Mini-Mike Looks To The Future : What's Next?

Mini-Mike has some tough decisions to make! Do I walk to work or play in the sewer?

It's the Disease of Destruction : You Can't Hide! democrats Will Find You!

Millions are effected by this sickness but they know it as something that is wonderful and rewarding. That is until it's too late to be inoculated against the destruction that follows. 

Professional say this disease is so powerful, free stuff, that even blaming others for your demise won't work as everyone is in the same sinking ship!

"Where can we run to avoid the results of so many affected coming to our door?''

Life without Meaning or Consequence : The New Cuba Definition For America!

Things in our past mean we have to believe or we are not serious about who we are! A defining moment in history is about to happen!

Life begins and ends with just a single thought that passes mostly unnoticed

by millions waiting in line!

Joseph Writes A Note To Bernie Before The Vote : We Back You All The Way!

'Have a great weekend democrats! Nothing to see here, and next Tuesday, keep your head down and your powder dry. The best is yet to come! 

Love Joe!

Castro Was About Education : Teaching What Matters Most - Obedience!

'Really, it is all about teaching the poor and ignorant what is important for success. They should all know their fate. What fun is there if the poor souls have no idea why they're being shot?' Always vote democrat!

See how this works in a society where education means never

having to say anything when the educating is over!

Sanctuary Status Discussed In Arizona : Why Area Voted It Out! (Podcast)

This is one of most important subject in our debates for president now on going. Illegal immigration.

 Everyone has staked out a position, one for common sense and the law while the other is based on an ideology for the power to control  all outcomes.

Providing sanctuary for people that are breaking the law is not common sense.

This podcast covers a lot of ground that is common sense.

Arizona GOP Leader Explains Why Area Voted Against Sanctuary Status

Rachel del Guidice / @LRacheldG / February 26, 2020

When talking about the immigration issue, more focus is often given to those coming into the country illegally, while citizens who live in border towns and cities are more often left out of the conversation. On today’s podcast, I speak with Chris King, the first vice chairman of the Pima County Republican Party, who talks about what it’s like to live in a border area, and why Pima County voted not to become a sanctuary city. Listen to our interview on the podcast, or read the lightly edited transcript below:

Podcast :  https://shows.acast.com/thedailysignal

Transgenders Rights And Demands? : Conflict - Feminists Push Back!

This is a little long but the narrative is very good and informative. It is about who has rights and who doesn't according to a very tiny minority, less then 1% of the population but demand the 99% conform.

This is extremely important as our society depends on individual rights for everyone, not just for the few that shout and protest the most!!!

On the Left, a New Clash Between Feminists and Transgender Activists

Richard Bernstein / February 21, 2020

In January, the august New York Public Library withdrew as host of a forum organized by a self-described radical feminist group called the Women’s Liberation Front, or WoLF.

The irony was palpable: The planned meeting was titled “An Evening With Canceled Women,” since the five speakers from WoLF all claim to have been “deplatformed”—i.e., shouted down by hecklers or kicked off speakers lists—because they questioned claims made by transgender advocates regarding sexuality and identity.

In other words, as some conservative news outlets gleefully reported, the New York Public Library canceled the “canceled women”! Why? The library had no comment, but it likely feared that it too would become a target of activists who have demonstrated and even threatened violence during other programs sponsored by the group.

“It’s very common for people to say we deserve to die,” Kara Dansky, a board member of WoLF, said in a phone interview.

Actual death threats seem rare, but there are plenty of signs of an angry front opening up in the culture wars. Although religious figures and people on the right have challenged the transgender movement, the conflict with WoLF involves feminist stalwarts of the social justice left who support their fundamental rights but reject the idea that a man can truly become a woman, or vice versa.

Specifically, the ire of trans activists and their supporters has been aroused by some basic positions taken by WoLF and others, namely: 1) that a person’s sex is biologically determined and can’t be changed, even by surgery; and 2) that the pieces of legislation passed or pending in several countries and American states to extend civil rights protections to transgender people, usually called Equality Acts, are wrongheaded and harmful to women and children.

The number of liberals making those arguments publicly is still small. But it is growing. And it has already given rise to a strange reshuffling of the political deck, as some feminists of otherwise impeccable leftist credentials have formed alliances with conservative and evangelical groups that would fervently disagree with them over just about everything else—abortion and gay marriage most conspicuously.

