ActRight

An Afghan migrant attacked a woman at an asylum centre in Austria because she was reading a bible.

Liberals believe in government action...Conservatives believe in limited government.

The 10 Most Annoying Liberals of 2016 - John Hawkins: Honorable mentions: Samantha Bee, CAIR, Ta-Nesi Coates, Dixie Chicks, Bill .12/31/2016 10:56:49AM EST.

Yesterday I submitted my post Fake News with photos of Fake Scientists to Reddit in subreddit inthenews.  It received one positive and one negative comments, and then I was banned from inthenews an…

Much of the time, fact-checking is opinion journalism in disguise.

Donald Trump's senior counselor told Dailymail.com that he wants 'Hobbits' and 'Deplorables' to hold his feet to the fire as he steers the president's strategic ship.

Migrants have slammed Sweden for not providing them with jobs and private homes, accusing Swedes of "killing" them and making them miserable.

Man, that did not go as planned at all. Remember 2008. President George W. Bush, who had planned to spend his presidency reforming education and overseeing a Texas-style economic renaissance on a national scale, had been for years mired in the unpopular and thankless project of trying to build liberal democracies for backward desert tribesmen who have neither the capacity nor the desire for them. Vast sums of money were spent, many fine soldiers gave their lives, and no obvious progress toward that larger end was made. The American people grew weary of it, and then grew frightened for their own immediate economic prospects as a financial crisis followed by a series of unusual government interventions into the economy gave them every reason to believe, and to resent the fact, that the politically connected were playing by a different set of rules. People in decaying Rust Belt towns and other communities that had failed to thrive in the early 21st-century economic order asked, not unreasonably, why it was that Wall Street firms were “too big to fail” but their former employers were not. And so they turned to Barack Obama. He was young, eloquent, and at times inspiring, apparently unflappable, and, in spite of his origins as a jumped-up Chicago ward-heeler — or perhaps because of them — he was, he assured us, above anything so petty as ideology. He was vague enough: “Hope and change” at the macro level, “do what works” at the operational level. To the extent that he had anything like a substantive vision, it was, roughly: Stop spending all that money over there, and start spending some of it over here. It was a message we had heard before and have heard since, not only from populists such as Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump but also, in some form, from more-traditional Democrats such as Hillary Rodham Clinton and from libertarian-leaning conservatives such as Rand Paul. That sentiment has long been a part of mainstream Republican rhetoric: It is what Dwight Eisenhower meant when he said that every dollar spent on bombs and bullets was stolen from the poor and the destitute. Obama’s mandate (here I use the ordinary sense of the word, not the special political sense) was clear enough: stabilize the economy and get it back to regular growth, bring our active military entanglements in the Middle East to some sort of orderly and honorable conclusion, and use the savings to fund some sort of national health-insurance benefit. It is a shame that Lyndon Johnson did not live long enough to see his 1964 election reprised. RELATED: Assessing the Obama Legacy — Against His Own Mileposts Johnson ran as the peace candidate in 1964, promising to get us out of Vietnam or at least to stop any escalation of American involvement there. The opposite happened. Johnson promised that Medicare would be efficiently run and financially self-sustaining. The opposite happened. Johnson said that his Great Society programs would usher in a new kind of America, one in which government-directed investments in anti-poverty campaigns and educational projects would not only lift up the poor but would, by helping them to maximize their own economic value, lift the entire country, too. The opposite, or something close to it, happened there, too. Johnson, who in Congress had opposed not only a great deal of civil-rights legislation but even anti-lynching bills, would in 1964 reinvent himself as a civil-rights champion. It is pleasant to think that, in whatever afterlife he finds himself in, he is both amused and pleased to see himself politically reincarnated as a black man. The key difference is that while Johnson may have been a rotten S.O.B., he knew what he was doing, more or less. He didn’t fumble into Vietnam in 1965 — he lied about his intentions in 1964. He was sufficiently intelligent, and sufficiently a man of the Senate, to understand that the particulars of legislative architecture were going to be the deciding factor in the success or the failure of his programs. He knew that they would have to be revisited over the years. He was a deeply weird man — and a monster — but he was also a resident of the real world. Barack Obama? Less so. #share#In the eight years of his presidency, we