The Remarkable Investing Power of ‘Creative Destruction’ - by Nicholas Vardy

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is soon set to celebrate its 105-year anniversary — an astonishing achievement for any single company, let alone one in the dynamic and changing technology sector.

“Big Blue” is a remarkable exception in a world where companies come and go — and yesterday’s “heroes” become today’s “zeroes.”

Yet, this very “creative destruction” that makes companies come and go is a crucial factor in the long-term success of any investment strategy.

That’s also why — for your long-term investment success — picking the right country, market or sector is much more important than picking any single company or stock.

The Accelerating Pace of ‘Creative Destruction’

Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter popularized the phrase “creative destruction” in the 1940s. It is the idea that the engine of capitalism is the continuous creation of new ideas and new products, where the new pushes out the old.

You see examples of creative destruction throughout the history of the U.S. stock market.

In the 1920s, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was the “Google” of its day — a fast-growing company with new technology that changed the way an entire generation of Americans communicated. RCA actually lived a remarkably long life, born in 1919 and passing on in 1986.

And in today’s world of exponential change, the pace of this “creative destruction” is accelerating even as the average life span of companies is shrinking.

A mere decade ago, everywhere you looked, people either had Motorola phones (in the United States) or Nokia (everywhere else in the world). Or they carried Blackberries, manufactured by Canada’s Research in Motion.

Today, Motorola’s cell phone business Motorola Mobility Holdings, Inc. is part of Chinese-owned Lenovo, even as its market share has all but disappeared. Nokia (NOK) was eventually acquired by Microsoft. And the market share of Research in Motion (RIMM) has fallen off a cliff. Indeed, the company’s market share in the businesses it dominated just a few years ago continues to evaporate.
The fate of Research in Motion and Nokia echoes that of Palm — a once-high-flying company that hit a share price of $95.06 in 2000 — only to be acquired by HP for $5.70 a decade later. Once a company hits a death spiral, few make it out of the dive toward oblivion. Palm, a once-pioneering company in the world of “personal digital assistants,” was eventually sold to the Chinese electronics firm TCL Corporation. And it hasn’t been heard from since.

Even companies that don’t disappear end up mere shadows of their former selves. Cisco (CSCO), once expected to be the first $1 trillion company, today is worth less than 15% of that lofty amount. Former tech giant Lucent Technologies retired to the 7th Arrondissement Paris in 2006, acquired by France’s Alcatel.

The surprising thing is that — from a long-term perspective — the same fate likely awaits today’s tech-darlings Alphabet (GOOGL) and Apple (AAPL), as well.

The Myth of ‘One Decision’ Stock Investing

The fate of these former rising-star companies highlights the challenges of “one decision” investing, espoused by Warren Buffett.

When Buffett buys a stock, his ideal holding period is “forever.”

And this worked for him remarkably well…

Until it didn’t…

Over the last 51 years — since he acquired it — Berkshire Hathaway’s book value has grown from $19 to $157,000 — a rate of 19.36% compounded annually.

That number, however, conceals more than it reveals.

First, Buffett’s average rate of return up until about 2000 was right around 30%.

But Buffett’s long-term investment returns have plummeted over 30% during just the past 15 years. The numbers bear this out.

On June 19, 1998, Berkshire’s share price was $80,900. On Friday, March 24 2016, it closed at $210,530.

That works out to a very un-Buffett-like annual return of only 5.45% a year for the last 18 years.

And that’s more than just a streak of bad luck. After all, 18 years is close to 35% of Berkshire’s entire lifetime under Buffett’s stewardship.

Viewed through the lens of “creative destruction,” you could argue that the lack of growth from new companies and new ideas with potential exponential growth are behind Berkshire’s flagging returns.

The Unexpected Lesson

Over the long term, the more a country or a sector provides for an environment of “creative destruction,” the better.

And in practice, that means betting on both tech and small-cap stocks, as both have the potential to generate exponential returns old stalwarts simply cannot.

According to Yale endowment chief David Swensen, had you invested your money in a U.S. small-cap index in 1932, you’d have made 15,600 times your money between then and 2008.

And I bet there were very few individual companies in that index in 1932 that made it to 2008.

After all, 1932 was a long time ago…

Warren Buffett was two years old. Hitler had not yet come to power in Germany. The United States and the Western world were in the midst of a Great Depression. Television, jet planes and computers had yet to be invented.

At the same time, nowhere else but in the United States, where “creative destruction” is part of the very fiber of economic life, could you have generated those kind of returns.