Last January, the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., hosted a panel called “The Inequality of the Equality Act: Concerns From the Left,” during which several speakers from WoLF explained their point of view to a supportive Heritage audience.

Watch the video : https://youtu.be/HMj9MOuRswc

Instead of provoking a full debate, these disagreements have prompted efforts to silence speech. Last year, for example, protesters accused the Toronto Public Library of endorsing “hate speech” because it agreed to provide space in one of its branches for an event featuring Meghan Murphy, the Canadian editor of an online journal, Feminist Current, and a prominent figure in the anti-transgender-rights movement.

“There is a difference between denying free speech—and what is known as de-platforming, which is when you refuse to allow hate speech to be disseminated in your facility,” read a Change.org petition assailing the library’s decision, signed by more than 9,000 people.

In Seattle, hundreds of trans supporters—some shouting “No hate, no fear, every gender is welcome here”—protested on Feb. 1 outside a public library where Murphy was on a program sponsored by WoLF.

In Toronto last year, according to the National Post, a resident of a shelter for female victims of sexual abuse, Kristi Hanna, 37, was accused of bias by the Ontario Human Rights Support Center after she complained that being forced to share a small room with a bearded male-to-female transsexual person made her feel unsafe. She left the shelter.

Lisa Littman, a professor in the School of Public Health at Brown University, lost an outside consulting position after local clinicians joined critics who objected to her peer-reviewed study that found many adolescents who claim to be trans and are being given body-altering medical treatment may be responding more to “social contagion and peer influences” than to a genuine, permanent condition.

In Britain, 54 transgenderism researchers signed a letter to The Guardian newspaper describing the intimidation they’ve experienced because they’ve raised questions about some provisions of a Gender Recognition Act being considered by Parliament.

“Members of our group have experienced campus protests, calls for dismissal in the press, harassment, foiled plots to bring about dismissal, no-platforming, and attempts to censor academic research and publications.”

Similarly, “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling was sharply criticized in December after she tweeted support for a British researcher who lost her job at a think tank for expressing “offensive and exclusionary” language, after she said “men cannot change into women.”

Even the feminist icon Germaine Greer has been reviled because she argues that even a man who takes hormones and undergoes sexual reassignment surgery is still a man.  “I’ve had things thrown at me,” she said in a now famous BBC interview. “I’ve been accused of inciting violence against transgender people. That’s absolute nonsense.”

Welcome, in other words, to the censorious world of the identity-politics left, where transgender rights have been recast as the new frontier of the broader civil rights movement.

New terms have emerged, including “transphobic,” which takes its place with racist, homophobic, and misogynist as the voguish terms of opprobrium for people who in many cases are by no means racist, homophobic, or misogynist, but simply depart from one or another plank of the identity-politics orthodoxy.

Women like the members of WoLF have been accorded a new pejorative acronym: TERF, for trans exclusionary radical feminist.

What’s “driving their influence” is “the false claiming of a feminist mantle to anti-transgender positions,” Ria Tabacco Mar, director of the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Washington Post, speaking of groups like WoLF. “This is not a crossing of party lines. This is a principle of exclusion.”

No doubt these terms emerge from a deeply felt sympathy for trans people, who certainly do experience discrimination and even violence. Still, the speed with which this once marginal effort has gained acceptance has created ideological whiplash as new modes of thought clash with older ones.

Some feminists and other more liberal skeptics of transgender rights note there has been little conversation about a movement that makes broader demands than other pushes for civil rights.

Until now marginalized groups have demanded equal status and protection from discrimination, but they haven’t called into question some of the basic ways in which people identify themselves.

Gays and lesbians never fought to be considered straight; black people don’t fight to be considered white. But the core tenets of the ideology embraced by many transgender advocates requires society to redefine basic signifiers of identity in profound and somewhat contradictory ways, most significantly demanding that biological men be considered women, thereby recasting traditional definitions of male and female.

At the same time, it also demands that society replace such binary notions of sex with a fluid, vague, not-very-scientific notion of gender as the key defining element of a person’s identity.

