I find cute sayings trite but every once in a while there are some that evoke/express wisdom:
“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”
— Voltaire
“Prejudices are rarely overcome by argument; not being founded in reason they cannot be destroyed by logic.”
— Tryon Edwards
“Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.”
— Vince Lombardi, Renowned Former Head Football Coach of the Green Bay Packers
“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes politics.”
— Unknown
“You can live in the past, but there is no future in it!”
— Rabbi Kalman Packouz
Business 101...
“The greatest mistake is to continue to practice a mistake.”
— Bobby Bowden, Celebrated
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Bibi tells Putin something he might not have wanted to hear. (See 1 below.)
And then:
http://www.soopermexican.com/2013/02/07/the-superbowl-commercial-you-missed-so-god-made-a-liberal/)
Liberals will find this racist and conservatives will find it smack on, I find it sad but worthy of discussion..
I recently commented that a growing number were fed up with the unearned privileged and they were fast reaching a boiling point.
Generally speaking:
When I think of my accomplished friends who are black and conservative I know they are unhappy with and frustrated by so many of their own and their failure to take personal responsibility for their actions and lives. Allen West comes to mind. There is no finer person or devoted citizen than this man. The same for Star Parker who lifted herself by her bootstraps. I never met Thomas Sowell but I have read most everything he has written and one of my personal heroes was Martin Luther King.
Many of my black friends are just ordinary people and not conservative. They range from a corporate consultant, a portfolio manager, an analyst, a waitress, a self-employed pressure washer etc.. All responsible, all hard workers all good citizens.
I also am equally disturbed by whites who have allowed themselves to become low life's.
My admiration for Asians is unbounded when I see what they have accomplished and how strong their family units are, how education is so important and how those who achieve are held in such high esteem.
One beautiful young lady and her husband comes to mind. Her name is Elle and she was a boat child when her family escaped from Viet Nam They came to this country with nothing and now she owns some of the most successful and physically beautiful restaurants in Savannah. The food is fantastic. Her story is an amazing one.
I will probably catch hell for posting this and though I did not write it I embrace much of the message. You decide. (See 2 below.)
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My grandson works for Bill Maher, Bill is not one of my favorite entertainers but give the devil his due:
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I have known the co-founder of The Southern Poverty Law Center, Morris Dees, for more years than I want to admit. He was the first to help raise political money through the mail and his efforts helped raise enough to elect Carter.
Morris began the organization to fight for black rights and he set it up in a way that had significant legal tax advantages. It has grown into a very wealthy and substantial organization. His partner in his marketing entity, prior to SPLC, was the founder of Habitat for Humanity..(See 3 and 3a below.)
Morris began the organization to fight for black rights and he set it up in a way that had significant legal tax advantages. It has grown into a very wealthy and substantial organization. His partner in his marketing entity, prior to SPLC, was the founder of Habitat for Humanity..(See 3 and 3a below.)
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Lessons to be learned. (See 4 below.)
Lessons to be learned. (See 4 below.)
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1)
Netanyahu to Putin: Israel may act to curb Iran's clout in Syria
SOCHI, Russia (Reuters) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday that Israel was prepared to act unilaterally to prevent an expanded Iranian military presence in Syria as Moscow works to end the civil war there.
Russia intervened on behalf of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2015, joining a de facto alliance with Iranian forces, Lebanese Hezbollah and other Shi'ite Muslim militias helping Damascus beat back Islamic State and other Sunni Muslim insurgent groups.
Israel worries that an eventual Assad victory could leave Iran with a permanent garrison in Syria, extending a threat already posed from neighbouring Lebanon by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah.
Meeting Putin in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Netanyahu said Israel's arch-foe Iran was fighting to cement an arc of influence from the Gulf to the Mediterranean.
“Iran is already well on its way to controlling Iraq, Yemen and to a large extent is already in practice in control of Lebanon,” Netanyahu told Putin.
“We cannot forget for a single minute that Iran threatens every day to annihilate Israel,” Netanyahu said. “Israel opposes Iran's continued entrenchment in Syria. We will be sure to defend ourselves with all means against this and any threat.”
Putin, in the part of the meeting to which reporters had access, did not address Netanyahu's remarks about Iran's role in Syria nor his veiled threat to take unilateral military action.
Netanyahu advisers have privately said that their focus is on keeping Iranian forces away from the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, the Syrian side of which falls under a partial truce brokered by Russia and the United States in recent weeks.
In parallel to lobbying Moscow, Israel has been trying to persuade Washington that Iran and its guerrilla partners, not Islamic State, pose the greater common threat in the region.
