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November 2018

China is planning an authoritarian system which will essentially reward people for good behavior and punish others with difficulty based on a points system. And if you think this sounds like something that will happen in the distant future, guess again. Beijing is planning to begin implementation in 2020.

There is a nagging suspicion among us conservatives that Democrats want to game the electoral algorithm to produce the snapshot of the electorate most favorable to themselves, and that they will continue tweaking it to improve their results in real time. Many on the left, of course, sincerely believe that they are fighting voter suppression or championing innovation.  One of the examples of their innovation is the ranked choice voting that adopted by the city of Oakland, CA in 2006.  In 2010, after a complicated campaign in which candidates vied for second and third place, Oakland has elected Mayor Quan, even though she performed poorly after the first round was tabulated.  A little more than a year later, Quan, who was nobody's first choice, pissed virtually everyone in town with her lackluster handling of the Occupy camp.  One would think this experiment was enough to show that traditional voting arrangements work better, but no.  Other municipalities, and the state of Maine, have adopted the system, and Utah is slated to do it.

A few years ago I remember listening to a random episode of the Rush Limbaugh Show live when Rush was on holiday and had a guest speaker sitting in from New York City. He did a segment on the much-ballyhooed “War on Christmas” that has been contentiously discussed on the right side of the aisle and flatly disregarded on the left.

Intro by Kemberlee Kaye: LI is currently without a podcast. My dear friend and children's authoress, Amelia Hamilton, produces a fabulous podcast for kids that covers all things colonial America. I interviewed Hamilton about her podcast, Growing Patriots. You can read that interview here.

European leaders need to halt mass-immigration to curb the growing right-wing populist movement across the continent, Hillary Clinton warned in an interview with a British newspaper. Europe "must send a very clear message – "we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support" – because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic," she told The Guardian.

Erik Solheim, the head of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), has been forced to resign after an internal audit report questioning his huge travel expense surfaced in the media. Solheim, a green politician and former Norwegian Environment Minister, had spent almost half a million dollars jet-setting around the world. Solheim stepped down after cerain UN member states threatened to withhold funding over the latest revelations. According to a UK media report: "Countries unhappy with Solheim’s conduct were holding back tens of millions of dollars, threatening a financial crisis at the body."

I wasn't planning on a "Thanksgiving" post. This is a late in the day inspiration, now that we have returned home from a relative's house and I'm fighting my best to keep from falling asleep.

I came across this recent very brief, four paragraph, news story out of Illinois a few days ago of a defendant acquitted in a bench trial on several felony charges after he stabbed someone 10 times with a 2.5” knife during a road rage incident. I noted that it conveniently provided a good basis for discussing several interesting legal points that often arise in cases of self-defense.

This is one of my favorite pieces of American history. It speaks so much to who we are and who we are meant to be as a people. And that's why I post it every year. George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation written in 1789 is essential holiday reading. The colonies frequently set, "aside days of thanksgiving, prayer, and fasting in response to significant events," according to Mount Vernon's historical sources.

The U.S. Treasury has sanctioned an illicit Iranian-Russian network supplying oil to the Syrian regime. The elaborate oil scheme was used to finance the Islamic terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah, a department press release said Tuesday. The covert shipment of Iranian oil was run by the aid of the Russian state-owned company Promsyrioimport. The network delivered millions of barrels of oil to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad's regime and hundreds of millions of dollars to Islamic terrorist groups, the Treasury Department disclosed.