The groups challenging these notions assert that sex is entirely biological and can’t be changed. But trans women have received more attention from some feminists (and others) because they believe that trans men do not present the sort of danger or discomfort to biological men that trans women do to biological women—such as sexual aggression or participation on sports teams.

Specifically, some feminists are defending protections and opportunities won expressly for women. WoLF and other critics reject the idea that a man should legally be a woman with the right to occupy protected women’s spaces simply because he says he’s one, feels like one, wears dresses, takes hormones, or even has a sex-change operation.

Beyond that, they argue that far from promoting hateful “transphobic” notions that ought to be shouted down, their goal is to protect women and children from wrongheaded ideas that would harm them.

“Disagreements over sex and gender have cleaved the feminist community,” Libby Emmons, a member of WoLF, wrote in the online magazine Quillette. This is, she continued, “an unusually vicious front in the culture war.”

There’s an irony in this. The feminist revolution of the past quarter-century was at least partly responsible for shaking up traditional notions of gender and sex; it advanced the idea that gender (like race) is largely a social construct, that most differences between the sexes are the result of culture, expectations, and upbringing, rather than biology.

As the pioneering feminist Simone de Beauvoir put it, “One is not born but becomes a woman.” This view gave rise to the emphasis on gender, or how a person feels about himself or herself, as the major element in identity, rather than sex, and from there it was only a short step to the idea that “gender identity” should have the same protected status as racial or sexual equality.

Members of WoLF and others like them dispute this, maintaining that the sexual barrier is unbridgeable.

“The third-wave feminist movement that came out of the 1990s made a mistake in saying there were no differences between men and women related to evolution and biology,” Murphy told me in a phone interview from Vancouver, where she lives. “But the big problem is the ideology of transgenderism itself, which conflates sex and gender and says it’s possible to ‘identify’ your way out of biological sex.”

“Sex is real, and it is immutable,” Murphy said at the “Canceled Women” conference in January, after it was moved to another venue in New York. “One is born either male or female and remains so for life, regardless of preference, surgery, or hormone treatments.”

“To be clear, I’m not saying that trans people don’t suffer, whether from body dysphoria or other forms of mental illness, or that people in general don’t suffer when they step outside the gendered roles laid out for us,” she continued.   “What I’m saying is that there’s no clear definition of what a ‘trans’ person is. … Trans is nothing more than a personal feeling or an announcement, which does not qualify you as part of a definable class of people who are inherently marginalized or subjected to discrimination.”

Emmons put it this way: The idea that by dressing in stereotypical women’s fashion and acting “like a woman,” a man can legally become a woman erases women as a separate category.  Moreover, she argues, the very idea that a man can be considered a woman by, say, putting on a dress and high heels derives from a stereotype about femininity that, she says, is itself “misogynist.”

“The word ‘woman’ is on the verge of having no meaning at all,” Emmons told me.

In practical terms, members of WoLF and others appear to be fighting an uphill battle, as trans rights, gender fluidity, and the nonbinary nature of some people have become widely accepted and promoted by many elite institutions, including universities, the media, Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and even the NCAA, the governing body of intercollegiate sports.

Last year the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed the Equality Act, now before the Senate, banning discrimination based on “sexual orientation and gender identity.” About 18 state legislatures as well as the Canadian and British parliaments have adopted similar bills or are considering them.

Although less than 1% of adult Americans identify as transgender, it is becoming de rigueur at colleges and universities for everyone to announce their pronouns. “He” and “she” are no longer the only singular options; “they” and “them,” for example, are now used to refer to one trans person as opposed to a group.

The Associated Press, The New York Times, and other news organizations now mandate the use of those pronouns. A libertarian columnist, Joe Caldera, says he was let go by the Denver Post in January because of a column that questioned the AP’s style guidelines.

The political climate on the left is such that at a town hall meeting in Iowa in January, Sen. Elizabeth Warren vowed to give a young transgender person veto power over her potential nominee for secretary of education.  Gestures like Warren’s were seen by some social media critics as pandering to a politically correct orthodoxy, but it was clearly an applause line at that town meeting.

So, why shouldn’t people who feel they were born in the wrong body be able to transition from one sex to another, and to be treated legally and socially in accordance with their adopted gender, not the sex they were born with?  “We don’t frame this as a question of trans rights,” Dansky told me, answering that question. “We want to protect the privacy and safety of women and girls.”