have both abandoned and re-invaded Iraq, launched new engagements in the Middle East and in Africa, and contributed mightily to the mess in Syria with President Obama’s empty talk of “red lines” and sundry ultimata, none of which was taken seriously in Damascus — or Moscow, or Tehran, or Beijing, or Washington, for that matter. The United States and Russia are at the moment engaged in an escalating tit-for-tat confrontation over Moscow’s minor-league meddling in the presidential election, which is, of course, what President Obama really cares about: Vladimir Putin can annex Crimea and test out new weapons on civilians in Syria, but release a bucket of embarrassing DNC e-mails (the veracity of which is, incidentally, not in dispute) and the Obama administration swings into action. RELATED: Obama’s Second Term Was a Complete Failure On foreign policy, the predictions of President Obama’s most trenchant conservative critics have come to pass: Neither our allies nor our enemies have confidence that we will say what we mean and do what we say. Beyond the squabble with Russia and the mess in Syria, our relations with Israel (speaking of meddling in elections overseas) are in tatters, our critical allies in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are both confused by our meandering indecision and alienated by the Obama administration’s pettiness and arrogance. The Europeans, who had hoped for so much from the Obama administration, have returned to their traditional view of the United States as the rich, powerful, oafish uncle kept at arm’s length until the moment of crisis, when he is irreplaceable. Democrats should be asking themselves what Barack Obama has accomplished, too: He has decimated their party. Obama’s record at home is no more impressive. He punted his health-care reform bill to his team in Congress, where the fine legislative minds of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid oversaw the creation of what the president proudly called “Obamacare,” which has created absolute chaos in the health-insurance market. The artificial marketplaces it created are collapsing, insurers are abandoning the program, premiums and deductibles are skyrocketing, consumers have fewer choices rather than more numerous ones, Medicaid is swollen, and the American people, who elected Barack Obama in no small part because they thought he could apply that cool intelligence for which he was famous (at least in the pages of the New York Times) to the health-insurance mess, absolutely hate what he has done. The Affordable Care Act almost certainly will be undone in the coming months, and the people who supported Barack Obama will be happy to see it go. It is foolish (and superstitious) to credit the president with the overall performance of the economy. But, holding President Obama to his own standard, things do not look too good there, either. Growth has been anemic for most of his presidency, and the outlook for employment and wages has been mediocre. Obama likes to boast of being the green-energy president and has been a terrible adversary for the traditional fossil-fuels business, but the fact is that much of the recent improvement in GDP growth is related to the recovery of the oil-and-gas business. The American energy renaissance is to be celebrated, but, at the same time, we should be mindful of the dangers of relying too heavily on any one source of growth and wealth. American homeowners felt pretty good about their economic prospects when housing prices were skyrocketing in the run-up to the financial crisis, but prices move both ways, including the price of oil, “peak oil” nincompoopery notwithstanding. #related#Republicans know what Barack Obama has accomplished: The GOP practically has never been in a better position politically, with the state legislatures and governorships, the House and the Senate, and a newly minted Republican president. (A ritual acknowledgement of Hubris, who is also a jealous god, is here appropriate.) But Democrats should be asking themselves what Barack Obama has accomplished, too: He has decimated their party. The things they care the most about are, from the progressive point of view, mostly either in stasis or in regress: climate-change legislation, economic inequality, abortion, transnational governance, etc. The Left is strangely focused at the moment on exotica such as which dressing room transsexuals use at the gym and whether nonconformist bakers can be obliged at gunpoint to bake a cake for Bill and Ted’s excellent wedding. Their national leaders are elderly, intellectually narrow hacks of the kind who give hacks a bad name. Their great hope is an author of self-help books who smoothed her academic career by pretending to be a Cherokee. Barack Obama, bless his heart, still hasn’t figured out that the job of the president isn’t giving speeches. And when was the last time he gave a speech that was worth a damn, anyway? No, that did not go as planned, at all. — Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent.

President-elect Trump has nominated as attorney general Jeff Sessions, who has championed the practice of civil asset forfeiture.