“Bringing Shi'ites into the Sunni sphere will surely have many serious implications both in regard to refugees and to new terrorist acts,” Netanyahu told Israeli reporters after the three-hour meeting – his sixth with Putin since September 2015.
“We want to prevent a war and that's why it's better to raise the alarm early in order to stop deterioration.”
After the meeting ended, Netanyahu was due to fly back to Israel for talks with U.S. peace envoys Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt and Dina Powell, who are on a Middle East tour.
Russia has so far shown forbearance toward Israel, setting up a military hotline to prevent their warplanes or anti-aircraft units clashing accidentally over Syria. Israel's air force said last week it had struck suspected Hezbollah arms shipments around 100 times in Syria during the civil war, rarely drawing retaliation and apparently without Russian interference.
Russian diplomats have argued that Moscow's stake in Syria deters Iran or Hezbollah from opening a new front with Israel.
“We take the Israeli interests in Syria into account,” Alexander Petrovich Shein, Russia's ambassador to Israel, told its Channel One television on Tuesday. “Were it up to Russia, the foreign forces would not stay.”
Zeev Elkin, an Israeli cabinet minister who joined Netanyahu in Sochi, said in a radio interview after the talks with Putin that he had “no doubt that it (the meeting) will lead to practical steps”. Elkin did not elaborate on these.
Additional reporting by Katya Golubkova in Moscow; writing by Dan Williams; editing by Jeffrey Heller, Maayan Lubell and Mark Heinrich++++++++++++++++++++++++
2) June, 2017
"The Baltimore Sun” is definitely not known as a conservative newspaper, so this very well written assessment of the situation in USA comes as something of a surprise!
The Black Dilemma
"For almost 150 years the United States has been conducting an interesting experiment. The subjects of the experiment: black people and working-class whites.
The hypothesis to be tested: Can a people taken from the jungles of Africa and forced into slavery be fully integrated as citizens in a majority white population?
The whites were descendants of Europeans who had created a majestic civilization. The former slaves had been tribal peoples with no written language and virtually no intellectual achievements. Acting on a policy that was not fair to either group, the government released newly freed black people into a white society that saw them as inferiors. America has struggled with racial discord ever since.
Decade after decade the problems persisted but the experimenters never gave up. They insisted that if they could find the right formula the experiment would work and concocted program after program to get the result they wanted. They created the Freedmans Bureau, passed civil rights laws, tried to build the Great Society, declared War on Poverty, ordered race preferences, built housing projects and triedmidnight basketball.
Their new laws intruded into peoples lives in ways that would have been otherwise unthinkable. They called in National Guard troops to enforce school integration. They outlawed freedom of association. Over the protests of parents, they put white children on buses and sent them to black schools and vice-versa. They tried with money, special programs, relaxed standards and endless hand wringing to close the achievement gap. To keep white backlash in check they began punishing public and even private statements on race. They hung up Orwellian public banners that commanded whites to "Celebrate Diversity" and Say No to Racism. Nothing was off limits if it might salvage the experiment.
Some thought that what W.E.B. DuBois called the Talented Tenth would lead the way for black people. A group of elite, educated blacks would knock down doors of opportunity and show the world what blacks were capable of.
There is a Talented Tenth. They are the black Americans who have become entrepreneurs, lawyers, doctors and scientists. But ten percent is not enough. For the experiment to work, the ten percent has to be followed by a critical mass of people who can hold middle-class jobs and promote social stability. That is what is missing.
Through the years, too many black people continue to show an inability to function and prosper in a culture unsuited to them. Detroit is bankrupt, the south side of Chicago is a war zone and the vast majority of black cities all over America are beset by degeneracy and violence. And blacks never take responsibility for their failures. Instead, they lash out in anger and resentment.
Across the generations and across the country, as we have seen in Detroit , Watts, Newark, Los Angeles, Cincinnati and now Ferguson, rioting and looting are just one racial incident away. The white elite would tell us that this doesn't mean the experiment has failed. We just have to try harder. We need more money, more time, more understanding, more programs and more opportunities.
But nothing changes no matter how much money is spent, no matter how many laws are passed, no matter how many black geniuses are portrayed on TV, and no matter who is president. Some argue its a problem of culture, as if culture creates peoples behavior instead of the other way around. Others blame white privilege.
But since 1965, when the elites opened Americas doors to the Third World, immigrants from Asia and India people who are not white, not rich and not connected have quietly succeeded. While the children of these people are winning spelling bees and getting top scores on the SAT, black youths are committing half the country's violent crime, which includes viciously punching random white people on the street for the thrill of it that has nothing to do with poverty.
