DISSECTING LEFTISM MIRROR ARCHIVE Leftists just KNOW what is good for us. Conservatives need evidence.. Why are Leftists always talking about hate? Because it fills their own hearts

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February 28, 2014

Obama Silences Complaining Employers With IRS

President Barack Obama is using the IRS to silence employers unhappy about Obamacare.

That's the hidden purpose behind the employer mandate delay announced on Feb. 10. The administration released 227 pages of mind-numbing regulations ridiculously billed as making "the compliance process simpler and easier" for employers. Hidden in the gobbledygook (on pages 125-126) is a requirement that employers sign a statement to the IRS - meaning under penalty of perjury - claiming they have not reduced the number of employees or cut hours to shield themselves from the costs of Obamacare.

Nine out of every 10 midsize employers already provide coverage, and for them, last Monday's announcement was about hush money, not delay. They are required to continue providing coverage, and worse, most will have to switch to the costlier Obamacare package of benefits because that's the only plan for sale. State insurance regulators and insurance companies have already said "no" to renewing noncompliant plans.

The only thing these employers get from last week's rule change is a "stop complaining" bribe. The Affordable Care Act says employers have to pay a whopping $3,000 each time a worker goes onto the Obama exchanges and gets a taxpayer-subsidized plan. Now the administration is offering to waive that penalty. Employers who want this deal must attest to the IRS that they haven't laid off workers or cut hours to squeeze under the 99-worker threshold.

In the first seven months of 2013, 77 percent of new hires were part-time. Obama rushed to stop the damaging news by announcing last July that he would delay the employer mandate until Jan. 1, 2015. Oops! That date is approaching.

Democrats running for re-election this fall are desperate to avoid similar headlines. This time, instead of the president offering employers a delay, he is offering most of them a bribe to keep quiet. Once employers swear they have not cut hours due to Obamacare, how can they speak out about the law's harm to their businesses?

Deceit is the primary motive behind the newly announced regulation. On page 36, it states that although employers are distressed that the law defines 30 hours a week as a full-time job requiring insurance, nothing can be done because the statute expressly states 30 hours. What? Is this the only part of the statute the administration won't change by fiat?

Obama's rule writers are lying and laughing as they concoct these regulations. None of this is being done to redress legitimate concerns of business. Obama is enlarging the powers of the IRS to silence critics, whether it's the tea party or businesses struggling to stay in the black. Say goodbye to fair elections.

SOURCE

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Government Power is an Economic Inequality

The liberal defenders of government power attack concentrations of wealth, but in the true concentration of wealth is not found in the hands of a few billionaires, but in the hands of the government.

The editorialists talk about income inequality and the 1 percent, but they focus on individuals rather than institutions, and it is the concentration of wealth and power in institutions that threaten civil liberties.

The top 10 wealthiest men and women in America barely have 250 billion dollars between them. Federal budgets run into the trillions of dollars, and the national debt approaches 15 trillion dollars. And that's not taking into account state budgets. Even Rhode Island, the smallest state in the union, with a population of barely a million, has a multi-billion dollar budget.

As the 10th richest man in America, Michael Bloomberg wields a personal fortune of a mere 18 billion dollars, but as the Mayor of the City of New York, he disposed of an annual budget of 63 billion dollars that was three times his own net worth. Spending so much money would wipe out the net worth of any billionaire in America.

That is the difference between the wealth wielded by the 10th wealthiest man in America, and the mayor of a single city. And that is the real concentration of wealth. Not in the hands of individuals, but at every level of government, from the municipal to the state houses to the White House.

Monopolistic power in 20th century America lies not in the hands of a few industrialists, but in the massive monopolistic trust of government, and its network of unions, non-profits, lobbyists and SuperPAC's. The railroads are broken up, offshore drilling is banned, coal mining is in trouble and Ma Bell has a thousand quarreling stepchildren-- now government is the real big business.

The 2008 presidential campaign cost 5.3 billion dollars. Another 1.5 billion for the House and the Senate. And that's not counting another half a billion from the 527's and even shadier fundraising by shadowy political organizations. In 2012, the price tag went up to 6.3 billion with 1.7 billion for the House and Senate.

But that's a small investment considering that the political players and their union and corporate allies were spending billions to get their hands on trillions.

Do you know of any company in America where for a few billion, you could become the CEO, run up trillion dollar deficits and parcel out billions to your friends who will then pay the money back to you so you can take over the company again four years later without the shareholders being able to force you out or have you arrested?

This company will allow you to indulge yourself, travel anywhere at company expense, live the good life, and only work when you feel like it. It will legally indemnify you against all shareholder lawsuits, while allowing you to dispose not only of their investments, but of their personal property and that of their children while obligating them to a debt slavery that will run for generations?

There is only one such corporation. It's the United States Government.

Under an ideological cloak of darkness, politicians act as if they can do anything they want. Public outrage is met with alarmist news stories about the dangers of violence, as if this were the reign of the Bourbon kings, not a democratic republic whose right of protest is as sacrosanct as its flag and its seal. Instead the republic is dominated by political trusts, party machines, media cartels, public sector unions and a million vermin who have sucked the cow dry and are starting in on its tender meat.

Consider that in 2008, Obama pulled in 20 million from the health care industry. (McCain took in 7 million). Afterward, he conspired to pass a law which mandated that every American be forced to buy health insurance from the industry. There is no definite figure for how much money the industry will make from this, but it will be a whole lot more than the mere 20 million they invested in him. During the days of the robber barons, the government never mandated that everyone must buy a product from them. Private companies might have contrived such control over the marketplace, but the IRS was never enlisted to collect their bills for them.

How much money has flowed from the Obama Administration to its friends in the private sector in just the last year alone and how much of it was used to secure jobs for its allied unions, which they then kicked back to liberal politicians running for office.

Entire states are going bankrupt because of political trusts formed by politicians and public sector unions which pass money back and forth to each other in the plain sight of the taxpayers they are robbing blind.

This is not merely a concentration of wealth, but a ruthless concentration of power. The real money isn't coming from that top 1 percent, it's coming from unions, lobbies and companies which use political power to extract public money.

And that money goes to the party which is so determined to keep on extracting that money no matter what it takes.

The big government left keeps playing the class warfare card, but even the worst company in the world isn't as larcenously extortionate as the worst politician. Some of the greediest and abusive companies were either created by the government or operate in close partnership with it.

HMO's were created by the government. Banks fed off Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's subsidized mortgages like vultures. Do we really need to go into insurance companies, defense contractors or Sallie Mae. AT&T is considered one of the worst companies in America, and it's also one of the biggest political donors. Is there a connection there? Only that companies close to the government don't need to worry as much about what the public thinks of them.

Hate the airlines? They've both been overregulated and subsidized into incompetence. Airlines have been bailed out and protected from competition too many ways to count, because of the unions riding on their coattails. And those unions are destroying airline after airline, while the non-union airlines prosper.

American business is looking a lot like Soviet business did, full of companies with contempt for their customers, and an unctuous smile for the government. They know where the money is coming from. And in an era of cut throat price competition, and high labor and regulation costs, it's just easier for them to extract the public's money by going over their heads to the politicians. Don't feel like paying for any of it? It's no longer a free market in which individuals make economic choices, but a collective economy with government fixing prices and then turning around and taking more of your money to pay back the companies to cover the difference. That's how ObamaCare works.

The new trusts operate out of Washington D.C. for the benefit of the public. Much like the food markets of Venezuela or the hospitals of Cuba. The money goes back and forth, lobbyists, unions, politicians, consultants, contractors, activists and lunatics huddling together and passing bills that no one has read.

And still the defenders of big government treat any calls for reform as a conspiracy of the rich. Yet the two richest men in America, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, were holding fundraisers for Obama. And the tenth richest man in America runs one of the biggest bastions of liberalism. And number 14 on the list, George Soros, is the left's sugar daddy.

This isn't a battle of billionaires. Mere money no longer means what it once did. The billionaire is a dinosaur. The wealthiest men in America can't wait to get rid of their holdings. In the free market, money made you king. But under socialism, money just buys you access and leverage. The leverage to force every man, woman and child to buy your product.

The real concentration of wealth is no longer among men, but among institutions. Like electricity passing along copper wire, it jumps among unions, political machines, companies, non-profits and back again. Its function is to provide the motive power for the great beast of government to grind on. And the American taxpayer is left lying flat in the street.

SOURCE

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Separation of Government From Press

After much criticism from conservative quarters, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has decided, at least for now, to withdraw plans for its proposed study of how media organizations gather and report news. The expressed goal of the survey was to determine if the "critical information needs" of the public are being met. In making the announcement on Friday, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler indicated the survey would be "revised" and that the government agency had "no intention" of regulating political speech of journalists or other broadcasters.

You couldn't prove that from reading the initial study.

The obvious question is: Who gets to define my or your "information needs"? The answer begins with two universities commissioned by the FCC to conduct the study: the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Communication and Democracy and the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Both associated with a liberal political philosophy.

The reasoning behind this proposed newsroom intrusion is that certain categories of the public ("underserved" consumers in multiple "media ecologies" in the bureaucratese of the study) may not be getting enough "balance" in its news diet.

FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, daughter of Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), says the FCC "must emphatically insist that we leave no American behind when it comes to meeting the needs of those in varied and vibrant communities of our nation -- be they native born, immigrant, disabled, non-English speaking, low-income, or other." But not, apparently, political conservatives, regular churchgoers, or patriotic Americans who believe their beliefs are "underserved" by most journalists. Seemingly, no one at the FCC cares overmuch if this particular "constituency" is underserved.

That there has been little more than a low decibel outcry from mainstream media about the FCC study is instructive. It is difficult to imagine Ms. Clyburn and her minions storming into network newsrooms, demanding to know how many conservatives are reporting the news. I once asked Lesley Stahl of CBS News if she could name a single conservative colleague. She could not. Maybe those concerned with our supposed news malnutrition can start at CBS.

This "study" -- and possibly its revised edition -- is a form of intimidation designed to target not the broadcast networks (which is why they seem unconcerned), or even mainstream newspapers. "Fox News executives feared they were the ultimate target of this exercise, and who can blame them for this suspicion?" writes RealClearPolitics.com. "From the beginning of the Obama presidency, White House communications officials and Obama political advisers have leveled attacks on Fox, even going so far as to proclaim that it is not 'a legitimate' news organization." Is it so far-fetched to think that the FCC would not try to monitor conservative news outlets?

There is a reason America's Founders selected only one profession -- the press -- for special protection in the Bill of Rights. As expressed by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to John Jay in 1786: "Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it."

Politicians throughout American history, including Jefferson, have been targets of press criticism, sometimes unfairly, even inaccurately, but still the press has remained free, or was allowed to regain its freedom after wartime censorship.

The organization Reporters Without Borders recently ranked the United States 46th in the world when it comes to press freedom, just one spot ahead of Haiti. Why the low ranking? The Atlantic.com explains, "...the heritage of the 1776 constitution was shaken to its foundation during George W. Bush's two terms as president by the way journalists were harassed and even imprisoned for refusing to reveal their sources or surrender their files to federal judicial officials. There has been little improvement in practice under Barack Obama. ... No fewer than eight individuals have been charged under the Espionage Act since Obama became president, compared with three during Bush's two terms."

If the FCC moves forward with even a revised agenda that is intrusive and unconstitutional, that ranking is likely to decline even further.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 27, 2014

Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of the Nazis

People who have read much of my writings will be familiar with most of the points made by Daniel Hannan below. We differ in one important respect, however: Hannan says that most Leftists mean well and that their motives are different from the motives of the totalitarians. I don't think that. I see the same authoritarian mentality in all Leftists. They all want to rule us

You can't accuse the NSDAP of downplaying the "Socialist" bit. On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars.

Rather, in the place of debased, Jewish Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht would deliver “der echte Sozialismus”: real socialism.

Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk.

So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have found it especially contentious. As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature of Socialism:

"It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too."

The clue is in the name. Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said.

Hitler told Hermann Rauschning, a Prussian who briefly worked for the Nazis before rejecting them and fleeing the country, that he had admired much of the thinking of the revolutionaries he had known as a young man; but he felt that they had been talkers, not doers. “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun,” he boasted, adding that “the whole of National Socialism” was “based on Marx”.

Marx’s error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity – to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order. His aim, he told his economic adviser, Otto Wagener, was to “convert the German Volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists” – by which he meant the bankers and factory owners who could, he thought, serve socialism better by generating revenue for the state. “What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish,” he told Wagener, “we shall be in a position to achieve.”

Leftist readers may by now be seething. Whenever I touch on this subject, it elicits an almost berserk reaction from people who think of themselves as progressives and see anti-fascism as part of their ideology. Well, chaps, maybe now you know how we conservatives feel when you loosely associate Nazism with “the Right”.

To be absolutely clear, I don’t believe that modern Leftists have subliminal Nazi leanings, or that their loathing of Hitler is in any way feigned. That’s not my argument. What I want to do, by holding up the mirror, is to take on the equally false idea that there is an ideological continuum between free-marketers and fascists.

The idea that Nazism is a more extreme form of conservatism has insinuated its way into popular culture. You hear it, not only when spotty students yell “fascist” at Tories, but when pundits talk of revolutionary anti-capitalist parties, such as the BNP and Golden Dawn, as “far Right”.

What is it based on, this connection? Little beyond a jejune sense that Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty and fascists are nasty. When written down like that, the notion sounds idiotic, but think of the groups around the world that the BBC, for example, calls “Right-wing”: the Taliban, who want communal ownership of goods; the Iranian revolutionaries, who abolished the monarchy, seized industries and destroyed the middle class; Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who pined for Stalinism.

The “Nazis-were-far-Right” shtick is a symptom of the wider notion that “Right-wing” is a synonym for “baddie”.

One of my constituents once complained to the Beeb about a report on the repression of Mexico's indigenous peoples, in which the government was labelled Right-wing. The governing party, he pointed out, was a member of the Socialist International and, again, the give-away was in its name: Institutional Revolutionary Party. The BBC’s response was priceless. Yes, it accepted that the party was socialist, “but what our correspondent was trying to get across was that it is authoritarian”.

In fact, authoritarianism was the common feature of socialists of both National and Leninist varieties, who rushed to stick each other in prison camps or before firing squads. Each faction loathed the other as heretical, but both scorned free-market individualists as beyond redemption. Their battle was all the fiercer, as Hayek pointed out in 1944, because it was a battle between brothers.

Authoritarianism – or, to give it a less loaded name, the belief that state compulsion is justified in pursuit of a higher goal, such as scientific progress or greater equality – was traditionally a characteristic of the social democrats as much as of the revolutionaries.

Jonah Goldberg has chronicled the phenomenon at length in his magnum opus, Liberal Fascism. Lots of people take offence at his title, evidently without reading the book since, in the first few pages, Jonah reveals that the phrase is not his own. He is quoting that impeccable progressive H.G. Wells who, in 1932, told the Young Liberals that they must become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis”.

In those days, most prominent Leftists intellectuals, including Wells, Jack London, Havelock Ellis and the Webbs, tended to favour eugenics, convinced that only religious hang-ups were holding back the development of a healthier species. The unapologetic way in which they spelt out the consequences have, like Hitler’s actual words, been largely edited from our discourse. Here, for example, is George Bernard Shaw in 1933:

"Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly… If we desire a certain type of civilisation and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it."

Eugenics, of course, topples easily into racism. Engels himself wrote of the “racial trash” – the groups who would necessarily be supplanted as scientific socialism came into its own. Season this outlook with a sprinkling of anti-capitalism and you often got Leftist anti-Semitism – something else we have edited from our memory, but which once went without saying. “How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?” Hitler had asked his party members in 1920.

Are contemporary Leftist critics of Israel secretly anti-Semitic? No, not in the vast majority of cases. Are modern socialists inwardly yearning to put global warming sceptics in prison camps? Nope. Do Keynesians want the whole apparatus of corporatism, expressed by Mussolini as “everything in the state, nothing outside the state”? Again, no. There are idiots who discredit every cause, of course, but most people on the Left are sincere in their stated commitment to human rights, personal dignity and pluralism.

My beef with many (not all) Leftists is a simpler one. By refusing to return the compliment, by assuming a moral superiority, they make political dialogue almost impossible. Using the soubriquet “Right-wing” to mean “something undesirable” is a small but important example.

Next time you hear Leftists use the word fascist as a general insult, gently point out the difference between what they like to imagine the NSDAP stood for and what it actually proclaimed.

SOURCE

Hannan has a number of interesting Nazi posters with his article but not all are translated or translated well. I therefore reproduce them with translations:


Workers of the mind and the fist choose the frontline soldier, Hitler. Against hunger and desperation, choose Hitler


This poster is a bit hard to read but its text is all rendered clearly here. The body of the poster reads: "Wir Arbeiter sind erwacht – wir wählen Liste 2 Nationalsozialisten" -- which translates as: "We workers are awoken. We choose List 2, National Socialists"

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Same Prosecutor Who Let David Gregory Go Is Destroying the Life of a DC Businessman Over an Empty Shotgun Shell

Remember this? When NBC's David Gregory brandished and waved around a 30-round magazine on Meet the Press during an interview with the NRA's Wayne LaPierre about gun control? The incident occurred inside the District of Columbia where magazines with a capacity of more than 10-rounds, and even fake magazines, are illegal. Not only did he violate D.C. gun laws, but according to D.C. police, he knowingly violated the law after being denied the use of the illegal magazine on the show. A review of the law:

"No person in the District shall possess, sell, or transfer any large capacity ammunition feeding device regardless of whether the device is attached to a firearm. For the purposes of this subsection, the term large capacity ammunition feeding device means a magazine, belt, drum, feed strip, or similar device that has a capacity of, or that can be readily restored or converted to accept, more than 10 rounds of ammunition."

Regardless a well connected, pro-gun control Gregory escaped without charges for illegal possession of the magazine, which would land a regular person in jail for up to a year with a $1000 fine. After D.C. police completed their investigation into the incident, D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier turned the case over to the D.C. Office of the Attorney General [OAG], headed by Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan, to determine whether prosecution would be appropriate. The ruling from the OAG on Gregory's prosecution? No charges, no trial, no jail time and no fines.

"Having carefully reviewed all of the facts and circumstances of this matter, as it does in every case involving firearms-related offenses or any other potential violation of D.C. law within our criminal jurisdiction, OAG has determined to exercise its prosecutorial discretion to decline to bring criminal charges against Mr. Gregory, who has no criminal record, or any other NBC employee based on the events associated with the December 23, 2012 broadcast."

Now the same Attorney General, Irvin B. Nathan, who failed to bring charges against Gregory, is doing everything he can to make the life of D.C. business and family man Mark Witaschek (who, like Gregory, doesn't have a criminal record) a living hell. Why? Cops in full SWAT gear raided Witaschek's Georgetown home on July 7, 2012 looking for "firearms and ammunition … gun cleaning equipment, holsters, bullet holders and ammunition receipts."

Police found a single empty shotgun shell and muzzleloader sabots (lead balls), no guns. Witaschek is facing jail time as a result of those finds and prosecutors are arguing Witaschek was in illegal possession of "ammunition" even though neither the empty shotgun shell casing or the sabots can be fired without other components. Emily Miller explains:

"The District of Columbia has finished presenting its case on why Mark Witaschek is a danger to society for possessing a single shotgun shell and muzzleloader sabots in his home. This outrageous legal battle shows how far unelected, anti-gun liberals will go to attempt to destroy a man’s life."

When Attorney General Irvin Nathan’s prosecutors rested on Tuesday, they established simply that Mr. Witaschek did not have a registered gun in the city, so he violated the firearms laws by having ammunition.

Mr. Witaschek has never denied these charges, but has said that he didn’t know that inoperable ammunition was illegal. He also insists that his constitutional rights have been violated.

“The police and attorney general obviously have infringed upon my Second Amendment right to keep arms, or ammunition, or even the muzzleloaders borne by our Founding Fathers,” the father of three told me. “And they trampled on almost every other amendment to the Bill of Rights not only for me, but my entire family.”

Right before the trial began, Mr. Nathan’s office dropped the charge from possession of unregistered ammunition to attempted possession.

It’s unclear how Mr. Witaschek could attempt to possess something that was in his home, but the facts aren’t the reason for the shift. The lesser charge carries a penalty of six months in jail, which means Mr. Witaschek was not eligible for the jury trial he wanted.

Judge Robert Morin has listened almost impassively as the government put police officers on the stand to explain how they raided the business man’s house twice looking for guns. Mr. Witaschek is a gun owner and hunter, but has always kept his firearms at his sister’s home in Virginia.

Miller pressed OAG spokesman Ted Gest about the clear double standard and difference in prosecution for Gregory and Witaschek. Gest told her, "Mr. Nathan and our prosecutors believe this is in the interest of public safety" while attempting to smear Witaschek with an allegation of domestic violence that has never been investigated or proven by police. “Accusations that are unproven in court factor into prosecution decisions," Gest told her.

Equal treatment under the law? Not in Washington D.C. Witaschek's trial resumes in March when the defense will make its case.

SOURCE

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Fox's Varney to CNN's Piers Morgan: 'Bugger Off'

Fox News business talk show host and native Brit Stuart Varney bid CNN host Piers Morgan adieu, unceremoniously telling him to "bugger off," after the announcement that the "Piers Morgan Live" show would end in March.

"Piers, go away. Don't come back. And there are two g's in bugger off," Varney said Monday on Fox Business Channel's "Varney & Co."

Morgan, a fellow Brit, announced Sunday that his show would end after a three-year run and disappointing ratings. CNN said his future with the network was undetermined. Varney said Morgan had misjudged his audience by regularly talking down to them.

"He has this upper-class accent and uses it to talk down to his audience. That's one of the dumbest things you can do in television news. You think you will win with an audience with your oh-so-superior attitude?" Varney asked.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 26, 2014

The 'Fairness' Fraud

Thomas Sowell

It seems as if, everywhere you turn these days, there are studies claiming to show that America has lost its upward mobility for people born in the lower socioeconomic levels. But there is a sharp difference between upward "mobility," defined as an opportunity to rise, and mobility defined as actually having risen.

That distinction is seldom even mentioned in most of the studies. It is as if everybody is chomping at the bit to get ahead, and the ones that don't rise have been stopped by "barriers" created by "society."

When statistics show that sons of high school dropouts don't become doctors or scientists nearly as often as the sons of Ph.D.s, that is taken as a sign that American society is not "fair."

If equal probabilities of achieving some goal is your definition of fairness, then we should all get together -- people of every race, color, creed, national origin, political ideology and sexual preference -- and stipulate that life has never been fair, anywhere or any time in all the millennia of recorded history.

Then we can begin at last to talk sense.

I know that I never had an equal chance to become a great ballet dancer like Rudolph Nureyev. The thought of becoming a ballet dancer never once crossed my mind in all the years when I was growing up in Harlem. I suspect that the same thought never crossed the minds of most of the guys growing up on New York's lower east side.

Does that mean that there were unfair barriers keeping us from following in the footsteps of Rudolph Nureyev?

A very distinguished scholar once mentioned at a social gathering that, as a young man, he was not thinking of going to college until someone else, who recognized his ability, urged him to do so.

Another very distinguished scholar told me that, although his parents were anti-Semitic, it was the fact that he went to a school with many Jewish children that got him interested in intellectual matters and led him into an academic career.

All groups, families and cultures are not even trying to do the same things, so the fact that they do not all end up equally represented everywhere can hardly be automatically attributed to "barriers" created by "society."

Barriers are external obstacles, as distinguished from internal values and aspirations -- unless you are going to play the kind of word games that redefine achievements as "privileges" and treat an absence of evidence of discrimination as only proof of how diabolically clever and covert the discrimination is.

The front page of a local newspaper in northern California featured the headline "The Promise Denied," lamenting the under-representation of women in computer engineering. The continuation of this long article on an inside page had the headline, "Who is to blame for this?"

In other words, the fact that reality does not match the preconceptions of the intelligentsia shows that there is something wrong with reality, for which somebody must be blamed. Apparently their preconceptions cannot be wrong.

Women, like so many other groups, seem not to be dedicated to fulfilling the prevailing fetish among the intelligentsia that every demographic group should be equally represented in all sorts of places.

Women have their own agendas, and if these agendas do not usually include computer engineering, what is to be done? Draft women into engineering schools to satisfy the preconceptions of our self-anointed saviors? Or will a propaganda campaign be sufficient to satisfy those who think that they should be making other people's choices for them?

That kind of thinking is how we got ObamaCare.

At least one of the recent celebrated statistical studies of social mobility leaves out Asian Americans. Immigrants from Asia are among a number of groups, including American-born Mormons, whose achievements totally undermine the notion that upward mobility can seldom be realized in America.

Those who preach this counterproductive message will probably never think that the envy, resentment and hopelessness they preach, and the welfare state they promote, are among the factors keeping people down.

SOURCE

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A good parable

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in the books of Ayn Rand. After escaping from the Soviet Union in the 1920s, Rand became a famous American playwright, philosopher, and novelist. She has written many books – three of which I would urge everyone to read. The first, Anthem, is a lot like Orwell’s 1984. The second, The Fountainhead, is a longer novel expounding on her philosophy, which is known as objectivism. The third, Atlas Shrugged, is her most famous work and includes the most complete explanation of her views on economics and morality.

For those interested in Rand, I also recommend a song that was inspired by a rock musician who reads her work. His name is Neil Peart – a member of the band “Rush.” Neil is the greatest rock and roll drummer who ever lived. He is also one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived.

When I was a teenager in the 1970s, Peart wrote “The Trees,” which fast became one of my favorite songs. I didn’t know at the time that the song was a stinging indictment of socialism and communism inspired by Neil’s reading of Ayn Rand novels. I’ve reprinted the verses below with some brief comments in between most verses.

There is unrest in the forest,
there is trouble with the trees,
for the maples want more sunlight
and the oaks ignore their pleas.

When I look back on it, I am somewhat embarrassed that it took me so long to figure out the symbolism behind the oak versus maple contrast. This is a classic Marxist over-simplification, which is intentional on Peart’s behalf. There were only two classes of people according to Marx - the “haves” and the “have nots” or, as he called them, the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat.” Here, the oaks are the “haves” or the “bourgeoisie” and the maples are the “have nots” or the “proletariat.”

The trouble with the maples,
(And they're quite convinced they're right)
they say the oaks are just too lofty
and they grab up all the light.

This verse is interesting because it raises the issue of absolute versus relative poverty. When the maples claim that the oak trees grab up all the light they are exaggerating – actually, the author of the song, Neil Peart, is exaggerating for effect. Oaks are big trees, to be sure. In my own yard, there is an oak that is 100 feet tall that will eventually grow to be about 125 feet tall. But maples are big trees, too. I have a sugar maple that is about 60 feet tall that will eventually grow to be about 80 feet tall.

Peart, quite ingeniously, shows that the “have nots” would be more accurately characterized as simply “having less than others.” Their problem is not that they do not have enough to get by. The problem is that, in their view, the oaks are just “too lofty.” In other words, others have too much. That is the key phrase in this paragraph because it reveals that covetousness, rather than true need, is what motivates the maples. In reality, that is always the motive of the collectivist.

But the oaks can't help their feelings
if they like the way they're made.
And they wonder why the maples
can’t be happy in their shade.

It is funny to me that the lyrics to this song were written just a few years before Ronald Reagan became President of the United States. After he took office, there was no small amount of controversy about his ideas concerning “trickle down” economics. Here, the oaks seem to reference the idea that their loftiness benefits others, too – this time, in the form of shade. This is a classic “trickle down” economic argument.

There is trouble in the forest,

And the creatures all have fled,
as the maples scream "Oppression!"
And the oaks just shake their heads.

So the maples formed a union
and demanded equal rights.
"The oaks are just too greedy;
we will make them give us light."

This is classic Ayn Rand. She focuses on unjustly taking from someone that which he has earned – noting that this always involves a violent struggle. The maples begin by screaming, and then they start demanding. Finally, they settle upon force, not reason, in order to obtain what they want. The results are always predictable.

Now there's no more oak oppression,
for they passed a noble law,
and the trees are all kept equal
by hatchet, axe, and saw.

This last verse is chilling because it reveals two truths about progressivism:

1) Progressivism is not progressive. Oppression is ended and equality is achieved not by advancing anyone but by retarding the achievements of some.

2) Social justice is punitive, not restorative. No one is restored under a progressive system, but people are often punished in order to guarantee equal outcome. That is another reason why Rand prefers to use the term “collectivism” rather than “progressivism.”

Ayn Rand was not a Christian. Nor was she one who professed belief in the Ten Commandments. Nonetheless, she understood that what is often packaged as compassion is really covetousness in disguise. We would do well to familiarize ourselves with her work in an age of “collective” historical amnesia. Screams of oppression and cries for revolution are never more than a generation away.

SOURCE

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Not a Damn Thing

Entitlement is a destructive mentality. It blinds people to the responsibilities that they have to themselves, to their lives and their happiness, which causes laziness and sloth. It makes people believe that the lives and labor of others are theirs by right, as if others live to serve them. If there's one lesson that I could impart to every child in the world, it's this: no one else owes you, and you owe no one else, a damn thing.

