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For the Holiday I quit my gluten free diet and went on a glutton one.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/
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Japan is an homogeneous nation and they do have a high rate of suicides because they are a very structured society with a large population living in a very small and confined island territory but they also have some meritorious societal ways.
America is too large and too diverse to copy Japan but we could embrace and take lessons from them and improve our own lifestyle. (See 1 below.)
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Wal Mart is hated by many Liberals and their Union friends and supporters because it is non-union, it has been wildly successful, challenges and threatens small shop owners, allegedly does not treat its workers well, is an example of how successful Capitalism can be, is an embarrassment when compared to how government functions, attracts the economic underclass as customers saving them billions in purchasing costs, and the list of negative depictions is endless.
Liberals love to talk about how they are for the little guy but sneer at Wal Mart which actually is a boon for the pocket books of our economically challenged citizens.
Government and liberals believe we can spend our way to prosperity. Conservatives know this is a fallible concept and are seeking candidates who have the courage to vote and act accordingly. This is why the Republican Party is suffering and why renegades are running ahead of establishment types.
I understand Ryan felt compelled to defend and submit the budget of his predecessor. Let's see how Ryan performs come the next budget, assuming Republicans are still in control of Congress after the 2016 election.
Meanwhile, Conservatives must also learn the practical lesson of compromise or they will continue to ride their principles to defeat. Half a loaf is better than none. That is the way to eventually get more of the loaf.
Playing to a shrinking base is not a wining strategy. Giving in is also not a principled strategy.
Conservatives have a winning and proven message. they need to make is more it believable, improve their deliverance and then sell it hard. (See 2 below.)
Principled compromise is something Maggie and Reagan understood! (See 2a below.)
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You are being racial if you reveal the truth. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) Interesting facts about Japan
America is too large and too diverse to copy Japan but we could embrace and take lessons from them and improve our own lifestyle. (See 1 below.)
===
Wal Mart is hated by many Liberals and their Union friends and supporters because it is non-union, it has been wildly successful, challenges and threatens small shop owners, allegedly does not treat its workers well, is an example of how successful Capitalism can be, is an embarrassment when compared to how government functions, attracts the economic underclass as customers saving them billions in purchasing costs, and the list of negative depictions is endless.
Liberals love to talk about how they are for the little guy but sneer at Wal Mart which actually is a boon for the pocket books of our economically challenged citizens.
Government and liberals believe we can spend our way to prosperity. Conservatives know this is a fallible concept and are seeking candidates who have the courage to vote and act accordingly. This is why the Republican Party is suffering and why renegades are running ahead of establishment types.
I understand Ryan felt compelled to defend and submit the budget of his predecessor. Let's see how Ryan performs come the next budget, assuming Republicans are still in control of Congress after the 2016 election.
Meanwhile, Conservatives must also learn the practical lesson of compromise or they will continue to ride their principles to defeat. Half a loaf is better than none. That is the way to eventually get more of the loaf.
Playing to a shrinking base is not a wining strategy. Giving in is also not a principled strategy.
Conservatives have a winning and proven message. they need to make is more it believable, improve their deliverance and then sell it hard. (See 2 below.)
Principled compromise is something Maggie and Reagan understood! (See 2a below.)
===
You are being racial if you reveal the truth. (See 3 below.)
===
Dick
========================================================================
1) Interesting facts about Japan
Japan
* In just ten years??? Hiroshima returned to what it was economically vibrant before the fall of the atomic bomb.
* Japan prevents the use of mobile phones in trains, restaurants and indoors.
* For first to sixth primary year Japanese students must learn ethics in dealing with people.
* Even though one of the richest people in the world, the Japanese do not have servants. The parents are responsible for the house and children.
* There is no examination from the first to the third primary level because the goal of education is to instill concepts and character building.
* If you go to a buffet restaurant in Japan you will notice people only eat as much as they need without any waste because food must not be wasted.
* The rate of delayed trains in Japan is about 7 seconds per year!! The Japanese appreciate the value of time and are very punctual to minutes and seconds.
* Children in schools brush their teeth (sterile) and clean their teeth after a meal at school, teaching them to maintain their health from an early age.