So, the next time you invest, ask yourself whether the companies in that sector will be the same ones tomorrow as they are today…

And if the names aren’t changing, take heed…

That’s because the greater the “creative destruction” in a sector, the greater chance for potential profits…

Just make sure you bet on the winners.

In case you missed it, I encourage you to read my e-letter column from last week about how behavioral finance can help explain shifts in the market. I also invite you to comment in the space provided below my Eagle Daily Investor commentary.

http://humanevents.com/2016/03/29/the-remarkable-investing-power-of-creative-destruction/

TO UNDERSTAND IMMIGRATION, STUDY WESTERN CIVILIZATION - by Kenneth Calvert

There’s a good bit of discussion these days about immigration and border policy. While good policy is crucial, so is the question of “why” people immigrate to the United States in the first place.

Historians estimate that between 1815 and 1915, more than 30 million people came to the United States in one of the largest population movements in human history. In the 20^thcentury, millions came from around the world to escape socialist and communist tyranny, not to mention forced population movements in places like the Soviet Union.

A recent report from the Center for Immigration Studies states that 61 million legal and illegal immigrants currently reside in the United States, representing the most recent chapter of this remarkable and often contentious history.

What many Americans seem to miss, especially on our college and university campuses, is why so many millions of people have risked life and limb to join us in this truly exceptional spot on the planet. 

A student newspaper, the Stanford Review, recently argued that the reinstatement of a required course on Western Civilization removed from the university’s curriculum in 1988 is one way to fix this lack of understanding. The student petition simply states that American citizens ought to know the roots of their nation’s political culture — both the good and the bad of it. 

Their petition begins with a reference to President Obama’s 2014 statement on immigration reform. While his actual policies are more than a little befuddling, the president’s stated reasons to encourage new citizens were decidedly helpful. He said, “What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal — that all of us are created equal, and all of us have a chance to make of our lives what we will.” 

While he left out “inalienable rights” and “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” as well as an explicit affirmation of a Creator (though he does say “created”), he also made no promises of “equal outcomes” or of a “nanny state” to look after new citizens. Rather, Mr. Obama acknowledged our God-given equality, as well as our right to pursue the dictates of our conscience.

From there, the Stanford petition makes its argument for a university course that might give us reason to believe that tens of millions of immigrants, voting with their feet, can’t be wrong.

It is an important fact, of course, that it was in our Western Civilization that the university system took its most profound shape. So we might say that every university in America ought to, at the very least, acknowledge the culture from which it arose.  

However, more important is the fact that with a strong course like this, the students of Stanford would be introduced to non-European thinkers, such as Moses, Jesus and Augustine of Hippo. They would hear from Europeans, such as Aristotle and Locke, whose thoughts on political science deeply shaped the form of government enjoyed by the citizens of our nation — and the students of Stanford University. 

Students would come to grips with the historians and philosophers who shaped our understanding of rights, of liberty, and of the inherent worth of the individual. Their conviction that one has a right to choose one’s leaders and so much else taken for granted by Stanford students will be found in the study of Western Civilization. 

To be sure, students would also face moments in that history when these ideals had not existed, were in their infant form or were subject to the inconsistencies and hypocrisies that are part of any human endeavor. But they would also learn of the abolition of such things as slavery, through the work of the American Founding Fathers in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, in the work of the English, evangelical reformer William Wilberforce, or of course, of Abraham Lincoln and all of the history he learned in preparation for the struggles of 1860-1865. 

An ignorance of these things results in a lack of appreciation for what our ancestors have passed along to us. We become convinced that the arrogance of the modern world is all that need be considered. More than that, however, we lose sight of why the United States, as a recipient of the good that Western Civilization has to offer, was and still is a magnet for millions of pilgrims who, for more than 240 years, have been united by the desire to flee slavery and totalitarian governments in the search for a better life.

Thomas Jefferson, in his First Inaugural Address, spoke of what he called “the essential principles of our government.” These, he said, “form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civil instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.” 

A course teaching such things at Stanford University — and at all American colleges and schools — can help us understand the motivations of our new citizens, as well as those convictions that unite all of us who are blessed to be citizens of this great nation.

Dr. Kenneth Calvert is Professor of Ancient History at Hillsdale College and the headmaster of Hillsdale Academy, an independent, classical K-12 day school located on the campus of Hillsdale College in Michigan.

http://spectator.org/articles/65939/understand-immigration-study-western-civilization

CAP – Study 6 – Kingdom of God – Confidence and Leadership

CAP – Study 6 – Kingdom of God – Confidence and Leadership

This segment concludes the chapter on the Kingdom of God, as authored by Gary North in his book “Unconditional Surrender.” It clearly calls into question some of the present teachings of the church and the resultant ineffectiveness not only of the church, but leadership at all levels in the whole world.

