It's Time to Talk About Black Privilege

Here's some good news for all you black folks complaining about racism in America.

You don't know how good you have it.

 

At least that's the message I heard during one of the strangest conversations I've ever had about race. I was talking about the concept of white privilege -- the belief that being white comes with unearned advantages and everyday perks that its recipients are often unaware of. I asked a white retiree if he believed in the existence of white privilege. He said no, but there was another type of privilege he wanted to talk about:

 

"Black privilege."

 

Confused by his answer, I asked him to give me an example of a perk that I enjoyed as a black man that he couldn't. His answer: "Black History Month."

 

"In America you can't even talk about whiteness," said Drew Domalick, who lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin. "If you try to embrace being white, you are portrayed as being a racist. If we had a White History Month, that would be viewed as a racist holiday."

 

Domalick isn't the only one who believes in black privilege. The term is being deployed in conservative circles as a rhetorical counterattack to the growing use of the term "white privilege." It's part of a larger transformation: White is becoming the new black.

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It's time to talk about black privilege - CNN.com

Hump Day Hunnies

The True Story of the Financial Crisis

By Peter J. Wallison

As many readers of The American Spectator will know, I was a member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a 10-member body appointed by Congress to investigate the causes of the financial crisis of 2008. The Commission issued its report in late January 2011, with a majority concluding that the crisis could have been avoided if the private sector had not taken so many risks and government regulators had not been asleep at the switch. I dissented from the majority's view, arguing in my dissent that the financial crisis would not have occurred if government housing policies had not fostered the creation of an unprecedented number of subprime and otherwise risky loans immediately before the financial crisis began.

After the majority's report was published, many people lamented that it was not possible to achieve a bipartisan agreement even on the facts. But the way the Commission was organized and run made this impossible. One glaring example will illustrate the problem. In March 2010, Edward Pinto, a resident fellow (and my colleague) at the American Enterprise Institute who had served as chief credit officer at Fannie Mae, sent the Commission a 70-page, fully sourced memorandum on the number of subprime and other high-risk mortgages in the financial system in 2008. Pinto's research showed that he had found more than 25 million such mortgages (his later work showed that there were approximately 27 million). Since there are about 55 million mortgages in the U.S., Pinto's research indicated that, as the financial crisis began, half of all U.S. mortgages were of inferior quality and liable to default when housing prices were no longer rising. In August, Pinto supplemented his initial research with a paper documenting the efforts of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), over two decades and through two administrations, to increase home ownership by reducing mortgage-underwriting standards.

This information, which highlighted the role of government policy in fostering the creation of these low-quality mortgages, raised important questions about whether the mortgage meltdown would have been so destructive if those government policies had not existed. Any objective investigation of the causes of the financial crisis would have looked carefully at Pinto's research, exposed it to the members of the Commission, taken Pinto's testimony, and tested the accuracy of his research. But the Commission took none of these steps. Pinto's memos were never made available to the other members of the FCIC, or even to the commissioners who were members of the subcommittee charged with considering the role of housing policy in the financial crisis.

Ultimately, I dissented from the Commission majority's report. There was no alternative. The Commission's management -- particularly its chairman, Philip Angelides, a former Democratic treasurer of California and unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate -- would not allow the staff to pursue any theories about the causes of the financial crisis other than those embodied in the standard left-wing narrative. And in the end a majority of the commissioners -- never having been presented with any contrary evidence -- signed on to a report that said the financial crisis could have been avoided if there had been better regulation of the private sector.
 
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The True Story of the Financial Crisis | The American Spectator

Paramedics Don't Make $15 an Hour

Science, Religion and the Big Bang Theory

Whenever a major new scientific theory comes along, there is a tendency to mix it together with religion, and the outcome is often both unexpected and unfavorable. When the distinction between science and religion is clearly understood, such problems can be avoided. The history of the Big Bang theory is a fine example of how to do it right, thanks to one man who had that clear understanding.

