Let's review some basics

1.) It's impossible by definition for there to be a right to health care.

2.) It's impossible by definition for there to be a right to a job.

3.) Until the last 20 years, no culture anywhere in the world defined marriage in such a way as to include the union of two people of the same sex.

4.) Gender is not fluid.

5.) The global climate is not in a state of crisis.

6.) A good or service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth. Allowing any other party to be part of that agreement distorts the value that buyer and seller have agreed upon.

7.) Appeasement of rogue states and rogue regimes invites continued hostile behavior directed at the nation-state doing the appeasing.

Monday roundup

Sorry for the absence. I was an assistant table leader at a jail-ministry weekend called Residents Encounter Christ. To say it was powerful would be to woefully understate the impact. I gained brothers. I saw hearts turn. I saw families begin the process of repair. I may compose a post about it at some point.

It was healthy to leave my devices at home. There is indeed more to life than social media, news aggregates and opinion sites.

But developments continue to transpire, don't they?

Let's have a look at some.

Claudia Rosett at PJ Media offers an on-the-ground look at Sunday's massive protest in Hong Kong.

I could be mistaken about this, but I don't think Beto has come up with a winning campaign theme with "our country was founded on racism and is still racist today."

Summer's here and the time is right for dancing in Baghdad:

Baghdad (AFP) - Hundreds of Iraqi teenagers clapped along exuberantly to techno beats pumping across a makeshift dance hall on Friday night, a scene their capital had not witnessed in decades.

Neon red, yellow and white stage lights helped transform the basketball court in the People's Stadium in central Baghdad into a club for the "Summer Festival", the first celebration of its kind in the city.

The party started at noon with a car show: classic cars, souped-up four-wheelers and motorcycles with proud owners revving their engines.

As the DJ took the stage, boys and girls alike swayed and sang along to Western tunes, alternated with popular Iraqi hits.

Though there were only a few young women among the 1,000 or so revellers, their presence was notable in a country where public spaces remain conservative.

"I love this type of music," said Layan, a 19-year-old woman in a leather black top and full makeup.

"I hear a lot of people say that we're influenced by the West. Fine, there's no difference to me -- the important thing is I don't have to listen to this music at home in secret anymore," she said, pumping her fist into the air.

Just a few years ago, the sound of staccato gunfire or the echo of car bombs was more common in Baghdad than the resounding bass of electronic music.

Iraq has been hit by nearly four decades of conflict, from a devastating war with Iran in the 1980s to the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Sectarian warfare followed, then the onslaught of the Islamic State group in 2014, only defeated territorially in late 2017.

Friday's festival was the latest indication that Iraq is entering a phase of relative stability, with blast walls and checkpoints coming down across the capital.

Restaurants are again abuzz with families and coffee shops full of young people watching cover bands late into the night, something that not so long ago was considered too dangerous because of the risk of suicide bombers.

Greg Weiner, writing at Law & Liberty, says that Mary Ann Glendon is exceptionally well-suited to lead Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's Commission on Unalienable Rights.

Oh, sheesh. The Business Roundtable now repudiates its former position that the a corporation's primary purpose for existing is to show its owners a return on their investment. It's issued a statement saying that the corporation has a "responsibility" to some wider array of "stakeholders." Ain't that nice?

Suit yourself, exterminators of fetal Americans:

Planned Parenthood will be foregoing as much as $60 million annually from a federal family planning program that will carry new anti-abortion rules. 

"Planned Parenthood is still open. We are continuing to fight this rule in court," said Alexis McGill Johnson, acting president of Planned Parenthood, said in a call with reporters Monday. She said the organization would do everything it could to make sure that clinics could stay open. 

The Trump administration is giving healthcare providers until midnight to comply with a new rule that says organizations that accept federal family planning grants cannot directly provide patients with an abortion referral. Critics of the rule call it a "gag rule" because they say the government is forcing them to keep information from patients.

A group of Chicago Teachers Union members go to Venezuela and go all Walter Duranty.  