·         Why is the church so pessimistic about its role - in time and on earth? Who wants to be a commander in a losing cause?

·         When Moses selected Joshua to lead ancient Israel, what happened to the rest of his generation which resisted and mistrusted God? Are we the modern version of them by resisting God’s dominion assignment?

·         How do we justify our inaction?

·         What are we in effect doing when we continually pray for miracles without laboring for victory under God’s revealed law-order?

·         When will we decide to leave the wilderness of doubt, pessimism and confusion?

The biblical reasoning and logic of this subject was detailed in the previous studies. Please review as you need to do so. Also, I would strongly advise that you re-read the recent Notes and Asides #4 – “Understanding What We Believe.” The following is from “Unconditional Surrender.”

For a successful program of delegated responsibility to persevere, the church must become convinced that such delegated authority can produce long-term benefits. The church must become confident in its own earthly future. The church must become convinced that it is an honor to bear new responsibilities, in time and on earth, in every area of life. The church - and I mean the multitude of Christians acting as dominion men - must become convinced that we aren't God's cannon fodder, that we aren't destined to defend the last outpost. Who wants to take responsibility for commanding despondent troops who won't take responsibility themselves? Who wants to lead an army of incompetents whose own Supreme Commander has supposedly told them that the army is destined for temporal defeat? Who wants to be a commander in a losing cause? Who wants to command troops when it isn't safe to delegate authority to any of your subordinates a lesson which you learned from your Supreme Commander, who made this mistake at the very beginning of the war? Nobody sensible would do it. I submit that this is a major factor in explaining why Christians have nobody sensible leading them in this century - or at least very, very few sensible people.

What should be our first step in locating a generation of competent leaders? Moses selected Joshua to lead Israel into the land because Joshua was one of only two spies who had returned to Israel, 40 years before, to recommend that they march in right then and take the land that had been promised to them (Numbers 14:6-10). Caleb, the only other spy to agree with Joshua, also entered the land, as God had said he would (Numbers 14:24). Only two men were optimistic. Not an auspicious beginning for Israel in the wilderness. But God has all the time necessary to achieve His goals. He simply waited for all of the older ones to die off, except Caleb and Joshua. Then they marched across the Jordan River and began the conquest.

The younger generation took God's word more seriously than their parents had. They entered Canaan believing that God would give all the nations of Canaan into their hands. They didn't remain true to this faith; they were unsuccessful in dislodging several of the tribes (Judges 1). They were, however, far more confident than the generation of the exodus had been, and far more successful.

Therefore, the first step in locating reliable leaders is to reverse the paralyzing pessimism of contemporary Christianity. We must take God seriously. When God gave man his dominion assignment, God meant business. He was serious. He built the dominion impulse into man, and only a progressive demonization of men can begin to thwart that impulse. In hell and in the lake of fire, the dominion impulse cannot find expression. Part of hell's horrors is the eternal thwarting of that impulse. For regenerated men, the adopted sons of God, there can be no question concerning the continuing nature of the dominion assignment. Since it was built into man's very being the task which defined man's purpose from the beginning - the progressive ethical untwisting of the presently distorted image of God in man will bring the dominion impulse into the forefront of the life of man. The kingdom of God is an ethical imperative, but since man bears God's image, and his built-in purpose is to exercise dominion over God's creation, the kingdom of God is also an ontological imperative an inescapable aspect of the being of regenerated mankind.

Israel was defined in terms of God's promise to Abraham (Genesis 15:13-16). God would give the seed of Abraham the land. This was an unconditional promise, for Abraham had surrendered to God unconditionally. God had dragged Abraham to Himself. He had dragged Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees and Haran. He told Abraham what He would do for Abraham's heirs, and He would fulfill His promise (Galatians 3:16-19). Israel would enter Canaan. Israel was destined to enter Canaan. Yet Israel was also commanded to enter Canaan, and the older generation refused to obey. Their punishment: to die in the wilderness. But Israel did enter the land eventually.

Redeemed mankind must subdue the earth. It is God's dominion assignment. We cannot evade its implications without suffering punishment. Our generation may try to evade its responsibilities in this regard. Our generation may continue to deceive itself, arguing that the Bible's promises of victory, in time and on earth, are to be interpreted as spiritual victories only, the internal victory over sin, but with endless defeat in the external world of culture, until Christ finally returns to deliver us from destruction. Men may try to justify their failure in the external world by pointing to their own hypothetical victory over sin in their spiritual lives. Christians who do this will view the institutional church as a haven of refuge, God's port in the storm, and they will turn inward, concerning themselves with endless bureaucratic ecclesiastical squabbles, signifying practically nothing.

