Wednesday, March 14, 2018






Hillary disrespects American women

Hillary took part in the India Today Conclave over the weekend and her contempt showed.  No conservative would go as far as she did in her downgrading of women.  Conservatives tend to like women -- even love them -- but Hillary just despises them. But she is a feminist!  A hater, more likely

Former Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton let loose in a conversation with the India Today Conclave over the weekend, calling Trump voters and residents of heartland states 'backwards," telling the audience that Americans "didn’t like black people getting rights," and "didn't like women," and claiming that white women only voted for Trump because they were told to do so by their husbands.

Clinton waited until she was well overseas to give the shocking speech, rehashing some of her greatest hits into a single, televised rant, delivered largely to an audience of Indians gathered for the innovation conference.

Asked about the 52% of white women who voted for Donald Trump in the Presidential election, despite being faced with the possibility of having the first woman President in American history, Clinton did not concede that women could have voted based on their own political preferences. Rather, the failed Democratic candidate claimed that white women were under the spell of their husbands, fathers, and sons, who forced them to pull the lever for Donald Trump.

"We do not do well with white men and we don’t do well with married, white women,” Clinton told the audience, about the Democratic Party. “And part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.”

Yep. That's right. A majority of white women in America are merely the pawns of their male betters, the willing tools of a massive Patriarchal conspiracy that sought to keep Clinton out of the White House because she happened to be a woman.

That's not all though. Clinton went on to claim that then-FBI director James Comey, now a liberal hero, destroyed her "momentum," and "decreased my vote," when he suddenly re-opened an investigation into her mishandling of classified information just days before the November election.

At some point, Clinton's habit of excusing her campaign performance simply because pathological. She no longer accepts any rational explanation for her loss that is at odds with her own carefully curated reality, and she'll likely carry these same explanations with her to her deathbed, always believing that America was too backwards, to brutish, and too misogynistic to see the paradise she promised.

SOURCE






Gun-Control Activist Finds Picture of ‘Scary’ Gun… Silenced After Learning What She Really Posted


An airhead

Gun control activists have been doing their worst again in recent weeks, demonizing law-abiding gun owners and the National Rifle Association as they seek to undermine and infringe upon the Second Amendment-protected right to keep and bear arms.

As such, they are also pushing yet another legislative attempt to ban “assault weapons,” a made-up term that essentially constitutes any sort of firearm that looks like something the military would use, but in actuality is a standard semi-automatic firearm with certain cosmetic features, of which there are millions upon millions in common use.

Unfortunately for them, their fear and loathing when it comes to firearms runs so deep that they can’t even keep straight what kinds of weapons they claim they do and don’t want to ban — likely because they don’t even know the basics of firearms and how they operate in the first place.

Case in point is the following tweet from Shannon Watts, leader of the Bloomberg-backed Moms Demand Action gun control advocacy group, who posted a picture of a “scary” looking rifle and fretted that an 18-year-old adult could purchase one at a sporting goods store, according to The Daily Wire.



In the eyes of Watts and her small but vocal coterie of liberal moms demanding gun bans, the above rifle should be classified as an “assault weapon” and ripped from the hands of law-abiding citizens, largely because of its black “tactical” appearance that resembles a military-issue firearm.

But in reality, the gun Watts is apparently so fearful of is nothing more than a bolt-action .22 long rifle caliber firearm, the sort of firearm that legions of gun owners learned to shoot with and grew up around as children. Deadly with a well-placed shot, yes, but still barely a step above a BB gun, and largely suitable for target practice or hunting small game like rabbits and gophers.

SOURCE






Why More Men Than Ever View Marriage as a Bad Deal

Over the last few decades, we’ve seen a revolutionary change in the way marriage works in America.

In your great-grandparents’ heyday, relationships were more about raising a family and making a living than love. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t any love involved; it just means the motivations were often a little different than they are today. Women wanted to get out from under the same roof as their parents and have kids. When a woman found a decent man who treated her well and seemed like he could provide for her and her children, that was often enough of a foundation to build a marriage. After all, the country was much poorer then, so her parents couldn’t necessarily support her and she didn’t have a lot of job options. A husband was the best financial option most women had back then.