Filmed at the Emmanuel Centre in London on 21st November 2016. What is going on in the Western democracies? From Britain’s vote for Brexit, to Donald Trump’s...

An excerpt of Jonathan Haidt's appearance on the Waking Up with Sam Harris podcast. He discusses the alarming rise of a vindictive, authoritarian kind of pol...

When he died in February, many thought his originalist constitutional approach died with him.

Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz slammed President Obama for "stabbing Israel in the back" on Monday morning's edition of 'Fox & Friends.' "[History wil...

Mainstream media works in the realm of extremes. Their current narrative is that there's no shortage of of emotions flaring up on the political front as we get rolling in 2017. They tell us that the vast majority of Democrats are still furious over the election results. Meanwhile, they say the vast majority of Republicans are riled up as well, seeing in Donald Trump the answer to all their prayers.

AN ENTREPRENEUR from Germany has created trousers with the aim of protecting women from possible sex attacks while they are out jogging - and the first 150 were sold out immediately.

Rachel Dolezal has been disinvited from a speaking event at a Martin Luther King Jr. festival.

Daily Mail: Trump Chief Strategist Stephen K. Bannon Says 'Deplorables' Need to Hold Administration Accountable

Anderson Cooper Refuses To Admit To Kathy Griffin He Voted For Hillary Clinton Kathy Griffin fails to get Anderson Cooper to admit he voted for Hillary Clint...

Trump claims that his policies of trade restrictions, immigration restrictions, tax cuts, and higher federal government spending will create 25 million new jobs and will nearly double the current economic growth rate over the next decade. [...] several of Trump’s policies provide nothing more than a false sense of hope, particularly to those workers who are the least skilled, and who are the most vulnerable to economic dislocations arising from globalization and technological change. The United States benefits enormously from international trade, which provides not only a much wider range of goods for Americans to purchase, but also benefits the average American household by about $10,000 per year from lower prices. [...] U.S. trade restrictions would not make our industries more competitive. The Commerce Department estimates that three jobs are lost in the candy industry alone for every sugar job that is “saved” by protection. [...] hiking U.S. tariffs will raise the cost of the raw and intermediate imported goods that comprise our complex international supply chain. [...] Trump has not offered any proposal to deal with the looming imbalances of Social Security. Trump’s immigration plans make his goal of creating 25 million jobs virtually unattainable. Because of the accelerating retirement of workers from the Baby Boom generation, economists broadly agree that there is almost no chance the U.S. can create 25 million jobs in the next 10 years without considerable immigration.

Many conspiracy theorists have declared over the years that there's no two-party system in America. They believe that it's an illusion designed to present a picture of constant battle when in reality there's only one consolidated party that always pushes in the same basic direction. This is almost entirely untrue with one major exception.

University of Kansas students are being offered buttons through the school's library system meant to make their preferred gender pronouns clear.