For WoLF’s members and those who agree with them, the implications of trans rights are stark. Because they consider trans women to be men, they are concerned about efforts to let males enter female spaces.

They argue, for example, that the “equality acts” being passed across the English-speaking world would allow biological men into spaces that have always been reserved for women, like bathrooms, changing rooms, sports teams, and prisons.

Much discussion has focused on public bathrooms. But Jennifer Finney Boylan, who identifies as a transgender woman, noted in a New York Times op-ed there is no evidence that “big hairy men” are invading ladies rooms.

Boylan further argued that there’s also no evidence on the sports teams question or any other concern that transgender people are changing things in a substantial or worrisome way. And, indeed, overall, evidence about the actual effects of equality laws and other efforts to recognize transgender rights seems largely anecdotal.

Still, some of that evidence indicates that there are plenty of instances where biological males claiming to be women have gained access to what used to be women’s-only spaces.  “I’ve spoken to two women in Texas forced to share a cell with two physically intact male prisoners,” Dansky told me. In fact, local newspapers have reported on complaints by women prisoners at Federal Medical Center in Carswell, Texas, that they are being forced to share showers and bathrooms with transgender biological male inmates being treated there.

In Massachusetts and other states, trans women are being accepted into shelters for battered women, a practice that gave rise to the case of Hanna, the victim of sexual abuse who left a shelter when she was forced to share her room with a person she deemed to be a man.

As of last year, at least 17 states allowed transgender athletes to compete without restriction, according to Transathlete.com, a website that tracks the issue.

More serious perhaps than the impact of trans rights on women’s sports or women’s prisons is the issue of medical interventions for sexually dysphobic young people, teenagers, and sometimes even younger children.

For the past 10 to 15 years, specialists in sexual dysphoria have been treating children and adolescents with medications and surgery that enable them to align their bodies with their sexual identities. The practice has passionate defenders.

Norman Spack, a pediatric endocrinologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, described in a TED talk a few years ago how his experience with sexually dysphobic children—who, he emphasizes, are few in number—led him to believe strongly in the benefits of medical interventions.

For several years, he directed a program at the hospital that administers drugs to delay the onset of puberty for younger children and hormones for adolescents that make effectively irreversible changes in their bodies, like breasts for transgender girls who were born male.

“Not doing anything for them not only puts them at risk of losing their lives through suicide,” Spack says in his TED talk, “but also says something about whether we are truly an inclusive society.”

Spack maintained that children treated in his program are rigorously evaluated and, if under 18, have to undergo months of counseling and have parental consent before they can be given drugs or undergo surgery. But there are many critics of sex-change procedures who contend that their advocates do them too quickly, dispensing with psychological examination.

Littman has found that some adolescents are responding more to social pressure than to deep psychological need, suggesting that treatment with hormones like estrogen and testosterone could be a grave mistake. She cites, for example, the case of four girls, all of whom “came out” as transgender after their coach did.

Then there is the matter of surgery, especially mastectomies on girls who want to transition to being boys.

One study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2018 concluded that women and girls wishing to become men who had double mastectomies were generally happier than those who had not undergone surgery. But what disturbed some critics was the disclosure that among the people studied, 33 of them had had mastectomies before they were 18, and 16 of them had had their breasts removed when they were 15 or younger.

Not all professionals in the field believe this to be a good thing. In 2018, the American College of Pediatricians concluded that the sex reassignment protocol for children and teenagers being followed in some clinics “is founded upon an unscientific gender ideology, lacks an evidence base, and violates the long-standing ethical principle, ‘First do on harm.’”

Emmons, the member of WoLF, says there are plenty of women in their 20s who underwent hormone treatments and mastectomies who now regret them, and, indeed, a Google search for “detransitioners network” or “Pique Resilience Project” will turn up plenty of examples of exactly that.

She adds bluntly: “Children are not allowed to get a tattoo, to drink, or to vote. The only thing they’re allowed to do is destroy their reproductive systems.”

Originally published by RealClearInvestigations

Chinese Citizens Escapes To Freedom : Relates Her Journeyl Podcast!