Today, most women can take care of themselves and those who can’t have the federal government helping them, so they don’t NEED a man to take care of them financially. Combine this with the fact that financial opportunities for uneducated and unskilled men are dramatically reduced from the pre-shipping container/pre-computer age and marriage has been forever changed. That male dockworker can no longer support a family by himself and even if the wealthier, more educated female executive were to marry him (and she probably wouldn’t because he has less status than she does), the marriage would be far less stable because financial need wouldn’t hold them together.

This has a lot to do with why divorce happened much less frequently in the past. Not only was it a little scandalous to get divorced, a woman had a lot more worries about how to pay her bills if she decided to go her own way. That combination of financial need and social stigma held people together. Consider that “the 1967 crude (divorce) rate was 8.7 times as large as that for 1867” and it becomes obvious that marriage was a much more certain bet for previous generations of Americans.

As the need for financial security has fallen away, “love” has become the primary motivator of people who want to marry. The problem with that is that love can be one fickle b*tch.

For most people, that hot, passionate love driven by hormones that makes you crazy for someone else typically doesn’t last forever. Additionally, as people say, “familiarity breeds contempt.” When a woman is on year three of sex with the same person, she just picked his stained underwear off the floor again and what she thought were cute little idiosyncrasies early on have started to get on her nerves, “love” has turned out to be a much less effective cement than financial necessity. That’s very important because almost 70 percent of the time the woman is the one who files for divorce.

Given that we have a justice system that rewards women and punishes men at every opportunity during and after a divorce, it’s no surprise that women are more likely to be the ones ending the marriage. Courts heavily side with women over men when it comes to custody of the children. Chances are if you’re a man in a battle for custody, you’re going to lose and then you’re going to be forced to pay through the nose for the privilege of not getting to spend as much time with your kids as you like. Speaking of which, financially, the courts still act as if we’re in the thirties. Certainly, there could be a situation where a significant alimony payment would be the only fair solution, but that should be a fairly rare occurrence in this day and age.

Imagine a secretary who makes $30,000 a year who marries a CEO making 10 million dollars a year. Five years later, they get divorced. How much does she deserve? Most women would say “half.” At least “half” of what he made while they were together. The honest answer a lot of men would give you would be “nothing.” You know how much she contributed to the man’s success in his career? Nothing of significance. How much is she worth in the working world after the marriage? About the same as she was before, plus she’s had the advantage of having her much richer husband buy her things for years that she’ll take with her. Do you know what he should owe her in that situation after five years of marriage that didn’t work out in the end? Nothing, just like she owes him.

Yet and still, in many states, her husband would be expected to keep her living in the “style to which she has become accustomed.” This is exactly the reason that any MAN WHO ALREADY HAS MONEY is crazy if he doesn’t insist on a prenuptial contract before a wedding. Is that romantic? No, but neither is giving a woman who hates your guts half your money. Does it imply you’re not 100 percent sure the marriage will last? Yes, it does, but in a world where divorce is so common, no one can really be sure a marriage will last anymore. You can claim otherwise if you like, but you’re just whistling past the graveyard. I’ve known women who divorced a husband because he lost his job and had trouble finding another one; because she wanted to relive her party years at 35 years old with two kids; because she decided her husband wasn’t manly enough; it goes on and on and on. What I am telling you is that there are no guarantees and your sweet, reasonable honey who loves you to death may decide she wants out of the marriage and turn into a monster once she has a lawyer whispering in her ear during the divorce. Guess what? Usually, the guy never sees it coming.