The George Washington University is named for: a) America’s first president b) the president of the 1787 Constitutional Convention c) the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army d) all of the above If you struggled to answer that question, you may be a product of the George Washington University. Recently, GW — a 25,000-student private university located in Washington, D.C.’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood — eliminated its American-history requirement for undergraduate history majors, making it theoretically possible to graduate from GW with a history degree without ever having had to take a college-level course in U.S. history. Of course, GW’s decision is hardly novel. In July, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that “only 23 undergraduate history programs at the U.S. News & World Report’s top 25 national universities, top 25 public institutions, and top 25 liberal arts colleges require a single U.S. history class,” and where the requirement remained, students could fulfill it with courses such as “Mad Men and Mad Women” (Middlebury College) and “Hip-Hop, Politics, and Youth Culture in America” (University of Connecticut). But there is a special irony in this latest installment of the trend — and a particularly acute demonstration of how the elite American university is failing its students. GW, like many elite institutions of higher learning, is going global. On its “Our Priorities” webpage, GW presents a “formula for moving the world forward,” declaring its mission to be “finding solutions to national and global problems.” This is the trend in higher education. Stanford University is “one of the world’s great universities.” Columbia University calls itself “one of the world’s most important centers of research,” emphasizes its support for “research and teaching on global issues,” and aims “to convey the products of its efforts to the world.” Down the road, New York University, the height of cosmopolitanism, boasts that it has “50,000 students at three degree-granting campuses in New York City, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai, and at study away sites in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North and South America.” Put another way, the only continent from which NYU is institutionally absent is Antarctica. “Globalism” as the term of art for a sinister, George Soros–funded “New World Order” has become the bête noire of a particular strain of contemporary politics. But the word “globalism” is an accurate, neutral description of the type of thinking that has characterized elite universities since the end of World War II. To the administrators and academics who revise these institution’s mission statements, the nation-state has had its day. Local attachments breed conflict. Peace on Earth will reign when people share the intimacy of neighborhoods at the distance of nations. We need to work toward a “global community.” Barack Obama was only parroting his education when he declared himself a “citizen of the world.” That’s not an ignoble vision. But “the world” is not a thing like “France” or “Chile” or “the United States.” “The world” does not provide a particular lineage or a set of customs or a canon of stories that helps a person situate himself in time and space, that helps to constitute a unique and coherent identity. No one’s home is “the world.” ‘The world’ has no citizens, and those who hope to change it must do so by way of particular places and specific, local loyalties. In fact, the George Washington University was founded with something like the opposite in mind. “It has always been a source of serious regret with me to see the youth of these United States sent to foreign Countries for the purpose of Education,” George Washington wrote in 1799, “often before their minds were formed, or they had imbibed any adequate ideas of the happiness of their own.” Too frequently, he lamented, they contract “principles unfriendly to Republican Governmt [sic] and to the true & genuine liberties of Mankind; which, thereafter are rarely overcome.” As a remedy, Washington in his will bequeathed his 50 shares in the Potomac Company “towards the endowment of a UNIVERSITY to be established within the limits of the District of Columbia,” to which “the youth of fortune and talents from all parts thereof might be sent for the completion of their Education in all the branches of polite literature; in arts and Sciences, [and] in acquiring knowledge in the principles of Politics & good Government.” In 1821, by an Act of Congress, Washington’s benevolence became the Columbian College in the District of Columbia, renamed in 1904 “the George Washington University,” in honor of its de facto founder. The appropriateness — in 1799 or now — of a “national university” is debatable, but Washington’s larger vision deserves renewed consideration: He wanted the American university to be an American university, in its educational activities faithful to the unique history, circumstances, and meaning of the fledgling country in which it stood. The American university should cultivate leaders with a devotion to their nation, not an intellectual loyalty to an abstract notion. Times having changed, nurturing patriotism now smacks of indoctrination, and elite universities are eager not to tempt a flare-up of nationalism. But the result is not increased global solidarity; it’s more and more elite anomie, as the products of elite institutions absorb the message that natural, concrete loyalties — to country, chief among them — are toxic, and struggle to muster the same affection for high-minded ideological projects. #related#There is a place for cosmopolitanism, for worldliness, for a cultured touch, just as there is a place for international coordination and cooperation. Washington himself hoped his university would help students free themselves from “local prejudices & habitual jealousies” that “when carried to excess, are . . . pregnant of mischievous consequences to this Country.” But the rebel against the British Empire was not under the misimpression that the United States was merely a larval stage on the way to a more perfect global union. That is the view of many of our elite academic institutions, which are keen to speed the process along. But “the world” has no citizens, and those who hope to change it must do so by way of particular places and specific, local loyalties. If the George Washington University wishes to change the world, it might start by relearning its own history. — Ian Tuttle is the Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow at the National Review Institute. 