* Japanese students take half an hour to finish their meals to ensure proper digestion because these students are the future of Japan.
The Japanese focus on maintaining their culture. Therefore,
* No political leader or a prime minister from an Islamic nation has visited Japan not the Ayatollah of Iran, the King of Saudi Arabia or even a Saudi Prince!
* Japan is a country keeping Islam at bay by putting strict restrictions on Islam and ALL Muslims.
1) Japan is the only nation that does not give citizenship to Muslims.
2) In Japan permanent residency is not given to Muslims.
3) There is a strong ban on the propagation of Islam in Japan
4) In the University of Japan, Arabic or any Islamic language is not taught.
5) One cannot import a 'Koran' published in the Arabic language.
6) According to data published by the Japanese government, it has given temporary residency to only 2 lakhs, Muslims, who must follow the Japanese Law of the Land. These Muslims should speak Japanese and carry their religious rituals in their homes.
7) Japan is the only country in the world that has a negligible number of embassies in Islamic countries.
8) Muslims residing in Japan are the employees of foreign companies.
9) Even today, visas are not granted to Muslim doctors, engineers or managers sent by foreign companies.
10) In the majority of companies it is stated in their regulations that no Muslims should apply for a job.
11) The Japanese government is of the opinion that Muslims are fundamentalist, and even in the era of globalization they are not willing to change their Muslim laws.
12) Muslims cannot even rent a house in Japan.
13) If anyone comes to know that his neighbor is a Muslim then the whole neighborhood stays alert.
14) No one can start an Islamic cell or Arabic 'Madrasa' in Japan.
15) There is no Sharia law in Japan .
16) If a Japanese woman marries a Muslim, she is considered an outcast forever.
17) According to Mr. Kumiko Yagi, Professor of Arab/Islamic Studies at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, " There is a mind frame in Japan that Islam is a very narrow minded religion and one should stay away from it."
The Japanese might have lost the war, but they are in charge of their own country.There are no bombs going off in crowded business centers, "Honor Killings", nor killing of innocent children or anyone else.
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2) WAL-MART VS. THE MORONS (NOT A JOKE)
I know lots of folks don't like Wal-Mart, but this is fascinating input.
READ THIS TO THE END. IT IS VERY INTERESTING!!!
1. Americans spend $36,000,000 at Wal-Mart Every hour of every day.
2. This works out to $20,928 profit every minute!
3. Wal-Mart will sell more from January 1 to St. Patrick's Day (March
17th) than Target sells all year.
4. Wal-Mart is bigger than Home Depot + Kroger + Target +Sears + Costco
+K-Mart combined.
5. Wal-Mart employs 1.6 million people, is the world's largest private
employer, and most speak English.
6. Wal-Mart is the largest company in the history of the world.
7. Wal-Mart now sells more food than Kroger and Safeway combined, and
keep in mind they accomplished this in only fifteen years.
8. During this same period, 31 big supermarket chains sought
bankruptcy.
9. Wal-Mart now sells more food than any other store in the world.
10. Wal-Mart has approx 3,900 stores in the USA of which 1,906 are
Super Centers; this is 1,000 more than it had five years ago.
11. This year 7.2 billion different purchasing experiences will occur
at Wal-Mart stores. (Earth's population is approximately 6.5 Billion.)
12. 90% of all Americans live within fifteen miles of a Wal-Mart.
You may think that I am complaining, but I am really laying the ground
work for suggesting that MAYBE we should hire the guys who run Wal-Mart
to fix the economy.
To President Obama and all 535 voting members of the Legislature,
it is now official that the most Americans believe you are corrupt morons:
a. The U.S. Postal Service was established in 1775. You have had 240 years to get it right and it is broke .
b. Social Security was established in 1935. You have had 80 years to
get it right and it is broke .
c. Fannie Mae was established in 1938. You have had 77 years to get
it right and it is broke .
d. War on Poverty started in 1964. You have had 51 years to get it
right; $1 trillion of our money is confiscated each year and transferred to
"the poor" and they only want more .
e. Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965. You have had 50 years to get it right and they are broke .
f. Freddie Mac was established in 1970. You have had 45 years to get
it right and it is broke .
g. The Department of Energy was created in 1977 to lessen our
dependence on foreign oil. It has ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a year and we import more oil than ever before. You had 38 years to get it right and it is an abysmal failure .