A century ago, we had no idea of separate galaxies. There were some fuzzy objects out there, but telescopes weren't good enough to resolve what they actually were. Astronomy was still a fascinating field, but there was not yet a field of cosmology. Then in 1916 came Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which was a comprehensive theory uniting space, time and gravity.

That theory was totally different from what people had previously assumed. However, Einstein's previous accomplishments (four important new theories in 1905) assured that many scientists at least paid attention. By 1919, a prediction of Einstein's theory was verified via an experiment conducted during a solar eclipse, and that greatly enhanced the credibility of General Relativity.

Soon many more scientists got interested, because it was possible to associate the huge amount of observed astronomical data with a theory that made sense of it all. The measurable difference in light arriving from some very distant stars (the “red shift”) provided convincing evidence that the universe was expanding – and that begged for an explanation. Einstein's equations of General Relativity involved tensor calculus, which was unfamiliar to most scientists at the time; but a few set out to solve those equations for special conditions of the universe. Einstein, who once said, “I want to know God's thoughts...the rest are details,” himself believed that the universe was in a “steady state,” hardly changing at all.

In 1922, the Russian Alexander Friedmann worked out a solution for a universe expanding from a singular starting point; unfortunately, he died soon thereafter and his work wasn't noticed. Working independently, Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian Catholic priest, solved Einstein's equations for a universe starting at time t = 0 and expanding from a singular point to its present size. He submitted that as his doctoral thesis to both Harvard and M.I.T. in 1925, and that was quickly noticed in the western scientific world.

Read the rest here:
Articles: Science, Religion and the Big Bang Theory

Back to the Future

Ninety years ago -- in 1921 -- federal income tax policies reached an absurdity that many people
today seem to want to repeat. Those who believe in high taxes on "the rich" got their way. The tax rate on people in the top income bracket was 73 percent in 1921. On the other hand, the rich also got their way: They didn't actually pay those taxes.

The number of people with taxable incomes of $300,000 a year and up -- equivalent to far more than a million dollars in today's money -- declined from more than a thousand people in 1916 to less than three hundred in 1921. Were the rich all going broke?

It might look that way. More than four-fifths of the total taxable income earned by people making $300,000 a year and up vanished into thin air. So did the tax revenues that the government hoped to collect with high tax rates on the top incomes.

What happened was no mystery to Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon. He pointed out that vast amounts of money that might have been invested in the economy were instead being invested in tax-exempt securities, such as municipal bonds.

Secretary Mellon estimated that the amount of money invested in tax-exempt securities had nearly tripled in a decade. The amount of this money that the tax collector couldn't touch was larger than the federal government's annual budget and nearly half as large as the national debt. Big bucks went into hiding.

Mellon pointed out the absurdity of this situation: "It is incredible that a system of taxation which permits a man with an income of $1,000,000 a year to pay not one cent to the support of his Government should remain unaltered."

Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/09/13/back_to_the_future_part_iii_111305.html#ixzz440fBWzcQ
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Blog: What Our Mis-educated Younger Generation Misses

By Edward Bernard Glick

 

Recently, Britain’s The Economist magazine began a piece with “One of the perks of getting old is that you are allowed to talk nonsense about the young.” 

Since I am old, I shall claim my perk.

What bothers me the most is that most young Americans do not share President Abraham Lincoln’s belief, expressed in an 1862 message to Congress, that America is “the last best hope of earth.” In fairness, given the sorry state of history instruction in this country, manny of them probably never heard of Lincoln’s phrase.

My other impressions have to do with:

(1) the failure of young Americans to live by basic economic principles,

(2) their apparent unconcern about our open southern borders,

(3) the unanticipated consequences of an all-volunteer military,

(4) their general silence about rogue states and terrorist entities,

(5) their belief that the Roman proverb “He who wishes peace should prepare for war” is bad advice,

(6) their embrace of the notion that the United States is history’s most imperialistic country, and

(7) their addiction to diversity and rejection of the melting pot.

America is not the world’s worst imperialist.  After World War Two, when it was briefly the world’s only nuclear power, it absorbed no one’s territory. And on July 4, 1946, it granted full independence to the Philippines. 