Saying 'Knowing the turth will set you free is at work here. To most of us that live and work in the trenches of real life, Zeng's story is just more proof we are right to believe America is a paradise.

Listen to the podcast - Very interesting and telling for our presidential debaters and what they have planned for all of us.

She Survived China’s Forced Labor Camp. Now She’s Urging Americans to Reject Socialism.

Rob Bluey / @RobertBluey / July 08, 2019

Jennifer Zeng grew up admiring the Communist Party of China and adhering to its stringent rules. But her life changed forever when she embraced religion and was swept up in a government crackdown on Falun Gong.

Arrested four times as a young adult and held in as a prisoner in a labor camp, she quickly woke up to the horrors of living in a socialist state. After being subject to brutal torture, Zeng managed to escape China and now tells about the evils of socialism and communism.

At a time when more Americans are embracing Karl Marx’s teachings, Chris Wright has helped Zeng share her story as part of a network called the Anticommunism Action Team. They recently spoke to The Daily Signal along with Darian Diachok, who escaped from Soviet-era Ukraine as an infant and has helped former Soviet satellite states democratize and overcome their failed communist systems.

The full audio is below, along with a lightly edited transcript. Some of the content is graphic and not suitable for small children.

Podcast : https://soundcloud.com/dailysignal

democrats Embrace The Castro Brothers : Communism - We Can Make It Work!

democrats believe they can make it work! All they want 

is for you to obey!!

It's the legacy of Barrrack Ogbjmma and now Bernie Sanders that explains why the progressive socialist liberal democrats are embracing mass killers like the Castro brothers and their communist agenda and ideology, they, Ogbjamma and Sanders believe the Castro's ideology is a workable solution for the people of the United States.

Anyone that has any sense of history will know and understand why Cuba is a failure, socialist of any kind is an abject failure to deliver any kind of living standard that promises success and prosperity. History is the best witness, socialism brings only death and destruction. 

Still the progressive socialist democrats demand that they can make it work with them in charge.

The Left’s Appalling Whitewashing of Castro’s Legacy

Mike Gonzalez / @Gundisalvus / November 26, 2016

You will hear some people today excuse Fidel Castro’s crimes by begging that he accomplished social goals. Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn have already beclowned themselves on that front. They were merely the first.

Our own President Barack Obama opted for washing his hands, choosing to neither praise Castro after his death Friday, nor to condemn the tragedy his communist dictatorship has inflicted on the Cuban people for 57 years.  “History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him,” said Obama, playing Pilate.

No social accomplishment, to be sure, could justify keeping an entire people hostage, denying them the right to elect their own leaders or exercise any human rights for half a century. But there weren’t any accomplishments. On the contrary, Castro destroyed a thriving society and imposed penury, either out of Marxist dogma or out of resentment that his out-of-wedlock birth had left him with a stigma among Cuba’s middle classes.

Cuba had problems in 1958, as many societies do. But on a number of fronts, it was the lead country in Latin America, or among the very top. Its social indicators were not just ahead of Asia and Africa, but also ahead of many European countries.

Many Europeans, including half of all my great-grandparents, immigrated to Cuba in the 20th century—barely a century ago—seeking to improve their lives economically. They did, and their granddaughter, my mother, went to law school.  After 57 years of communism it is risible to think of a single European immigrating to Cuba to improve his fortunes. Risible in a dark, macabre way.

That’s anecdotal, but the numbers back up what 2 million Cuban-Americans today (i.e., Cuban-born people who can speak freely) know to be true.

A study by the State Department’s Hugo Llorens and Kirby Smith shows, for example, that in infant mortality, literacy rates, per capita food consumption, passenger cars per capita, number of telephones, radios, televisions, and many other indicators, Cuba led when Castro took over on New Year’s Eve 1958.

The United Nations statistics leave no doubt. In infant mortality, Cuba’s 32 deaths per 1,000 live births was well ahead of Japan, West Germany, Luxembourg, Ireland, France, Italy, Spain (40, 36, 39, 33, 34, 50, and 53 respectively), and many others.

In food consumption, in terms of calories per day, Cuba was ahead of all of Latin America except cattle-rich Argentina and Uruguay. In automobiles per 1,000 inhabitants, Cuba’s 24 was ahead over everyone in Latin America expect oil-producing Venezuela (27).