You have FAILED in every "government service" you have shoved down our
throats while overspending our tax dollars.
AND YOU WANT AMERICANS TO BELIEVE YOU CAN BE TRUSTED
WITH A GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM??
AND
We have lost our minds to "Political Correctness"!!!!! !!
We're "broke" and can't help our own Seniors, Veterans, Orphans, Homeless etc. and yet, in the last months, we have provided aid to Haiti, Chile, Turkey and now Pakistan ( the previous home of bin Laden). literally, BILLIONS of DOLLARS!!!
Our retired seniors living on a 'fixed income' receive no aid nor do
they get any breaks!
AMERICA: a country where we have homeless without shelter, children
going to bed hungry, elderly going without needed medicines, and mentally ill
without treatment, etc.
Imagine if the GOVERNMENT gave U. S. the same support they give to
other countries.
Maybe we should turn the management of Government over to those who run that evil company called Wal-Mart?
2a)
2a)
How Margaret Thatcher Won the Cold War
The British prime minister prodded President Ronald Reagan to recognize the potential of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at a reception held at the Kremlin on March 30, 1987.PHOTO: BORIS YURCHENKO/ASSOCIATED PRESS
As we confront a hostile Russia today, the West is unsure what to do. For guidance, perhaps we should look back to the Soviet era, when we possessed a decidedly stronger sense of allied purpose.
In February 1984, Margaret Thatcher flew home from the Moscow funeral of the Soviet leader Yuri Andropov. Frustrated by his equally aged successor, Konstantin Chernenko,the British prime minister told her aides, “For heaven’s sake, try and find me a young Russian.”
She was searching for change. In London in April 1975, as leader of Britain’s opposition, Thatcher had her first one-on-one meeting with a former governor of California namedRonald Reagan. He, too, was out of office, seeking the 1976 Republican presidential nomination. The pair agreed that the West was giving away too much to the Soviets, while Moscow was winning the arms race. This was an unpopular view, so the Reagan-Thatcher friendship was forged in adversity. It would prove the stronger for it.
Thatcher gained power in 1979, Reagan in January, 1981. Together, against big protest movements, they installed a new class of nuclear weapons in Europe to counter the burgeoning Soviet arsenal. Having achieved this position of strength, Thatcher thought it should be bargained from. In September 1983, she said publicly in Washington, “We stand ready…if and when the circumstances are right—to talk to the Soviet leadership.” Reagan told her, privately, that he agreed.
In 1984, Thatcher found the man she was looking for: Mikhail Gorbachev, age 53. She wagered that he would be the next Soviet leader and had him and his wife, Raisa, to Chequers, her country residence, just before Christmas.
Thatcher interpreted Reagan to her Soviet visitor. She described the president as peace-loving and ready “to have another go” at talking. But she also hinted at a difference with her friend in the White House: She supported the research component of his Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, designed to create a missile shield against Soviet nuclear attack, but candidly said that Reagan’s desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons was “not a viable dream.” She was worried that unilateral U.S. action on SDI might split the Western alliance and terrify the Soviets into rash pre-emptive actions.The tension was so great that Raisa Gorbachevmouthed to her husband, “It’s over.” “I wondered if I should leave,” Mr. Gorbachev recalled. But Thatcher, sensing danger, announced that “the difficult part of the discussion was now over.” After lunch, they sat by the fire and talked about missiles.
Thatcher risked letting Mr. Gorbachev drive a wedge between her and Reagan. The Soviet leader immediately tried to do just that, telling her that America was being “egotistic” toward its allies. They agreed to start a process of disarmament talks, leaving her to gamble that her high level of trust with Reagan would see her through. Indeed, she had already invited herself to visit Camp David the following weekend. (Aides had advised Reagan that Thatcher would be intruding on “family time,” but he had told them, “She isfamily.”)