And I provide several rights-based arguments for immigration here. Image Source: nobeastsofierce/Shutterstock

A friend of mine treated himself to a new revolver for Hannukah, a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum. He and I took it to the range a few days ago to break it in. For the uninitiated, the S&W .44 Magnum is the gun Dirty Harry describes as the “the most powerful handgun in the world; would blow your head clean off.” It’s unbelievable fun to shoot, and, as you might guess, very, very loud. We were shooting at an indoor range, in Connecticut, and the noise led to a discussion of pistol silencers. My friend mentioned that in a couple of European countries where silencers are legal, it’s considered rude not to use one when you’re firing around other people. This makes sense; I’ve shot a few silenced guns over the years, and — aurally speaking — they are much, much more pleasant than their un-silenced counterparts. Thanks to movies — and the name “silencers” — people tend to think that silencers make guns silent. They don’t. What they do is turn something so loud that it damages your ears into something so loud that it merely hurts them. When you shoot a silenced gun, unless it’s a very low-caliber gun or its silencer is unusually large and effective, it’s still prudent to wear hearing protection. As it turns out, in Connecticut, it’s sort-of impossible to get a pistol silencer. In 1994, congress passed the Assault Weapons Ban. It was an asinine, ineffectual law that banned certain aesthetic features of guns, such as pistol grips, and certain features of convenience, such as adjustable stocks. It had no impact on the lethality of guns; a gun with a pistol grip can’t kill you any deader than a gun without one, or than a car. All the Assault Weapons Ban did was cause a nuisance. After Congress allowed the law to expire in 2004, Connecticut kept a version of it on its own books, as did many liberal states. Among the things that it makes illegal — it’s been expanded over the years — are threaded barrels, which you need in order attach a silencer to a gun. So while silencers are technically legal, you can’t buy a gun to which a silencer can be attached, unless it is a “pre-ban” gun and hasn’t left Connecticut, in which case it’s grandfathered in: A pistol with a threaded barrel that was legal in Connecticut before the ban is still legal today. Such guns are highly sought after, and now come with an enormous premium. Calls to a few gun shops and a look at the classifieds turned up only a handful for sale in the whole state, each selling for a 300 or 400 percent markup over the same pistol, post-ban. A new Glock 17, for instance, retails for four or five hundred dollars; a threaded barrel costs another hundred or so. One pre-ban threaded Glock 17 for sale in Connecticut costs $1,600. As of this writing, it appears to be the only one for sale in the state. An un-silenced Glock 17 will register at just over 160 decibels. According to Purdue University, a jet take-off at 25 yards registers at 150 decibels and will rupture your eardrums. This is why people generally wear hearing protection while they shoot guns. You know when people don’t wear hearing protection while they shoot guns? When someone breaks into their homes and they use their guns in self defense. The Trumps should also support a congressional overturning of all state laws which throw up arbitrary, nuisance restrictions on gun ownership. A silencer will bring a Glock 17 down to about 130 decibels, which is slightly louder than a pneumatic riveter but still 10 decibels short of the threshold for permanent hearing damage. If you have a lot of disposable income in Connecticut, you can exercise your right to self-defense and keep your hearing. If you don’t — if you are, for instance, poor and living in a high-crime neighborhood, Connecticut wants you to choose your ears or your life. How does this not infringe on one’s right to keep and bear arms? It’s disgraceful. Fortunately, there’s someone on the case: Donald Trump Jr. In late September, Trump Jr. gave an interview to an American silencer company called SilencerCo, in which he — like my friend — pointed out that when he shoots in Europe, the guns he uses are almost invariably silenced. “It’s about safety,” he said. “If you had noise levels in any other industry as you [have] in shooting sports, OSHA would be all over the place; people would be going crazy.” Silencer regulations, he argued, are “arbitrary policies” enacted by “people who don’t know what they’re talking about.” #related#Trump Jr. suggested that his father will support legislation to ban silencer bans, and everyone who likes being able to hear should be thankful if he does. The Trumps should also support a congressional overturning of all state laws which throw up arbitrary, nuisance restrictions on gun ownership: rules restricting barrel length, stock adjustability, firing rate, magazine capacity — all the stupid mandates of people who’ve never so much as fired a gun, and couldn’t make a rational argument that these restrictions save lives if their own lives depended on it. Then the Trumps should support a repeal of the asinine 1986 federal “Firearm Owners Protection Act” that invented a lot of these stupid ideas in the first place. Let’s #MakeGunsGreatAgain. — Josh Gelernter is a weekly columnist for the online Weekly Standard and a frequent contributor to NRO.

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