Christians may take another approach, and try to postpone the establishment of God's visible kingdom until after Christ returns physically to give us total direction, placing us in various bureaucratic positions where we will be allowed to follow detailed orders from the cosmic Command Post. General Headquarters will issue comprehensive orders, and we will obey them to the letter. We won't ever again have to make responsible decisions, fit ting the letter of the law to external circumstances without deviating from the spirit of the law a difficult, though responsible, process. The future external, visible kingdom will therefore not be our responsibility to build, but Christ's.

By using either of these two approaches, today's Christians seek to justify their own cultural impotence, their own lack of dominion. They internalize the kingdom, pointing to supposed victories inside their souls victories that never result in cultural influence. Or else they point to a coming discontinuous event, which will bring power to them only in terms of the creation of a massive supernatural bureaucracy. In the meantime, both views preach pessimism concerning this age. Both views prophesy the defeat of the church externally in this age. Both views create a desire to escape from the responsibilities of this world the comprehensive responsibilities of cultural dominion. Both views reinforce our rebellious tendencies to defy God, deny the dominion assignment, and retreat into a closed, isolated society to sing our hymns, pray our prayers for deliverance, and eat our mess of pottage.

We have tried to sell our birthright to the devil. Let him exercise dominion! Let him bear the responsibilities! Let him rule in time and on earth, if only he will give us a little more time to pray and sing. Maybe if we grant him his right to rule temporarily, he’ll be nice and let us alone. Let Satan rule, if Satan lets us alone: this is the "battle cry" of contemporary Christianity.

We need to revive our hope in God. We need to revive our hope in His good judgment. We need to revive our hope in ourselves, as redeemed men, so that we can face the dominion assignment with confidence. We need to regain our confidence in the power of God's revealed law as a tool of dominion. We need an eschatology of victory, in time and on earth an optimism concerning our ability to extend dominion and subdue the earth, making manifest the comprehensive kingdom of God, in time and on earth, before Christ finally comes in victory to remove His people from a world whose potential has been used up because God's people have fulfilled the terms of God's dominion assignment.

This requires unconditional surrender. We must surrender to God's absolute sovereignty. We mustn't mouth the words, "the sovereignty of God," if we really mean, "The sovereignty of God, with a little sovereignty to man." We have to read Job 38-41, Romans 9, and Ephesians 1 again and again, until we recognize God's total sovereignty. Then, once we see who is really sovereign, we can have faith in ourselves, as redeemed and progressively restored ambassadors of God on earth. Then, and only then, will we bring God's peace treaty before the citizens of Satan's shrinking and defensive kingdom, calling them to sign the treaty now, to submit unconditionally to its terms of surrender, and to make a covenant with the God of the invading kingdom. Those who are meek before God shall inherit the earth.

The kingdom of Satan is very much like Jericho in Joshua's early days. The church of God has its marching orders. It is to conquer the land, driving out the inhabitants. This time, we are not to use force, as the Israelites did, but we are to use the sword of the Lord, the preaching of the gospel. We are ambassadors, not spies, this time. We announce the coming of the kingdom. We warn the residents of today's cities of the coming judgment. In Deuteronomy 20:10-15, God gave us the command not to destroy a distant city without offering it the opportunity to sign a peace treaty and to become tributaries. This is the same treaty God sends to the nations today. Their time is running short. God's kingdom is coming. They must capitulate now, or else spend eternity as fiery sacrifices to God. It is to their advantage to become members of God's kingdom.

God gave the people of Canaan time to think about His arrival, in the person of His people. They knew what was coming a generation in advance, and they trembled (Joshua 2:9-11). Perhaps they grew temporarily confident when the Israelites of Moses' day grew fearful, and decided to remain in the wilderness, culturally impotent, fed by God's miraculous manna (Exodus 16:15,31-35). God graciously spoon-fed these pathetic former slaves until they died. The Canaanites were given an extra generation to fill up their cup of iniquity (Genesis 15:16). But the day God parted the waters of the Jordan River, the manna ceased forever (Joshua 5:12). God would spoon-feed these people no longer. The miraculous manna would never again appear on their land. The land was now permanent land; they would have to subdue it under God's law. That spelled the end of the road for most of the Canaanites, and had Israel been more faithful, it would have been the end for all of them.