As for literacy rates, Cuba’s 76 percent in the late 1950s put it closely behind only Argentina, Chile, and Costa Rica. Giant Brazil’s percentage, by comparison, was 49 percent.

And Cuba’s gross domestic product per capita in 1959 was higher than those of Ireland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, most of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, again according to U.N. statistics.

In most vital statistics, therefore, Cuba was on a par with Mediterranean countries and southern U.S. states.

And today? Castro’s communism has not just left Cubans economically pauperized, but politically bereft, a situation that Obama’s unilateral concessions to Castro’s little brother, the 85-year-old Raul, Cuba’s present leader, has only made worse.

According to the Cuban Committee for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, which is recognized by Amnesty International and Freedom House, so far this year there have already been over 8,505 political arrests during the first eight months. This represents the highest rate of political arrests in decades.

Meanwhile, we are in the midst of a new Cuban migration crisis. The United States is faced with the largest migration of Cuban nationals since the rafters of 1994. The number of Cubans fleeing to the United States in 2015 was nearly twice that of 2014.

Some 51,000 Cubans last year entered the United States, and this year’s figures will easily surpass that. The numbers of Cuban nationals fleeing Cuba have now quintupled since Obama took office, when it was less than 7,000 annually.

President-elect Donald Trump has promised he will reverse Obama’s opening unless Raul Castro opens up Cuba politically. This Castro won’t do and there were reports today that dissidents are being rounded up and carted off.

And so far, Trump’s statement on the “brutal dictator” Castro has been the moral one and the one closest to the mark: “Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.”

Today, therefore, will be a day for clarity. What world leaders say about the departed tyrant will reveal whether they have an inner moral compass or not.

democrat Debate : Sycophants Bleed on Stage!

The debate this week was a shameful display of people that don't have a clue about who the rest of us are down here in the trenches, working to survive for another day, paying bills and taxes that these progressive socialists think it's their birth-right to spend to benefit themselves and their friends as they see fit.

Please don't vote for more blood suckers like these sycophants bleeding on the national stage for a chance to drive the country into the sewer of socialist ideology of all power to a centralized authorty.

Things Happen For A Reason? : Lightning Strikes The Soul of Truth?

 

This is just one of those things that happen when you least except it. But maybe there is some truth in what take place that is out of our control.

Yikes!

Bernie Is In Love With The Socialist State Like Cuba! : "I Will Give You A Free Life" !

Life without worry or responsibility. 

All that's required is obedience!! What could go wrong?

As this author states, is the obsession with progressive socialism, communism just stupidity or worse, those that proclaim, demand the United States become a socialist state actually believe their own rhetoric that socialism actually works for everyone.

I believe it is the latter of these two or both if the truth be known. Bernie Sanders is the face of the ''New Wave" politics of the former democrat party, the progressive socialist liberal collective. 

He, Bernie makes no excuses about who and what he is. This of course scared the hell out of the other progressive socialists who are hiding in the shadows where they operate the real levers of power among the progressive socialsit democrat faithful believers and operatives.

democrats have never come right out and proclaimed they find America a bad place as founded like Bernie, they to believe America is corrupt and needs a complete do-over but the other democrats work behind the scenes to make it happen. They are masters a lies and deception!

The entire objective of the New Wave politics of hard core socialist politics is about convincing the general public that capitalism's works to take from the poor and give to the rich, but in truth, the progressive socialists take from everyone to benefit those in power, the socialists leadership.

No? Bernie is a millionaire, owns three house, mansion in the woods and flys around in a private jet. Nothing to see here. And who has the most money among the richest people in the country, why progressive democrats! Who knew?

Cuban Americans Tell What Life Under Castro Was Really Like

Fred Lucas / @FredLucasWH / February 24, 2020

When Sebastian Arcos and family members tried to travel from Cuba to the United States, authorities stopped them in what turned out to be a sting operation to arrest one of his uncles, who had advocated and fought for Fidel Castro’s revolution more than 20 years earlier.

That was Dec. 31, 1981, and for trying to leave the island nation, Arcos was jailed for a year.

His uncle spent seven years in jail. His father, also a political supporter of the communist revolution and like many other citizens soured on the broken promises of democracy, was imprisoned for six years.