I am troubled that the young do not relate to military service. After Vietnam, the country decided to do away with the “undemocratic” draft. That was a huge mistake because in a democracy all classes and regions should share the responsibility of fighting and dying for the country.

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Blog: What Our Mis-educated Younger Generation Misses

Hump Day Hunnies

The Myth of the Stolen Election

This was originally published at American Thinker in 2005. Thought it was worth revisiting.

By Richard Baehr

The serious political season is about to begin, and the preliminaries that have occurred to date suggest it will be an extremely bitter one. While most Americans go about their daily lives, not thinking all that much about politics, both conservative and liberal partisans are deeply engaged in the forthcoming Presidential election contest.

Elections in which vengeful anger is the strongest motivating force for one or more sides, deviate from the American norm. Rhetoric, tactics, strategy, judgment, and voter turnout are all affected, often in surprising ways, and blunders, major and minor, become even more common than usual.

While the ideological divide between the two sides often has been quite sharp, the current level of personal bitterness is unusually high, by recent historical standards.  In this election cycle, the tone of ugliness is being set on the left. Established liberal writers for respected publications, notably Jonathan Chait in the New Republic, have written lengthy defenses of why they hate George Bush. Chait's argument includes in equal parts policy differences with Bush, loathing of Bush's personal style (his Southernness, his lack of intellectual curiosity, his religiousness), and the bloody sheet that the left will wave this year: Bush's 'stolen election' of 2000. 

The emotional and political divide separating right and left in this country has become obsessive. The left is obsessed with the evil that is George Bush, and the need to get rid of him.The Democrats seem prepared to nominate as their candidate for President, the angriest of the Bush haters running, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean.In a September 25^th Democratic candidates' debate, Dean stated: 'We need to remember that the enemy here is George Bush, not each other.' And by extension, the enemy therefore is also not Osama Bin laden, Saddam Hussein, nor Kim Jong—il.

Paul Krugman, op ed columnist for the New York Times, and contender for the title of most obsessive Bush—hater, described the anger faction's perspective on January 2 : 'Most Democrats feel, with justification, that we're facing a national crisis—that the right, ruthlessly exploiting 9/11, is making a grab for total political dominance.' Krugman's idea of a national crisis is that the Republicans might get Bush re—elected, and increase their narrow margins in the Congress.

The right has had its own obsession in recent years, in its loathing of Bill Clinton.But this time around, anger management is a need mostly of the left.

Today, the right's enemies are the enemies of the United States, whether they be in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Saudi Arabia, or even hiding out in America. Certainly many Democrats also want America to be successful in these efforts. But for the agenda—setting, activist faction of the left, defeating George Bush takes precedence over beating back al Qaeda.

The statements made by the Democratic field of Presidential candidates in the run—up to their primaries leaves no doubt that the 'stolen election' of 2000 will be a constant refrain this year. Certain parts of the fable surrounding this alleged theft have been repeated so often that they are viewed as established fact by many partisans on the left.  A documentary film, consumed with outrage over the 'stolen election' is currently playing at such trendy venues as Chicago's Gene Siskel Theatre. Unprecedented: the 2000 Presidential Election, a 50 minute screed by Richard R. Perez and Joan Sekler, instructs its viewers how tens of thousands of African Americans 'were illegally but strategically disqualified as convicted felons," according to one approving reviewer.

The Democrats seem determined to keep the 2000 election issue alive, even though it failed miserably as a rallying cry against Jeb Bush, who won a resounding 56% to 43% re—election victory in the 2002 Florida Governor's race. It is worth examining the mythology and the real, not—so—ancient history of the 'stolen election'. 

It is ironic that among the angriest of those who charge that Bush's election was illegitimate, are many who did not even support Al Gore for President. Michael Moore has made the 'stolen election' a core element of his books and speeches since 2000. Yet Moore was an advocate for Ralph Nader, who won over 92,000 votes in Florida in 2000. Had Nader not run, or prominent leftists like Moore not supported him, perhaps enough Nader voters would have trickled over to the Gore column to enable him to win Florida. The anger over the 'stolen election' in many cases may be deflected guilt over some sense of responsibility for allowing Bush to win. 