No One Else Owes You

At appropriate times I've counseled my children that no one owed them anything. They came into this world with nothing, including any debts owed. Nobody else, in the entire world, including mom and dad, owe them a single thing, like time, money, food, clothing, shelter, anything. Anything and everything they want in life, they must find a peaceful way to get it. Their lives are their own, and the lives of others belong to those others, not to my children, nor to me, nor to you.

What they have they've either received as a gift from someone who loves them, found, or earned. Because I love my children, I gift to them enough to meet their basic needs, and more to make sure their lives are rich with learning opportunities and excitement. I give these things freely, and at least right now, only conditional to the level of love and respect they show me, within reasonable expectations of their age. They don't owe me anything for my sharing of my abundance with them. As the time has come that they've desired more than what I offer, I've proposed trading value for value. When they want something more from me, they're shown how they can earn it, and they have.

You Owe No One Else

As important as the above principle is, it would be incomplete without this counterpart. No on owes you anything, and you don't owe anything to anyone else. Your life is yours to live, to do with whatever you decide. Nobody but you is entitled to your life and the fruits of your labor. Anybody claiming otherwise better have an explicit agreement from you. If they don't, if their claim has been pulled out of the air, they are attempting to take your life, to enslave you to them. They want something, and instead of recognizing the fact that no one owes them anything, they are choosing to take it without regard to right or the will of those they take it from. They demand from others their lives, and for that they are the enemies of reason. They show with their actions their unwillingness to live in peace with others, to live civilly. They are a threat to you and to your loved ones. If they are not removed from society, either through banishment or death, their choice, then you and society have decided to value their lives, the lives of thugs and criminals, above your own.

Implications

The implication that no one owes you anything is that you must earn everything you want in life. To do that, you must create value for others, something that they want more than what they currently have. You have no right to take what you want from others, because it is neither owed to you nor do you have a right to it. Value must be traded for value.

And the implication that you owe no one else, but yet others claim that you do, in effect enslaving you, means that you have a choice to make. You can rightfully resist them, and there are many violent and nonviolent ways of doing that, or you can submit to them. Resisting may or may not be foolish, and submitting may or may not be wise. Different political climates, as well as one's self-imposed obligations to those he loves, determine the prudence in either resistance or submission. Either way, the fact remains you don't owe anything to anyone, and no one owes anything to you.

Final Thoughts

These considerations have been empowering for me as an individual. To know where I stand in regards to my responsibilities to myself, and my obligations to others, has also been very liberating. I am my own master. I know it and have internalized it. Every child and every adult in the entire world, the entire universe even, should likewise know it and make it the bedrock principle of their lives. You won't have liberty, peace, and ultimately happiness without it.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 25, 2014

Nazism prefigured the modern world

Of all the myriad myths spread at light speed by the enemies of Christianity and astonishingly believed without much critical thought by vast numbers of people, one of the most surreal must be the idea that Nazism was Christian.

This is part of an email I received from Tony, a supporter of my party Liberty GB, who sent me a long list of sharp attacks against Christianity after watching my video: What Is Uniquely Good about Western Civilisation Derives from Christianity.

"For example Adolf Hitler was a Catholic and included proclamations of his beliefs in his writings, e.g. "We demand liberty for all religious denominations in the State, so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the morality and moral sense of the German race. The Party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, but does not bind itself in the matter of creed to any particular confession."

What is totally missed by Tony and, unfortunately, many others is that "positive Christianity" is not Christianity at all, but a way of "restoring the old pagan Nordic values and 'substitute the spirit of the hero for that of the Crucifixion'."

Another thing that anti-Christians don't consider: in Nazi times Germans were overwhelmingly Christian -- even despite Nazism's comprehensive attempts to erase Christianity from Germany and replace it with a neo-pagan religion based on pre-Christian Germanic legends -- and so Hitler had to pay some lip service in public to Christianity. But both what he and the Nazis in power did and what he was recorded as saying in private tell another story, much closer to the truth.

Hitler said, as reported in Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944: His Private Conversations:

"Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things...

The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death... When understanding of the universe has become widespread... Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity... Christianity has reached the peak of absurdity... And that's why someday its structure will collapse... The only way to get rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little...

Christianity is an invention of sick brains...

I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie. Our epoch in the next 200 years will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity."

Very modern, with references to the theory of evolution -- in which the Fuhrer was an ardent believer -- and the scientific "understanding of the universe" replacing Christianity.

According to the book Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity by Michael Coren, a program listing the main dogmas of the National Reich Church -- a Nazi institution intended to eliminate Christianity from Germany and establishing a new pagan religion -- published in 1942 by The New York Times, ended with:

"On the day of the foundation of the National Reich Church the Christian cross shall be removed from all churches, cathedrals, and chapels inside the frontiers of the Reich and its colonies and will be replaced by the symbol of invincible Germany -- the swastika."

Another lie dear to the Left that has managed to enter the collective mind is that the Popes wanted to get rid of the Jews. Countless rabbis, Jewish leaders, and Israeli authorities have recognised the crucial role played by the Catholic Church in helping the Jews. In fact the Church did more than any other institution to help and rescue Jews from Nazism. From the Jewish Library website:

"The vindication of Pius XII has been established principally by Jewish writers and from Israeli archives. It is now established that the Pope supervised a rescue network which saved 860,000 Jewish lives -- more than all the international agencies put together."

The power of propaganda and how easy it is to smear a political or ideological opponent is terrifying.

The danger of a return to values and ideas espoused by the Nazis, that we hear so much about, is real, but doesn't come so much from the direction of the usual suspects, "Islamophobic", neo-Nazi groups, as from a far more mainstream, Leftist direction.

The threat has two sources. One is the rise of Islam in the West -- aided and abetted by the Left -- with its well-known ideological and historical links to Nazism and anti-Semitism. The second source is less well-known. Recent in-depth and groundbreaking historical research, thanks to the opening of national archives (previously closed to the public) after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, has thrown an entirely new light on what nurtured Nazi ideology. We already knew that Hitler and Nazism were neo-pagan and anti-Christian (despite what the Left says), but books like Karla Poewe's New Religions and the Nazis, Gene Edward Veith's Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judaeo-Christian Worldview and others, go much further than that.

They reveal a worrisome, sinister similarity between Nazism and current trends, both sharing hostility for the Judaeo-Christian tradition and its ethics and increasingly embracing neo-pagan views. In many way, Nazis were pioneers of what's happening today. About Nazis, Poewe says:

"They also rejected Christian morality. They couldn't stand the Ten Commandments. They were totally against any categorical or timeless morality. They wanted something opportunistic, something that changed with the human circumstances."

These days' moral relativism in a nutshell.

American historian Veith has a definition for fascism that is undistinguishable from our time's prevailing ethos: "Fascism is the modern world's nostalgia for paganism. It is a sophisticated culture's revolt against God."

As the 10 years of historical research by Karla Poewe document, Nazism was ushered in by new religions, chiefly the German Faith Movement (Deutsche Glaubensbewegung or DGB), mixing pagan Nordic and Hindu religions.

Mirroring present-day's environmentalism and its pantheism were Heinrich Himmler's proclamations of the sacred status of German lands. SS symbols, oaths and rituals were derived from ancient German and Nordic mythology. The rooms of their secret meetings were decorated with runes, prehistoric signs supposed to give the power of prophecy to anyone who could read them.

Himmler and Hitler wanted to abolish the "criminal institution of the Christian Church known as marriage", although gave up this goal as unacceptable to contemporary Germans. They'd be delighted to see how much their ideas are being vindicated nowadays.

There was a "secular christening" for illegitimate children, called "SS name-giving", created by Himmler, complete with swastikas and runes.

About homosexuality, Poewe wrote:

"Hauer's DGB bunde shared with National Socialism a tendency toward homoerotism. Hauer himself was permissibly heterosexual, but "homosexuality was very tolerated in these youth movements, and a high percentage of the SA and SS were homosexual or bisexual. People like to think that because Adolf Hitler murdered (SA leader) Ernst Rohm, who was homosexual, he was repressive of homosexuality. But that wasn't the case. It's a myth to think the Nazi movement was against homosexuality. Far from it; it wasn't sexually repressive at all."

So, here we have it: the Nazis paved the way, and now we can follow in their futuristic, progressive path: marriages are in decline, Christianity is dying, illegitimacy is on the rise, paganism seems the way forward, and homosexuality is making great advances towards normal status.

SOURCE

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Progressives’ Rules Of Outrage

Answering all accusations of hate speech or incivility with the simple phrase "Bush = Hitler" would deflate a lot of pomposity

The thing I like about most sports are the rules and how the winner is determined are pretty unambiguous. Score more points, cross the finish line first, jump higher, whatever, and you win. Should there be any foul play or skirting of the rules, there’s an official or referee there to cry foul. It’s simple and, to borrow a word from President Obama, fair.

Politics, on the other hand, is quite different. Truth used to be the most potent weapon in the game of politics. It was the best tool with which to garner the most votes, and whoever got the most votes won. Whoever gets the most votes still wins, but getting to that finish line is no longer even remotely restrained by rules of the truth.

Politicians always have lied, to be sure. But the media was there to, if not serve as an impartial referee, at least hold the players to some sort of standard. No more.

Putting aside the 2008 election, when Barack Obama was vetted with all the gusto guys use to vet pretty girls at the singles bar, the media has been a co-conspirator with Democrats in an unprecedented way the last five years.

It started with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The White House and Democrats laid out specific promises should the bill become law. We were told the unemployment rate would not go above 8 percent and the economy would be boosted by the hundreds of thousands of “shovel-ready jobs” the bill would create. None came close to happening.

The White House was nervous. This was early on, when the administration was not quite sure how supportive the media would be. Their political friends and donors were cashing their stimulus checks, but nothing was happening. What if the stimulus did not stimulate?

Turns out they needn’t have worried. To this day, progressives and their handmaidens in the media believe either that the stimulus saved the country or would’ve been more effective if it had been larger.

But non-believers were looking at the numbers and getting suspicious. Democrats had to act quickly. They had move the goalposts for “success.”

The professional obfuscators on the public payroll, also known as the president’s advisors, cooked up a new unit of measure – jobs saved or created. The beauty of this number was it couldn’t be proven, but it couldn’t be disproven either. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best they could do under such obvious failure.

But it’s one thing to fool average people. They have lives and don’t pay close attention to these things. But the watchdogs of democracy should have known better. They should have blown this new unit of measure out of the water. But they didn’t. They reported it like it was the plan all along.

It was then the White House, Democrats and progressives in general knew beyond a doubt that the old rules were gone. Truth was no longer something written in pen, or even pencil, it was written in sand and could be rewritten on a whim whenever needed. And they rewrote.

After all, if you can create a new unit of measure every time you’re in trouble, you can’t lose. Especially when you have the referees on your team.

We’ve since been inundated with unprovable declarations of success, such as “It would have been worse if we hadn’t…(insert any economic claim here).” The media referees played along as though they had seen this alternate future and determined the president was right – it could have been worse.

It is shameless. The only thing worse is Republicans’ inability to recognize the futility of complaining to those media referees and do an end-run around them directly to the people.

Now we come to this week, and another example of a malleable rulebook written in sand when it comes to how progressives and conservatives are treated by the media.

Ted Nugent, someone I grew up with on the radio in Detroit, called the president a “subhuman mongrel” at an event for Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott of Texas. The offended class in the media sprang into action, drooling like heroin junkies when they hear that flame hit the bottom of the spoon.

It was deemed one of the worst things ever said, by people who make their living declaring things said by others awful – one of the few growth industries in Obama’s economy.

CNN dedicated hour upon hour of coverage to the words of a man whose actions for charity they’ve ignored for decades. Current Texas Gov. Rick Perry went on with Wolf Blitzer and was badgered for 2 1/2 minutes to denounce these words, then denounce them in stronger terms, and again, as if Perry has said them himself. Republicans were nearly trampled by “journalists” demanding they react to and answer for something said in an entirely different time zone.

Meanwhile, taking a break from calling Republicans all manner of potty-mouth names, Bill Maher has made the rounds of cable television as if he knows anything about this beyond what he read on Daily Kos. Imagine the feigned outrage if Maher talked about progressives – any progressives – the way he has talked about Sarah Palin and her children.

This misogynistic bigot gives $1 million to President Obama’s reelection PAC, yet he is greeted as an insightful and unbiased commentator by Blitzer and others. And no progressives – not him nor any of the others – ever is demanded to denounce his attacks. When it comes to progressive racism, misogyny, hatred and violent rhetoric, the referees swallow their whistles, as they say in basketball.

Greg Abbott and Rick Perry are no more responsible for the words of Ted Nugent than progressives are for the words of Bill Maher. But although Abbott and Perry were forced to answer for Nugent, President Obama cashes Maher’s check and his cabinet secretaries, advisors and elected Democrats from Nancy Pelosi on down beat a path to the stage of the man who calls conservative women “c@nt” without question or repercussion.

That’s what happens when you are the one who gets to choose what is offensive. As Mel Brooks said, “It’s good to be the king.”

Republicans need to recognize this and do more than complain about it. They need to refuse to play by these rigged rules. They should start by calling out the gatekeepers of outrage when forced to answer for others. Newt Gingrich scared the hell out of moderators in the 2012 primaries by simply calling a garbage question what it was. If you don’t play the progressives’ game, their rules don’t matter. No matter how often they change them.

A simple, “Did you invite me here to talk about something I had nothing to do with? It wasn’t me, I wasn’t there. I’ll answer for something I had nothing to do with when you answer for Dan Rather. Until then, how about we talk about jobs?” would go a long way toward shutting up these arbiters of offense.

The new rules are there are no rules. The other side is making them up as they go along. Conservatives can’t control the questions they’re asked, but they can control the answers they give. Quick thinking and preparation can turn the tables on the outraged media class, turn the tables on their inquisitors and expose them for the frauds they are.

Of course, it also would be nice if people would stop saying stupid things.

SOURCE

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 24, 2014

Does dislike of homosexuality give you heart attacks?

An academic study has just emerged which says that it does. "Homophobia is bad for your health" is the intended message. And the study itself is a refreshing piece of work that uses representative data, extensive controls, careful analysis and cautious wording. It is far better than most academic journal articles I read. So its conclusions should settle the matter?

Sadly, No. The study is a correlational one so warrants no conclusions about cause. Whether attitudes to homosexuals CAUSED the heart attacks or whether something associated with such attitudes caused the attacks is not known. And the authors acknowledged that. They suggest that certain health variables could be the "guilty" third factor.

And the elephant in the room there (I seem to be a master elephant detector) is of course IQ. Unless they are motivated by fundamentalist religious convictions, anybody who admits to anti-homosexual attitudes these days has to be either dumb or very brave. And bravery in the matter seems very rare. Homosexuals are sacred these days. And low IQ people do have worse health.

And the correlation between health and attitudes is weak anyway so other factors could very well be involved.

And there are some signs that all is not well with the results anyway. Both religiosity and conservatism showed negligible correlations with "antigay" attitudes -- where we would expect both of those to be strong predictors. So the conclusions of the study are very dubious indeed. I suspect that the underlying data was not robust enough to support the weight that the authors put on it.

The study is: Mark L. Hatzenbuehler, Anna Bellatorre, and Peter Muennig. "Anti-Gay Prejudice and All-Cause Mortality Among Heterosexuals in the United States". American Journal of Public Health: February 2014, Vol. 104, No. 2, pp. 332-337.

Despite its inconclusiveness, it will no doubt be quoted joyously and uncritically for many years to come. People who can believe that women and men are really the same will believe anything.

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A Dutch police State?

I have just heard that Toine Manders, Head of of the Dutch Libertarian Party, was arrested at the end of January. He has apparently not been charged with any offence, but is being held in isolation, and his detention has been extended to or by a further 90 days.

The reason informally given for his arrest is his involvement in a company that helps Dutch entrepreneurs avoid their local corporation taxes by registering in England.

I have no further information. I am, of course, very disturbed by this news. Whatever a government does to one libertarian may be taken as an attack on all libertarians. I will follow this case to the best of my ability, and will follow up this post with further information.

SOURCE

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The first Fuehrer



He was even MORE brutal than Hitler... so why do we still romanticise Napoleon?

BOOK REVIEW of: "Napoleon: Soldier Of Destiny", by Michael Broers

Review By Roger Lewis

Because the 18th century is far in the past - ships were under sail not steam; there were few paved roads and no railways yet; troops rode or marched - people can romanticise Napoleon in ways they can’t when it comes to Hitler, who is likely to remain our Number One bogeyman for some time yet.

Chaplin and Kubrick planned to make admiring films about Napoleon. Cagney wanted to play him. Brando did play him - as a brave and brooding hero with, as Michael Broers describes his subject, ‘seething impatience and energy lurking under the cool, authoritative exterior’.

Napoleon’s thoughts and emotions were set to music by Beethoven in the Eroica Symphony. Hazlitt and Sir Walter Scott wrote admiring portraits.

As Broers outlines in this judicious and magisterial biography, however, Napoleon, who died 70 years before Hitler was born, was a kind of proto-Fuhrer, his public pronouncements having a ‘messianic tone’ that was ‘spine-chilling’.

Declaiming before the vanquished citizens of Egypt, for example, Napoleon said: ‘It is well you should know that all human efforts against me are useless, for all I undertake must succeed.’ You can easily imagine that translated into German and being yelled over the loudspeakers of the Reich.

Napoleon, like Hitler, also knew that occupied territories could only be retained ‘by brute force’. His policy, when arriving in a new spot, was ‘to burn a village’. Massacring a local population was an unequivocal ‘manifestation of his will’.

Napoleon encouraged the brutality of his soldiers, as this was ‘a clear sign of their devotion to duty’. Defeated towns and cities were turned over to his men in reward, ‘for a 24-hour spree of rape, looting and murder ... He did little to curb the desecration of churches, monasteries or even convents’.

Venice was stripped of its treasures, for instance, and ‘wagonloads of Renaissance masterpieces flooded into France’, including the bronze horses from St Mark’s Square.

Like Hitler, who rose from the confusions of Weimar and the ashes of World War I, Napoleon, born in 1769, was a child of the French Revolution, seizing ‘every chance that came his way in the midst of the most dangerous, uncertain times the western world had ever known’.

Having been raised in Ajaccio, Corsica, he was a model pupil at a military academy, which ‘inculcated in him his frugality, his aversion to ease and his iron self-discipline’. As a junior artillery officer at Toulon, he ‘displayed exceptional ability’, firing on British ships in the harbour. Admiral Hood had to order an evacuation.

Promoted to brigadier-general, ‘Napoleon was forced to be menacing and authoritative by circumstances’, says the ever-objective Broers, who then finds his subject in the Vendée, hunting down peasant and royalist rebels.

Napoleon rose to his new responsibilities ‘and quite obviously relished them’, particularly when he was despatched to command ‘the under-fed, virtually unpaid’ mob that constituted the French army in Italy.

Napoleon ordered supplies and reinforcements. Though he was always guilty of plundering and extortion, so too did he desire a reformation of military efficiency - and he was rewarded with victories against the Austrians on the plains of northern Italy. Indeed, after the Battle of Arcola, ‘I believed myself to be a superior man’, Napoleon, allegedly just 5ft 2in, said modestly.

His next posting was to the Middle East. Though ‘Nelson made short work of the French fleet’ at the mouth of the Nile, Napoleon’s land army took Cairo and Jaffa. The spoils of war included a giraffe, which unfortunately died on the way to Paris. Napoleon, however, returned to France as First Consul - prior to crowning himself Emperor in 1804 at a three-hour ceremony in Notre Dame.

Napoleon wasn’t only a military tactician, he had a genius for manipulating committees and running bureaucracies. Though surrounded by the ‘dark culture of mutual denunciation and suspicion’ that marked the Terror, he outwitted enemies who wanted to send him to the guillotine, created the Bank of France, thus stabilising the economy, had coins minted embossed with his own face in profile, and busily and single-handedly ‘initiated all legislation and appointed and dismissed ministers’.

Exceptional ability: Napoleon Bonaparte as a young artillery officer

Exceptional ability: Napoleon Bonaparte as a young artillery officer

He devised the Legion of Honour (still in existence) because even Republicans love medals and ribbons, set up schools (still in existence) favouring science and technology, and his Civil Code (still in existence) abolished primogeniture and reformed inheritance laws.

Meanwhile, the Austrians and Italians were re-mustering, and it took the Battle of Marengo for France to become master of Italy, Switzerland and Germany.

Though no Tolstoy, Broers describes it well: ‘The big horses ridden by big men, wielding sabres at close quarters, wreaked carnage on the fragmented Austrian infantry ... Blood and dust mingled on the fields.’

Guns got so hot, they couldn’t be handled for re-loading ‘for fear of igniting the cartridges. There was nothing for it but to piss in the barrels to cool them’.

Napoleon, again like Hitler, knew he could never be master of Europe without defeating the British. He began to make preparations to cross the Channel, but his invasion failed because of his ignorance of the sea.

He had ‘no grasp of the inherent problems of tide, wind and bad weather’. He was such a megalomaniac, he believed he could control the waves.

Also, Nelson, though he lost his own life doing so, defeated the French fleet again, at Trafalgar. Not only that, the Russians were mobilising in the east, in alliance with Austria, and Napoleon had to get his army away from Boulogne and to the Rhine.

SOURCE

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Principle and Power: Conservatives versus Republicans

According to recent polling, a majority of people who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 regret voting for him. That does not mean they wish, instead, that they had voted for Mitt Romney. They just regret voting for Barack Obama.

With Democrats convincing themselves the only way to win 2014 is to accuse Republicans of fostering domestic violence because of their opposition to Obamacare, the Republican Party looks set for another wave election year. From sea to sea, the GOP will probably pick up seats. The Democrats are largely resigned to having no chance to take the House of Representatives. The Senate remains in play, but only barely.

Republicans will, when November comes, most likely control both houses of Congress and will most likely keep their hold on the majority of states, too. All this raises a question -- what does the Republican Party stand for?

Those who say the Republicans stand for limited government should cast an eye toward the Ryan-Murray spending plan. Authored in bipartisan fashion, the plan broke the sequestration spending limits Congress had put in place and raised taxes. Cast another eye toward the recent vote to raise the debt ceiling.

Republicans in Washington gave President Obama a blank check to increase the nation's debt until March of 2015. Republicans in the Senate, led by Sens. Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn, shut down Sen. Ted Cruz's effort to block the debt ceiling increase.

For those who say the Republicans stand for local control and states' rights, cast your eye to Congressman Eric Cantor, the House Republican leader. He has given a series of speeches and suggested a number of policies premised on Washington helping the middle class. The whole of the Republican Party seems convinced that Washington, instead of leaving America alone, can rock us till we fall asleep, place bandaids on our scraped-up knees, and spoon feed us in high chairs.

In fact, the party of limited government, individual responsibility and traditional values listens more and more to billionaire and multimillionaire donors who are convinced what is good for Wall Street is good for Main Street. Consequently, the GOP's uniting principles seem to be that it can control the government leviathan better than the Democrats. Republicans have decided to settle for campaign claims of technocratic proficiency with subsidies for Wall Street.

Most Americans hold Washington in contempt. They do not want to vote for a party that believes the problem is not government itself, but just Democrats in charge of it. Americans want Washington to leave them alone. They are as tired of our black-robed judicial masters decreeing one-size-fits-all amorality as they are of elected officials finding new ways to reward their large donors with the middle-class tax dollars.

Americans also do not want to just be anti-Obama. Right now, the Republican Party, when not collaborating to grow the size and scope of the federal leviathan, runs on anti-Obama rhetoric. Conservatives like Mike Lee, the Republican Senator from Utah, have put forward tax reform packages and other legislation that favors the middle class. Republican leaders have ignored him, choosing to pound their chests about Barack Obama, the socialist, while giving him a blank check to increase the national debt.

Conservatism remains about limited government, taking responsibility for yourself and stabilizing values. Republicans in Washington and their talking-head friends in the media talk about these things. They talk about getting Washington out of our lives. But the Republican proposals pushed by the Republican leaders differ greatly from their rhetoric.

Is it any wonder Americans hate Washington and conservatives hate their own Republican Party? The Republicans look like they are on course to win big this November. But if they do not put to practice their conservative preaching, voters will again reject them. On the other hand, if Republican voters fight in primaries and replace the existing Republican faces in Washington with fresh faces and fresh ideas, perhaps they can reconcile their principles with the power of a party finally ready to lead again.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 23, 2014

BDS shows its antisemitic face again

Yossela [an Israeli] researched on the net for months as to which set of professional music string orchestral software he should purchase. After investigating, exploring, examining and inquiring, he decided that one particular product, Cinematic Strings 2, best suited his needs. He wrote to the company, complimenting them on their great music (Alex Wallbank, the head of the company himself is a composer).

Alex responded, and he and my husband shared a very pleasant, friendly, and warm email exchange. Yossela wrote to him that he would like to purchase their music library but, being a student, he would greatly appreciate a discount. Alex replied that they do provide “educational discounts,” and put him in touch with a marketing representative.

Jack, the CS2 info and marketing representative, responded promptly. He thanked him for his interest in the company and his kind words about Alex’s music. He confirmed that they “certainly do have a student discount… 50% off…” Naturally, my husband, was thrilled! Fifty percent off! Half-price! I am sure that any one of us values a discount, but when you are a student, a father of five, and the sole income earner of the family, this kind of mark down is a major advantage, to say the least.

Jack ended his email by asking for some sort of documentation, like a scan of a student ID card, or a class schedule, free receipt, or even an email exchange, verifying that my husband is actually a student. A fair request.

My husband scanned his student ID. As he was about to send it over to the company via email, he turned to me and said, “This company is based in Australia. I hope that they aren’t anti-semitic. What if they see that I’m from Israel, and because of that take away the discount?” He concluded that it shouldn’t stop him. All was for the best. He sent it, waited, and hoped.

Less than seven hours later, Alex had sent a response. His email reads as follows:

“Hi Yossela,

I am very, very sorry but I will not be able to provide you with a student discount. We support the BDS movement worldwide and the cultural boycott against Israel until Israel ceases its illegal settlement activities in the West Bank and ceases its discrimination against the Palestinian people.

Please understand that this is not in any way directed at you personally and we have heard from many Israeli students who have been very sympathetic towards the Palestinian people. However we are fairly powerless here in Australia to act on behalf of the victims of oppression and so the BDS is the only way we can have a voice.

We wish you all the best in your future musical endeavours.

Kindest regards, Alex and the CS team.”

More here

After publicity, the company backed down

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ObamaCare: The Terrifying Consequences To Healthcare

Conservatives can only warn -- and later say: "I told you so"

As the ObamaCare debate rages, we hear much about insurance companies, costs, and people's ability to pay. We hear the policy defended as proponents tell us it will provide healthcare to those who never had it. Of course, these proponents never seem to explain how those who couldn't afford healthcare when it was a choice can now afford an even more expensive cost now that government mandates it.

However, these debates about the pros and cons of ObamaCare basically focus on money. What about the real issue - healthcare? What will ObamaCare do to our medical system? How will it affect the quality of our care? How will it affect doctor's decisions as they attempt to take care of our health needs? And, ultimately, in a system controlled by government bureaucrats and government-written manuals - who will really be making the decisions that determine our quality of life? These are the real questions that need to be the center of the debate. And the answers are terrifying.

I recently received a report from an oncologist, Dr. John Conroy, who is fighting the desperate battle to treat cancer. All of those concerned Americans who wear their pink ribbons and dash for miles in their stop-cancer marathons should take a long hard look at what Dr. Conroy reports to be the future of all American medicine. They may want to start running straight at Congress to save their own lives.

Obviously, Oncology is a very detailed science, difficult for the layman to understand. That's why American healthcare has always promoted specialists. Let's begin with a patient who has discovered a lump on her breast. She takes a mammogram, undergoes a biopsy, and is found to have adenocarcinoma. She is seen by an oncologist and certain questions need to be addressed.

As Dr. Conroy explains the process, first, doctors must determine the "Stage" or extent of the disease. The most common system for determining classification of malignant tumors and the extent of a person's cancer is called the TNM system. "T" measures the size of the tumor and if it's invaded nearby tissue. "N" determines regional lymph nodes that are involved. "M" measures the distance the cancer has spread from one part of the body to another. These measurements are critical in determining how sick the patient may be.

In fact, there are four stages, classified under the TNM system, with multiple possible results determined by a large variable of TNM data. With an adenocarcinoma cell type under the microscope, there are about 40 pathological (histology) types which could lead to as many as 36,000 possible variable combinations of the cancer.

The grade or aggressiveness of the cancer is measured in 10 grades. So, 10×36,000 = 360,000 possibilities. Next, hormone sensitive status = eight possibilities. So, 360,000 x 8 = 2,880,000 and with menopausal status = 5,760,000 possible computer input combinations. These are the possible combinations on just one page of data in staging. So the computer system has to evaluate these combinations.

Whew! That's a lot of data to determine how sick a patient may be, with what kind of cancer, at what stage. It's all necessary data to determine the most effective course for treatment. Again, that's why we have specialists who focus entirely on certain diseases and other maladies that affect our bodies. No one individual could possibly be knowledgeable in all aspects of the human body.