After Mr. Gorbachev left Chequers, Thatcher announced that he was “a man I can do business with.” Writing privately to Reagan, she noted, “I actually rather liked him. I got the impression that…he was using me as a stalking horse for you.”
Not everyone in the White House was happy. The Washington Post reported that Reagan “fervently hopes” that “his straight-talking conservative ally from London will get off her gee-whiz kick about the Kremlin’s personable heir apparent.” But precisely because she was a true U.S. ally, Thatcher could make a difference within the administration: Europe’s greatest hawk was making dovish noises.
The administration, whose lines of information from the Kremlin were not strong, could not help being interested. Colin Powell was then military assistant to Caspar Weinberger,secretary of defense and arch-hawk. “Along comes Gorby,” Gen. Powell recalled. “He’s like none we’ve ever seen before—with his beautiful suits and his French ties and a stunning wife…And the first statement he got of acceptability was from Margaret…The feeling was, ‘Jesus, if dear old Margaret thinks there’s something here, we’d better take a look.’ ”
That is what Reagan did, after his discussions at Camp David with Thatcher. Already interested in talking to the Soviets and further encouraged by Secretary of State George Shultz, he did not swing from a “no” to a “yes” because of Thatcher. But she gave the right nudge at the right time.
Three months later, Chernenko died, and Mr. Gorbachev became general secretary. In November 1985, he and Reagan met in an ice-breaking summit in Geneva. “Maggie was right,” the president told his aides afterward. “We can do business with this man.” The unfreezing of the Cold War had begun.
That thaw’s consequences did not always please Thatcher. She was appalled when Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev met in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986 and all but agreed to abolish nuclear weapons. Giving them up, she told Reagan, would be “tantamount to surrender.”
Steering Reagan away from his line at Reykjavik, she helped persuade him to get less exotic arms-control negotiations back on track. The process that she and Mr. Gorbachev had first discussed at Chequers continued on to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and beyond. The woman whom the Soviets themselves had named the Iron Lady had known when to bend a bit.
The story says something about Anglo-American friendship in world affairs. As Thatcher wrote to Reagan during the Iran-Contra controversy in December 1986, “Anything which weakens you, weakens America; and anything that weakens America weakens the whole free world.”
It also says something in the menacing era of Vladimir Putin about the value of strong, shared beliefs among allies. In March 1987, Thatcher had a highly successful visit to Moscow, including many hours of fierce argument with Mr. Gorbachev. In the dining room, he pointed out a painting of a rural landscape in the evening, sunny after rain. “This is like our conversation,” said Mr. Gorbachev. “There have been storms, but the light is coming through.”
Thatcher studied the painting. “Yes,” she said. “The light is coming from the West.”
—Mr. Moore is the author of “Margaret Thatcher: At Her Zenith—In London, Washington and Moscow,” to be published by Knopf on Jan. 5.
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3)
3)
Trying to Hide the Rise of Violent Crime
Progressives and their media allies have launched a campaign to deny the ‘Ferguson effect’—but it’s real, and it’s increasingly deadly for inner cities.
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES/TETRA IMAGES RF
Murders and shootings have spiked in many American cities—and so have efforts to ignore or deny the crime increase. The see-no-evil campaign eagerly embraced a report last month by the Brennan Center for Justice called “Crime in 2015: A Preliminary Analysis.” Many progressives and their media allies hailed the report as a refutation of what I and others have dubbed the “Ferguson effect”— cops backing off from proactive policing, demoralized by the ugly vitriol directed at them since a police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., last year. Americans are being asked to disbelieve both the Ferguson effect and its result: violent crime flourishing in the ensuing vacuum.
In fact, the Brennan Center’s report confirms the Ferguson effect, while also showing how clueless the media are about crime and policing.
The Brennan researchers gathered homicide data from 25 of the nation’s 30 largest cities for the period Jan. 1, 2015, to Oct. 1, 2015. (Not included were San Francisco, Indianapolis, Columbus, El Paso and Nashville.) The researchers then tried to estimate what 2015’s full-year homicide numbers for those 25 cities would be, based on the extent to which homicides were up from January to October this year compared with the similar period in 2014.
