not go along with Barack Obama’s demands for more spending and higher tax rates on the top 2 percent, it just shows that they care more for “the rich” than for the other 98 percent.
 
What is remarkable is how easy it is to show how completely false Obama’s argument is. That also makes it completely inexplicable why the Republicans have not done so.
 
The official statistics which show plainly how wrong Barack Obama is can be found in his own “Economic Report of the President” for 2012, on page 411. You can look it up.
 
You may be able to find a copy of the “Economic Report of the President” for 2012 at your local public library. Or you can buy a hard copy from the Government Printing Office or download an electronic version from the Internet.
 
For those who find that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” they need only see the graphs published in the November 30th issue of Investor’s Business Daily.
 
What both the statistical tables in the “Economic Report of the President” and the graphs in Investor’s Business Daily show is that (1) tax revenues went up— not down— after tax rates were cut during the Bush administration, and (2) the budget deficit declined, year after year, after the cut in tax rates that have been blamed by Obama for increasing the deficit.
 
Indeed, the New York Times reported in 2006: “An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year.”
 
While the New York Times may not have expected this, there is nothing unprecedented about lower tax rates leading to higher tax revenues, despite automatic assumptions by many in the media and elsewhere that tax rates and tax revenues automatically move in the same direction. They do not.
 
The Congressional Budget Office has been embarrassed repeatedly by making projections based on the assumption that tax revenues and tax rates move in the same direction.
 
This has happened as recently as the George W. Bush administration and as far back as the Reagan administration. Moreover, tax revenues went up when tax rates went down, as far back as the Coolidge administration, before there was a Congressional Budget Office to make false predictions.
 
The bottom line is that Barack Obama’s blaming increased budget deficits on the Bush tax cuts is demonstrably false. What caused the decreasing budget deficits after the Bush tax cuts to suddenly reverse and start increasing was the mortgage crisis. The deficit increased in 2008, followed by a huge increase in 2009.
 
So it is sheer hogwash that “tax cuts for the rich” caused the government to lose tax revenues. The government gained tax revenues, not lost them. Moreover, “the rich” paid a larger amount of taxes, and a larger share of all taxes, after the tax rates were cut.
 
That is because people change their economic behavior when tax rates are changed, contrary to what the Congressional Budget Office and others seem to assume, and this can stimulate the economy more than a government “stimulus” has done under either Bush or Obama.
 
Yet there is no need to assume that Barack Obama is mistaken about the way to get the economy out of the doldrums. His top priority has always been increasing the size and scope of government. If that means sacrificing the economy or the truth, that is no deterrent to Obama. That is why he is willing to play chicken with Republicans along the fiscal cliff.
 
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
 
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