But now, with the growing control by government over healthcare decisions, things are changing. Over the past several years, a growing number of bureaucrats from insurance companies have been armed with manuals, guidebooks, and calculators to step in to the decision making process to decide what treatment procedures are allowed. And it's going to get far worse under ObamaCare, as a new layer of government bureaucrats is added to affect what doctors can do to save your life.

As Dr. Conroy explains, to look into the body and make a determination on where to start planning treatment, he uses X-rays and CAT-scans (CTs). "I generally cat-scan head to toe and look for metastasis and get a baseline." However, such decisions for care by the doctors are now being decided by others. Says Dr. Conroy, "In the past, it was ok (to X-Ray and CT), not now. Over the last few years all the X-rays have to be approved, so there are companies now that have algorithms to evaluate your request (for a CAT-scan or X- ray)." He explains that these companies, which work in partnership with hospitals and insurance companies, "process thousands of requests a day." They decide who gets to use the machines for what purposes. "So," he explains, "if there's no headache, then there is no cat-scan of the brain. If a normal chest x-ray is taken, then no cat-scan of the chest."

Here's where these rules and regulations start to really get scary. If he, as the doctor, wants to challenge the decision by the company as to whether he can get both a CAT-scan and X-ray, he will call them to do so. "I have to discuss this with the ‘medical director' who will say yes - if I use certain ‘key' words" Or the medical director will say "no," the procedure does not fit the guidelines. Without having the medical background of the doctor or all of the data he has been trained to read, the company medical director can make the call - all based on a manual written to one size fits all!

Meanwhile, the doctor is responsible for the health of his patient, tasked with the job of making the right decision as he is forced to move forward blindly. He's unable to get the complete information he needs to make an educated evaluation, because a bureaucrat rejected his request for the proper testing. Yet, if the doctor makes the wrong decision and the patient suffers or dies, he is liable for legal action by the patient's family. He has no legal protection if he missed a lesion in the brain. Says Dr. Conroy, "I am liable, let alone the damage to patient."

How "Red Tape" Strangles Treatment

The most important detail to expose here is that, while the doctor has had years of training and experience in the field, the medical director does not have to be qualified.

He's an employee! Dr. Conroy provided a resulting horror story that is certain to be repeated over and over again once ObamaCare gets control of the medical system. He reported, "I had a young patient with Hodgkin's disease and I needed a follow-up cat-scan of the chest. It was refused (by the company medical director). I challenged the decision (I challenge all of them) and called the company. The medical director was a retired General Practitioner, playing golf in Florida." Says Dr. Conroy, "the review companies intentionally have out of state physicians as medical directors so they do not have a state license that can be challenged."

Then there is the massive mountain of paperwork required for each patient and each procedure. The official guideline for treatment paths for patients with malignancy is called "Pathways," found at www.nccn.com. There are over 30 medical issue paths to choose. A doctor needs to match a pathway with his data, as described above.

As mentioned, that can be a huge number of possible combinations. The insurance companies are already restricting treatment options by forcing doctors to accept their approval for therapy, or they won't pay for it.

Now, follow the bureaucratic ball created by this mass of rules. Explains Dr. Conroy, "We are still on the first visit by the patient, (or second visit if something was challenged). It now takes 45-60 minutes to register a new patient. I get an hour for the history, exam discussion of treatment plan and then we have to load everything into the computer and fill out the required forms. With each patient visit we review all the data for accuracy, and again report it."

All this for one patient on the first visit. And with each visit it all has to be continually rechecked and reported. If the doctor makes an error on a Medicare bill submission, the fine is $5,000 PER LINE. A typical chemotherapy visit may have 20 or more lines of code per visit. Says Dr. Conroy, "one year we used 250 cc bags of IV fluids for chemotherapy. It was more than enough fluid for treatment, but Medicare retroactively decided not to pay for 250 cc bags so, we had to repay Medicare Reimbursement for all the 250cc bags for an entire YEAR! We then changed to 1000 cc bag, charged more, threw out most of it but got paid."

So, now the patient has had surgery, some radiation treatment, and chemotherapy and the cancer is in remission. All of those procedures would have had to go through the bureaucratic review process.

Are There "Death Panels" in ObamaCare?

Let's say, after treatment, unfortunately, the patient goes into relapse - the cancer returns. In the past, the doctor would start again, repeat treatment, and keep the patient alive over multiple cycles of chemotherapy. But things are changing.

Reports Dr. Conroy, "enter the ‘death panels.' I actually read the ACA law. They are not death panels per se, but panels appointed by the President, NOT reporting to Congress, that establish the funding and treatment for patients." Those on the appointed panels are not physicians.

And what are the potential results of the decisions of such panels? Dr. Conroy explains what happens through the example of a pediatric lung transplant case, involving a young boy who needed the treatment. According to Dr. Conroy, the case required official approval from Kathleen Sebelius, now the nation's top healthcare official and in charge of ObamaCare. Sebelius refused to approve the transplant and the family had to go to a federal court. She followed the official guidelines as outlined in Pathways. According to its rules, the transplant was not approved for a child of that age, so "the kid was out of luck."

These panels can decide whether care can be provided or refused based on age, finances, and the treatment required. That brings us back to the whole debate based on money. This time it becomes the "government's money." And, suddenly, when the government decides it doesn't want to spend "its" money, it can become very stingy.

It saves money by not providing care for the elderly, which it says are a burden to society. Or, in the case of the lung transplant victim, too young. The result is the same if care cannot be provided - death of the patient. Death panels? Perhaps not in name - but in practice. The panels do not report to Congress, but to higher bureaucratic panels. As Dr. Conroy describes it, "more like a central committee in the Soviet System."

Another example provided by Dr. Conroy is the NCCN Guidelines (National Comprehensive Cancer Network). There are a comprehensive set of guidelines detailing the sequential management decisions and interventions for the malignant cancers that affect 97 percent of all patients living with cancer in the United States. In addition, separate guidelines provide recommendations for some of the key cancer prevention and screening topics as well as supportive care considerations.

Explains Dr. Conroy, "they are fantastic for guidance in treatment plans, but imagine writing a program for any of the guidelines and then constantly changing them to meet new changes in care." He goes on with another example, "Check out the Palliative Care guidelines, there is a section explaining how to order an IV infusion to sedate a terminal patient, the plan is for them to not wake up. The guidelines recommend that nurses who feel uncomfortable ethically with this order should be assigned elsewhere. This is a concern because Hospice is recommended over and over in the guidelines more than ever before."

This is the real cost savings in ObamaCare - as money runs out, you change the parameters for treatment. Age, stage, and diagnosis care exclude aggressive therapy. In the past, this was a decision of a patient, minister, and family; now you have an insurance company/government agent making an "impartial" decision of no further treatment.

In a progressive secular society, ethics are not based on God or morality or individual wants and needs, but on the "common good" of the state. Concludes Dr. Conroy, "Obamacare is not about medical care but rather social and government control of the population."

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 21, 2014

Political Orientation and Moral Conviction

Comments on: "Political Orientation and Moral Conviction: A Conservative Advantage or an Equal Opportunity Motivator of Political Engagement?" by Linda J. Skitka G. Scott Morgan Daniel C. Wisneski, University of Illinois at Chicago (Preprint here (PDF))

There is a paper coming out in a book edited by Joe Forgas that tends to throw Haidt's findings into a cocked hat. Haidt found that conservatives were more morally complex than are liberals. Since liberals often proclaim: "There is no such thing as right and wrong", that is not exactly a surprising finding. Liberals do nonetheless use moral language: "Racism is wrong" etc., but I showed long ago (Ray, 1974) that they do so only as a matter of convenience. For them it is just a device to influence others. Any such beliefs are not deeply held.

I'm critical of a few points in the introduction to the paper -- e.g. the homage to the risible Lakoff, who confuses the diachronic with the synchronic, but I think the big problems in the paper are methodological. The use of meta-analyses is in principle admirable but in practice can deteriorate severely where the author has a barrow to push. One of the better known studies in this field did to my particular knowledge omit from consideration around 100 relevant studies -- in order to come to fairly conventional conclusions.

Another problem is the shotgun approach to sampling. Lumping general population samples in the with student samples is most incautious. The two groups often give very different results. One one occasion I repeated a study I had dome among students using a sample of army conscripts. A correlation of .808 among students dropped to something negligible with the more representative sample. I never wrote that study up but I probably should have. It was in the era when "positive" results were essential so it would probably not have been published anyway.

And I am pretty confident that something similar would have happened in the Skitka work. The students would have given complex responses and the ordinary folk would have given much simpler responses. So combining the two would have given you medium complexity across the board and erased Right/Left differences. In short, I don't think Skitka & co, have made their case.

Mother Jones has however welcomed the study. The Left like to think they are moral, despite their propensity for mass murder.

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Why is the Obama Administration Putting Government Monitors in Newsrooms?

The Obama Administration’s Federal Communication Commission (FCC) is poised to place government monitors in newsrooms across the country in an absurdly draconian attempt to intimidate and control the media.

Before you dismiss this assertion as utterly preposterous (we all know how that turned out when the Tea Party complained that it was being targeted by the IRS), this bombshell of an accusation comes from an actual FCC Commissioner.

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai reveals a brand new Obama Administration program that he fears could be used in “pressuring media organizations into covering certain stories.”

As Commissioner Pai explains in the Wall Street Journal:

Last May the FCC proposed an initiative to thrust the federal government into newsrooms across the country. With its "Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs," or CIN, the agency plans to send researchers to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run. A field test in Columbia, S.C., is scheduled to begin this spring.

The purpose of the CIN, according to the FCC, is to ferret out information from television and radio broadcasters about "the process by which stories are selected" and how often stations cover "critical information needs," along with "perceived station bias" and "perceived responsiveness to underserved populations."

In fact, the FCC is now expanding the bounds of regulatory powers to include newspapers, which it has absolutely no authority over, in its new government monitoring program.

The FCC has apparently already selected eight categories of “critical information” “that it believes local newscasters should cover.”

That’s right, the Obama Administration has developed a formula of what it believes the free press should cover, and it is going to send government monitors into newsrooms across America to stand over the shoulders of the press as they make editorial decisions.

This poses a monumental danger to constitutionally protected free speech and freedom of the press.

Every major repressive regime of the modern era has begun with an attempt to control and intimidate the press.

As Thomas Jefferson so eloquently said, "our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost."

The federal government has absolutely no business determining what stories should and should not be run, what is critical for the American public and what is not, whether it perceives a bias, and whose interests are and are not being served by the free press.

It’s an unconscionable assault on our free society.

Imagine a government monitor telling Fox News it needed to cover stories in the same way as MSNBC or Al Jazeera. Imagine an Obama Administration official walking in to the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal and telling it that the American public would be better served if it is stopped reporting on the IRS scandal or maybe that reporting on ObamaCare “glitches” is driving down enrollment.

It’s hard to imagine anything more brazenly Orwellian than government monitors in newsrooms.

Is it any wonder that the U.S. now ranks 46th in the world for freedom of the press? Reporters Without Boarders called America’s precipitous drop of 13 places in its recent global rankings “one of the most significant declines” in freedom of the press in the world.

Freedom of the press is proudly extolled in the First Amendment, yet our nation now barely makes the top fifty for media freedom.

We cannot allow the unfathomable encroachment on our free speech and freedom of the press to continue.

We’ve seen, and defeated, this kind of attempt to squelch free speech before in the likes of the Fairness Doctrine and the Grassroots Lobbying Bill (incidentally one of my first projects at the ACLJ). Each one of these euphemistically named government programs is nothing more than an underhanded attempt to circumvent the Constitution and limit free speech – speech that the government finds inconvenient. They’re equally unconstitutional, and they each must be defeated.

SOURCE

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Cruz Control?

Freshman Senator Ted Cruz says many things that need to be said and says them well. Moreover, some of these things are what many, if not most, Americans believe wholeheartedly. Yet we need to remember that the same was true of another freshman Senator, just a relatively few years ago, who parlayed his ability to say things that resonated with the voters into two terms in the White House.

Who would disagree that if you want your doctor, you should be able to keep your doctor? Who would disagree with the idea of a more transparent administration in Washington, or a President of the United States being a uniter instead of a divider?

There are many things like this that freshman Senator Barack Obama said that the overwhelming majority of Americans -- whether liberal or conservative -- would agree with. The only problem is that what he has actually done as President has repeatedly turned out to be the direct opposite of what he said as a candidate.

Senator Ted Cruz has not yet reached the point where he can make policy, rather than just make political trouble. But there are already disquieting signs that he is looking out for Ted Cruz -- even if that sets back the causes he claims to be serving.

Those causes are not being served when Senator Cruz undermines the election chances of the only political party that has any chance of undoing the disasters that Barack Obama has already inflicted on the nation -- and forestalling new disasters that are visible on the horizon.

ObamaCare is not just an issue about money or even an issue about something as important as medical care. ObamaCare represents a quantum leap in the power of the federal government over the private lives of individual Americans.

Chief Justice Roberts' decision declaring ObamaCare constitutional essentially repeals the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which declares that powers not given to the federal government belong to the states "or to the people."

That central support of personal freedom has now been removed. The rest of the structure may not last very long, now that the Obama administration is busy quietly dismantling other bulwarks against the unbridled power of the government in general, and the unbridled power of the presidency in particular.

The Federal Communications Commission, for example, is already floating the idea of placing observers in newspaper editorial offices to "study" how decisions are made there. Nothing in the Constitution grants the FCC this dangerous power, nor is there any legislation authorizing any such activity.

But what the federal government can do is not dependent on what the Constitution authorizes it to do or what Congressional legislation gives them the power to do.

The basic, brutal reality is that the federal government can do whatever it wants to do, if nobody stops them. The Supreme Court's ObamaCare decision shows that we cannot depend on them to protect our freedom. Nor will Congress, as long as the Democrats control the Senate.

The most charitable interpretation of Ted Cruz and his supporters is that they are willing to see the Republican Party weakened in the short run, in hopes that they will be able to take it over in the long run, and set it on a different path as a more purified conservative party.

Like many political ideas, this one is not new. It represents a political strategy that was tried long ago -- and failed long ago.

In the German elections of 1932, the Nazi party received 37 percent of the vote. They became part of a democratically elected coalition government, in which Hitler became chancellor. Only step by step did the Nazis dismantle democratic freedoms and turn the country into a complete dictatorship.

The political majority could have united to stop Hitler from becoming a dictator. But they did not unite. They fought each other over their differences. Some figured that they would take over after the Nazis were discredited and defeated.

Many who plotted this clever strategy died in Nazi concentration camps. Unfortunately, so did millions of others.

What such clever strategies overlook is that there can be a point of no return. We may be close to that point of no return, not only with ObamaCare, but also with the larger erosion of personal freedom, of which ObamaCare is just the most visible part.

SOURCE

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Obama(S)care: Con Artists and Criminals in Charge



Question: If Obamacare officials cannot prevent accused embezzlers from infiltrating their offices, how can they protect enrollees from grifters, con artists and thieves in the federal health insurance exchange system?

Here in my home state, a director of Connect for Health Colorado — the state-sponsored Obamacare health insurance exchange — was just put on administrative leave. No, Christa Ann McClure did not go on leave over the chronic problems plaguing the cursed Connect for Health website. She's on leave because she has been indicted for filching funds from her last employer in Montana.

No, the guardians of Obamacare didn't smoke her out on their own. McClure 'fessed up only after the local Billings (Mont.) Gazette newspaper reported on the charges against her. She was indicted by a grand jury on Jan. 16. But her current state government employers did not find out until last week, when McClure finally informed them because the press had published the indictment.

The Keystone Kops of the Colorado health exchange tell us they conducted "thorough" background checks of McClure. They say they "fully vetted" and investigated her references when they hired her last March for her six-figure job helming the state Obamacare office of "partner engagement." Colorado officials say she was "well-qualified" for the Obamacare job, which involves being a "liaison" with other government agencies.

But mum's the word on who recommended her, which references they talked to and who in Colorado Democratic circles might have known about her history in Montana.

The 12-page federal indictment is a blood-boiling document outlining government waste, fraud and abuse in the federal affordable housing racket. The feds say McClure siphoned untold amounts of money from the nonprofit group Housing Montana, which received a half-million-dollar federal grant to build homes for poor people.

McClure allegedly was paying herself "significant sums" for bogus "consulting services" while also taking a full-time salary as executive director of the nonprofit. She is accused of raiding the organization's funds for family expenses, personal travel and a laptop and lying to the IRS to obtain false reimbursements.

She further defrauded the government by inflating her unused sick and annual leave hours. The feds say she also bilked Montana homeowners who participated in the federal affordable housing program by charging them for a fake $750 warranty and a $1,000 fee for "leasing tools."

Here's another disturbing fact: In a classic dance of the lemons, McClure had bounced around successfully from government-funded job to job until now. The Montana state auditor's office disclosed last week that McClure had managed three grants worth more than $2 million to implement Obamacare in that state. McClure worked on the project for three years at an annual salary of $98,000. She was "responsible for managing a broad range of contracts and making sure they got delivered on time," according to The Billings Gazette.

I'd like to be able to tell you that she'll never work in another Obamacare job again. But take a look at California. Just a few weeks ago, Jillian Kay Melchior reported in National Review that "at least 43 convicted criminals are working as Obamacare navigators in California, including three individuals with records of significant financial crimes." The crimes include forgery, petty theft, shoplifting, welfare fraud, child abuse and evading an officer.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 20, 2014

Concealing Evil

By Walter E. Williams

Evil acts are given an aura of moral legitimacy by noble-sounding socialistic expressions, such as spreading the wealth, income redistribution, caring for the less fortunate, and the will of the majority. Let's have a thought experiment to consider just how much Americans sanction evil.

Imagine there are several elderly widows in your neighborhood. They have neither the strength to mow their lawns, clean their windows and perform other household tasks nor the financial means to hire someone to help them. Here's a question that I'm almost afraid to ask: Would you support a government mandate that forces you or one of your neighbors to mow these elderly widows' lawns, clean their windows and perform other household tasks?

Moreover, if the person so ordered failed to obey the government mandate, would you approve of some sort of sanction, such as fines, property confiscation or imprisonment? I'm hoping, and I believe, that most of my fellow Americans would condemn such a mandate. They'd agree that it would be a form of slavery — namely, the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another.

Would there be the same condemnation if, instead of forcing you or your neighbor to actually perform weekly household tasks for the elderly widows, the government forced you or your neighbor to give one of the widows $50 of your weekly earnings? That way, she could hire someone to mow her lawn or clean her windows. Would such a mandate differ from one under which you are forced to actually perform the household task? I'd answer that there is little difference between the two mandates except the mechanism for the servitude. In either case, one person is being forcibly used to serve the purposes of another.

I'm guessing that most Americans would want to help these elderly ladies in need but they'd find anything that openly smacks of servitude or slavery deeply offensive. They might have a clearer conscience if all the neighbors were forced (taxed) to put money into a government pot. A government agency would then send the widows $50 to hire someone to mow their lawns and perform other household tasks. This collective mechanism makes the particular victim invisible, but it doesn't change the fact that a person is being forcibly used to serve the purposes of others. Putting the money into a government pot simply conceals an act that would otherwise be deemed morally depraved.

This is why socialism is evil. It employs evil means, confiscation and intimidation, to accomplish what are often seen as noble goals — namely, helping one's fellow man. Helping one's fellow man in need by reaching into one's own pockets to do so is laudable and praiseworthy. Helping one's fellow man through coercion and reaching into another's pockets is evil and worthy of condemnation. Tragically, most teachings, from the church on down, support government use of one person to serve the purposes of another; the advocates cringe from calling it such and prefer to call it charity or duty.

Some might argue that we are a democracy, in which the majority rules. But does a majority consensus make moral acts that would otherwise be deemed immoral? In other words, if the neighbors got a majority vote to force one of their number — under pain of punishment — to perform household tasks for the elderly widows, would that make it moral?

The bottom line is that we've betrayed much of the moral vision of our Founding Fathers. In 1794, when Congress appropriated $15,000 for relief of French refugees who had fled from insurrection in San Domingo to Baltimore and Philadelphia, James Madison rose on the floor of the House of Representatives to object, saying, "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."

Tragically, today's Americans — Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative — would hold such a position in contempt and run a politician like Madison out of town on a rail.

SOURCE

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The Right To Take (Even Really Stupid) Risks

The value of life is determined not by the mere drawing of one breath after another, but by the freedom to make our own decisions

J.D. Tuccille

There's nothing like the feeling of a motorcycle sliding out from beneath you on a busy thoroughfare to focus the mind beautifully on the value of life. As your ass bounces from the cushioned seat toward the hard tarmac with the screech of unseen cars slamming on their brakes to your rear, you have one glorious moment in which to ask yourself: "What the hell am I doing?"

You see, that's the precise question that flashed through my mind as my accelerating rear wheel spun helplessly on an oil slick and 400lbs of Japanese machinery cushioned its fall with 170lbs of J.D. Tuccille.

My left elbow slammed against the asphalt before I had time to consider the answer.

But to a large extent, it's the question itself that matters the most: "What the hell am I doing?" Sooner or later most of us ask that same question. We ask it when we're doing something foolish, or brave, or unfamiliar, and we especially ask it when the situation goes sour—when we find ourselves airborne in late-morning traffic. And if we don't ask it of ourselves, somebody else is sure to do us the favor: "What the hell are you doing?"

The question means that we're taking risks, trying something new, or just pushing the boundaries of our usual behavior. It means that we're living, not just existing; to pass through life without facing that question would imply a tightly constrained existence lacking risk and adventure.

Not every situation that provokes the question is to our credit, of course. Sometimes we've made a mistake, sometimes we've embarrassed ourselves, and sometimes we've made a complete balls-up of a situation and we find ourselves staring up from the ground into the face of an Emergency Medical Technician. And whether we decide that our latest venture was a moment of glory or shame, it's a sure bet that somebody else views our decision with disdain; we all have our own lives, and our own very different standards by which to judge them.

But it's important to remember that while everybody has the right to ask the question of himself and others, only the person on the spot, the person living that moment has the right to decide whether the answer is justifiable—so long as that person also bears the costs and consequences of the answer, that is. And that is what gives life so much of its value. We have the right to try, to risk dignity and even death as we take the basic fact of existence and mold it into a life worthy of the name through a personal choice of experiences, occupations, and adventures.

So when others try to answer the question for us, to prevent us from taking the risk because they don't approve, they don't just do us a disservice—they rob us of the freedom that gives life its value. Through laws and taxes and regulations they try to consign us to an existence instead of a life; and this is not because the decisions they would make for us are necessarily bad decisions, but because they are not our own.

Some people—not enough—do understand this. After the accident, when the EMTs had assured themselves that my limbs were all in place and that I remembered my name, one turned to me and said: "And now for the important question: How's the bike?" (Answer: Not so good.) As an EMT he had certainly seen his share of nasty motorcycle accidents—incidents that ended with consequences more serious than my broken arm. But he understood, or at least respected, my decision to ride and to take risks that others find unacceptable.

We have the right to demand that attitude of everybody: disagree with us, call us fools, live your own lives differently, but don't try to tell us what decisions we may make in the conduct of our lives. Because the value of life is determined not by the mere drawing of one breath after another, but by the freedom to make our own decisions; to mold our lives as best we can into a shape that pleases us, and to enjoy the benefits or suffer the consequences.

What the hell was I doing? I was living my life. Now hand me my helmet or get out of the way.

SOURCE

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Thank You President Obama for Freeing Me

Bruce Bialosky

Hi, I’m Dave.

Until recently I was a full-time employee and had a very good job. In fact most years we were so busy I worked some long hours and received some significant bonuses from my employer. But now I have been freed from having to spend so much time supporting my family. Because of some great new policies from our government, I am now working part-time and spending more time with my family.

It has been an adjustment. When I told my wife the exciting news that I would spending more time at home, initially she wasn’t delighted. She sure seemed like she did not want me around.She asked how we were going to put the money away for the kids’ college educations. I was a little surprised she was not more focused on the time we could spend together, working on our relationship. She seemed like she thought having me at work was more beneficial for us. Then I told her about all the neat government programs that would help the kids pay for college. Plus, I am confident we will grow closer as we have more quality time together. I did point out we may have less money to spend, but sharing time was what life was all about.

The kids were really excited to hear about me being around a lot more. Kinda. Madison asked if I really was not going to work. When I told her it would give us more time to get to know each other, she said “Dad, get real. I’m like really busy with school and my friends.Maybe soon.”And then she stared at her phone and said she was having a conversation with a friend. Buddy Boy was a lot more receptive. I told him I could now learn how to play those video games and we could play together. He said, “Hey, don’t you think it would be geekish for me to be playing video games with my old man?” When I told him no, he turned and closed the door to his room.I am sure once he warms up to the idea we will have a blast together.

I went on HealthCare.gov and found out that my income is now going to be lower so I qualify for some really big subsidies. As long as I don’t go back to working full-time, the government will pay for over half of my family’s health insurance. All I have to do is just keep my work at the current reduced level and we will have some great coverage.I can even pick up some work on the side (if you know what I mean) and not have it affect my ability to have the government pay for most all our health insurance. Once I figured it out, we are really better off with me working less and staying home more.

Then with my new free time I found a speech that Mrs. Obama gave to college students.She told them “Don’t leave money on the table. ”This was regarding getting student aid that she told them did not have to be paid back.Pondering that I thought why not me?So I applied for Food Stamps -- thankfully now called SNAP -- and it makes me feel so much better. I was really surprised to find out that at my new income level that we qualify as a family.

The nice people at the SNAP office told me there are other state and federal programs I qualify for to help underwrite my new reduced income.For example, they will help pay for my utilities. While I was so busy working I never realized there were so many programs to help people. I have researched it and found there are over 100 programs to help pay for me.How stupid I feel working hard all these years when I could have been home and the government would pay for all these things.

As I begin my new less demanding life, I am really just beginning to explore the universe I am now part of each day. Who knew I could work so little and still get all this stuff from the government? President Obama, thank you for freeing me from the burden of having to work so hard to support my family.Now I just have to get my family used to having me around. And find something to do with my time.

I’m Dave, and I love this new America.

SOURCE

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Lawmakers Fight Obamacare Labeling Regulation

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are joining forces to curtail an overbearing labeling regulation mandated by Obamacare.

Embedded in the 906-page behemoth bill is a requirement that all chain restaurants (those with 20 or more locations) provide nutrition information for every item listed on the menu.

Now stop—mull over the reality of that regulation for a moment. A pizza place would need to provide the number of calories and the list of ingredients found in every pizza topping. Dominoes offers at least 31 topping options.

In accordance with Obamacare, the Food and Drug Administration has proposed requirements and is close to making them finalized. However Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) have initiated a bill that would amend the proposed rules to allow more leeway for businesses. Adjustments would include allowing delivery restaurants to post nutrition information online and limiting the penalties for labeling mistakes. More than 50 co-sponsors have rallied behind the bill.

The Hill reported:

“Specifically, the proposed rule limits the ability of businesses to determine for themselves how best to provide nutritional information to customers,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg. “As a result, the proposal harms both those non-restaurants that were not intended to be captured by the menu labeling law as well as those restaurants that have flexibility and variability in the foods they offer.”
The lawmakers pressed the FDA to limit the scope of the regulations, which they say would harm small businesses that are already complying separately with the 1990 Nutrition Labeling and Education Act.

Similar Obamacare labeling regulation for vending machines are estimated to cost $25.8 million initially and $24 million annually.

Estranging businesses from government management and allowing them freedom to invest time and money into what they deem profitable is undoubtedly the best option for the economy.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 19, 2014

Heh!

Here’s something illuminating about female millionaires.

Turns out, they prefer conservative men in and out of bed. Darren Shuster, the publicist for MillionaireMatch.com, the company that commissioned a survey, stressed in an email, “Especially in bed. Don’t kill the messenger.”

Hot off the presses from Silicon Valley, MillionaireMatch.com has released the results of a survey showing that show that rich ass females prefer their men on the “right” side of the political spectrum. According to site stats, 81.4 percent of female millionaires prefer a conservative man rather than someone liberal (this includes Republicans, Democrats and independents). A whopping 76.6 percent of Democrat female millionaires said they “would prefer to date a conservative man.”

Some comments from rich females to the site:

“I don’t want a liberal man, I want someone who believes in a traditional family.”

“I want to be with a man who is ambitious, liberal men simply aren’t as ambitious.”

“Conservative men plan for the future, they’re in it for the long run.”

“Liberal men are less masculine.”

“Politics doesn’t matter to me when we’re inside the bedroom.”

“I’m very liberal, but I’m open to other opinions.”

Two comments that could infuriate some women involved females who remarked on how conservative males take care of the female financially and how conservative males perform in bed.

One of the surveyed women explained why she believes conservative men are more appealing: “Simply put, conservative men are real men. They are the breadwinners, they wear the pants and they treat you like a lady.”

And of the women surveyed, 85 percent apparently agreed that conservative men are better in bed.

Said one woman, “Conservative men have so much masculine energy, they’re dominant.”