This can lead to a situation where you’re paying for the lifestyle of a woman who doesn’t want to be with you anymore and is using your kids as a weapon against you while you struggle financially. I know more than one man who has been in this situation. Almost every man does these days. Some people would tell you that’s just the price of marriage. “Hey, if she’s not worth that, then don’t get married.” But how often does the opposite situation happen? How often is a woman stuck paying the bills for her ex-husband while he has the kids after he decided he “just wasn’t in love” anymore? I’ve never heard of a situation like that, although I’m sure it has probably happened. This is an enormous risk that marriage entails for men, but generally not for women.

You also can’t underestimate the impact of having reliable female birth control and women pursuing their careers. Between college and many women trying to climb the career ladder, marriages are occurring later than ever. There was a time in American history when 80% of people were married by 21. That is no longer true.

Barely half of all adults in the United States—a record low—are currently married, and the median age at first marriage has never been higher for brides (26.5 years) and grooms (28.7), according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census data.
In 1960, 72% of all adults ages 18 and older were married; today just 51% are. If current trends continue, the share of adults who are currently married will drop to below half within a few years.

The longer you wait to get married, the less of a chance there is that the marriage will produce children. Take the potential of having children out of the equation and marriage is even less appealing to many men. Keep in mind that single women can now easily avoid pregnancy and have become much more promiscuous than they used to be. Does that mean every single guy is getting laid left and right? Not at all, but it does mean that sex is much more available to the average single man than it was 100 years ago. In other words, even if a man never gets married, he doesn’t have to forego sex. In fact, he has the opportunity to have sex with multiple women, an attractive proposition to most men that would be denied to him if he were married. On top of that, he doesn’t have to take on any burdens. He’s not financially responsible for his girlfriend. He doesn’t have to take care of the kid she had with another guy five years ago. There’s no potential for a brutal divorce if things don’t work out. Typically, women are the ones who grew up dreaming of the perfect wedding and the commitment that followed. Most men just grew up dreaming of having sex with beautiful women.

At one time, those two fantasies had to merge. When our society was less promiscuous, the man needed to get married to have regular access to sex. He got what he wanted and she got what she wanted. Is that still true today? The numbers say “No.”

Back in the early 1990s, the average American had sex about 60 to 62 times per year, but that number dropped to less than 53 times per year by 2014. Among married couples specifically, the drop was even more dramatic - from about 73 times per year in 1990 to 55 in 2014. This actually brings the sex lives of married couples below people who've never been married, who have sex about 59 times per year as of 2014.

So if you’re a man, getting married may very well mean LESS SEX and with the same woman instead of potentially sleeping with multiple women. It also means risking a soul-ripping divorce where the court system will be stacked against you. Oh, and don’t even mention the old, “Getting married? Wow, I’ll be treated like a king!” fantasy that men had once. Today, you’re more likely to be treated to demands that you do half the weekly housework.

When you look at that sort of thing, it’s easy to understand why some men are simply opposed to marriage. I am not one of those men, but I will tell you the scales have tipped too far against men in marriage. By that, I mean that unless something changes that shifts the institution of marriage back onto more favorable ground for men, marriage will have great difficulty recovering in America. Since marriage is one of the most important building blocks of a successful society, that’s something none of us should want.

SOURCE







Britain's odd housing regulations

Restricting whether you can build, rather than what, drives up prices

Matt Ridley

Sajid Javid, the Housing (etc) secretary, is right – and brave -- to go on the warpath about Britain’s housing crisis in his new national planning framework, to be launched today. Britain’s housing costs are absurdly high by international standards: eight times average earnings in England, 15 in London. A mortgage deposit that took a few years to earn in the early 1990s can now take somebody decades to earn. Average rents in the UK are almost 50% higher than average rents in Germany, France and crowded Holland.

Britain really is an outlier in this respect. Knightsbridge has overtaken Monaco in rental levels. Wealthy, crowded Switzerland has falling house prices and lower rents than Britain. Over recent decades, most things people buy have become more affordable – food, clothing, communication – and the cost of building a house has come down too. Yet the price you pay for it in Britain, either as a buyer or a tenant, has gone up and up.