The resulting projected increase for homicides in 2015 in those 25 cities is 11%. (By point of comparison, the FiveThirtyEight data blog looked at the 60 largest cities and found a 16% increase in homicides by September 2015.) An 11% one-year increase in any crime category is massive; an equivalent decrease in homicides would be greeted with high-fives by politicians and police chiefs. Yet the media have tried to repackage that 11% homicide increase as trivial.
Several strategies are employed to play down the jump in homicides. The simplest is to hide the actual figure. An Atlantic magazine article in November, “Debunking the Ferguson Effect,” reports: “Based on their data, the Brennan Center projects that homicides will rise slightly overall from 2014 to 2015.” A reader could be forgiven for thinking that “slightly” means an increase of, say, 2%. Nothing in the Atlantic write-up disabuses the reader of that mistaken impression. The website Vox, declaring the crime increase “bunk,” is similarly discreet about the actual homicide rate, leaving it to the reader’s imagination. Crime & Justice News, published by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, coyly admits that “murder is up moderately in some places” without disclosing what that “moderate” increase may be.
A second strategy for brushing off the homicide surge is to contextualize it over a long period. Because homicides haven’t returned to their appalling early 1990s or early 2000s levels, the current crime increase is insignificant, the Brennan Center and its media supporters suggest, echoing an argument that arose immediately after I first documented the Ferguson effect nationally.
“Today’s murder rates are still at all-time historic lows,” write the Brennan researchers. “In 1990 there were 29.3 murders per 100,000 residents in these cities. In 2000, there were 13.8 murders per 100,000. Now, there are 9.9 murders per 100,000 residents. Averaged across the cities, we find that while Americans in urban areas have experienced more murders this year than last year, they are safer than they were five years ago and much safer than they were 25 years ago.”
The Atlantic is similarly reassuring about today’s homicide rate: “The relative uptick”—which, again, the magazine never specifies—“is still small compared with the massive two-decade drop that preceded it.” True enough, though irrelevant—good policing over the past two decades produced an extraordinary 50% drop in crime. America isn’t going to give all that back in one year. The relevant question: What is the current trend? If this year’s homicide and shooting outbreak continues, those 1990s violent crime levels will return sooner than anyone could have imagined.
The most desperate tactic for discounting the homicide increase is to disaggregate the average. “Fears of ‘a new nationwide crime wave’ are premature at best and wildly misleading at worst,” asserts the Atlantic, because the “numbers make clear that violent crime is up in some major U.S. cities and down in others.”
But such variance is inherent in any average. If there weren’t variation across the members of a set, no average would be needed. Any national crime increase or decrease will have counterexamples of the dominant trend within it, yet policy makers and analysts rightly find the average meaningful. The Ferguson effect’s existence does not require that every city experience depolicing and a resulting crime increase. Enough cities—in particular, those with significant black populations and where antipolice agitation has been most strident—are experiencing murder increases that cannot be ignored.
Baltimore’s per capita homicide rate, for example, is now the highest in its history, according to the Baltimore Sun: 54 homicides per 100,000 residents, beating its 1993 rate of 48.8 per 100,000 residents. Shootings in Cincinnati, lethal and not, were up 30% by mid-September 2015 compared with the same period in 2014. Homicides in St. Louis were up 60% by the end of August. In Los Angeles, the police department reports that violent crime has increased 20% as of Dec. 5; there were 16% more shooting victims in the city, while arrests were down 9.5%. Shooting incidents in Chicago are up 17% through Dec. 13.
The Brennan Center report also tries to underplay the homicide increase by folding it into crime overall. The report projects that in 19 cities the 2015 average for all seven of the FBI’s index crimes—murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny and car theft—will be 1.5% less than in 2014. The FBI’s crime index is dominated by property crimes, which outnumber offenses committed against persons by a magnitude of nearly 8 to 1. The Ferguson effect is about violent crime, not theft. Proactive police stops and low-level misdemeanor enforcement deter young men from carrying guns, thus heading off violent felonies before they can erupt.
Career burglars are less affected by whether a cop is likely to get out of his car and question someone hitching up his waistband on a known drug corner at 1 a.m. If property crimes haven’t increased as much as homicides, that’s good news for homeowners but no disproof of depolicing’s role in the violent-crime spike.