SOURCE

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U.S. unemployment: A third view

The Congressional Budget Office's latest budget projections, released last week, estimated that 2.5 million people would leave the job market as a result of Obamacare. Immediately the two political sides engaged in verbal bickering, with Republicans saying the program would cause 2.5 million to lose their jobs, while Democrats claimed that 2.5 million people choosing leisure over work was a net increase in human welfare. Actually, both sides were wrong. It's worth examining why, and what the skewed incentives at modest earnings levels mean for our future.

The Democrats are right that the direct loss of jobs due to Obamacare is likely to be fairly limited. Although it imposes substantial costs on some employers, and makes the healthcare system overall less efficient, employers always have the option of restricting pay rises for employees whose healthcare costs have been increased, or of raising their healthcare premiums. There is a likely to be a certain squeezing of hours worked by part-timers, to keep them below the 30-hour week level, but direct job losses should be limited, according to the CBO. And of course, if the number of people with health insurance increases, and to the extent that the population covered by Medicare increases, there will be jobs created in the healthcare system to cover the newly insured people.

Nevertheless, the Republicans are correct that the 2.5 million people whose incentives are so changed by Obamacare that they will choose not to work are a problem not a side-benefit. If they do not work, the 2.5 million people will not contribute to the tax and benefits system, imposing greater costs on the rest of us. The 2.5 million themselves may value increased leisure time sufficiently to give up their income from work, they may receive enough in unemployment, social security and disability benefit that they are little worse off or (without being too cynical about it) they may feel they can earn nearly as much from working "off the books" on odd jobs, landscaping or some other activity for cash, thus avoiding costly interaction with the tax system.

But from society's point of view, we are much less well-off for the loss of the labor of those 2.5 million people. Their output would presumably have been worth more than their pay, so losing it is a blow to the economy. Further, if they had worked they would normally have contributed, possibly modest payments of income tax, certainly rather less modest payments of payroll tax. Without working, they will contribute nothing in direct tax to the general coffers, though they will still of course pay sales taxes on their purchases and property taxes if they own a home. What's more, as unemployed they will likely benefit from welfare, disability and other benefits. Thus the scales, which may be close to balanced from the individual points of view of the 2.5 million people themselves, are heavily unbalanced from the point of view of the U.S. economy as a whole and its tax base.

This is one of the reasons the U.S. budget is still so severely out of whack, with a projected deficit of $514 billion in the year to September 30. The labor force participation rate is now 63%, compared with 66.4% at its peak in December 2006. The unemployment rate at 6.6% is only 2.2 percentage points above its December 2006 level, so an additional 3.5 million more people are officially unemployed. However there are an additional 8.4 million people, over and above those 3.5 million, who would have been in the labor force if participation was at its December 2006 level, but who have dropped out of the labor force altogether. Some of those are early-retiring baby boomers, but by no means all of them; participation rates have also declined for young and prime-age workers.

It is thus not surprising that the United States is still running a $500 billion deficit, in spite of substantial tax increases since 2006, a reining back of military spending, and some moderation in the giant increases in domestic spending pushed through by the Democrat-controlled Congress in 2007-10. With 11.9 million fewer people than there should be paying for the costs of government, and not providing economic output, we should expect government to be further from being paid for than it was in 2006.

More HERE

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Failing Liberals Turn To Oppression To Hold On To Power

If you’re a conservative, you don't need to silence the opposition.

In fact, we conservatives want liberals to talk, to make buffoons of themselves, to prove their folly. We want liberals to expound upon their ridiculous ideas, to show the world exactly what they're about. Nancy Pelosi? Give that tiresome woman a microphone. Chatty liberals are the best advertisement for conservatism.

But liberals just can’t have conservatives speaking. We’ll tell the truth, and that’s why liberals need to shut us up.

Their traditional intimidation tactics are wearing out. Calling someone a “racist” used to be a devastating moral indictment. Liberals’ promiscuous employment of the word first turned it into a cliché and then into an ironic punchline.

I know, saying that out loud is racist. And sexist. And cisgender heteronormative, whatever the hell that means.

So now liberals have stepped up to formal governmental repression. Take the IRS scandal – or ex-scandal, in the eyes of the mainstream media. The Obama administration, at the urging of red state Democrat senators who are about to lose their seats because of their track records of failure, are doing everything they can to turn the taxman loose on the organizations that are pointing out their track records of failure.

Sure, the liberals come up with excuses, with justifications, with rationales for this prima facie oppression. But understand that the left was never against political repression. The left is only against being repressed itself.

It’s open season on everyone else. Don't dare bow down to god whose name isn’t spelled "G – O – V – E – R – N – M – E – N – T." Today’s heretic hunters work for Kathleen Sebelius, ready to burn you at the stake for expecting grown men and women to come up with the dough for their own contraceptives. No one expects the HHS Inquisition!

The Federal Communications Commission just floated a trial balloon about going out to radio and television stations to evaluate reporters on how they cover the news. There was a time when journalists' response to a government inquiry into how they did their job would be "Go to hell, you goose-stepping bureaucratic flunky."

Not anymore. Now, their response is slavish submission to their progressive governmental dominatrix. When supposedly independent, iconoclastic liberal journalists let themselves to be dominated by the feds, their safeword is “Hillary.”

Liberalism has to muzzle the truth because it operates on lies. It is built on lies, fueled by lies, and creates an empire of lies.

Look at the Obamacare scam. Liberals don't even blink at the fact that its foundational premise that if you liked your health care, you could keep it, was a lie. They’re not even offended by the lie. They’re offended that we point out that it was a lie.

Now the same people who got us into this mess are telling us we should go along and trust them to fix the same damn problem that they created in the first place. Liberals are the Lucys of American politics, holding the football and promising that this time it’ll be different. We need to stop being the Charlie Browns.

In the Senate, liberals toss traditions like the filibuster out the window for political expediency. The president creates his own laws or changes ones that are already in place on a whim. There are no norms, there are no standards. Everything is a short-term political gambit, and little things like the Constitution are just obstacles to progress.

How does all this end well? It doesn't. It can't. That is, unless the American people come to their senses and demand that the Constitution, as it is written, be respected. That change come through the political process, through persuasion rather than diktat.

But if that doesn't happen, what then? What becomes of our system? How do we act when we take power again? Should we also ignore those same principles that we seek to reaffirm in order to reaffirm them?

Does the next Republican president simply announce that he's repealing Obamacare by executive order? Does he simply refuse to implement other laws we dislike? Does he refuse to collect foolish taxes? Does he use his prosecutorial discretion to decide to refuse to prosecute his allies? Is that what we want?

No, it is not what we want, but it may be what we get. We are not ones for unilateral disarmament. Our constitutional system is not a suicide pact, as many have observed. The liberals aren't going to like it when we apply the same ruthlessness to them.

If the rules of the game are now that there are no rules, then the only political currency is raw power. But we know what happens when there are no rules, where pure power is the sole measure of right and wrong. I served in countries like that. They are full of mass graves

The American system’s strength is not that everyone always wins. It is that the system cultivates our ability to lose gracefully, to understand that you were heard, that you had your say, that there was a process, and that you lost fair and square. It sustains itself by reinforcing its own legitimacy.

But if your losses aren’t fair, if you haven't been heard, if the rules have been bent or broken or ignored, that crucial legitimacy is gone. And then there are no rules to respect.

What keeps this grand experiment in freedom going is that we honored, at least until now, our Constitution’s boundaries. Sure, we pushed at the edges, nudged the envelope, sometimes fudged the line, but what is happening now is different. What's happening now is that the line is being erased.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Awesome: Left-Wing UAW Rejected in Chattanooga: "Big Labor has just suffered a blow in the South. Thanks in large part to efforts by Americans for Tax Reform to expose the left-wing United Auto Workers, employees at Chattanooga, Tennessee’s Volkswagen assembly plant have rejected the labor union’s representation in a vote of 712-626. ATR’s Executive Director Matt Patterson released the following statement in response to the victory: "The workers at Volkswagen looked at the history of this union and made the best decision for themselves, their jobs and their community. In spite of the UAW's multi-million dollar propaganda machine, and with company and government officials at Obama's NLRB aiding the union in every possible way, workers learned the facts and were able to make an informed decision."

CA: Court strikes law restricting concealed weapons: "California must allow law-abiding citizens to carry concealed firearms in public, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday, striking down the core of the state's permit system for handguns. In a 2-1 decision, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said San Diego County violates the Constitution's Second Amendment by requiring residents to show 'good cause' (and not merely the desire to protect themselves) to obtain a concealed-weapons permit."

"Chocolate city" mayor convicted of graft in Katrina recovery: "A federal jury on Wednesday found former New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin guilty of accepting bribes and trading on the public trust during the critical years of rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2005. A jury of six men and six women convicted Nagin on 20 of 21 counts, including bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy, money laundering and tax evasion. It acquitted him on one bribery count. Sentencing will come at a later date but Nagin, 57, faces at least 20 years in jail."

VA: A Federal judge defies voters again: "A federal judge declared late Thursday night that Virginia’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, confirmed Michael Kelly, Director of Communications, for Attorney General Mark Herring. ... A lawsuit challenging the commonwealth’s ban on same-sex marriage went before U.S. District Judge ­Arenda L. Wright Allen on February 4, in Norfolk. The case of Bostic vs. Rainey argued that the Virginia Marriage Amendment, passed in 2006 by 57 percent of voters, is unconstitutional."

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 18, 2014

5 Virtues That Liberals Take To The Extreme: Taking things to extremes is what they do

"If one oversteps the bounds of moderation, the greatest pleasures cease to please." -- Epictetus

"The world is full of people who will help you manufacture tornados in order to blow out a match." -- Shaun Hick

There are few things on the planet more necessary than water. In fact, roughly 60% of the human body is water. Yet, water isn't ALWAYS a good thing as Noah could tell you. Virtues can be like this as well. In moderation, they're good for you, but taken to extremes, they become destructive.

1) Tolerance: A little tolerance is a good thing, but too much tolerance makes people blind, dumb and stupid. It's just fine for people and societies to set boundaries instead of giving the thumbs up to wallowing in a human pig pen. Yes, the Bible does say, "Judge not, that ye be not judged." However, it doesn't say there's no difference between the Bible and the Koran, right and wrong, or good and evil. We've taken tolerance to such an extreme that many Americans think it's better to abandon their morals, common sense, and history lessons rather than come across as "being judgmental."

2) Compassion: Compassion and $2.00 will get you a cup of overpriced coffee at Starbucks. At best, compassion doesn't mean much and at worst it has become an act of destructive self-congratulation. America is packed with angry, spiteful, nasty people who never give a dime to charity or personally help a soul; yet they consider themselves to be deeply compassionate for supporting harmful government programs with pleasant-sounding names. If you get into trouble, pray you'll be spared what passes for "compassion" in America today in favor of actually getting some real help.

3) Being nice: Sure, nice beats mean, but it's not an end unto itself. "Nice” is vanilla. "Nice" is generic. If all you bring to the table is "nice," you don't have much to offer. Furthermore, wanting to be "nice" keeps people from saying what needs to be said. It's the "nice" parent who has brats bothering everyone in the store because she won't discipline them. It's the "nice" relative who enables an alcoholic rather than encouraging him to go to rehab. It's the "nice" politicians who don't want to say "no" to anyone no matter how bad his lifestyle choices turn out to be. Meanwhile, our society seems to be getting ruder, stupider and more degenerate by the day, mainly because there are so many "nice" people who aren't willing to stand up and do something about bad behavior. Unfortunately at the end of the day, the nicest dog in the dung heap is still living in a dung heap.

4) Self-Esteem: We may be the first society in history to completely divorce self-esteem from actual accomplishment and self-worth. So, what happens when little Johnny, who coasted through school being told how "special" he was gets into the real world and starts getting his teeth kicked in on a regular basis because he brings nothing of value to the table? Next thing you know, he's marching at an Occupy protest, demanding government handouts and trolling the comment sections on conservative websites because he doesn't understand why he can't do anything productive with his life despite the fact he's been told that he's gifted. Instead of building a kid's self-esteem, we should be teaching him how to be good at things. Then he'll be of use to himself, his family and his society while building REAL self-esteem in the process.

5) Diversity: Diversity is a strength? Tell that to Afghanistan or Iraq. Both nations are so diverse they want to murder each other. That's not to say there isn't some value to diversity of thought, but we've taken it to such an extreme that we've started embracing tribalism. We tell immigrants to forget about the melting pot and embrace their old culture. We treat illegal immigrants who waltzed across the border two months ago as if they're indistinguishable from Americans. We sneer at patriotism and encourage Americans to fragment off from each other by race, gender, age, and sexual orientation. Then we're shocked that Americans have become so alienated from each other. Anyone emphasizing diversity should be aware that diverse groups of people generally don't get along particularly well. Conservatives and liberals? Northerners and Southerners? Muslims and Jews? Jocks and nerds? If these groups don't tend to see eye to eye, why should we expect other equally diverse groups of people to be best buddies while we're celebrating how different they are from each other?

SOURCE

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Palestinian Authority Human Rights Violations Ignored by Media, West

Evidently, most Western governments, journalists and human rights organizations have chosen to endorse the Palestinian Authority's stance that the only evil-doers are the Israelis. And that is precisely why the ICHR report on the anarchy, lawlessness and human rights violations by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas will be completely ignored in the West.

A report issued by the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) this week criticized the Palestinian Authority [PA] and Hamas for assaults on human rights and freedoms in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The report, which has been ignored by mainstream media and human rights organizations in the West, reveals that 10 Palestinians died in January 2014 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a result of anarchy, lawlessness and misuse of weapons.

The report also lists cases of torture and mistreatment in PA and Hamas prisons. ICHR pointed to an increase in the number of torture cases in prisons belonging to the PA's much-feared Preventive Security Service in the West Bank.

During January, ICHR wrote that it received 56 complaints about torture and mistreatment in Palestinian prisons: 36 in the Gaza Strip and 19 in the West Bank. In addition, the human rights organization received innumerable complaints about arbitrary and unlawful arrests of Palestinians by the PA and Hamas.

A Palestinian Authority policeman attacks protestors. (Image source: "Palestinians for Dignity" Facebook Page)
ICHR wrote that it also received complaints from Palestinians who accused the Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank of unlawfully seizing their money.

The organization also received complaints about assaults on freedom of expression and the media, as well as on peaceful protests and academic freedoms.

Of the 10 Palestinians who died during January, the report found that half of them died as a result of violent disputes between clans. One Palestinian was killed while working in a smuggling tunnel along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. Three Palestinians died in what the organization describes as cases of "security anarchy and misuse of weapons." In the Gaza Strip, the report said, a 13-year-old girl named Wisam Ashour committed suicide by hanging herself in her family home.

With regards to torture, the organization stated that it received complaints from Palestinians who said they had been tortured while in detention in Palestinian Authority and Hamas prisons.

ICHR related that it received 85 complaints during January concerning unlawful and arbitrary arrests by the two Palestinian governments. Many detainees said they were taken into custody for "politically-motivated" offenses.

As for assaults on freedom of expression and peaceful protests, the human rights organization pointed out that on January 12, 2014, PA policemen used force to break up a protest by Palestinian youths north of Ramallah. Between 60-70 protesters, the report continued, were wounded in the head and legs after policemen attacked them with clubs and stun grenades.

On January 28, 2014, Palestinian Authority policemen used live ammunition to disperse stone-throwers in the center of Ramallah, according to the report. It also stated that there was no reason for the use of live ammunition during the incident. Four protesters were wounded, the report documented, when policemen attacked them with clubs.

During the last week of January, the report noted, Hamas security forces raided two university campuses in the Gaza Strip and used excessive force to disperse student protests against high tuition.

In the West Bank, the Preventive Security Service summoned for interrogation a number of students suspected of involvement in political activities, and, the report revealed, a University in Jericho expelled a student on suspicion that his brother and cousin belonged to Hamas.

Referring to anarchy and lawlessness in the West Bank, the human rights organization pointed to an incident that took place near Hebron on January 18. On that day, more than 100 men attacked the building of the Yatta Municipality, using a bulldozer to force their way inside.

Mayor Musa Makhamarah said the assailants were relatives and friends of a municipal council who had been dismissed from his job. The mayor complained that although he had warned the Palestinian Authority police in advance about the possibility of such an attack, no police reinforcements were dispatched to the scene.

The report found that the Palestinian Authority was continuing to ignore court rulings. The Preventive Security Service and the General Intelligence Force regularly ignore orders issued by various courts to release Palestinian detainees, it pointed out, listing seven cases that occurred last month.

Earlier last week, representatives of ICHR met with PA Interior Minister Said Abu Ali and discussed with him cases of torture and human rights violations in the West Bank. They also discussed the continued security crackdown on Palestinian students at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank. Many students have complained that they were being targeted for "political reasons" by various branches of the Palestinian security establishment.

The report's findings once again show that neither the Palestinian Authority nor Hamas respect human rights and freedom of expression in the territories under their control.

That Hamas is responsible for human rights violations and assaults on freedom of expression should not come as a surprise to anyone.

But what is surprising is that the Palestinian Authority leadership, which often boasts that Palestinians living under its jurisdiction enjoy freedom of expression and democracy, is continuing to lie not only to its constituents, but also to the Western media and international donors about its human rights record.

The PA has been successful in diverting attention from these problems by putting all the blame on Israel. As far as the PA is concerned, Israel alone is responsible for human rights violations and assaults on freedom of expression and the media.

Evidently, most Western journalists, governments and human rights groups have chosen to endorse the Palestinian Authority's stance that the only evil-doers are the Israelis. And that is precisely why the ICHR report about the anarchy, lawlessness and human rights violations by the PA and Hamas will be completely ignored in the West.

SOURCE

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Using the IRS to Suppress Free Speech

The latest round of the IRS scandal, in which Tea Party and conservative groups have been selectively targeted for harassment by our tax collection agency, is now unfolding.

This comes in the form of proposed new rules from the IRS regarding the operation of organizations falling under the 501c4 provision of the tax code.

These are organizations whose purpose is to promote "social welfare" and therefore their income is tax-free.

Because promoting a cause or agenda in our free and democratic country cannot be isolated from political activity associated with that agenda, such activity is permitted by 501c4 organizations, as long as politics does not become its main purpose.

These are the rules of the game that have existed since 1959. But now the IRS wants to change the game.

The new rules they propose expand the definition of "candidate related activity" so broadly - to include voter education campaigns and grass roots lobbying campaigns - and to forbid even the mention of a candidate in any context 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election - that it will make it impossible for these organizations to function.

The IRS would like us to believe they are just trying to clear up some rules that are too vague regarding how these organizations are permitted to operate.

But can it be an accident that these new rules come in the midst of the current scandal in which an IRS official, Lois Lerner, admitted that Tea Party groups were being targeted for harassment?

It was revealed this week at a House committee hearing, at which new IRS commissioner John Koskinen testified, that an email was found from an IRS official indicating intent to scrutinize 501c4 organizations.

How much of this was generated by inappropriate politicized activity within the IRS and to what extent it relates to the IRS taking guidance from higher authority -- like the White House -- remains to be seen.

It does defy common sense to conclude that the White House has not been involved in this.

IRS activity in pursuit of non-profit organizations escalated in 2010.

It so happens that early 2010 the Supreme Court ruled, in the case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that the ban on independent political expenditures by corporations violated the free speech provisions in the first amendment of the constitution.

And it so happens funding escalated into 501c4 organizations after the Supreme Court lifted this ban. And it so happens a good deal of this activity has been Tea Party related activity.

After the Citizens United decision, the president himself weighed in, expressing his outrage about the decision, indicating his intent to "develop a forceful response to this decision."

To the dismay of our president and those with political agendas at the IRS, our constitution permits free speech and allows corporations to use funds to express a political viewpoint. So the IRS is now trying to render inoperative the vehicles that often receive and use those funds -- 501c4 organizations.

It is not an accident that if we look around the world, the one thing that uniformly characterizes un-free nations is lack of free speech.

Those that love political power hate those who want to question their power and who want to inform citizens and provide a different point of view.

This is what the current IRS scandal is about. IRS officials, whose job it is to collect taxes, have abused their power to harass those whose politics they do not like. And this is what the current attempt to shut down 501c4 organizations by rewriting long standing rules by which they operate is about.

Free flow of information and free speech is the oxygen of a free society. Every freedom loving American should vigorously push back against this abuse of power by the IRS to stifle free speech.

SOURCE

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 17, 2014

WHY AIPAC IS IN TROUBLE--AND WHY IT MATTERS

Richard Baehr has published a masterful analysis of the decline of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which recently had to back away from Iran sanctions for the first time in two decades. It did so to preserve the façade of bipartisan support for Israel, even though Democrats are jumping ship under pressure from the Obama administration and the radical academics and leftist organizers from whence Obama comes.

Baehr points to the central reason for AIPAC's decline--and for the deterioration in relations between the U.S. and Israeli governments: namely, President Barack Obama's desire to change the strategic reality of the Middle East. He resented American influence there, and has undone it entirely, destabilizing the region. Moreover, the president is busily propping up the Iranian regime to counteract the Sunni states plus Israel, and vice versa.

The president made that strategy explicit, Baehr notes, in his recent interview with David Remnick of the New Yorker, when Obama called for a "new equilibrium"--one "developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare." That idea, Lee Smith points out, likely comes from the anti-Israel (and so-called "realist") academic Stephen Walt.

Obama's "new equilibrium" requires downgrading the power of both Israel and the Sunni states--which is why the Saudis are suddenly just as furious as the Israelis about the way they are being treated, not just on Iran but overall. The "Arab Spring" has not changed Obama's thinking--he was against it before he was for it--except in that Obama deliberately protected the Iranian regime from the same impulses, and the regime knows it.

All of the above means that AIPAC has an increasingly difficult job. It is a task made more difficult by the fact that Obama has supported an alternative group, J Street, whose dishonest leaders and ignorant followers have not only clouded the debate with their left-wing views but who have actively suppressed the views of their opponents. AIPAC is also suffering from the fact that Israel is no longer a priority for many American Jews.

Yet AIPAC is also suffering from a political challenge that faces Americans in general: namely, the weakening of Congress in the face of a president who increasingly ignores the constitutional process and instead imposes his will through executive actions. The same Democrats who mindlessly applauded the president's threat, in his State of the Union address, to circumvent Congress are also the ones backing down on new Iran sanctions.

AIPAC's power base has always been in Congress. That is because, firstly, the vast majority of Americans are pro-Israel, and secondly because AIPAC has been extremely skillful in training local organizers to build contacts with congressional leaders even before they win their seats. The executive branch has always been less pro-Israel--and, at the State Department, often anti-Israel, especially under Obama (and Hillary Clinton).

The mistake AIPAC has made over the past five years was to put faith not only in Obama's promises but in its contacts in his administration. It elevated a Chicagoan to its presidency largely because of his friendship with Obama, and touted long associations with Joe Biden. Many of AIPAC's flip-flops over the past several months--Chuck Hagel, Syria, Iran--can be understood as an effort to protect these connections. It has done no good.

There are some Americans, on both the right and the left, who would no doubt applaud AIPAC's declining influence. They should think twice. Obama isn't just ignoring Congress on the questions of Israel and Iran: he is ignoring Congress altogether. He is creating a pattern and a precedent that will erode the ability of Americans to lobby or petition their elected representative for any cause, great or small. He is undermining democracy.

That seems to suit today's Democrats, and their left-wing hangers-on, just fine. As long as Obama (or Clinton) are in office, and they are close to power (or hope to be), they will not only ignore the constitutional threat, but celebrate it. As law professor Jonathan Turley noted yesterday: "I think many people will come to loathe that they remained silent during this period." The danger is not limited to AIPAC, Israel, or conservatives.

SOURCE

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Was assault on California Power Station a rehearsal for a major terrorist attack?

April Sniper Attack Knocked Out Substation, Raises Concern for Country's Power Grid -- giving a valuable warning

The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cut telephone cables.

Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night.

With over 160,000 miles of transmission lines, the U.S. power grid is designed to handle natural and man-made disasters, as well as fluctuations in demand. How does the system work? WSJ's Jason Bellini has #TheShortAnswer.

To avoid a blackout, electric-grid officials rerouted power around the site and asked power plants in Silicon Valley to produce more electricity. But it took utility workers 27 days to make repairs and bring the substation back to life.

Nobody has been arrested or charged in the attack at PG&E Corp.'s Metcalf transmission substation. It is an incident of which few Americans are aware. But one former federal regulator is calling it a terrorist act that, if it were widely replicated across the country, could take down the U.S. electric grid and black out much of the country.

The attack was "the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred" in the U.S., said Jon Wellinghoff, who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time.

The Wall Street Journal assembled a chronology of the Metcalf attack from filings PG&E made to state and federal regulators; from other documents including a video released by the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department; and from interviews, including with Mr. Wellinghoff.

The 64-year-old Nevadan, who was appointed to FERC in 2006 by President George W. Bush and stepped down in November, said he gave closed-door, high-level briefings to federal agencies, Congress and the White House last year. As months have passed without arrests, he said, he has grown increasingly concerned that an even larger attack could be in the works. He said he was going public about the incident out of concern that national security is at risk and critical electric-grid sites aren't adequately protected.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn't think a terrorist organization caused the Metcalf attack, said a spokesman for the FBI in San Francisco. Investigators are "continuing to sift through the evidence," he said.

Some people in the utility industry share Mr. Wellinghoff's concerns, including a former official at PG&E, Metcalf's owner, who told an industry gathering in November he feared the incident could have been a dress rehearsal for a larger event.

"This wasn't an incident where Billy-Bob and Joe decided, after a few brewskis, to come in and shoot up a substation," Mark Johnson, retired vice president of transmission for PG&E, told the utility security conference, according to a video of his presentation. "This was an event that was well thought out, well planned and they targeted certain components." When reached, Mr. Johnson declined to comment further.

A spokesman for PG&E said the company takes all incidents seriously but declined to discuss the Metcalf event in detail for fear of giving information to potential copycats. "We won't speculate about the motives" of the attackers, added the spokesman, Brian Swanson. He said PG&E has increased security measures.

Utility executives and federal energy officials have long worried that the electric grid is vulnerable to sabotage. That is in part because the grid, which is really three systems serving different areas of the U.S., has failed when small problems such as trees hitting transmission lines created cascading blackouts. One in 2003 knocked out power to 50 million people in the Eastern U.S. and Canada for days.

Many of the system's most important components sit out in the open, often in remote locations, protected by little more than cameras and chain-link fences.

Transmission substations are critical links in the grid. They make it possible for electricity to move long distances, and serve as hubs for intersecting power lines.

Within a substation, transformers raise the voltage of electricity so it can travel hundreds of miles on high-voltage lines, or reduce voltages when electricity approaches its destination. The Metcalf substation functions as an off-ramp from power lines for electricity heading to homes and businesses in Silicon Valley.

The country's roughly 2,000 very large transformers are expensive to build, often costing millions of dollars each, and hard to replace. Each is custom made and weighs up to 500,000 pounds, and "I can only build 10 units a month," said Dennis Blake, general manager of Pennsylvania Transformer in Pittsburgh, one of seven U.S. manufacturers. The utility industry keeps some spares on hand.

A 2009 Energy Department report said that "physical damage of certain system components (e.g. extra-high-voltage transformers) on a large scale…could result in prolonged outages, as procurement cycles for these components range from months to years."

Mr. Wellinghoff said a FERC analysis found that if a surprisingly small number of U.S. substations were knocked out at once, that could destabilize the system enough to cause a blackout that could encompass most of the U.S.

Not everyone is so pessimistic. Gerry Cauley, chief executive of the North America Electric Reliability Corp., a standards-setting group that reports to FERC, said he thinks the grid is more resilient than Mr. Wellinghoff fears.

"I don't want to downplay the scenario he describes," Mr. Cauley said. "I'll agree it's possible from a technical assessment." But he said that even if several substations went down, the vast majority of people would have their power back in a few hours.

The utility industry has been focused on Internet attacks, worrying that hackers could take down the grid by disabling communications and important pieces of equipment. Companies have reported 13 cyber incidents in the past three years, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of emergency reports utilities file with the federal government. There have been no reports of major outages linked to these events, although companies have generally declined to provide details.

"A lot of people in the electric industry have been distracted by cybersecurity threats," said Stephen Berberich, chief executive of the California Independent System Operator, which runs much of the high-voltage transmission system for the utilities. He said that physical attacks pose a "big, if not bigger" menace.

There were 274 significant instances of vandalism or deliberate damage in the three years, and more than 700 weather-related problems, according to the Journal's analysis.

Until the Metcalf incident, attacks on U.S. utility equipment were mostly linked to metal thieves, disgruntled employees or bored hunters, who sometimes took potshots at small transformers on utility poles to see what happens. (Answer: a small explosion followed by an outage.)

Last year, an Arkansas man was charged with multiple attacks on the power grid, including setting fire to a switching station. He has pleaded not guilty and is undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, according to federal court records.

Overseas, terrorist organizations were linked to 2,500 attacks on transmission lines or towers and at least 500 on substations from 1996 to 2006, according to a January report from the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry-funded research group, which cited State Department data.