Speculation exacerbates the problem. British people, and foreign investors here, borrow money to invest in housing on the generally valid assumption that it will rise in value. This distorts our economy, diverting funds from more productive investments and exacerbating labour shortages in expensive places like London and Cambridge.

The fastest take-off in house prices relative to earnings has been in the last two decades, when cheap money has further fuelled the house-price spiral, rewarding the haves at the expense of the have-nots. The high cost of housing is by far the biggest contributor to inequality. The reason some people have to turn to food banks is not because of high food prices, but because of high housing costs. It is a rich irony that the Attlee government’s town and country planning act of 1947 is probably as responsible as anything for the continuing prosperity of most dukes.

But seeking out profiteers misses the point. At root of the problem is supply and demand. Britain restricts the supply of housing through its planning system far more tightly than other countries. That keeps prices going up, enabling developers, landlords and speculative buyers to make gains. We are building not much more than half as many houses each year as France, despite a faster population growth rate, and a quarter as many as Japan.

So why is British planning so restrictive? Until 1947 Britain regulated house building in most cities the same way other countries did: by telling people what they could build, rather than whether they could build. As Nicholas Boys Smith, director of Create Streets told a recent conference at the Legatum Institute, in the centuries following the Great Fire of 1666, “There was a series of pieces of legislation that set down very tight parameters: ratio of street width to street height, the fire treatment of windows etc. That is how most of Europe still manages planning. They have not taken away your right to build a building.”

Britain switched to deregulating what you could build, but nationalized whether you could build, by adopting a system of government planning, in which permission to build was determined by officials responding to their own estimate of “need”. This brought great uncertainty to the system, because planning permission now depended on the whims of planners, the actions of rivals and the representations of objectors. Today local plans are often years out of date if they exist at all, and are vast, unwieldy documents, opaque to ordinary citizens and subject to endless legal challenge and revision.

This makes Britain both far more subject to centralized command and control and far more dominated by big corporations than other countries. It is a good example of how socialism and crony capitalism go hand in hand. Barriers to entry erected by planning play into the hands of large companies and make it hard for small, innovative competitors to take them on. In turn, this leads developers to produce unimaginative, repetitive designs to get the best return on their huge investment in land and permission.

Getting planning permission to build houses in Britain requires you to spend big sums on consultants, lawyers, lobbyists and public relations experts, as you wear down the councils’ planning teams and their ever growing lists of questions over several years. Not that the two sides to such debates are really antagonists: it is more like a symbiosis, a dance in which both sides benefit, because the fees to be earned by everybody from ecologists to economists are rich. And that is because at the end of the process the reward can be huge: a 100-fold uplift or more in the value of a field that gets turned into housing.

As a property owner, I have experience of this system and, I freely admit, a vested interest in it. I should be arguing for it, rather than against. However frustrating planning authorities can be, the rewards they bring to property owners can be large, either through upward pressure on prices and rents by their restrictions on permissions, or through uplifts in the value of land zoned for development.

Our mostly centralised taxes make things worse. In Switzerland, cantons compete for the local taxes that residential property owners pay, encouraging them to agree promptly to building bids, whereas here development brings headaches for local councils in providing infrastructure and services, only partly redressed with “section 106” agreements that make developers pay for schools and roads.

The system also creates opportunities for nimbyism on a greater scale than elsewhere. Opposing new development because it blocks your view, increases congestion on the roads and crowds the doctor’s surgery and local school, is rational everywhere. But it is much easier to organize a protest when the decisions are taken by council officials and the permissions are for big projects, rather than where many small decisions to build are taken by many dispersed owners and builders.

If Sajid Javid is to succeed in revolutionizing Britain’s housing market, he must tackle the underlying causes. Rent control, help-to-buy, affordable housing mandates and bearing down on developers’ land banks mostly address the symptoms. Forcing councils to set higher targets for house building is a start, but if he were to succeed in unleashing a building boom across the country sufficient to bring down house prices he would create a debt crisis among those with negative equity. So it will not be easy to cure Britain’s addiction to property, but he must try.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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