“For the sake of argument, let’s say both the [Cuban] health care system and education system are perfect, which they are not. There have been thousands of political executions, tens of thousands of political prisoners, and 3 million Cuban exiles,” said Arcos, 58, today associate director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.

“So, the question to ask when we are told to consider the good things is: What is the price for the good?” Arcos told The Daily Signal. Arcos said that he is “surprised when talking heads in the United States will give Fidel Castro the benefit of the doubt.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a professed democratic socialist, has defended comments he made in the 1980s, when he said of Castro: “He educated their kids, gave them health care, totally transformed the society.”

In defending those remarks during an interview that aired Sunday on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Sanders said:  "We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba, but you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad. You know? When Fidel Castro came into office [in 1959], you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?”

Castro handed control of the government to his brother, Raúl Castro, before his death at age 90 in November 2016.

Miguel Díaz-Canel was named president when the younger Castro stepped down at age 87 in February 2018, but is largely considered a figurehead. Raúl Castro, head of Cuba’s Communist Party, is said to make major government decisions. Sanders noted that President Donald Trump has had kind things to say about authoritarian rulers such as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Arcos joined the Cuban Committee for Human Rights in 1987, providing reports to the United Nations Human Rights Commission before coming to the United States in 1992.  He said people should know better than to concede gross human rights abuses in Cuba, and then point to health care and literacy.

“That’s been the regime’s argument for decades,” Arcos said. “Whoever makes that argument is just repeating their lines.”

Raúl Castro, first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party, gives a speech Jan. 1, 2019, during a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution at the Santa Ifigenia Cemetery in Santiago de Cuba. (Photo: Yamil Lage/AFP/Getty Images)

Cuba’s military dictatorship controls 80% of the economy. Political prisoners are common, and courts face political interference.

The Heritage Foundation’s 2019 Index of Economic Freedom ranks Cuba at 178th among the world’s nations based on how free its economy is.  Cuba did adopt some free market policies about a decade ago, but the government hasn’t been a strong effort to implement the reforms. Private property is allowed, but is strictly regulated by the government.

According to Heritage’s index, low state-dictated wages increase poverty in Cuba. The state runs the means of production, property seizures without due process are common, and the top income tax rate is 50%.

Repression in Cuba is on the rise, said Janisset Rivero, 50, a human rights activist who lived in Cuba until age 14. Her family was wrongly accused of engaging in seditious speech against the Cuban government because they received a letter from family abroad.

“Health care and education are not as good as the propaganda claims,” Rivero said. “It’s indoctrination more than education. The Cuban system doesn’t tolerate critical thinking.”

The two former Cuban citizens interviewed for this story gave similar accounts of health care in Cuba. They said the health care system has two tiers: One is for tourists, elites, and the military, which is top rate and what people see. The other is for the general population. When Cubans go to those hospitals, they have to bring their own food, water, bed sheets, and pillows.

Of support inside the United States for Cuba’s communist system, Rivero said, “It’s ignorance. Some people are ignorant.” However, she suspects that in some cases, it’s worse.

“Some people simply support socialism and communism with a big state that can take control of people’s lives,” Rivero said. “Some supporters know exactly what is going on in Cuba and believe it would be OK here because they believe they know best.”

Frank Calzon, who retired last year as executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba, was born in 1944. His parents sent him to the United States after the Castro-led revolution. He became active in human rights causes and led the center for 22 years.

“A lot of claims the Cuban government makes should be suspect,” Calzon said. “Cuban students are not really more educated now. In 1951, the country had 75-80% of students [who] knew how to read and write.”

A strong spirit exists in Cuba for freedom, he said, pointing to the group Ladies in White as one example.

“The Ladies in White is a group of mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters of political prisoners,” Calzon said. “They try to march to Mass on Sundays, but Cuban police intercept them and take them to prisons. They release them that evening, but they take them several miles out of their city.”

Homelessness - Drugs, Mental Illness : democrats Say It's Housing!!!

Why would anyone actually vote for more of this??

For West Coast cities like Seattle. Portland most any city in California, the actual solution to solving the homeless problem is a dramatic shift in the controlling  ideology of leadership in those cities and states.

