Mixed race can be a good thing

I gather that all references to mixed race are these days regarded as taboo. So when Obama referred to himself as a "mutt", you could almost hear the gasps. But blacks themselves take it very seriously. Among blacks, a lighter-skinned black tends to be more prestigious and more complacent about his skin color. So a brown black cruises, if that makes any sense.

Whites, on the other hand, are less sensitive to such differences. For political correctness purposes, all noticeably pigmented people are "black" and, as such, a privileged class who may not be criticized. Why the least competent segment of society is treated as a a privileged class is a question that I had better not address here.

But I want to say that being of mixed race is in fact a matter of some significance. I myself am of mixed race: Mostly English but with plenty of Irish and a bit of Scots. And that stands me in good stead. The English in me means that when I am in England I am quite reserved and hence qualify as "a nice quiet chap" -- which is a term of praise in England.

But when I am in Scotland the Celt comes out in me and the emotional, sentimental attitudes of the Scots are ones that I am entirely comfortable with. And even when I am back home in Australia, I do sometimes play sentimental Scottish music (is there any other kind?), which I greatly enjoy.

And I also have blood kin who are even more mixed than I am. My vivacious cousin twice removed -- Michelle -- is half Han Chinese and half Anglo and I am mightily impressed by her good qualities. She is still as yet in High School but she will go far. Her blue-eyed father is a very knowledgeable academic and a former Assembly of God minister so that helps.

So mixed race can be a good thing. American blacks are right. White racists will hate me for saying that but you can't win 'em all.

The Celtic sentimentalist in me, however, gives me a liking for the blue eyes that characterize all my close blood kin. But the fact that my tall blue-eyed son has a firm relationship with a lady who is half Han Chinese and half English will most probably mean that I will not have blue-eyed grandchildren. My son did however meet his lady when she was studying rocket science (I kid you not) so she is pretty smart. He is a mathematician and the Chinese are pre-eminent in mathematics so I am very pleased by the intellectual potential of any grandchildren that I might have. As an academic myself, I hold intellectual achievement in high regard. Iris pigmentation is a trivial matter if other things are good.

Mind you, genetics can sometimes spring surprises. Someone I see often and admire greatly is an Italian man with the usual Italian black hair and dark eyes. Yet he has recently fathered a gorgeous daughter who has blue eyes and RED hair -- two colorations that are recessive genetically. But he does have a blue-eyed, red-haired Anglo wife so that helps.

To forestall cynical comments, I might mention that Vincenzo does have a blue-eyed sister and that his mother is a Northerner. And there is a lot of Germanic blood among Northern Italians. Germans have been invading Italy for over 2,000 years -- since the days of the Roman republic, in fact. No wonder that Italians find Germans very alarming to this day.

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Hate is a tool of big government

If eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, incessant distractions are the way that politicians take away our freedoms, in order to enhance their own power and longevity in office. Dire alarms and heady crusades are among the many distractions of our attention from the ever increasing ways that government finds to take away more of our money and more of our freedom.

Magicians have long known that distracting an audience is the key to creating the illusion of magic. It is also the key to political magic.

Alarms ranging from “overpopulation” to “global warming” and crusades ranging from “affordable housing” to “universal health care” have been among the distractions of political magicians. But few distractions have had such a long and impressive political track record as getting people to resent and, if necessary, hate other people.

The most politically effective totalitarian systems have gotten people to give up their own freedom in order to vent their resentment or hatred at other people— under Communism, the capitalists; under Nazis, the Jews.

Under extremist Islamic regimes today, hatred is directed at the infidels in general and the “great Satan,” the United States, in particular. There some people have been induced to give up not only their freedom but even their lives, in order to strike a blow against those they have been taught to hate.

We have not yet reached these levels of hostility, but those who are taking away our freedoms, bit by bit, on the installment plan, have been incessantly supplying us with people to resent.