Ten truths I yearn to hear some aspirant to Congress or the presidency forthrightly assert

The global climate is not in crisis.

It is impossible by definition to have a right to health care. There is no such thing as a right to something that requires one's fellow human being to do something.

The minimum wage is bad and wrong for at least three reasons: It distorts the market value of an hour of labor, it entails government telling a private organization how to conduct its affairs, and it elbows the most economically vulnerable among us out of the job market.

It is always a mistake to legitimize rogue regimes.

Every school and business in America that has a diversity office should close it immediately.

Redistribution - that is, taking Citizen A's money at gunpoint to address the particular situation of Citizen B - is always an immoral use of government's power to tax.

The only two demographics in America against which there is systemic bigotry are Christians and Jews.

For all intents and purposes, all societies throughout history have been organized patriarchally.

Gender dysphoria is a mental illness.

Chances are slim that our culture's rot can be reversed.

Thursday roundup

The foremost development requiring our contemplation is the UK government's barbaric treatment of its most vulnerable citizen, Alfie Evans.

Three key paragraphs from David French's NRO piece about it:

With no God over the state, the state then becomes not the defender of liberty but the definer of liberty. You have no freedoms except those bestowed by the state, and those freedoms are defined entirely by the various branches of government. There is no inherent parental authority. There is no inherent right to life. There is only the justice the state gives according to the standards the state dictates.

And . . .

The long-term threat to the American experiment isn’t found in any given policy, but rather in a lost philosophy. Americans are shedding a belief in God at an alarming rate. In elite circles, fundamental liberties like free speech and due process are scorned and mocked as tools of white supremacy or oppressive patriarchies. Federalism has been reduced to a tactic of political opposition, not a bipartisan principle of self-governance.

If you don’t want America to become Britain — if you don’t want to wake up one morning to find the American state defying loving and prudent parents to declare that death is in a child’s “best interests” — I would suggest that you not wait until America is secularized, centralized, and authoritarian. I’d suggest that you not wait until the moment when the state has seized the power to act like Britain, and you’re reduced to arguing, “I know the government can do this, but it shouldn’t.”

Bill Cosby - he of the classic 1963 comedy album I Started Out As A Child, the Jell-O pudding commercials, and the Cliff Huxtable America's-dad situation comedy role - is found guilty of sexually violating Andrea Costand. 

Mike Pompeo is confirmed as Secretary of State.

Joy Reid learns that nothing expressed in cyberspace is never not permanent:

In a 2007 blog post, MSNBC host Joy Reid attacked TV host Rosie O'Donnell using misogynistic and fat-shaming language and defended future president Donald Trump.

After Reid apologized for old homophobic blog posts in December 2017, her blog "The Reid Report" was effectively taken off of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine thanks to an exclusion request added by the website's operators. But a mirror of the Wayback Machine operated by the Library of Congress remains unaffected, and several of Reid's posts are still visible on that site.

In a January 9th blog post, Reid weighed in on the celebrity feud between "The View" host O'Donnell and Trump. Earlier in the feud, Trump had called O'Donnell "a real loser," a "slob" with a "fat, ugly face," and "fat little Rosie."

Nonetheless, the liberal pundit was on Team Donald.

"How much longer until that chubbed-out shrew Rosie O'Donnell gets her fat ass canned by Babwa?" Reid asked, in an imitation of "The View" co-host Barbara Walters' first name.

"How much longer will the freak show that is ‘The View' continue to darken our television screens?" she continued. "How much more kick-ass funny can Donald Trump be???"

The indispensable Ben Shapiro rocks the house at Liberty University:

After thanking the YAF and opening with a prayer for Alfie Evans, Shapiro launched into something that many would consider a badly needed talk about a badly needed system:

The United States echoed that message from its very inception. George Washington stated in his First Inaugural Address, “Since there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness; between duty and advantage… the propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained.”

The very basis of our politics, then, lies in the recognition that rights without virtues lead to chaos, and that virtues without rights lead to tyranny. Only by balancing public rights with private virtues can we truly uphold freedom and pursue happiness.

