Sunday, November 22, 2015

Grandchildren Cannot Go To School When They Have An Infection and/or Fever! Leaks!


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 Many of my liberal friends have become hysterical over the fact that some Republicans want to defer allowing Syrian refugees from entering the country at this time because of rational concerns the Administration may not be able to adequately vet them so as to assure Americans their ranks have not been infiltrated by terrorists.

Once again, Obama has set up a false and cynical premise and liberals are allowing emotion to rule their decision making.

I would remind my liberal friends that when my grandchildren have some kind of infection and/or fever they are not allowed to go to school until their fever etc. has subsided. 

In fact government rules and regulations will not permit  parents to allow their kids to bring home baked goods to class for a Thanksgiving Party.  They have to be items purchased from grocery stores and in their original containers.Even water from home has to be bottled and sealed.

In other words, government rules are stricter regarding class room  health etiquette than what Obama wants enforced with respect to immigration.

Being compassionate, which America has proven time and again, does not have to equate with being stupid unless you are an hysterical liberal.

I do not mention this to make my liberal friends look like emotional fools.  I just thought bringing this to their attention might prove enlightening. (See 1 below.)

Liberal nonsense does not stop with kindergartens but increasingly invades college campuses . (See 1a below.)
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Response to locals who are hysterical about building another pipeline or two:


The last time I filled my car with gasoline the fuel came from a tank that could leak and the tank was filled from a pipeline that could also leak..

Every time I drink water it comes from a water line that can leak.

America has hundreds of thousand miles of pipelines that can, and some do, leak. Yet, I never hear Obama wanting to shut them down but all of a sudden our 'urological' president has a PP problem - in everything he does he places Politics over Principle.

Warren Buffett owns an entire railroad that transships energy and often the tank cars leak and even run off the their tracks but Warren is an Obama supporter and contributor so no call for him to stop.

Going up against the owner of the local newspaper is a thankless undertaking and emotion always trumps logic.  
If you believe all those who are opposed to new pipelines which will reduce our dependency on foreign sources and allow us to sell our energy thereby, reducing our trade deficit and will create a large number of jobs that pay well and also would allow Europe to reduce its dependence on Russian energy then we ought to shut the entire nation down because the danger of leaks appears far worse than climate change which we all know is the greatest threat to our freedoms.

By the way, leaking news stories and secrets are other threats we must take to heart, Let's close all newspapers and media outlets while we are at it.
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When it comes to Obama's upcoming visit from France's leader I suspect Obama will pledge to double down on his ISIS policy which is failing.  No doubt this will be a confidence builder so when the French leader goes to visit Putin he should feel Obama has his back.
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Now a little humor:

On a bitterly cold winter morning an Irish husband and wife in Dublin were listening to the radio during breakfast. 

They heard the announcer say, "We are going to have 8 to 10 inches of snow today. You must park your car on the even-numbered side of the street, so the snow plows can get through. "So the good wife went out and moved her car.  

A week later while they are eating breakfast again, the radio announcer said, "We are expecting 10 to 12 inches of snow today. You must park your car on the odd-numbered side of the street, so the snow plows can get through. "The good wife went out and moved her car again. 

The next week they are again having breakfast, when the radio announcer says, "We are expecting 12 to 14 inches of snow today. You must park...." Then the electric power went out. The good wife was very upset, and with a worried look on her face she said, "I don't know what to do. Which side of the street do I need to park on so the snowplows can get through?"