One of the most audacious attempts to take away our freedom to live our lives as we see fit has been the so-called “health care reform” bills that were being rushed through Congress before either the public or the members of Congress themselves had a chance to discover all that was in it.

For this, we were taught to resent doctors, insurance companies and even people with “Cadillac health insurance plans,” who were to be singled out for special taxes. Meanwhile, our freedom to make our own medical decisions— on which life and death can depend— was to be quietly taken from us and transferred to our betters in Washington.

Only the recent Massachusetts election results have put that on hold.

Another dangerous power toward which we are moving, bit by bit, on the installment plan, is the power of politicians to tell people what their incomes can and cannot be. Here the resentment is being directed against “the rich.”

The distracting phrases here include “obscene” wealth and “unconscionable” profits. But, if we stop and think about it— which politicians don’t expect us to— what is obscene about wealth? Wouldn’t we consider it great if every human being on earth had a billion dollars and lived in a place that could rival the Taj Mahal?

Poverty is obscene. It is poverty that needs to be reduced—and increasing a country’s productivity has done that far more widely than redistributing income by targeting “the rich.”

You can see the agenda behind the rhetoric when profits are called “unconscionable” but taxes never are, even when taxes take more than half of what someone has earned, or add much more to the prices we have to pay than profits do.

The assumption that what A pays B is any business of C is an assumption that means a dangerous power being transferred to politicians to tell us all what incomes we can and cannot receive. It will not apply to everyone all at once. Like the income tax, which at first applied only to the truly rich, and then slowly but steadily moved down the income scale to hit the rest of us, the power to say what incomes people can be allowed to make will inevitably move down the income scale to make us all dependents and supplicants of politicians.

The phrase “public servants” is increasingly misleading. They are well on their way to becoming public masters— like aptly named White House “czars.” The more they can get us all to resent those they designate, the more they can distract us from their increasing control of our own lives— but only if we sell our freedom cheap. We can sell our birthright and not even get the mess of pottage.

SOURCE

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Unbelievable: Obama Shifting NASA Mission from Moon to Muslims

President Obama recently announced he would be diverting funds away from NASA's plans to return to the moon, but failed to mention what his plans for the future of NASA might look like.

According to NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, President Obama has asked NASA to "find ways to reach out to dominantly Muslim countries," in a push to make the agency a tool of international diplomacy.

The Orlando Sentinel reports: In addition to the nations that most of you usually hear about when you think about the International Space Station, we now have expanded our efforts to reach out to non-traditional partners,” said Bolden, speaking to a lecture hall of young engineering students. Specifically, he talked about connecting with countries that do not have an established space program and helping them conduct science missions. He mentioned new opportunities with Indonesia, including an educational program that examines global climate change."

Canceling the Constellation program already threatens to put the U.S. behind countries like China and Russia. When did Kennedy's once undeterred vision of American space exploration transform into Obama's plan for an international science "welfare" program? When did NASA become a tool of diplomacy and an extended arm of the EPA?

SOURCE

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Bayh's Good-Bye: Here's the Real Reason

Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., "shocked" President Barack Obama and his party by announcing his plan to retire from the Senate. Appearing on CBS' "The Early Show," Bayh explained: Washington suffers from acute partisanship. Washington doesn't work. It is broken.

How noble -- a principled position against "divisiveness." Let us honor a good man standing tall against the lack of "bipartisanship." Pass the barf bag.

When has Washington, D.C., not been "divisive" under a president pushing unpopular ideas -- whether the war in Iraq, the Senate "amnesty" bill, partial privatization of Social Security or Bill Clinton's attempt to allow gays to serve openly in the military?

Could it be that the "fed-up" senator feared losing re-election? Don't ask. CBS didn't. The possibility that Bayh faced a tough re-election wasn't even hinted at. But imagine Bayh, who explored a 2008 presidential bid, running for re-election while justifying to skeptical Hoosiers his votes for "stimulus," TARP, the auto bailouts and ObamaCare.