Gary Wills, in his new book on Thomas Jefferson and slavery, accuses Jefferson of winning the election of 1800 by capturing the votes of states in which the slaves were counted as 3/5 persons, a device which padded the Congressional and therefore Electoral College representation of the slave states. He seems to find this comparable in some way to Bush's 'blitzkrieg of lawyers' who helped steal the 2000 election.  Wills's language is not accidental. Just as critics of Israel's policies love to diminish Israel, by analogizing Israel's behavior to apartheid South Africa or the Nazis, Wills's use of the word 'blitzkrieg' is designed to suggest that Bush and his fascist—like right wing hordes stole the recent election.

Five Things Children Know That Liberals Have Forgotten - John Hawkins

Liberals are actually worse than children, not just because it's so appalling to see adults who view
themselves as highly intelligent and sophisticated thinking like little kids, but because in some respects, left-wing thinking is inferior to that of children. There are things that five year olds all across this country know that liberal child-men are intellectually unable to comprehend.

1) Life's not fair. There's probably not a kid in this country who hasn't said, "That's not fair," and has heard a "Life's not fair" in return. You could actually go farther than that. Not only is life not fair, the word "fair" is completely arbitrary and primarily dependent on whose goose is getting gored.

If you're paying 35% of your income in taxes and are being told that it's not "fair" you're only paying that much when almost half the country isn't paying any income tax at all, you probably disagree in the strongest of terms. On the other hand, someone making $10,000 a year might not think it's "fair" for someone else to make so much more money than he does after taxes. If you're a black, Harvard educated business owner with 10 million dollars in the bank, you may think it's perfectly fair that your son gets into a college over a more qualified son of a white garbage collector because of Affirmative Action, but it's pretty easy to see how the person being discriminated against because of his race wouldn't feel the same way.

In other words, one person's "fair" is another's person's "unfair" which can become a huge problem when the government starts defining what's "fair" and putting the force of law behind it. Yes, some of that has to happen in order to have an orderly and law abiding society, but increasingly, what's "fair" is becoming little more than an overbearing government and tyrannical judges abusing the law to do favors for the politically well-connected and voting blocks they think will help "their side." No matter what they do, life will never be “fair" and trying to make it so is an inherently "unfair" exercise in utopianism that has proven to lead to considerably more misery than simply accepting that "Life isn't fair" in the first place.

2) You can't have everything you want. This is something most kids learn when they don't get a pony at Christmas or when their parents take them into a dollar store and tell them they can have "two things."

This is not a lesson liberals seem to have ever learned because their thinking is, "If it's a 'good idea,' then it should be funded, regardless of what it costs, regardless of whether it's worth the money." It's like liberals start with the assumption that we have infinite money and if anyone opposes spending for any reason, it must be because he’s "mean." Did you know we actually have a higher debt load per person than Greece ($44,215 vs. $39,000), a nation that's only being saved from default because richer countries are paying its bills? So what happens when we run out of money, go into a depression, taxes explode, and the checks from the government slow down and stop? Judging by what's happening in Greece, liberals will start throwing Molotov cocktails in the street and blame everyone but themselves for spending the country into oblivion.

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Five Things Children Know That Liberals Have Forgotten - John Hawkins - Page full

The Antibiotic Apocalypse Explained

What's the largest number you can represent with 3 digits? Nope. It's not 999.

This article was written by Ed Trice, Executive Director at Lightning Cloud Computing. It was originally published at linkedin.com

This post is about my fight against "Standardized Testing" in math, and what later became "Common Core." It goes back to 2008 when my daughter was in grade school. I got a call to come to the principal's office. I was surprised, as this was a real first. Like all fathers I suppose, we tend to think of our little girls as angelic and saintlike. In my case, this was the absolute truth.

"Your daughter was being disruptive in class."

It was like an arrow through my heart. I looked over at her. There were tear-streaked marks all down her face. She looked down at her shoes when I shot a glance over at her. And she started sobbing again. The principal continued his monotone diatribe, while I walked over to kneel besides my daughter and hug her.