To the Brennan Center and its cheerleaders, the nation’s law-enforcement officials are in the grip of a delusion that prevents them from seeing the halcyon crime picture before their eyes. For the past several months, police chiefs have been sounding the alarm about rising violent crime. In August the Major Cities Chiefs Association convened an emergency session to discuss the homicide and shooting surge. “We have not seen what we’re seeing right now in decades,” Washington, D.C., Police Chief Cathy Lanier said after the summit.
In early October U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch brought together more than 100 mayors, police leaders and federal prosecutors to strategize privately over the violent-crime increase. According to the Washington Post, attendees broke out in applause when mayors attributed the increase to officers’ sinking morale.
Later in October FBI Director James Comey said in a speech: “Most of America’s 50 largest cities have seen an increase in homicides and shootings this year, and many of them have seen a huge increase.” He noted “a chill wind blowing through American law enforcement over the last year,” and called it “deeply disturbing.” The next month the acting chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Chuck Rosenberg, seconded Mr. Comey’s crime analysis and his hypothesis that the demonization of the police was likely responsible for the violent-crime increase.
President Obama wasn’t happy with his FBI director. In a speech on Oct. 27 to a gathering of international police chiefs in Chicago, he accused Mr. Comey of “cherry-picking data” and ignoring “the facts” on crime in pursuit of a “political agenda.” When the DEA’s Mr. Rosenberg endorsed Mr. Comey’s views about the Ferguson effect, the White House lashed out again: Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Mr. Rosenberg had “no evidence” for his assertions.
Critics of the Ferguson-effect analysis ignore or deny the animosity that the police now face in urban areas, brushing off rampant resistance to lawful police authority as mere “peaceful protest.” A black police officer in Los Angeles tells me: “Several years ago I could use a reasonable and justified amount of force and not be cursed and jeered at. Now our officers are getting surrounded every time they put handcuffs on someone. The spirit and the rhetoric of this flawed movement is causing more confrontations with police and closing the door on the gains in communication we had made before it began.”
St. Louis Alderman Jeffrey Boyd, at a news conference in July after his nephew was slain, made a poignant plea: “We march every time the police shoot and kill somebody. But we’re not marching when we’re killing each other in the streets. Let’s march for that.”
The St. Louis area includes Ferguson, the site of the police shooting that was so utterly distorted by protesters and the media. The Justice Department later determined that the officer’s use of force was justified, but the damage to the social fabric had already been done. Now cops making arrests in urban areas are routinely surrounded by bystanders, who swear at them and interfere with the arrests. The media and many politicians decry as racist law-enforcement tools like pedestrian stops and broken-windows policing—the proven method of stopping major crimes by going after minor ones. Under such conditions, it isn’t just understandable that the police would back off; it is also presumably what the activists and the media critics would want. The puzzle is why these progressives are so intent on denying that such depolicing is occurring and that it is affecting public safety.
The answer lies in the enduring commitment of antipolice progressives to the “root causes” theory of crime. The Brennan Center study closes by hypothesizing that lower incomes, higher poverty rates, falling populations and high unemployment are driving the rising murder rates in Baltimore, Detroit, Milwaukee, New Orleans and St. Louis. But those aspects of urban life haven’t dramatically worsened over the past year and a half. What has changed is the climate for law enforcement.
‘Proactive policing is what keeps our streets safe,” Chief William Bryson, chairman of the Delaware Police Chiefs Council, tells me. “Officers will not hesitate to go into a situation that is obviously dangerous, but because of recent pronouncements about racism, they are not so likely to make a discretionary stop of a minority when yesterday they would have.”
To acknowledge the Ferguson effect would be tantamount to acknowledging that police matter, especially when the family and other informal social controls break down. Trillions of dollars of welfare spending over the past 50 years failed to protect inner-city residents from rising predation. Only the policing revolution of the 1990s succeeded in curbing urban violence, saving thousands of lives. As the data show, that achievement is now in jeopardy.
Ms. Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute. This op-ed was adapted from the forthcoming winter issue of City Journal, where she is a contributing editor.