This leads us to a crucially important principle: when God's people seek continual miracles from God, rather than victory by means of labor under God's revealed law-order, they are admitting defeat. When God's people prefer to be spoon-fed rather than to exercise responsible dominion, the kingdom of Satan is given another stay of execution. It is this continual praying for miracles, for discontinuities in history rather than the continuity of victory under law, which has paralyzed the expansion of God's kingdom. Pessimism concerning the church's ability to extend God's comprehensive kingdom, coupled with the slave's hope in miraculous, discontinuous deliverance, have kept the church wandering in the wilderness for several generations. Should we be surprised at the second-rate officers we have today, given the state of mind of the troops? Should a generation of slaves, who wait trembling for their master to tell them exactly what to do next, expect anything better than third-rate bureaucrats to lead them? When men flee from the burdens of responsible self-government as men of both kingdoms are doing all over the world today, should we expect to see Christians demand God's freedom under God's law?

Let us flee the wilderness. Let us abandon hope in our daily manna, our daily miracles. Let us abandon the need to be spoon-fed by God. Let us begin to act like shepherds. Let us begin to accept the bur dens of responsible self-government under the guidelines provided by God's law. Since the law is no longer a threat to us eternally, because we are delivered by Christ from the curse of the law, let us approach God's law as a master craftsman approaches a tool that he understands and respects, and not as apprentices who are afraid of the tool and the responsibilities of using that tool in their labor.

When Christian leaders see that they are called to lead confident troops who understand the responsibilities of self-government, and who are willing to bear these responsibilities because they understand the law of God, their tool of dominion, we will find better quality leaders accepting their positions of responsibility, not just in the institutional church, but in every institution, in every walk of life.

Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed about Thomas Jefferson - Book Review by Richard Kirk

In 2012, David Barton's popular analysis of Thomas Jefferson was pulled by the book's publisher, Thomas Nelson, based on what appears to have been an academic putsch designed to protect the now popular view of the third president as a secular deist and hypocritical slave-holding philanderer.  This uprising was led by a motley intellectual crew who, for the most part, had little or no expertise in the subject matter at issue.

The re-release of The Jefferson Lies by WND Books begins with an extended preface in which the author discusses the largely picayune objections raised against his original work – primarily by a psychology professor from Grove City College, Warren Throckmorton.  These somewhat arcane refutations should have been placed at the end of the work – allowing Barton's clear and convincing evidence to speak first for itself.  That evidence primarily concerns "lies" about Jefferson's relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, "lies" about Jefferson's supposed hypocrisy vis-à-vis slavery, "lies" about the ex-president's position concerning the separation of church and state, and "lies" related to Jefferson's religious beliefs.   

Barton's most startling revelation concerns the brazenly dishonest claim that DNA evidence proved that Jefferson fathered one of Sally Hemings's children.  This blockbuster story in Nature magazine (November 5, 1998) was splashed with gusto all over the national media.  The retraction of this "proof" came eight weeks later – with all the impact of an obscure page 16 correction…….

(Full text at link below)

 
So who should read The Jefferson Lies?  Anyone who thinks Thomas Jefferson and William Jefferson Clinton have a lot in common, anyone who thinks Thomas Jefferson supported the modern notion of "separation of church and state," anyone who thinks Jefferson was a hypocritical racist, and anyone who thinks academia and the publishing world aren't partisan cesspools. 

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/04/exposing_the_myths_youve_always_believed_about_thomas_jefferson.html#ixzz44h00kfjE

A Jewish case for white nationalism - by Mytheos Holt and comments by Vox Day

Mytheos Holt explains why Donald Trump appeals to so many dispossessed and disadvantaged whites, as well as why white nationalism is on the rise:

This brings me to the first and, arguably, the most important lesson that Sylvia taught me about what drives people into the arms of white nationalism: that urge comes not from economic dispossession, nor spiritual dispossession, but cultural dispossession.

No, I don’t mean the sort of “where has my country gone” ignorance that I and my fellow coastal cosmopolitans like to mock over cocktails. I mean the sorts of people who are attracted to white nationalism are people whose own communities have been hollowed out by economic and cultural forces beyond their control, and who are now adrift in a society they perceive to be universally hostile to their heritage for no good reason.

That heritage, as white nationalists in America see it, is the heritage of Western civilization. If you wonder what that means (which is reasonable), let me spell it out: It means historically Western European cultural norms. Specifically, norms like respect for agents of the law, aspirational pride in work, willingness to accept the consequences of one’s actions, disdain for laziness and welfarism, and reproductive responsibility (i.e., not having children you can’t afford to keep).