"Really, Mr. Trice, that's not appropriate..."

I continued to ignore him. "Are you OK?" I asked her. She looked up, nodded her head, and sniffled.
"Tell me what happened" was all I said as I tried not to stare through the principal's skull with my X-ray vision superpower.

"Your daughter tried to correct her math teacher. The teacher explained why she was wrong, and she insisted that she was correct."

I laughed.

I knew she was right and the teacher was wrong. I couldn't wait to hear this one.

"What was the question?" I asked as the principal was about to interject a rebuke to my outburst.

The teacher was also present, and he spoke up. "The question was, what was the largest number that can be represented with 3 digits. I said it was 999, your daughter disagreed."

I remember thinking "Uh-oh. What the heck was she thinking?"

That's when she spoke up, anger in her voice, "Oh yeah? Tell me what 9 raised to the 9th power raised to the 9th power is then??"

Holy crap! She was right! Technically, the problem is not asking for the largest 3-digit number, which is exactly where my mind went upon hearing the question. The question is asking you to represent a number using 3 digits, so exponentiation cannot be ruled out.

I looked over at her and smiled and said "Way to go! You're 100% correct!" And I gave her a high-five. She smiled. Then cried some tears of joys as she laughed. She knew I had her back.
"Well? What do you say now?" I asked them both as I rose.

"That is not the correct answer," the principal insisted.

"The hell it isn't!" I said.

"We have not covered exponents yet," explained the teacher.

And so it went. For 30 minutes I gave them hell. I asked for a compromise. My daughter was not to be marked wrong, due to the ambiguous nature of the question, and I won't insist that the rest of the class be marked wrong, because they did not learn exponents yet.

"You don't understand," the principal said, "This is a standardized, nationwide test. We don't have the power to change her grade."

I then asked them to factor into account her "real grade" if it was marked correct when it came time for them to compute her report card grade. Again, they declined. That got me angry.

You see, for 5 years straight, my daughter has had the same grade in math: 100%. She scored 100 on every test she ever took. Seriously. She has a unique mind. It was 4 years later that I was called by a math teacher again. This time it was for geometry. The teacher was going over how triangles added up to 180 degrees, always, no matter what. My daughter thought about this for a few minutes as the lesson went on, and she raised her hand. "I know how to make a triangle add up to 270 degrees."

And she did. All she had to do was stare at the globe in the corner of the classroom. When the teacher said it was "impossible" to have a triangle add up to 270 degrees, she corrected him with an incredible example. If you draw a triangle on globe, each angle being 90 degrees, you can connect the north pole to the equator, the equator line can go 90 degrees around the globe perpendicular to the first one, then then north pole can drop a 90 degree line to meet this line at the equator to complete the triangle. Triangles on curves can have more, or less, than 180 degrees, depending on convexity or concavity of the surfaces.

In the second instance the teacher called to congratulate me on raising such a brilliant little girl. Back to the first instance...

My real fight began when I got home. I looked up the formal procedure to request a third party review for a dispute over a national test question. It was laborious. I met with the superintendent of schools, who called the principal, who brought the math teacher to another meeting, this one at the state capital.

Their faces were no longer smug and arrogant when I walked into the room. In fact, I sensed fear. Real fear. They looked white as ghosts.

The tone was civil. The teacher began with a 2 minute prepared speech about how brilliant my daughter is, and then the inevitable conjunction showed up: "...but..."

The superintended nodded.

"Mr. Trice, the only way I can give your daughter credit for that one answer," (and he really put emphasis on one) "is to go to the national board of education and have everyone who took this test have their answers marked incorrect."

Amazingly, he thought that would make me want to back down.

"OK. Do it."

The three of them were mid-stance, not yet fully risen from their seats, and they froze.

"Beg pardon?" asked the superintendent.

"I said, do it. As in, make it happen. As in, execute that course of action."

They sat back down. The next hour involved them trying to persuade me against it. Finally, they started the concessions. My daughter would be given a score of 100 instead of 99, but the others would not be penalized. After all, this was two months later, etc. etc. etc.