One half of the equation, though, seems to have gone awry in modern America.

We have been taught that our rights are paramount, which is fine, but we’ve also been taught that we have no duty to be virtuous. In fact, anyone who says that we have a duty to be virtuous is harming you, microaggressing you, ethnocentrically mansplaining to you in cisgender fashion.

Shapiro then highlighted that a virtuous society cannot be brought about by a centralized government, despite the fact that collectivist politicians promise Eden if they’re just put into power.

How can anyone expect us to be virtuous, the argument goes, when the system itself is so deeply flawed? How can we blame people for being immoral when the system is biased in favor of a few white rich men at the top? First we have to fix the system – then human beings themselves will change. Virtue will become natural; we’ll all just magically become wonderful great people. All we have to do to make this magical thing happen is hand over all our freedoms to a centralized government – and that government will then provide us new rights, better that the old God-given ones. Instead of the right to free speech, the government will provide us a right not to be offended; our feelings will be protected.

Instead of a right to life, the government will provide us the right to kill unborn babies. Instead of a right to create and keep the wages of our labor, the government will provide us a nice, comfortable social safety net, without us actually having to do the work.

Then, after all that’s done, human beings will magically become better. We’ll become good, if all this happens.

Shapiro notes that this is the philosophy of collectivism, which promises more than it can possibly give if you would just give up yourself to it:

Collectivist philosophy, however, thinks differently; they expect us to give our individual striving up; no more striving, no more struggle, all we have to do is trade our individual responsibility for the comfort of collective power. Collectivist philosophy points out that individual virtue isn’t natural – it is a struggle. And we can avoid that struggle by handing over all power to a Nanny State. Judeo-Christianity says, “You’re free, and therefore you must give”; collectivist philosophy says, “You are unfree, and thus the state must take on your behalf.”

Shapiro goes on to describe how collectivism goes directly against the nature of humans, and the will of God by putting it up against each of the Ten Commandments in order in what is a very eye-opening comparison.

David Marshall at The Stream offers a great takedown of GQ magazine's inclusion of the Bible in a list of 21 famous books that one need not read.

 

Your overlords no longer make any pretense about their totalitarianism

Check out the latest "right" that Valerie Jarrett seems to have found:

The Healthy Families Act would affect 40 percent of American private sector businesses that have 11 or more employees. It would require those firms to offer at least seven days of paid leave time to employees and provides states and municipalities with $2.2 billion to develop their own paid leave programs. Obama will also sign a memorandum that grants federal employees’ six days of paid leave. 

In a post on the social media network LinkedIn, White House advisor Valerie Jarrett wrotethat the administration believes paid leave should be a “worker’s right, not a privilege.” 

How many working parents know that sinking feeling from sending their child off to school with a fever? How many Americans have to show up to work when battling an illness even when they know they won’t be at their best, it will lengthen their recovery time, and they may likely spread their sickness to others? And how many moms and dads have been denied the ability to bond with their newborn, or to care for an aging parent, all because they could not afford to miss work? These are real, significant moments in life that nearly everyone faces at some point. The last thing we should do is add guilt, fear, and financial hardship on working parents as they try to do what’s right – while keeping their job.
…
We know that today, 43 million private sector workers in the U.S. are without any form of paid sick leave. Only three states — California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island — offer paid family and medical leave. The United States remains the only developed country in the world that does not offer paid maternity leave.

The truth is, the success and productivity of our workers is inextricably tied to their ability to care for their families and maintain a stable life at home. More and more employers are coming to understand this. And voters get it too—from Massachusetts to Oakland, they have been showing their overwhelming bipartisan support for policies allowing workers to earn paid sick days.

“[W]e can’t say we stand for family values when so many women  in this country have to jeopardize their financial security just to take a few weeks off of work after giving birth,” she closed. “We can’t say we’re for middle-class stability when a man has to sacrifice his economic security to care for his ailing mother.”