The experiment has failed. Not because of white culture, or white privilege, or white racism. The fundamental problem is that American black culture has evolved into an un-fixable and crime ridden mess. *They do not want to change their culture or society and expect others to tolerate their violence and amoral behavior. They have become socially incompatible with other races by their own design, not because of the racism of others - but by their own hatred of non-blacks.*
Our leaders don't seem to understand just how tired their white subjects are with this experiment. They don't understand that white people aren't out to get black people; they are just exhausted with them. They are exhausted by the social pathologies, the violence, the endless complaints and the blind racial solidarity, the bottomless pit of grievances, the excuses, and the reflexive animosity.
The elites explain everything with racism and refuse to believe that white frustration could soon reach the boiling point.
You can't legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government can't give to anybody anything that the government doesn't first take from somebody else.
When half of the people get the idea that they don't have to work because the other half is going to take care of them and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.
You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."
Ian Duncan
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Americans are being emotionally manipulated to take up cause
with
those whose ultimate purpose is the repeal of the First Amendment and erasure
of national memory.
3a) J.P. Morgan’s Hate List
What is its gift to the Southern Poverty Law Center telling bank customers?
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Corporate America will do almost anything to stay on the safe side of public opinion—at least as it’s defined by the media. CEOs will apologize, grovel, resign, settle. They will even, as of this month, legitimize and fund an outfit that exists to smear conservatives.
The press is still obsessing over President Trump’s incompetent handling of the violence in Charlottesville, Va., and that has suited some profiteers just fine. The notorious Southern Poverty Law Center is quietly cashing in on the tragedy, raking in millions on its spun-up reputation as a group that “fights hate.” Apple CEO Tim Cook informed employees that his company is giving $1 million to SPLC and matching employee donations. J.P. Morgan Chase is pitching in $500,000, specifically to further the SPLC’s “work in tracking, exposing and fighting hate groups and other extremist organizations,” in the words of Peter Scher, the bank’s head of corporate responsibility.
What Mr. Scher is referring to is the SPLC’s “Hate Map,” its online list of 917 American “hate groups.” The SPLC alone decides who goes on the list, but its criteria are purposely vague. Since the SPLC is a far-left activist group, the map comes down to this: If the SPLC doesn’t agree with your views, it tags you as a hater.
Let’s not mince words: By funding this list, J.P. Morgan and Apple are saying they support labeling Christian organizations that oppose gay marriage as “hate groups.” That may come as a sour revelation to any bank customers who have donated to the Family Research Council (a mainstream Christian outfit on the SPLC’s list) or whose rights are protected by the Alliance Defending Freedom (which litigates for religious freedom and is also on the list).
Similarly put out may be iPhone owners who support the antiterror policies espoused by Frank Gaffney’s Washington think tank, the Center for Security Policy (on the SPLC’s list). Or any who back the proposals of the Center for Immigration Studies (on the list).
These corporations are presumably in favor of the SPLC’s practice of calling its political opponents “extremists,” which paints targets on their backs. The group’s “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists” lists Mr. Gaffney (who worked for the Reagan administration); Maajid Nawaz (a British activist whose crimes include tweeting a cartoon of Jesus and Muhammad ); and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (a Somali refugee who speaks out against Islamic extremism).
The SPLC has tarred the respected social scientist Charles Murray, author of the well-regarded book “Losing Ground,” as a “white nationalist.” Mr. Murray has been physically assaulted on campus as a result. He happens to be married to an Asian woman and has Asian daughters, so the slur is ludicrous. But what’s a little smearing and career destruction if J.P. Morgan Chase gets some good headlines?
It isn’t only the lists. An honest outfit tracking violent groups would keep to straightforward descriptions and facts. Instead, the SPLC’s descriptions of people are brutally partisan, full of half-truths and vitriol designed to inspire fury.
We’ve seen what this kind of fury can do in Europe, with the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the controversial filmmaker, by a Dutch-Moroccan Islamic fanatic. Ms. Hirsi Ali, who had worked with Van Gogh, still travels with security—and J.P. Morgan thinks it appropriate to further target her? In 2012 a gay-marriage supporter named Floyd Corkins smashed into the Family Research Council’s headquarters and shot a security guard. He told police he was inspired by the SPLC’s “hate group” designation.