To some, the Metcalf incident has lifted the discussion of serious U.S. grid attacks beyond the theoretical. "The breadth and depth of the attack was unprecedented" in the U.S., said Rich Lordan, senior technical executive for the Electric Power Research Institute. The motivation, he said, "appears to be preparation for an act of war."

The attack lasted slightly less than an hour, according to the chronology assembled by the Journal.

The substation's cameras weren't aimed outside its perimeter, where the attackers were. They shooters appear to have aimed at the transformers' oil-filled cooling systems. These began to bleed oil, but didn't explode, as the transformers probably would have done if hit in other areas.

Riddled with bullet holes, the transformers leaked 52,000 gallons of oil, then overheated. The first bank of them crashed at 1:45 a.m., at which time PG&E's control center about 90 miles north received an equipment-failure alarm.

Grid officials routed some power around the substation to keep the system stable and asked customers in Silicon Valley to conserve electricity.

In a news release, PG&E said the substation had been hit by vandals. It has since confirmed 17 transformers were knocked out.

Mr. Wellinghoff, then chairman of FERC, said that after he heard about the scope of the attack, he flew to California, bringing with him experts from the U.S. Navy's Dahlgren Surface Warfare Center in Virginia, which trains Navy SEALs. After walking the site with PG&E officials and FBI agents, Mr. Wellinghoff said, the military experts told him it looked like a professional job.

In addition to fingerprint-free shell casings, they pointed out small piles of rocks, which they said could have been left by an advance scout to tell the attackers where to get the best shots.

"They said it was a targeting package just like they would put together for an attack," Mr. Wellinghoff said.

Mr. Wellinghoff, now a law partner at Stoel Rives LLP in San Francisco, said he arranged a series of meetings in the following weeks to let other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, know what happened and to enlist their help. He held a closed-door meeting with utility executives in San Francisco in June and has distributed lists of things utilities should do to strengthen their defenses.

A spokesman for Homeland Security said it is up to utilities to protect the grid. The department's role in an emergency is to connect federal agencies and local police and facilitate information sharing, the spokesman said.

As word of the attack spread through the utility industry, some companies moved swiftly to review their security efforts. "We're looking at things differently now," said Michelle Campanella, an FBI veteran who is director of security for Consolidated Edison Inc. in New York. For example, she said, Con Ed changed the angles of some of its 1,200 security cameras "so we don't have any blind spots."

Some of the legislators Mr. Wellinghoff briefed are calling for action. Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) mentioned the incident at a FERC oversight hearing in December, saying he was concerned that no one in government can order utilities to improve grid protections or to take charge in an emergency.

As for Mr. Wellinghoff, he said he has made something of a hobby of visiting big substations to look over defenses and see whether he is questioned by security details or local police. He said he typically finds easy access to fence lines that are often close to important equipment.

"What keeps me awake at night is a physical attack that could take down the grid," he said. "This is a huge problem."

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 16, 2014

So, who are the smartest scientists?

The paper below is a curious one. The authors seem to be making mountains out of molehills. There IS for instance a correlation between IQ and conventional religion but it is slight -- unlikely to be of any practical importance and probably artifactual anyway. See here

But the thing which amused me most was the claim that social scientists are more religious. I spent many years teaching the social sciences in Australian universities and during that time went to a lot of conferences both in Australia and overseas -- where I met many fellow social scientists. And it is true that most social scientists are religious, but the religion is Leftism. Anybody who can still believe in socialism after all the socialist disasters of the 20th century is in the grip of deep faith. I think I only ever met three Christian social scientists. So I would have thought that social scientists were the LEAST religious academic group as far as conventional religions are concerned. So the study below would seem to rely on some very strange sampling. Journal abstract included below


SOCIAL science professors at elite institutions are more likely to be religious and politically extreme than their counterparts in the natural sciences, argues a new paper. Why? Natural scientists are just smarter.

“There is sound evidence of a negative correlation between intelligence and religiosity and between intelligence and political extremism,” reads the paper in the Interdisciplinary Journal on Research and Religion which examines existing data on academic scientists’ IQs by field, and on religious beliefs and political extremism among science professors in the US and Britain. “Therefore the most probable reason behind elite social scientists being more religious than are elite physical scientists is that social scientists are less intelligent.”

The paper, written by Edward Dutton, adjunct professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Oulu, in Finland, and Richard Lynn, a retired professor of psychology from the University of Ulster, in Northern Ireland, who is known for his work on race and IQ, continues: “Intelligence is also a factor in interdisciplinary differences in political extremism, [with] physicists, who have high IQs, being among the least extreme and lower-IQ scholars being among the most extreme.”

In an interview, Dutton said social scientists aren’t stupid, or necessarily extreme in their politics or overly religious. But, statistically speaking, they have lower IQs than their colleagues in biological and physical sciences and are likelier to be extremely conservative or liberal or religious, or both.

Dutton said that there are many similarities between political extremism and religious fundamentalism; in other research, he uses the term “replacement religions” to describe the phenomenon.

“[Physical] scientists are overwhelmingly atheist,” Dutton said. “This is predicted by their high IQ, which allows you to rise above emotion and see through the fallacious, emotional arguments.” Arguments about God are all emotional arguments, he added.

The paper is a meta-analysis of existing data showing several things: that natural scientists have higher IQs than social scientists; that low intelligence “predicts” political extremism and religiosity; and that physical scientists at elite institutions are less likely to believe in God or be politically extreme than their counterparts in the social sciences.

The connection between all three research areas has never been made until now, Dutton said. But — in just one example of potentially problematic methodology — the logic can’t be extended to academe in general. Several studies cited in the paper drawing from a wider mix of colleges and universities than simply the most elite show that life sciences professors are more likely to attend church than their peers in the social sciences, not less. The paper assumes this is because professors at elite institutions are smarter than their peers elsewhere.

The researchers also use IQ as the sole measure of intelligence (they mention Howard Gardner’s multiple forms of intelligence, but argue that they could also be considered personality traits).

The researchers acknowledge some of their limitations, including that some older data in the analysis involve a very small sample size. Dutton and Lynn say that future research involving larger academic samples would be “extremely useful” in exploring these areas in greater depth.

Dutton said he knew his paper would upset some readers, but that he invited feedback from fellow scholars. The point of research, even when controversial, is to “get closer to the truth of human life,” he said.

SOURCE

Interdisciplinary Journal on Research and Religion. 2014 Volume 10, Article 1

Intelligence and Religious and Political Differences Among Members of the U.S. Academic Elite

ABSTRACT

Many studies have found inverse correlations between intelligence and religiosity, intelligence and political conservatism, and intelligence and political extremism. Other studies have found that academics tend to be significantly less religious and more liberal than the general population. In this article, we argue that interdisciplinary differences in religiosity and political perspective among academics are predicted by interdisciplinary differences in intelligence between academics. Once personality factors correlating with religiosity have been substantially controlled for, physicists, who have higher average intelligence, are less religious than are social scientists, who have lower average intelligence. Physical scientists are also less politically extreme than are social scientists.

SOURCE

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Why Valentine's Day Makes Me Queasy

Andrew Klavan has some good thoughts below but I do not agree with him entirely. He seems to find the transactional nature of male/female relationships objectional but most psychologists would see that as basic. A relationship is a trade of sorts. Not very romantic, I guess, but it explains a lot

As Valentine's Day approaches, I find myself looking at contemporary depictions of romance with a distinct feeling of nausea. TV ads for flowers, Teddy Bears and jewelry all suggest that men will — wink, wink — get lucky if they give their girl the right gift and will have some serious 'splaining to do if they do not. It's awful tripe. I mean, I understand the Kay Jeweler slogan "Every Kiss Begins with Kay," is meant as a clever nonsense, but my mind reflexively responds, "Yeah, and Every Prostitute Begins with Pay!"

Do these ads really speak to any human males and females in actual relationships?

I fear they must. The ABC-TV show The Bachelor has been running for 18 seasons and, according to Slate television critic Willa Paskin, it basically makes popular entertainment out of women giving themselves in sex and even marriage in return for luxury and treacly lies. "It's callow, sordid behavior made somehow acceptable by the use of Hallmark Card language and a really fly hotel room."

I would chalk this up to trash TV, and yet I see with my own eyes the elaborate and expensive lengths young men now go to in order to propose to their girlfriends "romantically," not to mention the enormous gobs of cash these couples then shell out to turn the wedding into "her special day." I don't think you have to be a psychologist to suspect that this extravagance is meant to disguise the emptiness of such white-dress rituals in a world where virginity goes cheap, divorce is easy and gender roles are blurred.

But worse, beneath such displays of conspicuous enchantment, there also lies, I think, an insecurity about the depth of true affection between man and mate. I was not surprised to read a column this week by the Wall Street Journal's Elizabeth Bernstein in which, under the headline "Answers to the Relationship Question Readers Ask Most," she deals with the absence of sex in marriage. Well, at least the wedding was nice!

Listen, at this point, to be frank, I have no chips in this game. My marriage of more than three decades has been a God-sent miracle of love and hilarity. I have no idea what our "secret" is. We try to be nice to each other. We made a conscious decision to ignore cultural pressures from all sides. She treats me like a king. I worship the ground she walks on. It works for us. I really don't care what the rest of you do.

But I have an observation which, in lieu of chocolates, I offer as a Valentine's gift from an old campaigner to the romancing young.

I think in all the modern hysteria over gender roles, young people have become trapped between two competing materialist world-views, both wrong. On the one side are the idiot feminists, whining about a mathematical equality no one wants, prattling endlessly about their tiresome vaginas as they seek to intimidate men out of their inborn natures and pressure women to forgo their deepest dreams.

On the other side are the latest scientific and sociological studies that inevitably prove that boys will continue to be boys and girls girly. The gifts-for-sex jewelry ads and "reality" shows are outgrowths of this deterministic view of human sexuality: exaggerated Darwinian kabukis of power and fertility in which I give you presents and romance to show I can and will support you, you parade your body to show you can and will bear young.

And it's true, I know, nature shapes us. We shouldn't let the culture bully us out of our native selves. But in the end, both Darwinian fundamentalism and reactionary feminism are reductive and foolish. We are individuals — and more: incarnate spirits, fearfully and wonderfully made. It is love, not money, not sex, not even reproduction, that is our true heart's desire.

Trust me on this. You can do without the Teddy Bear. Come Valentine's Day, man or woman, devote your soul to your lover's. You'll get a lot luckier than you ever imagined.

SOURCE

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The Rushdie Fatwa 25 Years Later

By Daniel Pipes

Twenty-five years ago today, Ayatollah Khomeini brought his edict down on Salman Rushdie. Iran’s revolutionary leader objected to the author’s magical-realist novel The Satanic Verses because of its insults to the Muslim prophet Muhammad and responded by calling for the execution of Rushdie and “all those involved in the publication who were aware of its contents.”

That Rushdie was born in India, lived in Britain, and had no significant connections to Iran made this an unprecedented act of aggression, one that resounded widely at the time and has subsequently had an enduring impact. Indeed, one could argue that the era of “creeping sharia” or “stealth jihad” or “lawful Islamism” began on February 14, 1989, with the issuance of that short edict.

If Rushdie, 66, is alive and well (if not exactly flourishing; his writings deteriorated after The Satanic Verses), many others lost their lives in the disturbances revolving around his book. Worse, the long-term impact of the edict has been to constrain the ability of Westerners freely to discuss Islam and topics related to it, what has come to be known as the Rushdie Rules. Long observation of this topic (including a book written in 1989), leads me to conclude that two processes are underway:

First, that the right of Westerners to discuss, criticize, and even ridicule Islam and Muslims has eroded over the years.

Second, that free speech is a minor part of the problem; at stake is something much deeper – indeed, a defining question of our time: will Westerners maintain their own historic civilization in the face of assault by Islamists, or will they cede to Islamic culture and law and submit to a form of second-class citizenship?

Most analyses of the Rushdie Rules focus exclusively on the growth of Islamism. But two other factors are even more important: Multiculturalism as practiced undercuts the will to sustain Western civilization against Islamist depredations while the Left’s making common political cause with Islamists gives the latter an entrée. In other words, the core of the problem lies not in Islam but in the West.

SOURCE

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Communist echoes haunt Sochi

As the Olympics got underway in post-Soviet Russia this weekend, a moment in NBC's coverage briefly revived a Soviet-era controversy: the charge that Western liberals are soft on communism.

Narrating the network's lead segment on the opening ceremonies, actor Peter Dinklage mused on Russia's history and referred to "the revolution that birthed one of modern history's pivotal experiments." Conservative blogs quickly accused NBC of glorifying Russia's Soviet past. Unfortunately, such a rose-tinted view of communism is not an isolated instance. It is a mindset that still infects the left and, too often, spills over into more mainstream liberalism.

Salon.com, a leader in the left-of-center media, recently published an article by activist Jesse Myerson titled "Why you're wrong about communism," purporting to debunk American "misconceptions" on the subject. Among those alleged errors: the notion that "communism killed 110 million people for resisting dispossession."

First, Myerson writes that the 110 million figure is not rooted in "sound research." Actually, the figure, based on "The Black Book of Communism," a landmark 1999 work, may be too low: The book lists a body count of 20 million for the Soviet Union, but some scholars put the number of terror victims at 20 million-25 million and the death toll from regime-made famines as high as 10 million.

Second, Myerson argues, many victims were not resistant property owners but people who were Communists. So? No anti-communist ever claimed that all of communism's victims died for refusing collectivization. Rather, the idea of collective ownership could be imposed only through such violent coercion that even supporters of that "dream" were caught in the terror machine.

Myerson offers other standard excuses (the Soviets had to fight a revolutionary war and battle the Nazis) before turning to China to conclude that Mao's Great Leap Forward, which caused a famine that killed tens of millions, had nothing to do with communism. Then, he asserts that if communism must be held accountable for its terror toll, capitalism should be blamed not only for the deaths in wars against Communist regimes, but also for presumed future deaths from climate change. Someone should tell him communism was no environmental paradise.

While Myerson is on the far left, milder versions of such apologetics can be found closer to the media mainstream. In 2005, reviewing a biography of Mao, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof argued that "Mao's legacy is not all bad" and that his rule "brought useful changes to China."

Meanwhile, U.S. Communists such as folk singer Pete Seeger, a onetime admirer of Josef Stalin, often get a pass for supporting murderous totalitarianism. After Seeger's death last month, David Graham, a political editor at The Atlantic, admitted the singer took some "distressing and dangerous positions" -- but argued that his pro-communist politics were part of an idealistic commitment to social justice that also led him to embrace the civil rights movement.

After "The Black Book of Communism" was published, socialist writer Daniel Singer lamented in The Nation that to see communism as "merely the story of crimes" -- rather than flawed but real "social advancement" -- is to give up on the possibility of "radical transformation" today. It's a telling admission. Many on the left still yearn for egalitarian alternatives to capitalism, often finding them in authoritarian left-wing regimes such as the rule of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.

Democratic capitalism is nothing if not flawed. But if there is one thing the 20th century should have taught us, it's to beware of noble "experiments" that use human beings as their fodder.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 14, 2014

The Privileged People

John Stossel

Politicians say, "We're all equal," and pretend that they represent everyone. But, in fact, they constantly pick winners and losers. America is now like the place described in George Orwell's book "Animal Farm": "All animals are equal," but some are "more equal than others." "Animal Farm" was about Communism, but today the allegory applies to our bloated democracy, too.

During the "fiscal cliff" negotiations that Congress and the media made sound so tough -- as if every last penny were pinched -- Congress still managed to slip in plenty of special deals for cronies.

--NASCAR got $70 million for new racetracks.

--Algae growers got $60 million.

--Hollywood film producers got a $430 million tax break.

When America's going broke, how do moviemakers get a special break? By lobbying for it. Movies are a sexy business, so 42 states offer film producers "incentives" to film there. (State legislatures are as shortsighted as Congress).

Michigan offered the juiciest handouts until the state ran out of taxpayers' money. Now Ohio, Louisiana and Georgia (that's why the latest "Hunger Games" movie was shot in Georgia) offer the biggest handouts. The mayor of Los Angeles recently declared a "state of emergency" -- not over an earthquake or storm, but because so much moviemaking has left California for states with bigger subsidies.

The U.S., which used to pride itself on being more free-market than Europe, is now hardly different from France, which crippled its economy by subsidizing all sorts of old industries, and even gives money to producers of American films that mention France.

Politicians everywhere are always eager to help out people who helped get them elected. In the U.S., labor unions were big supporters of President Barack Obama, and -- presto -- unions got 451 waivers from Obamacare.

Congressional staff got a special exception, too. Funny how many of these laws are supposed to be great for all of us but, once passed, look ugly to the privileged class. So they exempt themselves.

Even the crusade to save the earth is captured by the "special" people. Subsidies for "green energy" were supposed to go to the best ideas. Yet somehow your money went to companies like Solyndra, whose biggest shareholder just happened to be an Obama backer who bundled money for the president.

And somehow Al Gore, who had a modest income when he entered politics, reaped $200 million from brilliant investments after he left office. He must just be really smart.

On my TV show this week, progressive commentator Ellis Henican says this cronyism is "inevitable" and doesn't really bother him: "If we want roads and bridges and prisons and a military and a safety net, someone somewhere is going to benefit from that. But you can't use that as an excuse to not do important things for our society."

I say it's one more reason to keep government small.

Politicians doling out favors quietly shift where society's resources flow, who gets employed, what ideas are pursued.

It distorts the economy and the culture -- and it turns us into a nation of favor-seekers instead of creators and producers.

What about all the new businesses that would have gotten investment money but didn't have Gore on their boards? What new ideas might have thrived if old industries weren't coddled? We don't know. We will never know the greatness of what might have existed had the state not sucked the oxygen out of the incubator.

Because of government's favor-granting, Washington, D.C., is now the place where the well-connected go to get rich. For the first time in history, six of the richest counties in the U.S. surround D.C. When a small group of people gets to dispense $3.6 trillion and set rules that can help or kill your idea, you want to suck up to them.

As long as government has the power to grant favors, cronies and their lobbyists will seek those favors out. The privileged win. The people lose.

SOURCE

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Coverage Gap Leaves Millions Struggling

A growing insurance coverage gap is trapping millions of low-income Americans without affordable coverage thanks to yet another failure of ObamaCare. When the law was passed in 2009, Democrats in Washington believed they could hide its tremendous cost by passing some of it on to the states through forced expansion of their Medicaid programs. Thankfully, the Supreme Court put an end to that farce in 2012 when it struck down the provision, though regrettably it stopped short of throwing the whole law in the trash.

By that time, Medicaid had already grown prohibitively expensive in some states, consuming as much as 50% of their annual budgets. Freed of the burden of carrying the federal government's water, Republican governors and legislators in 24 states refused to take the bait, opting instead to protect their states' fiscal health. Now, many low-income families are learning the hard way that they don't earn enough to qualify for federal subsidies to purchase insurance, but they also earn too much to enroll in Medicaid. In other words, they're caught in a coverage gap. And then there's the problem highlighted last week of people opting not to work as much in order to avoid losing their subsidies. Only a law born in Washington could create such a cosmic joke.

Well, people may not be able to keep their insurance, but at least they can keep their doctor, right? Not exactly. Reports are coming in from around the nation of chronic care patients in danger of losing their coverage as insurance companies cut hospitals and other providers from their plans. For example, Seattle Children's Hospital is threatening legal action against Washington State's insurance commissioner over being excluded from a major insurance network. Dr. Sandy Melzer said, "We're seeing denials of care, disruptions in care. We're seeing a great deal of confusion and, at times, anger and frustration on the part of these families who bought insurance thinking their children were going to be covered, and they've found that it's a false promise." Indeed, the bottom line is that ObamaCare is a false promise.

SOURCE

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Political targeting of Walker supporters proves it can happen here

It can’t happen here. Government targeting and intimidation against political opponents is something found in North Korea or Iran, not in the United States of America.

Tell that to conservative groups in the state of Wisconsin whose leaders have had their private homes raided by local police due to their attempts to support Gov. Scott Walker (R) during the labor unions’ failed attempt at recalling him from office.

After losing at the ballot box, Big Labor allies in the Milwaukee County district attorney’s office have conducted a secret witch hunt of their opponents’ activities that is specifically designed to intimidate and discourage their future political participation.

Using leaks to the media to question credibility, coupled with kicking in a few doors to make a dramatic statement, the Milwaukee district attorney has proven that it can, in fact, happen here.

Now, one of those groups has had enough and has filed a federal lawsuit against the high-profile Walker opponent.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of the Wisconsin Club for Growth and its director, Eric O’Keefe, names four Milwaukee prosecutors including special prosecutor Francis Schmitz and District Attorney John Chisholm.

The lawsuit’s description is eerily reminiscent of the actions of the IRS in targeting conservative groups. It charges that the defendants have spent four years using their official offices attempting to harass and silence political opponents.

Wisconsin has been at the center of a heated legislative battle that has seen many public employee unions lose their capacity to compel employees to pay dues. Attempts to change the majority in the Senate as well as to recall the governor have fallen flat. Now, the AFL-CIO, SEIU, NEA and their state affiliates are engaged in a last-ditch challenge to Walker’s reelection.

Chisholm, who appeared in an ad supporting the public-employee-union-led effort to recall Walker, is charged with using his office to affect the outcomes of the upcoming 2014 election by knocking potential Walker supporters to the sidelines through legal intimidation.

O’Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for Growth serve as exhibit A for the impact of this local prosecutor’s jihad against Walker supporters, as they have been forced to hire a bevy of lawyers while avoiding normal political activity.

As the federal lawsuit moves forward, the bullying tactics of prosecutors will be laid bare as they are forced to defend their actions.

And Americans will learn that, yes indeed, it can happen here. The only question is do they still care?

SOURCE

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Poof: A Scandal Disappears

IRS corruption

Remember the IRS scandal? It's gone. Poof. So flaccid has press interest in the story become that President Barack Obama made bold in an interview with Fox News to say there was not a "smidgen of corruption" in the IRS's conduct.

It requires terrific confidence in the passivity of the press to float the discredited "Cincinnati did it all" dodge since we know that IRS employees in that office were taking direction from Washington. We further know that IRS offices in California, Oklahoma, Washington, D.C. and other places have been identified as singling out groups with "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in their names.

Obama's confidence in the press is not misplaced. Despite juicy opportunities to delve into the story of government abusing its power, reporters have let the matter drop.

There was no smoking gun showing that Obama personally ordered the harassment of conservatives, some explain. Is that the standard? Because it seems the press applied a different yardstick to Chris Christie. Well, there's a "scandal attention cycle," says the Columbia Journalism Review. To some extent, this is true. But there are different rules for Democrats, and particularly for Obama.

To review: When the behavior of the IRS was first revealed in May of 2013, the press furor was considerable. The president was alarmed enough about the damaging story to hold a press conference. "If ... IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported on," he said, " ... then that is outrageous, and there is no place for it." He continued, "I will not tolerate it, and we will make sure that we find out exactly what happened on this."

Or not. Now it's just "bone-headed decisions out of a local office." This is tamely accepted. If it concerned just a local office, why did Obama fire the director of the IRS? Why did Lois Lerner plead the Fifth and resign? (Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee erred by not granting her use immunity and intensely questioning her about what really happened. They could still do it.)

It was also a non-scandal when the Justice Department appointed an Obama donor to investigate the IRS. Nor did the press follow up on uncontested accounts of IRS employees leaking confidential taxpayer information -- which is a felony.

Last week, Catherine Engelbrecht, a small businesswoman from Texas who founded True the Vote and King Street Patriots, testified about her ordeal at the hands of the federal government. After she became politically active, she was subject to personal and business audits by the IRS going back several years. Then the FBI came knocking to ask about someone who attended one of the meetings of the King Street Patriots. The IRS returned with an armamentarium of questions about True the Vote. Then the Occupational Safety and Health Administration showed up to examine her business with a fine-tooth comb. (They fined her $17,500.) Finally, the Engelbrechts were graced with a visit from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

Engelbrecht's experience should chill anyone concerned about government intimidation, overreach, arrogance and abuse of power. But most of all, it should alarm the press -- supposedly the fierce guardians of the First Amendment. The press made Sandra Fluke a household name when she testified before a House subcommittee about the terrible injustice she would suffer if taxpayers did not purchase her contraceptives for her. Yet Engelbrecht, an ordinary person merely attempting to join with other Americans in petitioning the government for redress of grievances, was hammered by a succession of powerful government agencies. Not even a bleat from the press about this flagrant assault on free speech.

Government agencies should operate in a strictly neutral and nonpartisan fashion. If they become politicized, we've entered banana republic territory. The press, by failing to beat the drums on this, is complicit in corruption that goes far beyond a "smidgen."

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 13, 2014

Is intelligence written in the genes?

The evidence keeps piling up. Many genes are now known to be involved, which reinforces my view that high IQ is just one aspect of general biological good functioning

A gene which may make people more intelligent has been discovered by scientists. Researchers have found that teenagers who had a highly functioning NPTN gene performed better in intelligence tests.

It is thought the NPTN gene indirectly affects how the brain cells communicate and may control the formation of the cerebral cortex, the outermost layer of the human brain, also known as ‘grey matter.’ Previously it has been shown that grey matter plays a key role in memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought and language.

Studies have also proved that the thickness of the cerebral cortex correlates with intellectual ability. However, until now no genes had been identified.

Teens with an underperforming NPTN gene did less well in intelligence tests.

Dr Sylvane Desrivières, from King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry and lead author of the study, said: “We wanted to find out how structural differences in the brain relate to differences in intellectual ability.

“It’s important to point out that intelligence is influenced by many genetic and environmental factors. “The gene we identified only explains a tiny proportion of the differences in intellectual ability.”

An international team of scientists, led by King’s, analysed DNA samples and MRI scans from 1,583 healthy 14 year old teenagers.

The teenagers also underwent a series of tests to determine their verbal and non-verbal intelligence.

The researchers looked at over 54,000 genetic variants possibly involved in brain development.

They found that, on average, teenagers carrying a particular gene variant had a thinner cortex in the left cerebral hemisphere, particularly in the frontal and temporal lobes, and performed less well on tests for intellectual ability.

The genetic variation affects the expression of the NPTN gene, which encodes a protein acting at neuronal synapses and therefore affects how brain cells communicate.

Their findings suggest that some differences in intellectual abilities can result from the decreased function of the NPTN gene in particular regions of the left brain hemisphere.

Although the genetic variation identified in this study only accounts for an estimated 0.5 per cent of the total variation in intelligence.

However, the findings may have important implications for the understanding of biological mechanisms underlying several psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, autism, where impaired cognitive ability is a key feature of the disorder.

The study was published in Molecular Psychiatry

SOURCE

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A video to ponder



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Barkin mad

Her Eastern European roots are showing



On Wednesday, actress Ellen Barkin announced on Twitter that as long as Barack Obama is President, the people of the United States belong to him, Twitchy reported.

The actress made her opinion known in an exchange that started when she announced that she voted for Obama to "protect" all of "his" people.

"Yes I vote Pres Obama...to protect his ppl,ALL his ppl.The poor,the middle class,the jobless...the 1's that need our help..I vote 4 humanity, (sic)" she tweeted.

"HIS people?? Holy s**t you communists are insane," user "Linsey" tweeted in response.

"Right now he is the President of our country.He is our leader & we are his people, (sic)" Barkin tweeted.

Conservatives gave Barkin the civics lesson she should have received in grade school, letting her know in no uncertain terms that the American people are not the property of the state, or the president.

"Conservatives know a President doesn't own the American people but works for them," tweeted "Nathan Duffy," in response to a racially-charged tweet Barkin sent.

"He doesn't have any people - Americans are a free people. That means our presidents serve us, not us them. Kings have people," added "Teresa Graves."

"Doug" added: "I thought we weren't a monarchy? Is this like @donnabrazile referring to his beginning 'his rule' in 2008?"

"[W]ow, you sure are dumb," one person tweeted, while another called her "psychotic."

The staff at Twitchy suggested Barkin "seek help."

Barkin, the 58-year-old actress who appears in "The New Normal," a new NBC series about a gay couple who wants to have a baby using a surrogate, caused controversy in July when she expressed her hatred for conservatives in a series of profane tweets.

In August, she retweeted a message hoping that Tropical Storm Isaac would kill Republicans by washing them out to sea during the RNC convention.

SOURCE

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Obama Doesn't Care to Enforce ObamaCare

For the 27th time, Barack Obama has issued a unilateral delay of an ObamaCare provision, this time the one requiring businesses with 50-99 full-time workers to offer health benefits. Obama had already delayed that mandate until 2015, but now it's not effective until 2016. Furthermore, businesses with more than 100 employees need not cover 100% of employees, but rather only 70% of workers by 2015 and 95% in 2016 and after.

Or, you know, whenever. The Obama Treasury Department wrote, “As these limited transition rules take effect, we will consider whether it is necessary to further extend any of them beyond 2015.” Whatever politically benefits Democrats. Republicans certainly can't challenge it or they would appear to support the mandate.

Last week's CBO report showed that ObamaCare is costing the economy big time, but the White House insisted that it's liberating workers. “Well, which is it?” asks The Wall Street Journal. “Either ObamaCare is ushering in a worker's paradise, in which case by the White House's own logic exempting businesses from its ministrations is harming employees. Or else the mandate really is leading business to cut back on hiring, hours and shifting workers to part-time as the evidence in the real economy suggests.”