They respect these norms not merely because these are what their own communities follow, but also because they think these norms make constitutional government, liberty, and classical republicanism possible. If you have to pick between the two, defend the norms every day, since temporary cessations of liberty will naturally recover if they’re still in place, whereas the institutions without the norms will become meaningless: the Constitution will become a pointless scrap of paper to which people pay only lip service, and constitutional government will become bureaucracy hiding behind the fig leaf of a separation of powers.

Where this otherwise perfectly respectable, conservative pride in Western culture atrophies into white nationalism when the person holding it comes to believe that respect for liberal Western civilization is inextricably tied to one’s race. One particularly irreverent white nationalist YouTube songster sums this attitude up in a video mocking libertarians: “It’s not that freedom is bad/But only whites think it’s rad.”

Moreover, and this cannot be stated enough: these people genuinely believe that to be proud of the history of Western European accomplishment, and one’s own descent from the people responsible, is taboo in modern America. If you look at what cultural studies departments, much of modern media, left-wing college students, and the crazy wing of the Democratic Party says, this is probably at least partially accurate. Unfortunately, however, it’s not just leftists who are responsible for the rise of white nationalism in communities like Sylvia’s. We conservatives bear some blame too, though in this case, largely because of misunderstandings of how our own behavior is perceived.

It's a fairly honest assessment, although I would say that it is not a misunderstanding of how conservative behavior is perceived, but rather a straightforward failure of conservatism to defend or conserve Western civilization. Conservatism is not, as Red Eagle and I chronicled in Cuckservative: How "Conservatives" Betrayed America, a set of principles or a coherent ideology. It is an attitude, and more, it is an attitude that is intrinsically incapable of holding its ground against the forces that assail both Western civilization and the various white nations that built and value it.

Now, I am not a white nationalist for the obvious reason that I am a red nationalist. Also, and more importantly, there is no white nation; only in America can anyone even contemplate the concept. When one lives in Europe, it is considerably more clear that the English nation is not the German nation is not the Dutch nation is not the Italian nation.

However, just as the Jews who historically considered themselves German discovered that it didn't matter what they considered themselves to be, many Americans of various European descents are learning that in the eyes of those who hate and envy them, they are nothing more than "white". And, as Holt observes, it should be no surprise that they are beginning to band together and respond to the tribalist attacks on them with a tribalism of their own.

But whether it is intellectually coherent or not, white nationalism is entirely Constitutional. Freedom of Association is an unalienable and Constitutional right. Diversity, imposed and involuntary, is intrinsically anti-Constitutional, anti-American, anti-human rights, and anti-Western Civilization.

Perhaps it takes a Jew to understand that if white nationalism is immoral, so is Jewish nationalism and the State of Israel.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/04/a-jewish-case-for-white-nationalism.html?m=1

Full text at: http://thefederalist.com/2016/03/30/the-intellectual-case-for-trump-i-why-the-white-nationalist-support/

Killing Knowledge in K-12 - By Bruce Deitrick Price

The first schools, the first great universities, were focused on knowledge: figuring out what it is, collecting and verifying it, and passing it on from teachers to students.

Our K-12 schools have drifted far away from this ideal.  Knowledge itself is disparaged.  The transmission of knowledge is sneered at.  These shifts are huge and destructive, and they are by design.

Consider what any real school looks like: judo schools, medical schools, language schools, flight schools, bartending schools, flower-arranging schools.  All possess a body of knowledge they strive to give to the next generation.

That's not what our public schools are focused on now.

It used to be well understood that the human race is divided into uneducated people (they don't know anything) and educated people (they know lots of information).  Creating educated people takes work, by the school and the student.  K-12 no longer believes in the importance of that work.

What changed?

John Dewey and his socialist brotherhood, a hundred years ago, decided they would use the public schools to transform the entire society.  They first had to seize control of what is taught in K-12 classrooms. Dewey and his successors settled on two major strategies for controlling what educators call "content."  

First, they discarded as much of the traditional curriculum as possible – i.e., knowledge was thrown out the window by the boxload.  Secondly, they invented many techniques for scrambling classroom instruction so that knowledge was no longer taught efficiently.

So we have here, across a wide front, a well organized war against knowledge and the transmission of knowledge.  Dumbed down schools were created intentionally in order to create dumbed down students.  That, my research suggests, is the horrible reality.

Consider for a moment how extraordinarily successful this campaign has been.  Jay Leno used to go "Jaywalking" and find people who didn't know which ocean is to the west of California.  That same tradition has been continued by Jesse Watters on Fox News and others.  In this video, Watters asks people what country we fought against in the Revolutionary War.  People say things like "the French?"

To repeat, this rising tide of ignorance is not an accident.  It's too relentless to be anything but intentional.  So how exactly do our social engineers achieve what Charlotte Iserbyt called "the deliberate dumbing down of America"?