With love and understanding in his voice all married men should exhibit, the husband replied,

 "Why don't you just leave the bloody car in the garage this time."
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Dick
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1)President Obama’s Cynical Refugee Ploy
By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
The debate we are having over the acceptance of Syrian refugees is not the conversation the country needs.
The governors of 26 U.S. states signaled yesterday that they will not be willing to take in any Syrian refugees, following the lead of Michigan and Alabama, which announced similar objections this past Sunday. Governor Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire became the first Democrat to voice opposition to President Obama’s plan to accept 10,000 refugees from the war in Syria in the next year. Governors of Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington, and Connecticut, on the other hand, came out in explicit support of the initiative.
Goodhearted liberals have reacted with hand wringing to the avalanche of dissenting governors. Some have earnestly quoted relevant Bible verses about taking in the poor and the afflicted, while the usual righteous tut-tutters have engaged in their usual righteous tut-tutting. “Everybody who disagrees with my proposal is a bitter-clinging xenophobe, not to mention a racist,” is the clear implication of the President’s supporters.

That there are racist xenophobes in this country is clear to anybody who has ever perused the comments section of an internet news site, or has spent too much time on Facebook and Twitter. And many of these people are spewing ugly hate about Syrian refugees in ways that appall—or should appall—anybody with an open mind and a humane spirit. That said, the refugee issue is not, despite President Obama’s rhetoric, a simple morality play featuring Wise Liberals and Racist Jacksonians. It is something more complicated and, at least as far as President Obama’s own role in the debate, a bit uglier.

To see the full cynicism of the Obama approach to the refugee issue, one has only to ask President Obama’s least favorite question: Why is there a Syrian refugee crisis in the first place?

Obama’s own policy decisions—allowing Assad to convert peaceful demonstrations into an increasingly ugly civil war, refusing to declare safe havens and no fly zones—were instrumental in creating the Syrian refugee crisis. This crisis is in large part the direct consequence of President Obama’s decision to stand aside and watch Syria burn. For him to try and use a derisory and symbolic program to allow 10,000 refugees into the United States in order to posture as more caring than those evil Jacksonian rednecks out in the benighted sticks is one of the most cynical, cold-blooded, and nastily divisive moves an American President has made in a long time.
Moreover, many of those “benighted” people were willing to sign up for the U.S. military and go to fight ISIS in Syria to protect the refugees. Many Americans who now oppose the President’s ill-considered refugee program have long supported the use of American power to create “safe zones” in Syria so the refugees could be sheltered and fed in their own country. If President Obama seriously cared about the fate of Syria’s millions of displaced people, he would have started to organize those safe havens years ago. And if he understood the nature of America’s role in Europe, he would have known that working with the Europeans to prevent a mass refugee and humanitarian disaster was something that had to be done.

Not even President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq has been as destructive for Europe or as damaging to the Transatlantic alliance as President Obama’s hard-hearted and short-sighted Syria policy.

Not even President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq has been as destructive for Europe or as damaging to the Transatlantic alliance as President Obama’s hard-hearted and short-sighted Syria policy. The flood of refugees is shaking the European Union to its core, and Obama’s policy has cemented perceptions among many around the world that the United States is no longer the kind of useful ally that it once was. France didn’t even bother to invoke NATO’s Article 5 after the Paris attacks; nobody really thinks of President Obama as the man you want at your side when the chips are down.

The collapse of President Obama’s Syria policy is hardly a partisan issue. He has repeatedly overruled his own national security officials, top diplomats, and advisors, many of whom have been horrified by the President’s passivity in the face of onrushing disaster. His abrupt policy switch on airstrikes left many senior Democrats who had supported his apparent determination to enforce his “red line” against Assad twisting in the wind.

To think that conspicuous moral posturing and holy posing over a symbolic refugee quota could turn President Obama from the goat to the hero of the Syrian crisis is absurd. Wringing your hands while Syria turns into a hell on earth, and then taking a token number of refugees, can be called many things, but decent and wise are not among them. You don’t have to be a xenophobe or a racist or even a Republican to reject this President’s leadership on Syria policy. All you need for that is common sense and a moral compass.