"No. I gave you that option already and it was declined. I want every exam in the country marked incorrect that has 999 as the correct answer."

It took an attorney and another 3 months, but I got the result. My daughter scored the only 100 on the exam that year for her grade, not just in her class, but in the country.

I didn't care what it cost. I didn't care how much effort it took. I didn't care that an entire federal department was given tens of thousands of hours of work in addition to the demands placed on it.

I cared that an individual who had the ability to shape my daughter's future mind made her cry when she was right and he was wrong and he knew it. This could have been handled so much better by the overlords.

Forget about it being my daughter for a second. The truly sad thing is, look how a unique mind was mistreated for being brilliant. How many times does something parallel to this happen in our once great country? How many teachers squelch out the faint cry of genius from some shy personality sitting in the back of a classroom?

My daughter is now a sophomore in college, carrying a 3.82 in Biology with a leaning towards pre-med. I fought hard for her, and continue to do so. I remind her all of the time about a great quote from Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain.

"I never let schooling interfere with my education."

Don't let common core stand in the way of your own children's education.

Friday Funnies

Democrats Love Free Stuff

Hump Day Hunnies

Enough with the Double Standards for Muslims

If alleged Islamophobia causes Muslims to pillage, rape, and slaughter, then how come centuries of anti-Semitism have not produced a raging Jewish population hell-bent on murder?  Or if cartoons about Muhammad can cause homicidal riots, how come the daily anti-Semitic cartoons emanating out of the Middle East and other parts of the globe do not result in Jews going on a rampage? 

Because civilized people don't behave this way.

For that matter, how come when people step on the American flag and rip it to shreds, Americans don't go on assassination raids? 

I am absolutely sick and tired of talking heads using a double standard for those Muslims who act like barbarians against their own women and against other people who refuse to accede to their demands.

If you don't want to eat bacon, then don't eat bacon.

If you don't want to drink alcohol, then don't drink alcohol.

If you don't want to wear pig costumes, then don't.

But we will not surrender to your demands.

When people begin to self-censor their ideas, their activities, their food, and their entertainment, we might as well put "RIP" over our heads, because we are triggering our own suicide.

I, for one, opt out of that thinking.  If you cannot abide by the American Constitution, and despise what the Stars and Stripes symbolizes, you are certainly free to leave this country.  If you cannot use the same toilet as a non-Muslim child, then please do not use the facilities.  We are not going backward to a segregation of Muslims vs. non-Muslims.

If you want to pray, you will not take over public space of a taxpayer-funded university and demand a key to lock out anyone else who wants to use the room.

Engaging in female genital mutilation has no place in this country; it is heinous and a form of child abuse.
If you don't approve of gay people's lifestyles, it is unacceptable to harm them.  You can think what you want, but when you act out and are violent, then you have crossed the line.  It will not be tolerated.

And no, we don't want American girls to wear the hijab in school, since it actually represents one part of the infiltration and indoctrination that ultimately results in building mosques, advancing the teaching of Arabic, demanding Halal food, and creating Islamic financial institutions that fund jihad.  These are not disconnected events, but part of a well coordinated movement toward an Islamic caliphate.

Read the rest here:
Articles: Enough with the Double Standards for Muslims

Here Be Dragons: How the 2016 Election is Shaping Up | Afterburner

Were Jews Ever Really Slaves in Egypt, or Is Passover a Myth?

by Josh Mintz

Here's a question for you: what do actor Charlton Heston, DreamWorks animation studios and Former Prime Minister Menachem Begin all have in common? Well, they've all, at one time or another, perpetuated the myth that the Jews built the pyramids. And it is a myth, make no mistake. Even if we take the earliest possible date for Jewish slavery that the Bible suggests, the Jews were enslaved in Egypt a good three hundred years after the 1750 B.C. completion date of the pyramids. That is, of course, if they were ever slaves in Egypt at all.