See, we have to let the jackboots appeal to our emotions.  No time for letting market forces channel the most desirable prospects to employers that do offer some kind of leave.  No, the government has to tell private organizations how to conduct their operations.

Like environmental regulations, like government health care, like mandatory nutritional information in restaurants, the issue is really control.

Where are they from and where do they get off sticking their nose into an American city's attempt to climb out of bankruptcy?

The water-is-a-human-right crowd in Detroit got a little help from the stink in' UN:

Detroit officials are fuming after two visiting United Nations lawyers scolded the city for cutting off water to delinquent customers and described the shut-offs as a “human rights” violation. 

The response follows a three-day visit to Detroit -- which desperately is trying to bail itself out of bankruptcy -- from two representatives with the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“It is contrary to human rights to disconnect water from people who simply do not have the means to pay their bills,” Catarina de Albuquerque, one of the two representatives, said Monday at the conclusion of their visit. 

“I heard testimonies from poor, African American residents of Detroit who were forced to make impossible choices -- to pay the water bill or to pay their rent.”

But the mayor's office blasted the U.N. review as one-sided. Alexis Wiley, Mayor Mike Duggan’s top aide, said the city is "very disappointed" with them. 

"They weren't interested in the facts," she said. "They took a position and never once [before Monday] reached out to the city for data."

The policy change shuts off water to businesses and residents who either are 60 days past due or owe more than $150.

Detroit -- the country's largest municipality to file for bankruptcy -- reports making 27,000 shut-offs from Jan. 1 to Sept. 30.

Nowhere in the linked article does it say where Ms. de Albquerque or her fellow "rapporteur" are from.  If it's not America, they need to take their globalist asses back to whatever utopia they call home.

Our tax money goes for this garbage.

Water madness in Detroit

It would take more peeling back the layers than there is really space for in a post on this specific aspect of Detroit's situation.  You know the basics:  the 1967 race riot that began driving industry out of the city, 50 years of corruption and mismanagement, unsustainable pension packages in both the governmental sector and the auto industry.

The upshot: shrinkage to the point where what was once America's fifth largest city is now smaller than Columbus, Ohio.  Bankruptcy and a shell government that has had to step aside for a team of crisis-management experts.  Huge swaths of blocks of vacant lots and abandoned buildings, both commercial and residential.

So in March, the city water service served notice that customers more than two months behind on water bills would be cut off.

This led to downtown protests along Grand Avenue last week.

Nurses wanted to work the public-health angle:

A group called National Nurses United, which led a march and protest downtown Friday near Cobo Center, said the shut-offs pose a public health emergency and demanded an immediate moratorium on them. The group’s co-president, Jean Ross, has called the shut-offs an “attack on the basic human right of access to safe, clean water.”

Others wanted to do the demonize-corporations thing, as well as turn their municipal sovereignty over to an obsolete and ineffective global entity:

Demonstrators chanted “Who’s on their side? Corporations. Who’s on our side? United Nations.”

A prominent Freedom-Hater politician wants to make individual households' personal financial business the state's business:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mark Schauer on Friday called for a moratorium on Detroit’s water shut-offs until city officials can assess who has the financial means to pay off delinquent accounts — and who doesn’t.

Memo to Schauer:  By definition, if they have the means to pay and a lick of sense, their water is still on.

Two main things that need to be yelled at maximum volume about this little scenario:

One is the LITD First Law of Economics:  The money has to come from somewhere.  Just has to.  And, due to the reasons cited in paragraph one of this post, neither producer nor consumer has any.  So the water ain't happening.

The other is that there is no right to water, just like there is no right to health care, a job or "affordable" housing.  It's impossible by definition to have a right to something that requires your fellow human being to do something.

I got into this with somebody on FB and that person tried to tie it in with the right to life.  Here's the relationship between hydrogen oxide: You should be able to seek to obtain water with the expectation that you won't be killed while doing so.

Sheesh.

Detroit is a perfect example of the importance of a geographic and political entity coming to its senses about economics before the consequences are so flippin' dire.