And it’s worse. The Obama Administration’s extreme caution about engagement in Syria led it to insist on such a thorough process of vetting potential Syrian allies that years of effort and tens of millions of dollars resulted in only a paltry handful of people being found acceptable to receive American weapons and training. The refugee vetting process won’t be nearly this thorough; it’s almost certain that the President’s program will result in settling people in the United States who could not be certified to fight for the United States in Syria

Given our gun laws, uncertified Syrians living in the United States will soon have the opportunity to get weapons that the United States government would refuse to give them in Syria. To millions of Americans, this is a double standard they can neither understand nor accept. To call people troubled by these concerns racists and xenophobes is to divide and polarize this country in ways that will cost us all dearly down the road. We have enough hate, enough radicalism, enough mutual misunderstanding and distrust between left and right in America as it is. The President is adding to that distrust, and doing it in a particularly ugly and damaging way.
If  President Obama really had the superior moral insight and wisdom that he believes makes him so much more humane and far-seeing than the ignorant rednecks who keep on opposing him, he would have approached the refugee issue with less arrogance and more self-awareness. It is not given to the sons (or even to the daughters) of mortals to be right about everything all the time; Presidents make mistakes, even in the Middle East. A little humility, a little acknowledgement of responsibility, a little self-reflection could go a long way.

For no one, other than the Butcher Assad and the unspeakable al-Baghdadi, is as responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria as is President Obama. No one has committed more sins of omission, no one has so ruthlessly sacrificed the well-being of Syria’s people for his own ends, as the man in the White House. In all the world, only President Obama had the ability to do anything significant to prevent this catastrophe; in all the world no one turned his back so coldly and resolutely on the suffering Syrians as the man who sits in the White House today—a man who is now lecturing his fellow citizens on what he insists is their moral inferiority before his own high self-esteem.

From the standpoint of American interests and of the well being of the Syrians, the primary responsibility that the United States has toward the people of Syria is not to offer asylum to something like 0.25 percent of its refugee population. The primary duty of this country was to prevent such a disaster from happening and, failing that, to support in-country safe havens and relief operations. No doubt President Obama and the unthinking press zealots who applaud his every move prefer a conversation about why ordinary Americans are racist xenophobes to one about why President Obama’s Syria policy has created an immense and still expanding disaster.

The “why are Jacksonians such xenophobes?” conversation, given the way so much of the country’s media works, is the conversation we are having. It is not the conversation the country, or even the President, needs. The Syria war has not finished creating refugees, undermining regional and even global security, putting WMD in terrorist hands, or spreading the poisons of radicalism and sectarian war across the Middle East and among vulnerable Muslims in Europe and beyond. Things can and will get worse as long as American policy continues to flounder; instead of arguing about how to shelter a few thousand refugees we need to look hard at how we are failing to address the disaster that has created millions, and that continues to grow.


1a) The Real Problem on Today's College Campus


The problem on campus these days is not racism.  It is the lack of racism.

For decades, the campus left has preached (falsely) that all injustice in the world may be reduced to the elementary component vectors of race, gender, and unequal redistribution of wealth.  After America's unprecedented civil rights activation of half a century, Americans live in the most relatively discrimination-free utopia that world history has ever known.  These things together are an intolerable state of affairs.

Real moral problems exist, and real injustices occur, but because the American left academy has insisted that all these things can be reduced ad absurdum to "race," then race, somehow, in the aggrieved mind of an adolescent simply, must be at fault...for nearly everything...somehow.

In that age, the late teens and early twenties, when the passion for significance runs headlong into the first thoughts of moral agency, great causes are sought.  In our present world, these kids have not been allowed to be exposed to Christian persecution, missionaries combating poverty, or the march of democratic freedom in the face of tyrannical regimes.  No, these kids have been steeped in a weirdness where sexual adventurism is proclaimed as identity and tone of skin is the sole competitor for the same.  They were told over and over again since birth that the only acceptable public passions about right and wrong can and always should be reduced to either crotch or race.  The adolescents choose race, crotch being a bit too personal right now.
But there is a problem.