First, they invent redundant, overlapping sophistries that mandate teaching less, always less.  Multiculturalism says you can teach only about foreign cultures.  Relevance says you can teach only about the child's own life.  Readiness says you can teach only what children are ready to learn.  Self-esteem says you can teach only information the child finds easy to learn.  Constructivism says you can't teach directly – kids have to assemble knowledge for themselves.  You can't expect children to actually know anything, therefore no memorization should be required.  That's six separate gimmicks that guarantee, in toto, a scorched earth policy toward the  acquisition of knowledge.

Secondly, you invent sophistical gimmicks that will jumble whatever little knowledge can still be taught.  We see this, par excellence, in New Math circa 1962, where basic arithmetic was mixed up with complicated high school- and college-level material.  Bingo: total confusion and kids learning little.  In reading, you have bogus instruction known as Look-say, Whole Word, Dolch words, and so on.  The schools spend years teaching children to read, but few students become fluent readers.  (This is happening year after year.  Don't we have to assume that schools are achieving the results they want?)

The schools always profess hostility to direct instruction, mastery of basics, memorization, traditional testing – in short, all the things that work.  They teach as little as possible, and then they create a disconnect with what little they do teach.  The result is probably the least educated general population we've had in a century.

One particularly striking result is that students have little sense of  historical time.  You can ask kids in college which came first, World War II, World War I, or the Civil War, and many won't know.  Students aren't told to memorize dates, people, or places, so when American citizens are asked, on the 4th of July, what country did we break away from, they look at you in amazement: who knows stuff like that?

People should give credit where credit is due: our Education Establishment, in its war against knowledge, has been cunningly successful.

Where does all this go? The American people are increasingly like a big blob of jelly.  They can't think critically because they don't know much.  If leaders lie to them, who is going to realize this?  If the media tell them only half of what's going on, how could they know the difference?

Thomas Jefferson said it long ago: you can be ignorant or free, not both.

Our professional education class, what I call the Education Establishment, is hopelessly incompetent (or deeply into subversion).  Either way, Americans have to get much more involved in improving their local schools.  Be sure that every kid can read by the end of the first grade.  Make sure they learn basic arithmetic the old-fashioned way.  And teach them lots of facts, one after the other.

It would probably be easy to teach children a new fact each hour, assuming that the fact was taught dramatically and repeated at intervals.  But for the sake of discussion, let's settle on teaching one fact each day.  Think what that would add up to in a few years.  Our middle school students would know more than our college graduates do today.

Only one thing is required for this dramatic turnaround.  Schools have to love knowledge. 

At present, our public schools are having a squalid love affair with ignorance.

Bruce Deitrick Price explains theories and methods on his education sites Improve-Education.org.  (For info on his four new novels, see his literary site Lit4u.com.)

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/03/killing_knowledge_in_k12.html#ixzz44b2Ek1VW
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The West’s War on Jihad Begins at Home - By Raymond Ibrahim

As someone specializing in Islamic jihadism, one would expect I’d have much to say immediately after jihadi attacks of the sort that recently occurred in Brussels (35 killed), or San Bernardino (14 killed), or Paris (130). Ironically, I don’t: such attacks are ultimately symptoms of what I do deem worthy of discussion, namely, root causes. (What can one add when a symptom of the root cause he has long warned against occurs other than “told you so”?)

So what is the root cause of jihadi attacks? 

Many think that the ultimate source of the ongoing terrorization of the West is Islam. Yet this notion has one problem: the Muslim world is immensely weak and intrinsically incapable of being a threat. That every Islamic assault on the West is a terrorist attack -- and terrorism, as is known, is the weapon of the weak -- speaks for itself.

This was not always the case. For approximately one thousand years, the Islamic world was the scourge of the West. Today’s history books may refer to those who terrorized Christian Europe as Arabs, Saracens, Moors, Ottomans, Turks, Mongols, or Tatars -- but all were operating under the same banner of jihad that the Islamic State is operating under.

No -- today, the ultimate enemy is within. The root cause behind nonstop Muslim terrorization of the West is found in those who stifle or whitewash all talk and examination of Muslim doctrine and history; who welcome hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants while knowing that some are jihadi operatives and many are simply “radical”; who work to overthrow secular Arab dictators in the name of “democracy” and “freedom,” only to uncork the jihad suppressed by the autocrats (the Islamic State’s territory consists of lands that were “liberated” in Iraq, Libya, and Syria by the U.S. and its allies).

So are Western leaders and politicians the root cause behind Islamic terrorization of the West?