We are so quick to point out the obvious lies about Jews and Israel that come out in Egypt – the Sinai Governors claims that the Mossad released a shark into the Red Sea to kill Egyptians, or, as I once read in a newspaper whilst on holiday in Cairo, the tale of the magnetic belt buckles that Jews were selling cheap in Egypt that would sterilize men on contact – yet we so rarely examine our own misconceptions about the nature of our history with the Egyptian nation.

We tend, in the midst of our disdain for Egyptian, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, to overlook the fact that one of the biggest events of the Jewish calendar is predicated upon reminding the next generation every year of how the Egyptians were our cruel slave-masters, in a bondage that likely never happened. Is this really so different from Jaws the Mossad agent?

The reality is that there is no evidence whatsoever that the Jews were ever enslaved in Egypt. Yes, there's the story contained within the bible itself, but that's not a remotely historically admissible source. I'm talking about real proof; archeological evidence, state records and primary sources. Of these, nothing exists.

It is hard to believe that 600,000 families (which would mean about two million people) crossed the entire Sinai without leaving one shard of pottery (the archeologist's best friend) with Hebrew writing on it. It is remarkable that Egyptian records make no mention of the sudden migration of what would have been nearly a quarter of their population, nor has any evidence been found for any of the expected effects of such an exodus; such as economic downturn or labor shortages. Furthermore, there is no evidence in Israel that shows a sudden influx of people from another culture at that time. No rapid departure from traditional pottery has been seen, no record or story of a surge in population.

In fact, there's absolutely no more evidence to suggest that the story is true than there is in support of any of the Arab world's conspiracy theories and tall tales about Jews.

So, as we come to Passover 2012 when, thanks to the “Arab Spring,” our relations with Egypt are at a nearly 40 year low, let us enjoy our Seder and read the story by all means, but also remind those at the table who may forget that it is just a metaphor, and that there is no ancient animosity between Israelites and Egyptians. Because, if we want to re-establish that elusive peace with Egypt that so many worked so hard to build, we're all going to have to let go of our prejudices.

Josh Mintz is completing his degree in International Relations and Middle Eastern studies and is the communications director at Friend a Soldier, an NGO that encourages dialogue with IDF soldiers.

Source:
Were Jews Ever Really Slaves in Egypt, or Is Passover a Myth? - The Jewish Thinker - Haaretz - Israeli News Source Haaretz.com

What Is the Fair Share of Taxes? by Walter E.Williams

Presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders, along with President Obama, say they
want high-income earners, otherwise known as the rich, to pay their fair share of income taxes. None of these people, as well as the uninformed in the media and our campus intellectual elites, will say precisely what is the "fair share" of taxes. That is because they would look ignorant and silly, so they stick with simply saying that the rich should pay more. Let's you and I take a peek at who pays what in federal income taxes.

The following represents 2012 income tax data recently released by the Internal Revenue Service, compiled by the Tax Foundation (http://tinyurl.com/j5yr8cd). The top 1 percent, 1.37 million taxpayers earning $434,682 and more, paid 38 percent of all federal income taxes. The top 5 percent, those earning $175,817 and more, paid 59 percent. The top 10 percent of income earners, those earning $125,195 and up, paid 70 percent of all federal income taxes. The top 25 percent, those earning $73,354 and up, paid 86 percent. The bottom 50 percent, people earning $36,055 and less, paid a little less than 3 percent of federal income taxes. According to estimates by the Tax Policy Center, slightly over 45 percent of American households have no federal income tax liability.

With this information in hand, you might ask the next person who says the rich do not pay their fair share of taxes: Exactly what percentage of total federal income taxes should the 1-percenters pay? I seriously doubt whether you will get any kind of coherent answer. By the way, since 1-percenter income starts at $435,000, it might be pointed out that $400,000 or $500,000 a year is not even yacht or Learjet money. Plus, if one has two kids in college, a big mortgage and car payments, I doubt he would declare himself rich.

Read more:
What Is the Fair Share of Taxes? by Walter E.Williams | Creators Syndicate

Friday Funnies

George Carlin - Political Correctness is fascism pretending to be Manners

Hump Day Hunnies