For the Obama administration, it's both. While assuring low-info voters that ObamaCare enables people to “make a decision about how they will work, and if they will work,” the White House can also give businesses a reprieve until after the mid-term election. The previous delay put businesses in the position of accounting for the mandate right before the election and that simply wouldn't do. But the effect of yet another delay and the prospect of who knows how many others is that businesses can't plan for the law. Therefore, the economy will remain stagnant.

As an aside, the timing of this delay is especially interesting given that House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) just said immigration reform was unlikely because Republicans don't trust Obama to enforce the law. The president's doubling down on ObamaCare should completely take immigration off the table.

Speaking of timing, it's incredibly ironic that, on a visit to Thomas Jefferson's home with French President Francois Hollande, Obama reportedly said, “[A]s a president, I can do whatever I want.” Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, didn't have kind things to say about Obama's brand of tyranny. “The tree of liberty,” wrote Jefferson, “must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

SOURCE

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Unemployment Data Brutalize Krugman and Keynes

When Republicans dug in their heels and allowed extended unemployment benefits to expire for 1.3 million people in late December, "progressives" charged that this "heartless" move would cause people to stop looking for work, and that the reduction in government spending (i.e., "stimulus") would slow job growth.

Oops. After falling by an average of 48,000/month during 2013, labor force participation surged by 523,000 in January. The total number of full-time-equivalent* (FTE) jobs shot up by 678,000, for the biggest one-month gain since April 2000. The number of long-term unemployed (27 weeks or more) declined by 232,000, or 6%, in a single month.

Although the reported headline (U-3) unemployment rate fell by only 0.1 percentage points in January, the true unemployment rate (adjusted to the labor force participation rate of December 2008) fell by 0.3 percentage points, to 10.6%. The broader U-6 unemployment rate fell by even more, 0.4 percentage points.

Given the spectacular results produced by the Republicans' courageous refusal to renew extended unemployment benefits, it would be tragic for them to give in now, and vote to extend a program that has had the unintended consequence of extending unemployment.

Recent economic data have been brutal on Keynesians, who believe that GDP and employment growth are driven by fiscal and monetary stimulus.

The Federal Reserve's "tapering" of its bond-buying binge (a.k.a., quantitative easing) was supposed to slow the economy. The jobs numbers belie this.

During the first 11 months of 2013, the Fed expanded the monetary base by an average of $91.9 billion/month. It then began to "taper." The monetary base rose by $31.8 billion in December, and by only $12.7 billion in January. This amounts to a pretty drastic tapering.

The results? FTE job growth averaged 103,000/month for the first 11 months of 2013, but came in at 240,000 for December, followed by 678,000 for January.

We have seen this pattern before, in both the employment and GDP numbers. During both QE2 and QE3, the performance of the economy was inversely correlated with the amount of quantitative easing done by the Fed. "Printing money" just made things worse, at least for ordinary people.

Recent GDP numbers have also been unkind to Keynesians in the area of fiscal stimulus, the notion that higher government deficits boost the economy.

Federal borrowing fell by 32% from 2012 to 2013, while our real GDP (RGDP) growth rate (4Q over 4Q) increased by 40%.

OK, so if Keynesianism doesn't explain what we are seeing, what does? Supply-side economics does. Let's revisit Jude Wanniski's "wedge model," and its implications for our economic future under ObamaCare.

Progressive welfare-state programs involve taxing things that we want more of (e.g., work, profits, capital gains, savings) to subsidize things that we want less of (e.g., idleness, disability, irresponsibility). The taxes and subsidies create a "wedge" between economic decision-makers and reality.

As an example, let's take America's corporate income tax, which is the highest in the world. This tax causes investors to locate factories in places like Ireland, when the actual cost of production would be lower in the U.S. Because jobs follow investment, the corporate tax wedge reduces employment in the U.S., and suppresses American wages.

Our system of unemployment insurance taxes working, and subsidizes not working. Accordingly, it would not surprise any supply-sider that when unemployment checks stopped flowing to millions of people in late December (and when even more people noticed that the rules of the game had changed), both labor force participation and total FTE employment increased.

The Obama administration and progressive pundits (like Paul Krugman) had to scramble last week after the CBO predicted that ObamaCare would reduce the labor force by the equivalent of 2.5 million FTE workers by 2024. The best that the liberals seemed to be able to come up with was to praise ObamaCare for "increasing worker choice."

Great concept, guys. If we want to maximize "worker choice," why not raise payroll taxes to 80%, and institute ObamaChow (to pay for food), ObamaCar (transportation), and ObamaCrib (housing)? Then everybody could choose not to work.

The worst thing about ObamaCare is that it will kill people by suppressing private sector investment in medical research. However, its second-worst feature is that it adds to a welfare state wedge that is already far too large.

In 2012, the Pennsylvania State Secretary of Public Welfare determined that a single mother in his state was no better off earning $69,000 than $29,000. In other words, the government "wedge" (taxes plus phase-outs of welfare state benefits) between these two income levels was 100%. If you want to know why more and more Americans are becoming trapped in the underclass, look no farther.

The supply-side wedge model explains the economic data we are seeing, and the Keynesian demand-side model does not. The way forward to prosperity is clear. We must shrink the welfare-state wedge.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 12, 2014

The Israel Boycott Mirage

US Secretary of State John Kerry is warning that Israel faces economic embargoes if a US-drafted framework agreement with the Palestinians fails to go forward. While the merits of the current American diplomatic initiative are debatable, Kerry's warnings clearly have a deleterious effect: they feed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign being waged by Israel's enemies, and create the false impression that this campaign is a significant threat to Israel.

The BDS effort has thus far had little success. For the moment and for the near future, it constitutes a bearable nuisance for Israel, not more.

Due to wise economic policies that have gradually distanced Israel from its socialist past, the Jewish state has adapted well to a globalized economy. With the exception of isolated cases, Israeli exports are well received all over the world, particularly if they are competitive in quality and price. Israel has found ways to penetrate important markets and Israeli products are even imported by Arab states. Moreover, some Israeli-made products have unique qualities which make them indispensable. Israeli high-tech components have become part of core embedded systems of many global brands. Most Israeli businessmen hardly meet obstacles that are connected to political animosity toward Israel.

Moreover, it is important to note that many previous American diplomatic efforts to bring peace in the Middle East have failed, yet this has not created long-term adversarial conditions for Israel – even if Israel was partly blamed for the lack of American success. The linkage between American diplomatic efforts and the fate of Israeli economy is tenuous, at best.

A survey of the international scene also indicates that the impact of BDS efforts is unlikely to grow dramatically in the coming years. Attempts to boycott Israeli products are unlikely to be successful in America, Israel's number one export country. American public support for Israel has remained stable for the past two decades at over 60 percent. A variety of legislative steps have already been adopted to prevent a boycott of Israeli products or institutions. Even the current administration, which has been more than once at loggerheads with Israel on Middle East issues, firmly states its opposition to BDS.

Several Western European states, prime recipients of Israel's exports, are indeed displaying a growing anti-Israel bias, despite good bilateral relations. Many Europeans have lost the shame of being anti-Semitic as Holocaust memories fade away. Therefore, a heightened boycott of Israeli products is conceivable. Yet as the Euro crisis lingers and the European population ages, the purchasing power of European countries is in decline. In addition, even in Europe there are strong pockets of pro-Israeli sentiment. The EU itself has announced that it has no plans whatsoever to boycott the Israeli economy. Israeli products originating beyond the Green Line are a different story, but only a small part of Israeli economic activity is sourced in the settlements.

Israeli exports are gradually, albeit too slowly, being redirected to Asian markets. The large Chinese and Indian economies are growing fast, and these societies do not carry historical anti-Semitic baggage. Moreover, Israel is generally viewed in Asia as a successful country and a model to be emulated. This is true even in Central Asian states whose populations are largely Muslim.

At the same time, the political clout of the Arab world – considered a natural ally of the Palestinians – is decreasing. The Arab world is in the midst of a deep political and socio-economic crisis, with failed states such as Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya. Egypt, the most important Arab state, faces tremendous domestic challenges and is allied with Israel against Islamic radicalism. Saudi Arabia is more concerned with the rise of Iran than the Palestinian issue, as is most of the Sunni world. Finally, the growing energy independence of the US diminishes Arab leverage.

Thus, Israel has overcome the boycott of the relatively stronger Arab world, and the BDS movement's attempts to harm the Israeli economy are unlikely to produce a different outcome.

Indeed, it takes a lot of imagination to see a concerted international effort to boycott the Jewish State. If Israel continues to make products with a clear qualitative edge at competitive prices, there will be many customers to buy them.

This leads to the conclusion that the boycott threat is exaggerated. Secretary Kerry is simply echoing the arguments of the Israeli political Left, which claims that an agreement with the Palestinians is the only way to escape international isolation. Moreover, irresponsible elements of the Left are asking for foreign pressure on Israel, realizing that they have no chance to change Israeli policies at the ballot box. The Left's electoral decline makes it more desperate and less democratic; hence its conclusion that "Israel has to be saved from herself" by the international community.

Fortunately, Israel is not internationally isolated and most of the world does not care enough about the Palestinians to sacrifice the benefits of good bilateral relations with Israel. Israel has the leeway to decide for itself what is good for its future.

SOURCE

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The Secular Religion of the Left

For most of human history, men and women have derived their moral dimension of life from the family and religion. Both of those are now dead or dying in the West under the influence of its new moral and ethical system. That system is one that we know in its various forms as the left.

The left can be summed up as moral materialism. It is a secular religion that claims to add a moral
dimension to materialism. Its obsessions are largely economic, from its early class warfare focus to its modern environmentalism. Even its racial politics code class warfare by skin color.

Kill off religion and what do you have left? The answer can be seen in China. You're left with materialism and family interests.. Cast off the shackles of the family for individualistic consumerism and you're left with nothing except materialism as can be seen in any major Western city.

Modern urban man is much too "smart" for religion. At least his own. He wants to add an ethical dimension to life without having to believe in anything except the sense of fairness that he already has, but which he does not realize is not nearly as valid objectively as it is subjectively in his inner emotional reality.

And that is what the left is. It strips away everything except that egotistical sense that things should be run more fairly with predictably unfair results.

Liberalism, and the milder flavors of the left, provide a permission slip for materialism by elevating it through political activism. This is the philosophical purpose of environmentalism's green label. It tells you that you are a good person for buying something and soothes the moral anxieties of an urban class with no coherent moral system except the need to impose an ethical order on the consumerism that defined their childhood, their adolescence and their adult life.

Those most in need of the moral system of materialism are the descendants of the displaced, whether by immigration to the United States or migration within the United States from rural to urban areas, who have become detached from a large extended family structure that once sustained them.

Their grandparents had already loosened their grip on religion and as the family disintegrated, materialism took its place. Their grandparents worked hard to provide for their children, but the children no longer saw maintaining the family as a moral activity. Sometimes they didn't even bother with a family. They became lonely individuals looking for a collective. A virtual political family.

Liberalism fills the missing space once inhabited by religion and the family. It provides a moral and ethical system as religion did and the accompanying sense of purpose and its state institutions replace and supplant the family. It does both of these things destructively and badly as its institutions forever try to patch social problems created by the disintegration of the family and its ideas provide too few people with a sense of purpose of a meaningful life.

And yet it isn't entirely to blame for this state of affairs. The left has actively tried to destroy the family and religion, but the American liberal was until recently less guilty on both charges. His main crime was collaborating with the left while refusing to acknowledge its destructive aims. The process by which the displacement of liberal ideas and their replacement by the ideas of the far left is nearly complete. The American liberal is now an aging relic. In his place is the resentful radical.

The process that led to this state of affairs isn't the left's fault either. Even if it's not for lack of trying. In some ways the left isn't the problem, it's a symptom of the problem. Its ability to fundamentally transform people is limited. The transformation that has occurred is because of the choices that people have been led into making trading religion and family for a dead end materialism. Those choices evolved organically from the natural direction of society and technology.

And into that empty space, the left came. It dominates because there is nothing else to fill that space. It can only be truly resisted by cultural groups that have maintained hold of family and religion. Without that sense of purpose, there is only the endless baffled retreat of the Republican Party.

Liberalism appeals more to the middle class and the upper class because it is a religion of materialism. It makes very little sense to those who don't have material things. The underclass might embrace the harsher populism of the left, but shows little interest in its larger collectivist philosophy. The underclass is losing family and religion at a faster rate than the upper class, but it clings to what it has and finds meaning in it. It may be nakedly materialistic, but it doesn't believe that it is too smart for religion or too individualistic for family. It has many flaws, but arrogance isn't one of them.

Ennobling consumerism is a difficult task. The left doesn't come anywhere close to succeeding at it. Instead it makes it more expensive and raises the entry barriers for everything by working to eliminate cheap food, cheap household goods and cheap everything. It's a class issue.

Why does the left really hate Walmart? It doesn't really have a lot to do with unions and has a lot to do with class. Walmart's crime is industrial. It's the crime of the factory and the supermarket and every means of mass production and consumption. It makes cheap products too readily available to the masses. Liberals like to believe that they oppose consumerism, but what they really want to do is raise the entry levels to the lifestyle. Liberal consumerism is all about upselling ethics.

When tangible goods become too easy to produce, you add value through intangibles. The fair trade food tastes the same as non-fair trade food. Organic, a category with a debatable meaning, doesn't really provide that much more value. And environmental labels are worth very little. And yet the average product at Whole Foods is covered in so many "ethical liberal" labels that it's hard to figure out what it even is.

Intangible value is all about class. And class is all about creating barriers to entry.

Liberalism has become a revolt against the middle class that its grandparents struggled to reach, a rejection of their "materialism" while substituting the "ethical materialism" of liberalism in its place that envisions a much smaller upper and middle class that derives its wealth and power not from hard work in the private sector, but highly profitable social justice volunteerism in the public sector.

An American Dream of universal prosperity has been pitted against the left's dream of a benevolent feudal system in which the few will be very well paid to oversee the income equality of the many.

The left's private argument against the American Dream is that it's little more than Walmart. And to some degree they're right. Easy availability of the necessities of life does not lead to a meaningful life. But the easy contempt that the left has for it shows its basic inability to understand how important these things are and how hard they were to come by for most of human history.

Salt was once a precious commodity. Today it sells for pennies a pound. The ability to light the darkness meant the difference between studying at night and living in ignorance. Today a light bulb goes for a quarter. At least it did until the left banned them. And electricity, the left also keeps raising the price of that. Few of the post-apocalyptic fantasies spilling out of Hollywood really describe what would happen if the people manufacturing them were thrown back before the industrial revolution..

Progress has made a good life materially possible, but it has also displaced and damaged the social mechanisms that make a good life socially possible. We have easy access to technology and streets full of vicious illiterate thugs. We can discuss anything with anyone, but we live in a society that values few things worth discussing. We have mass production, but not mass character.

For all its feigned populism, such elitist critiques of society are not foreign to the left. The left's elitist critiques differ in some regards, but they are on the same basic wavelength as those of the social conservative. And its solution is to promote what it considers social progress by reversing or slowing down industrial, commercial and technological progress. The environmental movement is only the latest ideological incarnation of this philosophy which strives to slow down the rate of progress.

The left's social collectivism however is no replacement for what is being lost. What it really does is attempt to apply industrial and commercial strategies to human relationships. Not only is it not a challenge to a consumeristic society, but it attempts to worsen the damage by rebuilding society on the model of the factory and the department store as an impersonal system.

That's not a solution to the problem. It is the problem.

The left cannot escape its own materialism. Its attempts at adding an ethical dimension to materialism fail because its ethical dimension is still materialistic. Its pathetic efforts at injecting pastiches of Third World and minority spirituality into its politics to provide the illusion of a spiritual dimension are hollow and racist. The left cannot fill its own hole, because it is the hole.

Like Islam, it provides something for people to believe in, but the thing it provides is the compulsion to find meaning by forcibly remaking other people's lives in a perpetual revolution which becomes its own purpose.

The left can't replace family or religion. Its social solutions are alien and artificial. They fix nothing and damage everything. Their appeal is to those who are arrogant and starved for meaning, who want religion without religion and family without family only to discover that they are not enough.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 11, 2014

History is crazy

No wonder the Left keep revising history. The reality is so strange that only conservatives could cope with it.

Take for instance the death of Queen Victoria at the age of 81 in 1901. She died in the arms of a member of her family. Who was that family member? You would never guess. It was Kaiser Bill, Wilhelm II, the German emperor! He was her grandson.

And yet Germany and Britain were at war only 13 years later.

Such a strange sequence of events requires explanation. Because she had so many daughters, Queen Victoria became the grandmother of Europe. An English princess was a great catch so the German emperor -- father of Kaiser Bill -- got one. Her descendants eventually occupied the thrones of no less than nine European countries

And Edward VII, Victoria's son, who was such a scapegrace in his youth as to be the complete despair of his strait-laced parents, actually turned out to be a very good King. He had the mildly reformist ideas of his father -- Prince Albert -- and was a generally good-natured soul who was known for treating everybody equally, regardless of their rank or importance. So if there was a problem for Britain anywhere in the world, the Foreign Office would send him out to visit. Even as a young man he was a great success abroad. When he visited America in his capacity as Prince of Wales in 1860, he was so popular that he spent months there, meeting just about everybody who was anybody. Prayers for the Royal family were said in Trinity Church, New York, for the first time since 1776.

So on his Royal visits he would shake hands all round, make all the right noises and charm everybody. And that part of the world would then resume lying down peacefully under the British crown. Having met the King himself and finding him such a pleasant and reasonable chap, how could they do otherwise? So against his parents' initial expectations, Edward turned out to be a great asset to British diplomacy. And Edward's wife was the sister of the Tsarina of Russia! And that Tsarina had a son who in time became Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. So the new Tsar was Edward's nephew. Beat that!

And, as it happens, Edward got on well with his nephew the Tsar. But NEITHER got on well with Wilhelm II. Queen Vic. kept the peace between them all while she was alive but after that it all went downhill. So we see that personalities can influence politics. Wilhelm was even a frequent visitor to Balmoral in Vic's lifetime and there are as a result of that a number of photos of Wilhelm in Highland dress.

I have written previously on the multifarious causes of the dreadful WWI. This adds another, though more minor one.

Below is a picture of Wilhelm as a child accompanying his father (later Friedrich III). Both are in Highland dress, at Balmoral. So Queen Victoria's autumn retreat in Scotland was a familiar place for Wilhelm.



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Leftist hate of their own society pops out again

In theory, Leftists should be vehemently critical of Islam. It stands for everything they claim to oppose: religious rule, maltreatment of women and executing homosexuals. So why do Leftists cosy up to Islam? Because the only genuine motive of the Left is hatred of Western society. And Muslims share that hate

What are you doing for Valentine's Day? Bleeding-heart progressives across the country are raising money for "an evening of music, song and sharing love for recently released People's Lawyer Lynne Stewart." Warm fuzzies for one of the world's most notorious terrorist helpers? I can't think of a more stomach-turning way to mark the holiday.

Thanks to the Obama administration, Stewart walked out of prison on New Year's Eve. She is reportedly suffering stage-four breast cancer. Now she's passing the plate among her supporters, asking them to foot the bill for her health insurance deductibles and co-pays, as well as for a "special diet, vitamins and other healing methods." What, no Obamacare?

Has Stewart shown exceptional remorse or good behavior to warrant such compassion? Don't forget: Both the Bureau of Prisons and a federal judge previously had denied Stewart's petition for a compassionate release, but a U.S. Attorney intervened. This preferential treatment is extraordinary: Since 1992, the annual average number of prisoners who receive compassionate release has been less than two-dozen.

Let me remind you of what she did, who benefited, who died and how she has acted since being caught red-handed and freed.

Stewart was convicted in 2005 of helping terrorist Omar Abdel Rahman -- the murderous Blind Sheik -- smuggle coded messages of Islamic violence to outside followers in violation of an explicit pledge to abide by her client's court-ordered isolation. Rahman, Stewart's "political client," had called on Muslims to "destroy" the West, "burn their companies, eliminate their interests, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill them on the sea, air or land." He issued bloody fatwas against U.S. "infidels" that inspired the 1993 WTC bombing, the 1997 massacre of Western tourists in Luxor, Egypt, and the 9/11 attacks.

Stewart ignored a judge's communications ban, transmitting Rahman's edicts of violence to fellow jihadist Rifa'l Ahman Tara in Egypt. She smuggled out a coded order to his followers lifting a ceasefire between his terrorist group and the Egyptian government.

SOURCE

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The Sunstone is losing its shine

Sunstein's "Paranoid Libertarianism" Is Just As Mainstream As Modern Liberalism

The specter of "paranoid libertarianism" continues to haunt American liberals. Hot on the heels of Sean Wilentz's recent fretting in The New Republic that Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and Julian Assange have undermined the case for big government by drawing too much attention to various instances of big government malfeasance, former Obama administration official Cass Sunstein has now weighed in with his own contribution to the genre, an op-ed titled "How to Spot a Paranoid Libertarian."

According to Sunstein, paranoid libertarianism is characterized by such pathologies as "a presumption of bad faith on the part of government officials--a belief that their motivations must be distrusted," as well as "a belief that liberty, as paranoid libertarians understand it, is the overriding if not the only value, and that it is unreasonable and weak to see relevant considerations on both sides."

Sunstein tries very hard to make that sound like dangerous and exotic stuff, but in fact what he's really describing is mainstream American jurisprudence when it comes to such vast areas of the law as free speech, voting, abortion, privacy, and gay rights. In those areas, our judicial system basically operates exactly as Sunstein describes: it subjects government regulations to what lawyers call strict (or intermediate) scrutiny. In essence, judges presume that the government has acted illegitimately when it legislates in such areas, and therefore forces the government to shoulder the burden of proof and justify its actions with extremely convincing rationales. Why do the courts place these government actions under the microscope? To protect the people's liberty to speak, vote, associate, and enjoy various forms of privacy. One more thing: American liberals overwhelmingly favor this approach in such cases.

Here's a recent example. During the March 2012 oral argument over the constitutionality of Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan openly questioned the motives of each and every member of Congress who voted in favor of that law. "We have a whole series of cases which suggest the following," Kagan told Republican lawyer Paul Clement, who was arguing in favor of DOMA. "That when Congress targets a group that is not everybody's favorite group in the world, that we look at those cases with some...some rigor to say, do we really think that Congress was doing this for uniformity reasons, or do we think that Congress's judgment was infected by dislike, by fear, by animus, and so forth?"

Is Elena Kagan a "paranoid libertarian"? Judging by Sunstein's definition, the answer is yes. Welcome to the brave new world.

SOURCE

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Young People Still Getting Hosed by Unemployment in Obama's Economy, Losing Prime Earning Years

For two months in a row, and quite frankly for the past five years, the unemployment report from the Department of Labor has been nothing short of pathetic. Although the unemployment rate is falling, giving the false perception that less people are out of work, millions have stopped looking for work and have dropped out of the labor force. But there's one subsection of the unemployment picture that doesn't get discussed enough: the young unemployed can't find jobs and haven't been able to for years.

The teenage unemployment rate sits at 21 percent, which is more than three times the national unemployment rate of 6.6 percent. CNSNews breaks down the numbers:

The teen unemployment rate went up in January to 20.7% -- from 20.2% in December-- and is now more than three times the national unemployment rate of 6.6%, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Then of course there's the millennial generation. According to Generation Opportunity, the unemployment rate for 19-31-year-olds is 15.8 percent.

The declining labor force participation rate has created an additional 1.922 million young adults that are not counted as "unemployed" by the U.S. Department of Labor because they are not in the labor force, meaning that those young people have given up looking for work due to the lack of jobs.

The effective (U-6) unemployment rate for 18-29 year olds, which adjusts for labor force participation by including those who have given up looking for work, is 15.8 percent (NSA). The (U-3) unemployment rate for 18-29 year olds is 11.3 percent (NSA).

In addition, a new report shows nearly one in four 26-year-olds are living at home with mom and dad.

A ten-year survey of millennials reveals that almost one in four (22.6%) 26-year-olds are still living with their parents.

The U.S. Department of Education report confirmed that, if you are tired of living with Mom and Dad, then do your homework and stay in school. According to the survey titled "Where Are They Now," education makes a difference: generally those with more schooling were less likely to be living at home. The study shed some light on how older millennials have been faring during the Great Recession.

According to a Pew Research analysis of the 2012 data, lower levels of employment, an increase in college enrollment, and a decrease in young people getting married are major factors in the increase of millennials living at home.

By the time Barack Obama leaves office, millennials will have spent nearly a decade and prime working years, jobless. Considering 2/3 of lifetime wage growth occurs in a person's 20s, the young unemployment trend is alarming.

Dr. Meg Jay, author of a new book called The Defining Decade, says that a significant portion of your lifetime earning potential happens in your 20s, making it critical to get out there and get working. She estimates that as much as two-thirds of lifetime wage growth happens during just the first 10 years of a career. Once you hit your 40s, salaries will peak or plateau, making it hard or impossible to catch up if you only start getting serious about your career in your 30s.

SOURCE

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The TSA: An Inside Scoop

Former TSA agent Jason Edward Harrington has gone public describing the uglier aspects of his five year gig acting in airport security theater. “I hated it from the beginning,” Harrington said. “It was a job that had me patting down the crotches of children, the elderly and even infants as part of the post-9/11 airport security show. I confiscated jars of homemade apple butter on the pretense that they could pose threats to national security. I was even required to confiscate nail clippers from airline pilots – the implied logic being that pilots could use the nail clippers to hijack the very planes they were flying.”

Of course, none of that is really news to anyone who has flown since 9/11, but this is confirmation straight from a former agent. Harrington went even further explaining the preposterous protocol: “Once, in 2008, I had to confiscate a bottle of alcohol from a group of Marines coming home from Afghanistan. It was celebration champagne intended for one of the men in the group – a young, decorated soldier. He was in a wheelchair, both legs lost to an I.E.D., and it fell to me to tell this kid who would never walk again that his homecoming champagne had to be taken away in the name of national security.” It's heartbreaking and outrageous that a man who lost his limbs in service to his country was subsequently treated just like the Islamofascist terrorists who made his mission necessary.

As for those infamous $150,000-apiece full-body scanners, Harrington said, “We knew [they] didn't work before they were even installed.” He recalled that an instructor admitted that distinguishing between body fat and plastic explosives was nearly impossible. But on the other hand, yes, the “security” agents could see you naked and, yes, they were laughing at you. Harrington concluded, “Most TSA officers I talked to told me they felt the agency's day-to-day operations represented an abuse of public trust and funds.” We can't argue with that.

Finally, we'd be remiss if we didn't note that the TSA was brought to you by a Republican Congress and a Republican president. Indeed, it should be incumbent on the party to explain why, if given the reins of power again, things would be different next time.

SOURCE

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 10, 2014

My Rebuttal to a Progressive who Admonished Me to Play Nice ....

The essay below is from 4 years back but it is just as relevant today. She too has encountered the absolute bone-headedness of the abusive Left -- who just will not listen to any facts that conflict with their simple little theories -- JR

The following rebuttal is mine alone. I do not speak for my husband, for my friends, for my children, but solely for myself.

I am tired of being told to sit down and shut up. I am tired of being told what I can and can not say. What is “acceptable”, while my ideas and values are mocked and trampled.

Enough. I have had enough.

I remained stoic when your acolytes spit on my car and called my husband a “baby killer” when I crossed through your phalanx at Walter Reed to take my children for medical care. I refused to respond as you smashed your fists into the hood of my car, destroyed my mirrors with bottles and keyed my doors in California, my children mute and terrified as you screamed your hate and bile.

I remained calm the day after 9/11 when the progressives in my office, in typical overwrought hyperbole of your side, were shrieking about “TANKS IN THE STREETS”, when in fact it was nothing more than two National Guardsman, fresh-face boys of about 19, stationed at an intersection, armed with whistles and a Humvee, deployed as extra eyes and ears two blocks from the White House.

I stayed silent when your leadership called my friends and my husbands' colleagues “Cold Blooded Killers” and judged them guilty in the court of media opinion.

I turned the other cheek when your liberal propaganda outfits refused to report on the humanitarian success stories in Iraq and Afghanistan, but delighted in the roll call of the lost as a way to bludgeon and demoralize our military.

I stopped listening to CNN and MSNBC when they openly reported lies about Marines in OIF – I know-- my husband was one of them.

I began paying attention to FOX news when only they – Oliver North, Bill Hemmer and like-minded conservatives like G. Gordon Liddy, had the courage to travel into the most dangerous parts of the battlespace to actually report on the successes of the surge, rather than filing reports that affirmed the narrative of the LSM from behind the Jersey barriers of the Green Zone.

I have been silent long enough. I have bent, I have yielded, I have endured slander, dishonesty, ad hominem attacks and actual physical threats.

Anger is a powerful motivator. I began to push back. The first time was when I decided to counter demonstrate against the Code Pink harridans who had set up shop outside the Pvt Bolio gate at the Defense Language Institute on November 18, 2007 to ostensibly run a “Torture Teach-In” and to demonize and excoriate our troops.