Close -- but still not there yet.

Far from being limited to a number of elitist leaders and institutions, the Western empowerment of the jihad is the natural outcome of postmodern thinking -- the real reason an innately weak Islam can be a source of repeated woes for a militarily and economically superior West.

Remember, the reason people like French President Francois Hollande, U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are in power -- three prominent Western leaders who insist that Islam is innocent of violence and who push for Muslim immigration -- is because they embody a worldview that is normative in the West.

In this context, the facilitation of jihadi terror is less a top down imposition and more a grass root product of decades of erroneous, but unquestioned, thinking. (Those who believe America’s problems begin and end with Obama would do well to remember that he did not come to power through a coup but that he was voted in -- twice. This indicates that Obama and the majority of voting Americans have a shared, and erroneous, worldview. He may be cynically exploiting this worldview, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s because this warped worldview is mainstream that he can exploit it in the first place.)

Western empowerment of the jihad is rooted in a number of philosophies that have metastasized into every corner of social life, becoming cornerstones of postmodern epistemology. These include the doctrines of relativism and multiculturalism on the one hand, and anti-Western, anti-Christian sentiment on the other.

Taken together, these cornerstones of postmodern, post-Christian thinking hold that there are no absolute truths and thus all cultures are fundamentally equal and deserving of respect. If any Western person wants to criticize a civilization or religion, then let them look “inwardly” and acknowledge their European Christian heritage as the epitome of intolerance and imperialism.

Add to these a number of sappy and silly ideals -- truth can never be uttered because it might “hurt the feelings” of some (excluding white Christians, who are fair game), and, far from suspecting them, the West should go out of its way to appease Muslims until they “like us” -- and you have a sure recipe for disaster, that is, the current state of affairs.

Western people are bombarded with these aforementioned “truths” from the cradle to the grave -- from kindergarten to university, from Hollywood to the news rooms, and now even in churches -- so that they are unable to accept and act on a simple truism that their ancestors well knew: Islam is an inherently violent and intolerant creed that cannot coexist with non-Islam (except insincerely, in times of weakness).

The essence of all this came out clearly when Obama, in order to rationalize away the inhuman atrocities of the Islamic State, counseled Americans to get off their “high horse” and remember that their Christian ancestors have been guilty of similar if not worse atrocities. That he had to go back almost a thousand years for examples by referencing the crusades and the Inquisition -- both of which have been completely distorted by the warped postmodern worldview, including the portrayal of imperialist Muslims as victims -- did not matter to America’s leader.

Worse, it did not matter to most Americans. The greater lesson was not that Obama whitewashed modern Islamic atrocities by misrepresenting and demonizing Christian history, but that he was merely reaffirming the mainstream narrative that Americans have been indoctrinated into believing. And thus, apart from the usual ephemeral and meaningless grumblings, his words -- as with many of his pro-Islamic, anti-Christian comments and policies -- passed along without consequence.

Once upon a time, the Islamic world was a superpower and its jihad an irresistible force to be reckoned with. Over two centuries ago, however, a rising Europe -- which had experienced over one millennium of jihadi conquests and atrocities -- defeated and defanged Islam.

As Islam retreated into obscurity, the post-Christian West slowly came into being. Islam didn’t change, but the West did: Muslims still venerate their heritage and religion -- which impels them to jihad against the Western “infidel” -- whereas the West learned to despise its heritage and religion, causing it to become an unwitting ally of the jihad.

Hence the current situation: the jihad is back in full vigor, while the West -- not just its leaders, but much of the populace -- facilitates it in varying degrees. Nor is this situation easily remedied. For to accept that Islam is inherently violent and intolerant is to reject a number of cornerstones of postmodern Western thinking that far transcend the question of Islam. In this context, nothing short of an intellectual/cultural revolution -- where rational thinking becomes mainstream -- will allow the West to confront Islam head on.

But there is some good news. With every Islamic attack, the eyes of more and more Western people are opened to the true nature of Muhammad’s religion. That this is happening despite generations of pro-Islamic indoctrination in the West is a testimony to the growing brazenness of the jihad.

Yet it still remains unclear whether objective thinking will eventually overthrow the current narrative of relativism, anti-Christianism, and asinine emotionalism.

Simply put, both celebrating multiculturalism and defeating the jihad is impossible.

However, if such a revolution takes place (sooner rather than later), the Islamic jihad will be easily swept back into the dustbin of history. For the fact remains: Islam is terrorizing the world, not because it can, but because the West allows it to.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/03/the_wests_war_on_jihad_begins_at_home.html#ixzz44atd6Fb2
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