Here's the big underreported story: In a hypothetical race against undeclared candidate Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind. -- according to a recent Rasmussen poll of likely voters -- Bayh was down 3 points. Against another possible opponent, former House Republican John Hostettler, he was only ahead by 3 points. Welcome to the new normal. No Democrat or squishy Republican is safe.

By a 2-1 margin, more people call themselves politically conservative than liberal. Self-identified "independents," who outnumber both the Dems and the Republicans, have turned against Obama with a vengeance. This center-right country now realizes it elected a left-winger for president. And voters don't like what they see or what he's doing.

More HERE

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GOP 'tsunami' predicted for exurban, South, mountain states

Former Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, the architect of previous Republican campaign successes, says outer-suburban voters eager to place a check on President Obama and Democrats are swinging back to the GOP and will power a Republican resurgence in New England, while aiding GOP "tsunamis" in Virginia, Colorado and Iowa.

Mr. Davis, the current president of the Republican Main Street Partnership, a group of the party's more moderate lawmakers, told reporters Wednesday that the GOP has had its best-ever year of recruiting candidates for congressional elections, which has helped put so many seats into play.

He said Democrats are having a tough time reaching a balance of keeping regular voters happy while also appeasing the liberal voters who surged to the polls in the 2008 election. "Those are the problems Democrats have coming in. The surge voters right now, they're asleep. And the outer suburbs, the South, the mountain states, I think you can look for Republican tsunamis," Mr. Davis said. "You're going to have big years."

A sign of how bad Republican fortunes have been the past two elections is their ouster from New England, where the GOP no longer holds any House seats. But Mr. Davis said Republicans will capture seats there this year, including both New Hampshire districts.

On Wednesday, Mr. Davis' predecessor at the Main Street Partnership, former Rep. Charlie Bass, said he'll run to try to recapture the House seat from New Hampshire that he lost in 2006 to Rep. Paul W. Hodes. Mr. Hodes is vacating the seat to run for the Senate.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Catholic foster care cut in light of D.C. gay marriage laws: "The Archdiocese of Washington's decision to drop its foster care program is the first casualty of the District's pending same-sex marriage law that will obligate all outside contractors dealing with the city to recognize gay couples. Its decision, posted late Tuesday on the archdiocese's Web site, announced that the archdiocese had ended its 80-year-old program Feb. 1, the day the city's contract expired with Catholic Charities, the church's social services arm. "We regret that our efforts to avoid this outcome were not successful," Catholic Charities Chief Executive Officer Ed Orzechowski said in a statement. "Foster care has been an important ministry for us for many decades. We worked very hard to be able to continue to provide these services in the District." Catholic Charities' caseload of 43 children and 35 foster families was transferred, along with seven staffers, to the Bethesda, Md.-based National Center for Children and Families so as not to disrupt client care".

Economists told Britain's numbskull Leftists that their planned higher taxes would REDUCE tax revenue: "Gordon Brown’s launch of a Labour election campaign promising economic recovery was in jeopardy last night as a record slump in tax receipts fuelled fears that Britain could slip back into recession. Official figures showed that the Treasury borrowed another £4.3 billion last month. It is the first time since records began in 1993 that the nation has been in the red in January, traditionally the month when government coffers are swelled by big tax receipts. Economists, who had expected a surplus of about £2.8 billion, sounded renewed alarm, with some saying Britain’s deficit could exceed Greece’s." [The higher taxes haven't all kicked in yet but big businesses are already moving out in droves]

Are our “leaders” superior?: "When people talk about how market agents need to be regulated because, well, without it they could do bad things, it never fails to amaze me how narrow-minded is this line of reasoning. When human beings are fit for regulation by others, they are usually children and the others are their parents or guardians. So it has to do with who is an adult, who is not. Makes sense. But when it is about adult citizens allegedly requiring regulation by other adult citizens, it is simply baffling.”

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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