Approaching them first with logic, facts and civility didn't work.
I explained that the School of Americas isn't even on the west coast (it's on the east coast), and has nothing to do with the mission of DLI. That pertinent fact was “irrelevant” and dismissed.

I then patiently explained that the SOA does not teach “torture”, and that policy is in contravention to the doctrine of our military forces. I was called a liar.

I tried a third time to explain that my husband had just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq where he was an advisor to the Iraqi army, and he had specifically advised them against torture as a method of intelligence gathering and intimidation. I was called naïve.

So, you see, I have had multiple first hand encounters where it has been obvious that your side is intellectually lazy, refuses to do their own research, and dismisses facts that don't fit with the pre-established narrative.

I then disengaged, but not before telling them I was personally very proud of my husband, and the thousands of other men and women in uniform, who chose to defend their right to conduct protests, (even fallacious ones) against US policy and the military, but asked simply that they honor that by being at least honest with their facts and information.

No acknowledgment.

My girlfriends and I then retreated to my home where we elected to play by their rules and stage a protest against their encampment and Islamofascist “love-in”. We tried very hard to channel our best moonbattery, but it was difficult, since we were still tethered to reality.

Some of our signage included:

I will never be a Dhimmi.
Hands off my clitoris.
Got Freedom – Thank a Vet!
My husband fights for your right to protest!

We staged ourselves on the sidewalk on Lighthouse Avenue, with our backs to Camp Pink(o), and facing the oncoming traffic.

We got honks, cheers, chuckles, and a plethora of thumbs-up out of the windows of passing cars. In very liberal, deep blue Monterey.

The Pinkies were very pleased with this turn of events, and started to cheer as well when cars gave us an energetic “toot-toot” of approval.

Then we turned around to face them and showed them our signs. Some moments in time are priceless. That is one I will cherish for a long time. The look of the faces of the Camp Pink(o) will be forever etched in my mind.

The Left likes to use what they believe to be witty signage (although I am not sure how BUSHCHIMPHITLER qualifies as “witty”), props and sheer numbers of die hard believers and rent-a-students to validate the “justness” of their cause-du-jour and to manufacture a sense of widespread support for their “issue”.

So we took your tools and began to employ them against you. And you don't like it very much. Except we don't have to pay anyone to come to our rallies, and that just infuriates you further.

I don't “do” protests, because I think the time and resources are better employed elsewhere. I also don't do sarcasm and contempt well either, because I prefer to discuss facts and measurable outcomes, but you have framed the terms of the engagement, and I am learning as fast as I can.

Contrary to your false accusations against the genesis of the Tea Party, I began protesting the bailouts before Obama was selected and around the time that McCain had elected to suspend his campaign in order to rush back to Washington to sell us all out.

I went to the big April 15th rally with a “violent” sign forged from pink posterboard which simply stated, “Give all of Congress Pink Slips”. Frightening imagery, I know.

I went to the first 9/12 rally in DC, which you did your best to disrupt by shutting down the orange metro line and turning away buses, and which your scribes and stenographers diminished and which the White House refused to acknowledge. We weren't deterred. We were there. We knew the size of the crowd – and more importantly – the fastness of their determination. A sleeping giant had been awakened.

I went to 8-28 and to the following 9-12 rally. I began commenting on blogs, writing letters to the editor, and showing up for Tea Party strategy sessions.

I donated money to outlier Tea Party candidates who were mocked by the “all knowing” media and had been dismissed by the Establishment. Some of them actually won. They are the hired mercenaries of the Tea Party. Do not underestimate or misunderstand their mission and their support. They are on the front lines in the upcoming battle of ideas and the direction of our nation.

No where in the history of civilization has the welfare state succeeded over the long term. From Plato to Thatcher, warnings about the propensity for the professional politicians to expand the looting of the public treasury and to debase the currency as a mechanism for retaining power has been well documented and a rallying cry for sound money and conservative principles.

I challenge you to name one state where it has survived longer than two generations, for it is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme predicated on the willingness of our youth to voluntarily shackle themselves.

You have seized the public schools and the universities and conducted a purge of any non-compliant conservatives; a massive re-education for the faculty was in order. You believe you can turn our children against us. Unfortunately for you, all it takes is one look at their first paycheck as working adults for them to question the validity of your wealth redistributive economic policies. Homeschooling, constitutionally upheld, is on the rise; Ron Paul now fills college auditoriums, while the Won struggles to fill them without piggybacking on the coat tails of a free pop concert.

Your side knows you can not prevail on the battlefield of open and honest ideas, so you retreat behind the fortification of expanded regulation, unelected czars who rule by decree and diktat, and a boy-king who is being urged by the janissaries to complete the transformation to a totalarian state by executive orders.

Except, that to emplace your policies and “vision” requires the consent of the people. You can not hire enough guards, build enough prisons, operate enough courts to entrap and control the whole population of these (for-now) united states. It only takes a small percentage of dissenters, non-conformists and cascading acts of strategic civil disobedience to bring your entire command-and-control crashing all around you. Decapitating by legal and tax retributive means, a few titular heads of the resistance, will only serve to strengthen and embolden the diffuse movement. Look back at how the Solidarity movement was organized and how it ultimately prevailed before you declare Victory.

Your side has chosen to engage in a low-level, asymmetric campaign for decades. Deceit, dishonesty and exploiting the mechanisms of state have been your weapons.

Unfortunately for you, you can no longer hide and your methods have been revealed and exposed for what they are. The Fabian operational concepts are only successful when they are hidden and cloaked in disingenuous “narrative”. Thousands now are aware of, and have read, Alinsky and his fellow socialists and have formulated a counter strategy.

At first, your team mocked and lied and delighted in debasing our ideals and beliefs. Why wouldn't you feel confident? It had worked so well in the past, and you had the stenography class to support you.

Then you lowered yourselves even further by deriding anyone not in agreement with your viewpoint as “low information voters”. Given what we know now about the mortgage fraud, the chicanery of the stimulus, the hidden deceptions of Obamacare … who, pray tell, is the “low information” voter?

You were jubilant November, 2008. You strutted, you crowed, you reveled. Newsweek triumphantly declared, “We are all Socialists Now!”.

Except for one thing. You misunderstood the battlespace. You failed to recognize the numbers who stayed home rather than vote for a progressive RINO like McCain. You misread the temperment of the people, who wanted an end to the theft, the lies, the spending, the corruption and the deceit. Instead, you doubled down.

The people went underground. Everyday work folk, alarmed at the rising tide of tyranny and the rhetoric of hate, weary of the false accusations and the lies, joined the libertarian and conservatives and forged an underground resistance. The town halls in that raucous summer were not an aberration – they are the new norm. Get used to it.

Word spread – from uncensored blogs, to private e-mails and forwarded commentary, meet-ups large and small, the resistance grew and strengthened. There were gatherings of the clans across the nation. The movement began to grown organically, a leadership structure evolved, and a long term plan developed.

“Burn down the House”.

Yes, in your world, graphic or martial imagery is only to be exploited by the Left.

“We bring a gun”
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/06/14/obama-if-they-bring-a-knife-to-the-fight-we-bring-a-gun/

“Get in their faces”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCMDur9CDZ4

Oh yes, your side “went there”. Not only was there no outcry about the “violent imagery”, there were claps and cheers of agreement. You framed the imagery. Own it.

“Retreat and Reload”and “Burn down the house”. Get used to it. Don't think for a moment you've earned the right to open your mouth in protest.

Here's some more martial imagery for you. Yes, we will burn down the house of Progressive Democrats and lay waste to the entire construct of the welfare state. It will be a long, decades-long battle, but we will prevail because we learned the consequences of not teaching our young ourselves. We delegated that to you, and that was our first mistake. We assumed you were honest brokers, but now we know better.

Carthago delenda est.

I accept that's the intellectually lazy response, but I have to work with what you can understand.

My preference is more of a “Thucydides account of the no-mercy overthrow of the oligarchs at Corcyra” type of historical reference.

Either way, I am confident you can deduce the “tone”of my rebuttal.

Realizing that you are losing your grip on the public schools, that the youth that propelled the boy-king to victory have abandoned you, that the bitter, blue collar white workers are now Tea Party grandmas and grandpas, that you have lost control of the federal checkbook and the legislative calendar, now you want to petition for peace? now you cry out for civility and consensus? I have a message for you: Go. To. Hell.

When you retreat back to the comfort and safety of your salon filled with like-minded Hopeium addicts, perhaps you can rouse them from their stupor long enough to send them this message.

We don't want civility.
We don't want to “play nice”.
We don't want to “compromise” with you.

From coffee shops to soccer fields and everywhere in between, the message has been clear. Draw a line in the sand.

Those who we have sent to Washington this January who yield will be removed from the field and replaced. Make no mistake about it.

We came to you with ideas and a sincere intent to find common ground. Our emissaries were told, “I won”.
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2009/01/23/obama-to-gop-i-won/

We tried to engage you and bring alternative solutions to the health care crisis. We met in good faith at Blair House. Our concerns and our emissaries were rudely dismissed.

So, this is our message to you: The scorched earth policy is in effect. A court of accounting will be convened. Fix bayonets.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 9, 2014

Lumen Fidei

"Lumen Fidei" (light of faith) is the first encyclical of Pope Francis, though Francis admits that it was mostly written by Benedict, his predecessor. And in my usual eccentric way I used part of my secular Sabbath to read it.

There is no doubt we encounter the mind of a real scholar in it. He actually mentions the name of God (YHWH) as given in the Hebrew Bible -- which is bordering on the eccentric in both the Christian and Jewish traditions. It would appear however to be what YHWH himself wanted according to Psalms 83:18 ("That men may know that thou, whose name alone is Jehovah, art the most high over all the earth" KJV) and other OT passages. That the commandment to respect YHWH's name is taken to require suppression of it is incredibly perverse and would certainly make YHWH throw up his hands if he had any hands.

And Benedict's attempt to reconcile a Septuagint rendering of Isaiah with the Masoretic version is surely heroic, given the obvious divergence. But the fact that he refers to the Septuagint at all is impressive. There is a view that the Septuagint -- or at least part of it -- is based on a text older than the Masoretic version and may hence be closer to the original.

But despite such flashes of unusual scholarship, the encyclical as a whole is quite unoriginal. Perhaps an encyclical has to be that way. The encyclical is a very thorough survey of past and present enthusiasm about faith and that is about it. But that may enthuse others more than it does this hard-hearted old atheist.

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Rep. Paul Ryan: 'We Have an Increasingly Lawless Presidency'

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopolous” that President Barack Obama’s presidency is becoming “increasingly lawless,” because the president is “actually contradicting law” or “proposing new laws without going through Congress."

“We have an increasingly lawless presidency where he is actually doing the job of Congress, writing new policies and new laws without going through Congress,” Ryan said. “Presidents don't write laws. Congress does, and when he does things like he did in health care - delaying mandates that the law said was supposed to occur when they were supposed to occur, that's not his job.”

“The job of Congress is to change laws if he doesn't like them - not the presidency. So executive orders are one thing, but executive orders that actually change the statute, that's totally different,” Ryan said.

Stephanopolous asked Ryan if he really thought Obama’s proposals are unconstitutional, pointing out that the rate of the president’s executive orders is far behind Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton.

According to the National Archives Federal Register, Obama has signed 167 executive orders as of Dec. 23, 2013. President George W. Bush signed 291 executive orders, and his father, President George H.W. Bush signed 166 executive orders. President Bill Clinton signed 364 executive orders.

“It's not the number of executive orders. It's the scope of the executive orders," said Ryan. "It's the fact that he's actually contradicting law like in the health care case, or proposing new laws without going through Congress, George. That's the issue. So this is a big concern. We have an increasingly lawless presidency."

SOURCE

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RNC Launches Black History Push

Liberty is colorblind

The Republican National Committee has launched a Black History Month ad campaign that also honors recipients of this year's Black Republican Trailblazers Awards. The RNC has made minority outreach a priority after the 2012 election, recognizing that Republicans have ceded far too much ground to Democrats when it comes to engaging minority voters. Democrats have won and held the loyalty of black voters over the last several decades by claiming to offer them opportunities while holding them in an endless cycle of government dependency - the poverty plantation, if you will.

The fact that Democrats hold such an overwhelming majority of black votes year in and year out represents a sad historical irony. The Republican Party was founded in 1856 with an anti-slavery platform, and it was Republican votes that added the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Jim Crow was a Southern Democratic invention, and for decades it was Democrats who stymied the advancement of civil rights legislation. Yet, leftist propaganda would have us believe that the GOP has a long history of racism. Just the opposite is true. Democrat President Lyndon Johnson may have been behind the push to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but he was also responsible for creating welfare programs that have not done anything to improve the lives of minorities - and arguably the opposite - for over 60 years.

Yet the GOP has a lot of work to do to reverse this long-entrenched lie that is perpetuated by the Leftmedia. They can start by communicating the real history of the Republican Party, and explain that the GOP platform is actually in the best interest of everyone, including minorities. Blacks embrace Democrats because they have been led to believe there is no alternative but state dependence. It's up to the GOP to spread the word that opportunity comes from personal responsibility and Liberty, not government subsidies.

Democrats have very successfully politicized race, making it an issue of conflict in electoral politics. But all people deserve freedom of opportunity, and Republicans need to push that message. After all, as Mark Alexander wrote Wednesday, Liberty is colorblind.

SOURCE

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Leftwing antisemitism: So what else is new?

A politician from the main opposition party in Greece caused an uproar after posting an anti-Semitic rant on his Facebook page accusing the Greek prime minister of heading a Jewish conspiracy.

Theodoros Karypidis, the left-wing Syriza Party's candidate for governor of Western Macedonia, said Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras was at the head of a Jewish plot to visit "a new Hanukkah against the Greeks."

At the heart of Karypidis' theory was a move last year by Samaras to shut the allegedly corrupt Hellenic Broadcasting Authority and replace it with the New Hellenic Radio and Television, known by its Greek acronym NERIT.

According to Karypidis, NERIT is derived from the Hebrew word for candle, "ner," which he links to the festival of Hanukkah.

"Samaras is lighting the candles in the seven branched candelabra of the Jews and lighting Greece on fire after his visit to the Thessaloniki Synagogue," wrote Karypidis. "He is organizing a new Hanukkah against the Greeks."

Samaras visited the synagogue as part of the commemorations marking the destruction of the Jewish community of Thessaloniki by the Nazis. A spokesman for Samaras condemned the comments as "unacceptable, racist and anti-Semitic."

Syriza, the second-largest party in Greece, was due to meet Thursday to discuss the issue, the Kathimerini daily newspaper reported.

In recent years most of the anti-Semitic vitriol in Greece has come from the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party. But Syriza also has a clear anti-Israel stance. Several of its members took part in the flotilla to break Israel's naval blockade of Gaza.

SOURCE

The Greek "Golden Dawn" party is sometimes described as "far right" but that is what Leftists call Fascism. And Golden Dawn is certainly both nationalistic and antisemitic so it deserves to be associated with old Adolf & co. But, like Hitler, Golden Dawn is also socialistic. One of the headings on the Golden Dawn website is "Golden Dawn's socialism". It's just a rival version of socialism, not "right wing" at all -- JR

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Lottery winners: More evidence that conservatives are the happy people

After buying a new house, a sports car and going on holiday with their winnings, the next thing people do is support a right-wing party, academics found.

While those who hit the jackpot could be expected to vote for low taxes to protect their money, people who scoop relatively modest sums also become more right-wing, the study revealed.

Researchers at Warwick and Melbourne Universities looked at survey results from 4,000 people from Britain who scooped up to œ200,000 between 1996 and 2009.

They found that among those who won more than œ500 on the lottery, 45 per cent said they vote Conservative. Among those who had not won a prize, just 38 per cent indicated that they supported the Tories. They found that the trend was more pronounced among men than women.

The study, which is the first of its kind, also revealed the larger the win the more people tilt to the right.

The transformation in political views happens quickly - and 18 per cent said they switched to voting Conservative immediately.

Professor Andrew Oswald, from Warwick University, said that on the back of the results he was doubtful that morality was an objective choice.

'In the voting booth, monetary self-interest casts a long shadow, despite people's protestations that there are intellectual reasons for voting for low tax rates,' he said.

None of the people who responded to the survey had won large jackpots.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

More fraudulent history from the Left: "I'm not here to attempt to claim that the decision to name the GOP's new digital division Para Bellum Labs was brilliant, and frankly, it would make a better title for our "Guns & Gear" section. What I can tell you is that the knee-jerk leftist reaction to it by Gawker's Adam Weinstein was moronic, as he attempted to claim "Para Bellum" was the creation of Nazism in an article titled The GOP Just Named its Hot New Innovation Lab After a Nazi Pistol. The 9mm Parabellum was not a gun, but a cartridge. The 9mm Parabellum cartridge was designed in 1902. The Nazis didn't exist for another 18 years. It was originally designed for the P08 Luger pistol by Georg Luger himself. Oh, and the standard Nazi pistol was the Walther P38, not the P08 Luger, which was regarded as unreliable"

There, He Fixed It: "A young fry cook lamented to the president that ObamaCare is costing him hours at work. "We were broken down to part time to avoid paying health insurance," he said, adding that he's making $7.25 an hour. He concluded, "We can't survive, it's not living." Obama's cut-and-paste solution? "I am working to encourage states, governors, mayors, [and] state legislators to raise their own minimum wage," Obama said. "Obviously, the way to reach millions of people would be for Congress to pass a new federal minimum wage law." Employers already are addressing increased costs by reducing employee hours, but Obama's "solution" is to make those hours more expensive.

GOP Pulls Back on Immigration: "The House GOP rank-and-file have seemingly succeeded in delaying the leadership's immigration "reform" - at least for the time being. House Speaker John Boehner explained why reform could be shelved: "There's widespread doubt about whether this administration can be trusted to enforce our laws, and it's going to be difficult to move any immigration legislation until that changes. . [We] do not believe that the reform that we're talking about will be implemented as it was intended to be. The president seems to change the health care law on a whim, whenever he likes. Now he's running around the country telling everyone that he's going to keep acting on his own." We're hesitant to ascribe savvy strategic thinking to the GOP, but it's possible that they rolled out a reform proposal only to withdraw it while highlighting Obama's untrustworthiness. Then again, rumor has it Boehner's job was on the line, and maybe that's what gave him strategic perspective

'Religion Is Under Threat': "As the saying goes, if it weren't for double standards, the Left wouldn't have any. Barack Obama demonstrated this point to perfection at the annual National Prayer Breakfast where he warned that "freedom of religion is under threat . around the world." He neglected to mention, however, that organizations like Little Sisters of the Poor and Hobby Lobby are suing his administration because they object to contraceptives mandated under ObamaCare in violation of their religious views. Even more astoundingly, Obama claimed, "We . believe in the inherent dignity of every human being," and "the killing of the innocent is never fulfilling God's will; in fact, it's the ultimate betrayal of God's will." Remember, this is a man who supports abortion under any and all circumstances, even in its most appalling partial-birth form, and who once told Planned Parenthood "God bless you." The seemingly total lack of self-awareness is beyond shocking. [But typically psychopathic -- JR]

One Insurer's Bailout: "Remember that ObamaCare insurance bailout? Well, the first stats are in for one insurer and it's not pretty. The American Enterprise Institute's Scott Gottlieb writes, "Humana announced that it expects to tap the three risk adjustment mechanisms in ObamaCare for between $250 and $450 million in 2014. This amounts to about 25 percent of the insurer's expected exchange revenue." That's also just one insurer! More will undoubtedly follow. Not only that, but Humana enrolled 202,000 people via the ObamaCare exchanges as of Jan. 31, and some 82% of them were eligible for subsidies. The price of Hope 'n' Change just keeps going up.

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up. Chris has been in one of Britain's government hospitals -- getting the sort of appalling treatment that I foresaw. He left waving his fist and shouting abuse at them over the treatment he got. He has a short submission today, with an account of his hospital experiences leading off --JR

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 7, 2014

The Left still hanker after Communism

While Soviet Russia existed, the Western Left defended it to the end. Their over-riding goal at that time was to get the West to lay down its arms so that the Soviets could take over everywhere: The so-called "Peace" movement. As with the Left today, no facts could shake them from their beliefs and objectives.

An article has recently appeared in the iconic Leftist "Salon" magazine which shows that the love of Communism has not disappeared. Leftists are still defending it. It's a pretty feeble effort -- as ever. I reproduce two parts of it below:


Communism killed 110 million* people for resisting dispossession

For one thing, a large number of the people killed under Soviet communism weren’t the kulaks everyone pretends to care about but themselves communists. Stalin, in his paranoid cruelty, not only had Russian revolutionary leaders assassinated and executed, but indeed exterminated entire communist parties. These people weren’t resisting having their property collectivized; they were committed to collectivizing property. It is also worth remembering that the Soviets had to fight a revolutionary war – against, among others, the US – which, as the American Revolution is enough to show, doesn’t mainly consist of group hugs. They also faced (and heroically defeated) the Nazis, who were not an ocean away, but right on their doorstep.

So much for the USSR. The most horrifying episode in 20th Century official Communism was the Great Chinese Famine, its death toll difficult to identify, but surely in the tens of millions. Several factors evidently contributed to this atrocity, but central to it was Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” a disastrous combination of applied pseudoscience, stat-juking, and political persecution designed to transform China into an industrial superpower in the blink of an eye. The experiment’s results were extremely grim, but to claim that the victims died because they, in their right minds, would not volunteer for “a left-wing dream” is ludicrous. Famine is not a uniquely “left-wing” problem.

21st Century American communism would resemble 20th century Soviet and Chinese horrors.

Before their revolutions, Russia and China were pre-industrial, agricultural, largely illiterate societies whose masses were peasants spread out over truly vast expanses of land. In the United States today, robots make robots, and less than 2% of population works in agriculture. These two states of affairs are incalculably dissimilar. The simple invocation of the former therefore has no value as an argument about the future of the American economy.

For me, communism is an aspiration, not an immediately achievable state. It, like democracy and libertarianism, is utopian in that it constantly strives toward an ideal, in its case the non-ownership of everything and the treatment of everything – including culture, people’s time, the very act of caring, and so forth – as dignified and inherently valuable rather than as commodities that can be priced for exchange. Steps towards that state of affairs needn’t include anything as scary as the wholesale and immediate abolition of markets (after all, markets predate capitalism by several millennia and communists love a good farmer’s market). Rather, I contend they can even include reforms with support among broadly ideologically divergent parties.

Given the technological, material, and social advances of the last century, we could expect an approach to communism beginning here and now to be far more open, humane, democratic, participatory and egalitarian than the Russian and Chinese attempts managed. I’d even argue it would be easier now than it was then to construct a set of social relations based on fellowship and mutual aid (as distinct from capitalism’s, which are characterized by competition and exclusion) such as would be necessary to allow for the eventual “withering away of the state” that libertarians fetishize, without replaying the Middle Ages (only this time with drones and metadata)

SOURCE

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ALL Communist revolutions have been bloody. They know no other way

Excerpt from ALG in reply to the above mealy-mouthed tripe:

The truth, however, is that Communism has proven itself a cancer that demands unto itself a revolution baptized in the blood of human beings unwilling to subjugate themselves to the will of the sovereign man in his collective expression: the socialist state.

But Karl Marx’s vision was not one of peace or democracy. Marx was a man of violent action. The famous last lines of the Communist Manifesto read, “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

In the United States centuries and decades past, there was a practical middle ground between the polar political persuasions. Some question, and rightly so, why the same is conspicuously absent from today’s political environment.

The fact is, there is no middle ground between the socialist and lover of individual responsibility, achievement, and liberty. At the end of the day, conservative annihilation is a necessary means to a socialist utopian end.

SOURCE

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More community organizing at work

Trader Joe’s wanted to build a new store in Portland, Oregon. Instead of heading to a tony neighborhood downtown or towards the suburbs, the popular West Coast grocer chose a struggling area of Northeast Portland.

The company selected two acres along Martin Luther King Blvd. that had been vacant for decades. It seemed like the perfect place to create jobs, improve customer options and beautify the neighborhood. City officials, the business community, and residents all seemed thrilled with the plan. Then some community organizers caught wind of it.

The fact that most members of the Portland African-American Leadership Forum didn’t live in the neighborhood was beside the point. “This is a people’s movement for African-Americans and other communities, for self-determination,” member Avel Gordly said in a press conference. Even the NAACP piled on, railing against the project as a “case study in gentrification.” (The area is about 25 percent African-American.)

After a few months of racially tinged accusations and angry demands, Trader Joe’s decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. “We run neighborhood stores and our approach is simple,” a corporate statement said. “If a neighborhood does not want a Trader Joe's, we understand, and we won't open the store in question.”

Hours after Trader Joe’s pulled out, PAALF leaders arrived at a previously scheduled press conference trying to process what just happened. The group re-issued demands that the now-cancelled development include affordable housing, mandated jobs based on race, and a small-business slush fund. Instead, the only demand being met is two fallow acres and a lot of anger from the people who actually live nearby.

“All of my neighbors were excited to have Trader Joe’s come here and replace a lot that has always been empty,” said Nghi Tran. “It’s good quality for poor men.” Like many residents, Tran pins the blame on PAALF. “They don’t come to the neighborhood cleanups,” he said. “They don’t live here anymore.”

“There are no winners today,” said Adam Milne, owner of an area restaurant. “Only missed tax revenue, lost jobs, less foot traffic, an empty lot and a boulevard still struggling to support its local small businesses.” The store was to be built by a local African American-owned construction company.

Artist Kymberly Jeka insisted “this is not what the neighborhood people want. This is terrible.” Grayson Dempsey looked out of her window at the vacant lot: “I appreciate that (PAALF) is trying to talk about the origins of gentrification. That’s really essential, but they can’t stand up and say, ‘As residents of the King neighborhood, this is what we want.’ The residents of the King neighborhood want this to happen.”

Sometimes a community doesn’t want to be organized.

But have no fear, Portland. You might not have a new Trader Joe’s, but PAALF promised to hold a “community visioning process” later this month. No word yet if that brainstorming session will offer jobs, affordable housing or Two-Buck Chuck.

SOURCE

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The Bay State's model of health care 'reform': Wait for it

by Jeff Jacoby

IS MASSACHUSETTS, now in its seventh year under Chapter 58, the health-care overhaul signed into law by Governor Mitt Romney in 2006, a preview of what the rest of the country can expect under ObamaCare? If so, my fellow Americans, you'd better get used to waiting.

According to a national survey of approximately 1,400 medical practices in 15 major metropolitan markets, the average wait for new patients scheduling a non-emergency doctor appointment between June and November 2013 was 18.5 days. In Boston, however, patients had to wait an average of 45 days, and considerably more than that for some specialties. The wait was 66 days to see a family physician and 72 days to see a dermatologist.

With 450 doctors per 100,000 residents, Boston has a higher ratio of physicians to population than any other metro market in the study, which was conducted by Merritt Hawkins, a Texas-based health care search and consulting firm. All other things being equal, such an abundance of providers ought to mean shorter waits for an appointment, not the longest in the country.

But all other things haven't been equal for Massachusetts, especially since the enactment of Chapter 58. Romney accurately predicted that the law would be "a model for the nation," and indeed it was the template of the Affordable Care Act — as President Obama and many Democrats have readily acknowledged. Which suggests that what's happening in Boston is unlikely to stay in Boston.

"Long wait times in Boston may be driven in part by the health-care reform initiative that was put in place in Massachusetts in 2006," the new study notes. As the share of residents without health coverage has shrunk to 3 percent, "many patients in Massachusetts are encountering difficulty in accessing physicians. . . . Long appointment wait times in Boston could be a precursor of what is to come nationally should some 25 million people or more eventually obtain health insurance through the ACA."

The Massachusetts Medical Society raises similar concerns. In a statewide survey last year, it found that half of primary-care practices were not accepting new patients. Among those that were, wait times averaged 39 days for an appointment with a family physician, and 50 days for an internist. The numbers have fluctuated over the years. But the trend is clear, and disturbing: The share of family physicians and internists available to new patients has dropped by one-fifth over the last seven to nine years.

Health insurance doesn't guarantee accessible and affordable health care, not even in the state with the nation's highest concentration of medical providers. Through a combination of penalties, subsidies, mandates, and moral suasion, Massachusetts has succeeded in achieving near-universal insurance coverage for Bay State residents. But that doesn't mean that those residents are getting the care they need, from the providers they prefer, at prices they can afford. Chapter 58 hasn't brought down health-insurance premiums, as its proponents were sure it would. Nor has it saved the commonwealth millions of dollars, freeing Beacon Hill to concentrate on other public priorities.

Last fall, amid the disastrous rollout of the ObamaCare exchanges, the president flew to Boston to defend the law in a speech at Faneuil Hall, where Romney had signed the Massachusetts legislation seven years earlier. "I'm confident these marketplaces will work," Obama said, "because Massachusetts has shown that the model works.

What Massachusetts really shows is that it's possible, in a state where roughly 90 percent of population already had health insurance, to deploy an elaborate series of carrots and sticks and boost coverage levels to about 97 percent. Beyond that, as the Pioneer Institute's health-policy analyst Joshua Archambault demonstrated in a series of eye-catching graphics at the time of Obama's Boston visit, the Massachusetts experiment only confirms that health-care reform is a lot easier to proclaim than to accomplish.