Had the companies done a bit of homework, they’d have discovered the SPLC isn’t even considered a sound charity. Karl Zinsmeister excoriated the outfit in a recent article for Philanthropy Roundtable: “Its two largest expenses are propaganda operations: creating its annual list of ‘haters’ and ‘extremists,’ and running a big effort that pushes ‘tolerance education’ through more than 400,000 public-school teachers. And the single biggest effort undertaken by the SPLC? Fundraising. On the organization’s 2015 IRS 990 form it declared $10 million of direct fundraising expenses, far more than it has ever spent on legal services.”
Apple did not return a call to its media center. J.P. Morgan Chase, in an emailed statement, said only that it has a “long history of supporting a range of organizations that are committed to addressing inequality.”
The corporate donations are nonetheless appalling, as they legitimize a group that already exercises inappropriate influence. The SPLC’s list is cited regularly by the media and congressional Democrats, ignorant or uncaring of its falsehoods. The charity tracker GuideStar for a time attached warning labels to philanthropies flagged by the SPLC.
This undermines the fight against truly hateful groups. Comparing pro bono lawyers at the Alliance Defending Freedom to hood-wearing KKK members only make the Klan seem more innocuous. Blackballing mainstream groups only silences the moderate voices the country needs to fight hate and bigotry.
Corporations have a role to play in calming today’s divisions. This is the opposite.
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4) Three Lessons for Negotiating With North Korea
By Alan Liotta
4) Three Lessons for Negotiating With North Korea
I’ve been to the country six times for talks. Sometimes the only words they hear are the strong ones.
By Alan Liotta
When determining how to deal with North Korea, policy makers often debate the best method for predicting how the country’s leaders will act. But Americans who really want to understand North Koreans instead should study how the U.S. has conditioned North Korea to behave.
From 1996-2005, as the senior Defense Department negotiator, I made six trips to North Korea. We conducted numerous rounds of official talks to allow the first U.S. military teams into North Korea to recover service personnel missing since the cessation of hostilities in 1953. Those negotiations repeatedly stalled until we changed how the North Koreans approached the talks. We learned three critical lessons, all of which are relevant in this current state of uncertainty.
• The North Korean leadership rarely empowers negotiators to make a decision. Everything must be referred to their superiors, and ultimately to the “Supreme Leader.” I had an off-chance meeting with the head of a leading nongovernment organization in Pyongyang at the height of the North Korean food crisis in 1998. He told me that North Korea could easily learn to feed itself, but the problem is there is only one person who can tell the farmers what to plant, when to plant it, and where to grow it—and he isn’t a farmer.
Normal work flow does not progress through the North Korean bureaucracy. To get an issue to the top leadership, it had to be a crisis. Harsh language, dangerous threats and even attempts at intimidation—privately in our talks and publicly through their media—were merely ways for North Koreans to inflate the importance of the issue. The trouble was that previous U.S. negotiators often feared responding with similarly strong language. Americans repeatedly sought compromise through reason, which only encouraged continued North Korean threats, intimidation and harsh language.
• Walking away from the table can provide a tactical advantage. The most important objective of previous negotiations simply was to keep the talks going. As a result, North Korean negotiators were conditioned to threaten and stall. They knew no matter how uncooperative they appeared, U.S. officials would not walk away. We were trapped by our own negotiating strategy.
During our first round of talks in Hawaii in 1996, when my team exposed a split in the North Korean team’s unity that caused them to lie to us, we decided not to continue the talks. Against the objections of other U.S. officials who had negotiated in the past, we walked away. Our parting words: “When you have your act together, and are ready to negotiate in good faith, give us a call. Until then, we have nothing to talk about.”
We sent them home stunned. Six months later they asked to reopen the talks. As a result, we successfully sent our first recovery teams into North Korea and began retrieving the remains of missing U.S. service personnel. More than 200 sets of remains eventually were brought home to be identified and reunited with their families.
• The U.S. should share its bottom line immediately—and never waver from that line. We knew that previous U.S. negotiators regularly compromised and adjusted their bottom line, often to keep talks going. Our negotiating teams used a different tactic. As our North Korean counterparts would poke, prod and offer options to go below the line, and threaten to end the talks if we refused, we held firm.
They soon realized that our position would not change. If they could agree to it, then the talks could end successfully. If they could not meet it, they learned quickly we would get up and walk away. In almost every case, they eventually called us back to the table to meet our terms.
Although many are quick to criticize President Trump’s strong words to the North Korean leadership, it bears remembering that often the only words they hear are the strong ones. Using such language to define your endgame, and then steadfastly adhering to your bottom line, is a different negotiating style than they are used to. But as the personnel-recovery talks repeatedly showed, you can teach the North Koreans to moderate their behavior, to talk productively, and ultimately to meet you on your terms.
Mr. Liotta was deputy director of the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, 1995-2004.