Today's American campus is essentially without racism – real racism, that is.  No one ever gets fired for being the wrong color; if one did, legions of lawyers and hundred-million-dollar lawsuits would ensue.  So everyone frantically tippy-toes around what skin color you are in order to not offend the trial lawyers union.  Scholarships are sent out by the billions to insure that the "right" mix of skin tones is achieved.  Big, big money and overwhelming threats of both law and professional pressure ensure that the tiniest inference of bias with respect to "race" is immediately greeted with great fusillade of cannon.  The campus is raceless.

But for the impassioned adolescent, filled with both the moral unction for a cause and the fulsome knowledge that only sex or race is acceptable to make a scene about, there is a barrier.  The barrier is that there's no barrier.  No one can remember the last time someone was docked pay, let alone fired, for being the wrong color.  No one can remember the last time a Barbie doll was hung in effigy over skin tone.  But we can now remember lots of fake such incidents, where "race activists" have simulated acts of racial vandalism in order to get attention.  This latest spate of nonsense on campus is of a piece with the same.

When there's no cause, make one up.  When there's no injustice, zoom in closer until you find some.  Drama, after all, can justify poor performance.  And the great impassioned moral unction mixed with feeling within our breast is "real" right?  And feelings are realities, right?  Didn't our hyphenated grievance studies teacher tell us that?  Perception is all; I control perception; so I am all!  And so every thin-skinned whiner who ever heard an insult thinks that his offense is now an international incident.

Prepped and primed with emotional discontent, mixed solidly with the first awakenings of a youthful moral sense in search of some moral clue, here come the protesters, ranting and raving about nothing.  They are unaware that they do the bidding of America's enemies, who wish to destroy our institutions and leave the countryside in chaos.  And they are people whose parents didn't direct their moral and spiritual sense toward something that matters, toward a problem that actually exists.  This leaves them all the more emphatic – they have a moral sense but have absolutely no one interested in it, because they have no practice or refinement in its use.  As such, they rage with exponential  indignation, trying to attract a crowd, trying to assert their significance when, in fact, they don't have any.


Hence the demand for people to be fired.  Firings seems significant!  They changed something!  Outcome-based education!  This has little to do with the cause and much to do with the need for feeling a cause of some kind.  And the cause of some kind is a crime of opportunity – their academics have told them endlessly that this type of rage will be the most sacred and the most utterly coddled kind.  These kids should not be allowed to demonstrate in favor of their religion.  They shouldn't be allowed to demonstrate in favor of self-defense.  They shouldn't be allowed even to demonstrate against the indentured servitude of having only one student loan provider in the USA.  But they will be lionized on CNN if they rant and rave about "race" and stoke the fires of conflict that otherwise would not erupt.  

And then there are the grandparents.  That is, the hippies from the '60s who felt that the answer to everything was a protest and a sit-in.  Their crybaby grandchildren are now committing sit-ins against granny-hippy.  But granny-hippy wants to join the sit-in against herself, because she feels that's the way to be cool.  Granny-hippy doesn't get it – this is all about being offended while young and protesting The Man, and granny-hippy is now The Man and, hence, very bad.  They don't know what their cause is, they don't know who the man is, but they are sure that they're making history and they are really offended.  Someone must pay!

Where ends grievance without crime?  Granny-hippy and hipster-hippy-retro conspire together to manufacture both the crime and the punishment.  Granny-hippy agrees she's been very bad (for doing what no one can tell, except it's got something to do with Halloween costumes), and hipster-hippy agrees to skip class, and everyone demands that granny-hippy be fired for generating insufficiently hip hippy-safety spaces.  Playtime for radicals!  The engineering students, who will soon have jobs, could not be reached for comment, as they were at the library, studying.

My only question is, who replaces granny-hippy as someone yet more "sensitive" to the increasingly incoherent "struggle"?  And when hipster-hippy takes over granny-hippy's job, what shall the next generation protest, since we're already at failure to initiate speech others would've preferred?
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