If there is a positive aspect to the nightmare of progressive socialsit laborism in these communities that is driving this shameful and hurtful embarrassing situation for our country, it's the rest of the country can see, first hand what the results are of progressive socialism. 

That these cities allow this despicable situation to continue is who they are. They do not care about these people or what they are having to deal with in their lives. This is and always has been the most basic tenant of the democrat candidates now that are running  for president of the United States.

democrats use and abuse people to gain power. This is probably the most important aspect of real socialism.

Really now, think about this for just a minute, if that long, after watching the debates this week, why would anyone in their right mind vote for more chaos and conflict like what we witnessed on national televised debates and what is and has been going on in our largest cities for decades?

What’s Really Driving the Homelessness Crisis

Christopher Rufo / @realchrisrufo / February 24, 2020

The homelessness crisis in America’s West Coast cities is beginning to draw national attention. There are now an estimated 166,752 people on the streets in California, Oregon, and Washington, and sensational stories of human despair and the return of medieval diseases have captured the public imagination.

Even President Donald Trump has tweeted about the “very bad and dangerous conditions” in San Francisco and warned that leaders must take action “to clean up these hazardous waste and homeless sites before the whole city rots away.”

There has been remarkably little clarity, however, on the key question: What’s really driving the homelessness crisis in West Coast cities?

For the past decade, progressive political leaders, activists, and media organizations have insisted that housing costs are the primary cause of homelessness. There is some truth to that: It’s obvious that in the largest West Coast cities, where a one-bedroom apartment rents for at least $2,000 a month, it’s more difficult for low-income individuals to afford stable housing.

However, as an emerging body of evidence shows, homelessness in America’s West Coast cities—particularly unsheltered homelessness—is not driven primarily by high housing costs, but rather by three interrelated phenomena: addiction, mental illness, and permissive public policies.

In cities such as Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Francisco, residents have complained about rampant public drug consumption, psychotic episodes, and millions of used hypodermic needles that have been discarded on city streets.

Still, despite the obvious visible evidence, progressive political leaders have insisted on the fiction that addiction and mental illness are only a small part of the homelessness crisis. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan insists that only “1 in 4” of the homeless struggle with drugs and alcohol, while Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti does not even list addiction as one of the major causes of homelessness on his official website.

However, as the Los Angeles Times has demonstrated in a recent investigation, “mental illness [and] substance abuse … are much more pervasive in Los Angeles County’s homeless population than officials have previously reported.”

While the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported substance abuse for only 14% of the homeless population, according to a UCLA study, the real figure is likely to be 75%—more than five times higher than the official estimates.

The figures are similar for mental illness. [State]Government authorities have estimated that 25% of the unsheltered population suffers from mental illness, while the UCLA study suggests that the true number is likely to be 78%.  As the Times points out, “the findings lend statistical support to the public’s frequent association of mental illness, physical disabilities, and substance abuse with homelessness.”

Put another way, the politically incorrect perception that homelessness, substance abuse, and mental illness are deeply intertwined is, in actuality, factually correct—and political leaders who insist otherwise are in a state of deep denial, preferring an ideological fiction to the harsh reality of life on the streets.

Unfortunately, the progressive political class in major West Coast cities is compounding the homelessness crisis with a set of permissive public policies.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, homelessness is not a national crisis. In fact, homelessness has declined 14.6% nationwide over the past decade, while at the same time increasing dramatically in major West Coast cities, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.  In part, it’s because these cities have adopted permissive policies on public camping, drug consumption, and property crime, which has created an attractive environment for the homeless.

In Los Angeles, more than one-third of unsheltered adults migrated to Los Angeles County after becoming homeless. In Seattle, even the former homelessness czar has admitted there is a “magnet effect” because of the city’s policies and availability of services. (As I have reported for City Journal, 9.5% of Seattle’s homeless population moved to the city “for legal marijuana,” 15.4% “to access homeless services,” and 15.7% were “traveling or visiting” and decided to stay.)

If political leaders in West Coast cities truly want to reduce street homelessness, they must first break through their denial about its causes.

Although reducing housing costs is a critical public policy goal, it will not significantly reduce the number of people on the streets. The compassionate response is not to maintain the fiction that homelessness can be solved with new housing developments, but to grapple with the complex human challenges of addiction and mental illness.