Romney's law didn't make a dent in the number of patients showing up in the state's emergency rooms. It didn't keep insurance premiums from racing ahead of inflation. It didn't relieve taxpayers from having to pour hundreds of millions of dollars annually into more and more "free" care for safety-net users.

And it hasn't made it any easier to get a doctor's appointment without a long wait.

Andrew Dreyfus, the CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, often introduces himself to out-of-state audiences by telling them: "I am from the future." Now there's a scary thought.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Report from the inimitable Phyllis Chesler: "My trip through Security at JFK this afternoon was slowed when one of the agents spotted me holding a copy of the Jewish Press. He found it suspicious, brought it to another agent, and they had a discussion. At that point, my bags were opened and searched. Meanwhile, a woman in niqab – a veil covering the entire face except the eyes -- walked through without incident. I saw no one ask her to lift the veil to check her actual identity against her documents. [Phyllis is an elderly NYC Jewish lady so does not need anyone else to blow her trumpet but nonetheless let me recommend her latest book: here. I admire her sincerity]

Gibson Strikes Back: "In 2011, two Tennessee factories of the Gibson Guitar Corporation were raided by federal authorities, who seized guitars, office files and pallets of exotic wood used in the manufacture of instruments, including East Indian rosewood. The raid was conducted on the basis of India's law that discourages the processing of this wood outside India; the company did not violate any American laws. Now that the dust has settled, Gibson is introducing a new guitar series made from the very same wood targeted by the feds. According to Gibson, “Great Gibson electric guitars have long been a means of fighting the establishment, so when the powers that be confiscated stocks of tonewoods from the Gibson factory in Nashville – only to return them once there was a resolution and the investigation ended – it was an event worth celebrating.” That's a tune we love to hear!

Poster girl representing hard-working, low-paid 'American' in President Obama's minimum wage ad is actually a British woman on a LONDON train: "In a new ad by a political action group affiliated with President Barack Obama urging the U.S. Congress to raise the minimum wage, one of the featured hardworking, underpaid taxpayers is not like the other. The nonprofit Organizing for America, which formed out of the President's campaign and is run by 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina, used what appears to be stock footage showing a woman on London's Overground commuter train. The train car where the young woman is standing is empty enough to see the unmistakable yellow chairs and railings of Overground trains that run between central London and the suburbs."

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 6, 2014

Bible critics assume what they have to prove

They say that domestic camels arrived in Israel after the times that the Bible says. But they admit that some camel bones dated from earlier periods have been found. To fit their theory they say that the earlier finds "probably belonged to wild camels". How do they know? They don't. They are just assuming what they have to prove.

A more reasonable summary of the findings would be to say that most people were too poor in earlier periods for many of them to own camels -- hence the rarity of camel remains in those earlier periods.

Dromedary camels are thought to have first been domesticated by humans in Arabia around 3,000 BC. Considering that Arabia and Israel share a land border, how absurd is it to say that domestic camels were unknown in Israel at that time?

Atheists really give me the pip sometimes, even though I am one myself. Why do they have to keep denigrating faith? It seems childish and insecure to me

Camels are mentioned in Biblical stories involving Abraham, Joseph and Jacob as well as other famous characters. But archaeologists have found that the mammals were not domesticated in Israel until centuries after famous figures were said to have ridden them.

They claim this shows that text in the Bible was compiled long after the events described in it and challenges the holy book as a historical document.

Camels were not domesticated in Israel until centuries after the Age of the Patriarchs – when Abraham, Jacob and Issac are said to have lived - between 2,000 and 1,500 BC.

Dr Erez Ben-Yosef and Dr Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures used radiocarbon dating to pinpoint the moment when domesticated camels arrived in the southern Levant.

They found camels came in the 9th century BC, not the 12th as previously thought.

‘The introduction of the camel to our region was a very important economic and social development,’ Dr Ben-Yosef said.

‘By analysing archaeological evidence from the copper production sites of the Aravah Valley, we were able to estimate the date of this event in terms of decades rather than centuries,’ he said.

It is believed that camels were originally domesticated in the Arabian Peninsula for use as pack animals sometime towards the end of the second millennium BC.

The oldest known domesticated camel bones were discovered in the Aravah Valley, in the southern Levant, which runs along the Israeli-Jordanian border from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea and come from a time when the valley was an ancient centre for copper production.

Dr Ben-Yosef dated an Aravah Valley copper smelting camp where the domesticated camel bones were found in 2009 and discovered they dated to between the 11th and 9th century BC.

He led another dig in the area in 2013 to determine exactly when domesticated camels appeared in the southern Levant.

Together with Dr Sapir-Hen, he used radiocarbon dating and other techniques to analyse the findings of these digs as well as several others done in the valley.

In all the digs, they found that camel bones were unearthed almost exclusively in archaeological layers dating from the last third of the 10th century BC or later – centuries after the patriarchs lived and decades after the Kingdom of David, according to the Bible.

The few camel bones found in earlier archaeological layers probably belonged to wild camels, which archaeologists think were in the southern Levant from the Neolithic period or even earlier.

SOURCE

UPDATE

LOL! I rather naughtily left a pitfall in my comments above. A reader writes to me that Israel has Southern borders only with Egypt and Jordan. It has no borders with Saudi Arabia. That is true. But I did not mention Saudi Arabia. I spoke of Arabia. Jordan is part of Arabia. Look at any map of the area for starters.

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CBO: Obamacare Driving Millions Out of Work Force, Price Tag Tops $2 Trillion

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) determined in early 2011 that the president's healthcare overhaul would cost the US economy 800,000 jobs. Democrats balked at the figure, insisting that the new law would be a job creation boon. Nancy Pelosi said a fully-implemented Obamacare program would create four million American jobs -- and 400,000 "almost immediately:"

Implementation is upon us, and the CBO has revised its numbers:

The Affordable Care Act will also reduce the number of fulltime workers by more than 2 million in coming years, congressional budget analysts said in the most detailed analysis of the law’s impact on jobs. The CBO said the law’s impact on jobs would be mostly felt starting after 2016. The agency previously estimated that the economy would have 800,000 fewer jobs as a result of the law. The impact is likely to be most felt, the CBO said, among low-wage workers. The agency said that most of the effect would come from Americans deciding not to seek work as a result of the ACA’s impact on the economy. Some workers may forgo employment, while others may reduce hours, for a equivalent of at least 2 million fulltime workers dropping out of the labor force.

The official numbers indicate that more than two million Americans will simply leave the work force (the workforce participation rate is already at a 36-year low) over the next four years as a result of the "Affordable" Care Act.

Democrats' sunny expectations were only off by about six million jobs -- in the wrong direction. NBC's Chuck Todd notices that the nonpartisan data reinforces Republicans' warnings about the law from day one.

The GOP campaign ads practically write themselves. This law is increasing national healthcare spending, raising premiums and out-of-pocket costs for millions, kicking people off of their preferred plans, limiting patients' access to care, contributing to deficits, and drastically reducing employment.

Panicked lefties online are squealing that the report merely states that people will choose to leave the workforce, not that Obamacare will directly kill jobs, per se. Good luck with that argument. Over the next few years, millions fewer Americans will get up in the morning and go to work because of Obamacare's impact on the economy.

The report's authors have concluded that the healthcare reform discourages work. That's horrible, unspinnable news. Attempts to spin it will sound desperate and tone deaf. The public will not buy "less people working" as anything other than bad news.

Another note from the CBO document: Democrats touted a $900 billion price tag for the law in 2010, citing a cynically-manufactured CBO score. What will the first ten years of Obamacare cost now that it's in full swing? More than $2 trillion. Beyond that, the government's projected Obamacare enrollment total for 2014 has dropped by one million people. Paul Ryan's office also notes that on our current path, the annual deficit is expect to shrink to "only" $514 billion next year (Bush's average deficit was in the neighborhood of $250 billion, even with two active wars), but it will begin a steady climb after 2015, hitting $1 trillion within eight years:

Our short-term deficits problem isn't good. Our long-term obligations crisis is a disaster, and Democrats have no solutions to fix it -- aside from raising taxes on "the rich," which they've already done, and won't work.

SOURCE

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Unaffordable and Uncaring

We all knew there would be incredible transition pains from ObamaCare, and thus far the Affordable Care Act has predictably turned out to be anything but what its name implies. The latest is news that those who made mistakes in signing up via Healthcare.gov and later found out they're paying too much for coverage are trapped in a situation where there is no hope for change. In the case of one 27-year-old West Virginian, a botched calculation in her subsidy is costing her $100 more a month for her policy and an extra $4,000 on her deductible – bad news for her given that she needed gall bladder surgery in January. Unfortunately, even after she learned of the mistake, her appeal is stuck in a bureaucratic loop because the appeals system for the online signup is non-functional.

Others are finding out the hard way that premiums are going to be taking a much larger slice of their paycheck than falsely advertised. A Pennsylvania television station was on location when workers at a small business learned of the cost of their new group plan. To put it mildly, few of them considered it “affordable.” Others are seeing more modest premium increases, or even small decreases, but will have to bear steep out-of-pocket costs on deductibles or co-pays to keep their premiums in check.

As this sort of news trickles out through the gatekeeping Leftmedia, support for the ACA among the uninsured is dropping – a nearly 2-to-1 margin now view ObamaCare unfavorably. However, the same Kaiser poll showed respondents would rather fix the bill than kill it, and Republicans seem more willing to oblige. Since dozens of repeal votes went nowhere with the Senate or the president, GOP efforts are beginning to focus on realistic repairs to the system such as tax credits, allowing insurance to be sold across state lines, necessary tort reform, and a revived emphasis on health savings accounts.

While any and all aspects of ObamaCare are subject to change at the whim of namesake Barack Obama, the general feeling among those who were told that we had to “pass it to find out what was in it” is that we got a raw deal. Even though recent focus has been on the disaster of rolling out the online portion of ObamaCare, the balky website is the least of its problems.

SOURCE

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Retirees not the ones to worry about, it is young people

The precipitous drop in the nation’s labor participation rate has fueled a debate amongst economic prognosticators about what it means for America’s economy. Some, like the Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s Shigeru Fujita, say the rate is declining naturally due to our nation’s population aging and Baby Boomers hitting retirement age.

Others, like this author, have pointed to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing seniors are actually participating in the workforce at an even greater percentage than in the past.

On January 15, I wrote a piece published at Forbes.com, “Retirees are not the labor exodus problem,” in which I assembled data on contributions to the declining labor force participation rate, now at a 36-year low.

Since 2008, the civilian non-institutional population has jumped by 11.9 million, yet the civilian labor force has only increased by 1.1 million, according to annual figures published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As a result, the participation rate has dropped from almost 66 percent throughout 2008 to its current level of 62.8 percent, the lowest it’s been since 1978.

In the Forbes piece, I noted that those 65 years old and over, because they were working longer, had added 1.13 percent to the labor participation rate, and those 55-64 years old added another 2.39 percent to it.

That in short, if older Americans were not working longer, the participation rate would be even lower than it already is. And that is certainly true.

However, after continuing to evaluate this issue, it became clear that this did not tell the whole story.

What it left out was who was not participating, and how old they are, numbers critical to making the case that the collapse of labor participation is a retirement problem.

To put this dilemma about what is happening in the U.S. workforce into perspective, younger Americans are certainly participating less. The participation rate for those aged 16-24 has dropped from 61.56 percent in 2003 to an average annual 55.05 percent in 2013. 25-54 year olds’ participation rate dropped from 82.98 percent to 82.01 percent.

This is a major problem as younger Americans are failing to enter the labor force and get their careers started.

Yet, younger Americans make a significantly smaller percentage of the population now. Those between the ages of 16 and 54 used to make up 71.9 percent of the non-institutional population in 2003. Now, they only make up 66.4 percent. This shift in population has made a tremendous difference in terms of the reported labor participation rate.

So has the increase of older Americans as a percentage of the population. Those aged 55 and older have increased from 28 percent of the overall population to 33.6 percent in just 10 years.

All of these factors show based on an Americans for Limited Government study of Bureau data that those aged 65 and older added 1.04 percent to non-participation. Those aged 55-64 added 0.95 percent to non-participation. 25-54 added 0.13 percent to non-participation. And 16-24 added 0.87 percent.

So even though older Americans are working longer and contributed to a net increase in participation, because they make up such a larger percent of the population, they simultaneously drove up the non-participation rate.

And although younger Americans are participating less, because they make up a smaller percent of the population, this limited their impact on non-participation.

In short, the aging workforce and retirees have unquestionably driven the participation rate lower, by almost 2 percent, accounting for about two-thirds of the drop.

All that said, poor labor market conditions have undeniably prevented about 4.9 million younger and middle-aged Americans from working or even looking for work — because there’s no work to be found. This too has driven labor participation lower, by 1 percent.

The 4.9 million are spread almost evenly between 2.5 million 16-24 year olds and 2.4 million 25-54 years olds. If these Americans were included in the labor force, the unemployment rate today would be about 9.5 percent or so, and not the 6.7 percent currently reported.

This underscores the continued weakness of the labor market, more than five years after the financial crisis.

It remains true that retirees are not the labor exodus problem. They are not the ones we need to worry about. It is those younger failing to enter the labor force who are not going to be able to get ahead that deserve our attention.

Even when the role of retirees are properly taken into account over the past decade, the fact remains that the current economy is not producing nearly as many jobs as it once did. And until it does, the impact on younger Americans trying to get their start will continue to be devastating — a sustained lost generation of opportunity.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 5, 2014

Your racist family may just be feeling left out (?)

They draw that conclusion from the attitudes of 50 German students to the building of a mosque. Attitudes to mosque building indicate racism? I would have thought that they indicated attitudes to a vile religion. This study is hardly even an attempt at social science

YOU know that grandmother you have that seems to just be racist for no reason? Well, a new study out of Germany has revealed it's most likely because she feels left out.

The new research suggests that a narrow-mindset or racism can be triggered when someone feels ostracised or excluded.

The report reads that feeling excluded from a desirable social group threatens a person's "sense of personal control". This then leaves the person to reassert their control by putting down or making derogatory comments towards that group or minority.

The research was conducted around 50 students who were asked a series of questions about their approval on building a mosque, with 75% of those who felt excluded consistently opposing the idea.

"When threatened by uncertainty, people identify more strongly with extremist or ethnocentric groups," the researchers write. "Engaging in radicalism may reduce feelings of uncertainty by restoring a sense of predictability and controllability in one's social world."

SOURCE

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Danielle Steel’s Amazing Ex-Husband

Thomas James Perkins is a stud. If he weren’t an octogenarian, I’d ask for his hand in marriage because he courageously and eloquently defends free market capitalism.

Perkins is the founder of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). He is also the ex-husband of the world’s reigning best-selling author alive: American novelist and San Francisco resident Danielle Steel.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a three-paragraph op-ed by Perkins in which he defended free market economics. The liberal media, especially the Silicon Valley tech blogs, went up in arms. HOW could he have the audacity to defend capitalism?!

Perkins basically expressed disappointment in “a rising tide of hatred of the successful,” including his ex-wife Steel. Despite the fact that she had donated millions of dollars to the San Francisco community, Perkins bemoaned that the San Francisco Chronicle continued to libel Steel as a ‘snob.’ He compared the attack against the successful one percent in America to fascist Nazi Germany’s attack on the Jews.

Valley Wag, a Gawker Media gossip blog about Silicon Valley celebrities, called Perkins’s op-ed: “one of the most disgustingly tone deaf statements on class tensions we've ever seen.” Media Bistro was appalled WSJ had the gall to “allow” Perkins to voice his opinion. Salon used imagery to compare Perkins to a villain in the movies. And on and on.

It’s interesting how quick these bloggers were to attack a capitalist. After all, most of them probably idolize one of the biggest free market entrepreneurs of all time: Steve Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple. If they took the time to read Walter Isaacson’s terrific biography of Jobs, they would learn that Jobs was a capitalist, not a socialist.

Perkins has a point. Progressives are looking for a fight; an unreasonable and puerile war against self-made success. Remember how on the 2012 campaign trail, Obama said: “If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.” And remember how he said the same thing but in a different way last week during his 2014 State of the Union address?

Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled. The cold, hard fact is that even in the midst of recovery, too many Americans are working more than ever just to get by; let alone to get ahead. And too many still aren't working at all. So our job is to reverse these trends.

Since he can’t blame Bush any longer, Obama is now trying to blame his historically slow recovery on the greed of the rich who cling to their profits, while offering a “solution” of more government intervention. In fact, Obama has had five years to reverse the trends of rising poverty and unemployment.

His “new” ideas sound exactly the same as those he peddled back in 2008. For example, during the 2014 SOTU, Obama said: “one of the biggest factors in bringing more jobs back is our commitment to American energy.” Oh, really? Well then why hasn’t he approved the northern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline? Keystone XL could mean thousands of jobs and it would help the U.S. move away from dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

The U.S. State Department has thrice indicated that the XL pipeline is environmentally safe, but apparently that is not good enough for Obama. He’d rather tell the American public during his SOTU that “solar” holds the future for American energy. (He conveniently forgot to name all of the solar companies that went bankrupt after receiving taxpayer dollars.)

Why do you think it’s possible for Obama to receive cheers and applause when he says: “Let's continue that progress with a smarter tax policy that stops giving $4 billion a year to fossil fuel industries that don't need it so we can invest more in fuels of the future that do.” After all, we all rely on and need energy in some way. If it weren’t for companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron, we would not enjoy the same high quality of life.

Obama can get away with attacking big oil because he is not interested in telling the truth. With a complete straight face, he exaggerates the potential of solar. Without a twinge of guilt, he encourages Americans to envy the rich instead encouraging them to work harder and aspire toward their own self-made success.

We need more men and women like Tom Perkins who are willing to speak up and defend the truth about economic freedom. Remember: sticks and stones can break your bones but the words of a progressive can never hurt you.

SOURCE

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Another Example Of Obama’s ‘Affordable’ Healthcare

In another example of just how affordable Obamacare is making health insurance for average Americans, Simonetta’s Collision Repair Center, a small business in Pennsylvania, shared its story of huge premium and deductible increases for its employees’ health insurance plans with a local news station.

According to WTAE-PA, the small business’s employee premiums have jumped from a 6 percent increase last year to a whopping 32 percent increase for this year and co-pays have doubled from $20 to $40. In addition, employees with children had their deductibles doubled from $2000 to $4000 thanks to the Affordable Care Act.

“They call it the ‘Affordable Health Plan’. There’s nothing affordable about it. I can’t afford it,” one employee said.

Business owner Gary Simonetta told the station that his healthcare premium now costs him an additional $500 per month, an increase of 63 percent.

Another Simonetta employee, whose premium jumped from $900 to over $1300 per month, said of Obamacare, “I don’t know how President Obama thinks that he’s helping us. We can’t afford this. We can’t afford to pay these co-pays, or these deductibles, on what we’re making.”

SOURCE

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The Man Who Would Be King

Obama was elected to administer the law, not make it

Other than his fundamental dishonesty about certain conditions in America, what he stands for, his record, his failure to accept responsibility for his actions, his demonization, his divisive rhetoric, his arrogant promise to double down on his unconstitutional unilateral executive actions, his calls for yet more government instead of less, his foreign policy distortions and his diminution of the presidential office, President Obama's State of the Union address was pretty good.

President Obama remains on his high horse about minimum wage, but he conveniently ignores that only 1 percent of the people in the U.S. labor force earn minimum wage, that the largest group among them is teenagers, that most are younger than 25, that most work less than 30 hours a week and that there are more than six times more minimum wage workers now than there were in 2007, shortly before he took office. More importantly, he doesn't admit that increases to minimum wage invariably lead to increased unemployment.

He continued his phony GOP war on women meme with his distortion of the employment pay disparity between men and women. He has to know that it is outright misleading to imply that women who are in the same jobs as men are paid only 77 cents for every dollar the men are paid. Studies show that women who are doing the same work as men receive less, but it's closer to 91 cents for every dollar.

He boasted that "more than 9 million Americans have signed up for private health insurance or Medicaid coverage." He failed to mention that because of Obamacare, more than 5 million Americans have been forced out of their private plans and that many are losing access to their doctors. He didn't say that his law robs $700 billion from Medicare to finance unnecessary new health care spending under Obamacare. He omitted Obamacare's deliberate assault on religious freedom. Nor did he discuss his lawless edicts exempting entities from the law's mandates.

Obama says he has cut the deficit in half. That's only close to true if you use as a base line Bush's last (partial) fiscal year, which was an extraordinary year because of the financial crisis. He's probably the biggest spender in the history of the universe. His current deficit is about twice Bush's average deficit, and if it weren't for Republicans forcing spending cuts, it would be much higher. Obama blocks reform of entitlements, which will bankrupt the nation unless restructured, and if he had his way, he'd further increase spending, with more "stimulus" and infrastructure schemes.

Obama says we have "the lowest unemployment rate in over five years," conveniently ignoring that we have the lowest labor participation rate in decades and that some 50 million people are on food stamps! His spending, taxing and regulations are killing the job market.

Obama touted the American people's "profound belief in opportunity for all." "Opportunity," he said, "is who we are." No one believes that "he" is part of that "we." If he truly cared about opportunity, he would loosen his stranglehold on the private sector and promote jobs. He would quit opposing work requirements in welfare reform and stop sabotaging the labor market with his minimum wage and unemployment extension agenda.

Obama dovetailed this counterfeit fealty to opportunity with his demagoguery about income inequality. But his own policies are exacerbating income inequality, and he has no solutions to alleviate it -- other than to use government to confiscate the assets of some Americans and give them to others. He can't talk about upward mobility on the one hand and then do everything in his power to discourage people from helping themselves on the other.

In a staggering display of dishonesty, he took credit for increased American production of oil and natural gas and claimed he supports energy independence. In the meantime, he impedes both industries -- and the coal industry -- and implements oppressive fuel omission standards. Any increases in energy production, other than his failed green projects, are in spite of him, not because of him. He's pushed for cap and trade, imposed energy taxes and demanded more onerous regulations on oil, gas and coal. And though global warming, er, climate change is a "fact" and "settled," we're freezing our buns off in the Midwest.

Obama impugns the "wealthy" at every opportunity, implying that most have acquired their money unfairly or through inheritance, which is demonstrably, statistically false. He vilifies Republicans while saying he wants us to all work together.

He says Republicans are only against things and not "for" anything. In fact, they've proposed countless reform plans, on health care, energy, taxes, spending, entitlements, defense and job creation. He knows better, but he has but one mode of operation: division, polarization and demonization.

If all this weren't bad enough, he promises even more unlawful unilateral action, as if he were king and not the head of one of three coequal branches of government. If he had his way, he would be.

SOURCE

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More Obama-led destruction

President Obama introduced in this year’s State of the Union address his proposal to create new retirement accounts for, in the words of the White House, “the millions of low and middle-income households earning up to $191,000.” What they are calling “MyRAs.”

How could enhancing retirement savings not be a good idea? And, even better, it is a free lunch. Again in the words of the White House, “the account balance will never go down in value” and will be totally secure because it will be “backed by the U.S. government.”

President Obama is creating these accounts with the greatest of ease, without even a new law from Congress, by doing what he has done better than any president in American history. Drive the U.S. government into debt.

These wonderful new retirement accounts will receive bonds from the U.S. Government. And who guarantees them?

Please, dear reader, if you are a U.S. taxpayer, look in the mirror and say “me.”

If the State of the Union was really about the president informing Congress and the nation, he would have reported the following from the recent 2013 Long-Term Budget Outlook report of the Congressional Budget Office:

“Federal debt held by the public is now about 73 percent of the economy’s annual output…higher than at any point in U.S. history, except a brief period around World War II, and it is twice the percentage at the end of 2007.”

“CBO projects,” the report continues, “that federal debt held by the public would reach 100 percent of GDP by 2038….even without accounting for the harmful effects that growing debt would have on the economy.”

Meanwhile, as President Obama uses U.S. government bonds to create magical new risk-free retirement savings accounts, there was not a word in the State of the Union of the broken state of affairs of the government’s oldest retirement plan – Social Security.

According to Social Security’s latest trustees report, the revenue shortfall, in today’s dollars, of projected requirements of Social Security to meet its long-term obligations is $9.6 trillion. Beginning in 2033, when those now in their late forties start retiring, there will be only funds “sufficient to pay 77 percent of scheduled benefits.”

If the president really wants to enhance retirement savings of low and middle income Americans, and create real savings and investment while addressing the fiscal disaster of Social Security, let these folks opt out of the Social Security black hole and use those funds to open a real retirement account.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 4, 2014

Governing by Pen and Phone

Obama used to sigh that he was not a dictator who could act unilaterally. No more.

Lately a weakened President Obama has fashioned a new attitude about consensual government: “We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help they need. I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone,” Obama boasted Tuesday as he convened his first cabinet meeting of the year. At least he did not say he intended to govern by “pen and sword.” If Obama used to sigh to supporters that he was not a dictator who could just implement progressive agendas by fiat, he now seems to have done away with the pretense of regret.

Obama has all but given up on the third branch of government since he lost control of it in 2010: “And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward in helping to make sure our kids are getting the best education possible, making sure that our businesses are getting the kind of support and help they need to grow and advance, to make sure that people are getting the skills that they need to get those jobs that our businesses are creating.”

There are lots of creepy things about such dictatorial statements of moving morally backward in order to go politically “forward.” Concerning issues dear to the president’s heart — climate change, more gun control, de facto amnesty, more massive borrowing supposedly to jump-start the anemic, jobless recovery — Obama not long ago had a Democratic supermajority in the Senate and a strong majority in the House. With such rare political clout, he supposedly was going to pass his new American agenda.

Instead, all he got from his Democratic colleagues was more borrowing and Obamacare. In the case of the latter, the bill passed only through the sort of pork-barrel kickbacks and exemptions to woo fence-sitting Democratic legislators that we hadn’t seen in the U.S. since the 1930s. And for what? Obamacare (be careful what you wish for) is proving to be the greatest boondoggle in American political history since Prohibition. If Obama sincerely wished to work in bipartisan fashion with Congress, he probably could easily get a majority vote to build the Keystone XL Pipeline, or a backup sanction plan against Iran in case his own initiatives fail.

Note as well that Obama says he will bypass Congress for “our kids.” Politicians usually cite the “kids” when promoting something that is either illegal or unethical. Meanwhile, apart from Obama’s support for late-term abortion, no president has waged a greater war against those under the age of 30 — passing on to them an additional $9 trillion in debt, socializing the economy and presiding over near-record youth and minority unemployment rates, taxing far poorer youth who will not use much health care to pay for more affluent baby boomers who will, or floating easy federal student loans to facilitate mostly liberal universities’ jacking up tuition at well above the rate of inflation (currently a $1 trillion bubble).

We are reentering Nixonian times, or perhaps worse, given that a free press at least went after Nixon’s misdeeds and misadventures. Now it has silenced itself for fear of harming a once-in-century chance for a fellow progressive’s makeover of America. We live in an age when a CNN moderator interrupts a presidential debate to help her sputtering candidate, and when a writer for the often ironic and sarcastic New Yorker sees no irony in doing a fawning interview with the president, tagging along on a shakedown jet tour from one mansion of crony capitalists to the next — as Obama preaches to the head-nodders about inequality and fairness in order to ensure that the bundled checks pour in.

Without the media acting as a watchdog, the administration has with impunity found the IRS useful in going after political opponents. When Obama’s IRS appointees were exposed, he for the moment called their deeds outrageous; when the media did not pursue the outrage, he wrote it off as a nothing story.

The media certainly thought it was nothing, given that none of the obsequious Washington press corps will be unduly audited or indicted. But the administration has also monitored Associated Press reporters. Most of what it initially said about the National Security Agency snooping proved untrue — including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s flat-out lie to Congress while under oath, when he testified that the NSA was not collecting data on millions of Americans. All we know for now about Benghazi is that everything the administration alleged about the murders was false — from why Americans were there, to what prompted the violence, to why no help was sent before or during the attack, to the aftermath promises to hunt down the perpetrators.

The filmmaker and arch-critic of Barack Obama, Dinesh D’Souza, is now under indictment for improper campaign contributions. If he deliberately violated campaign-finance laws and compounded the violation by conspiring with others, then by all means he should face the full force of the law. The problem, though, is that even if D’Souza proves to be guilty as charged, others with far greater culpability — but with the correct political views — have not met the same degree of administration scrutiny.

Note, for example, what D’Souza did not do: He did not, as an Obama insider in the heat of the reelection campaign, leak classified information about vital national-security secrets like the Stuxnet virus attacks, the bin Laden raid, the drone protocols, or a double agent in Yemen in order to bolster the anti-terrorism credentials of the president; he did not, as a high-level Obama official, lie under oath to Congress about the NSA program; he is not a former Democratic governor who defrauded thousands of investors out of billions of dollars. Apparently none of that will get you arrested by this administration.

Mr. D’Souza also did not, as did Obama himself, have a soon-to-be-jailed felon sell him a lot next to his own house at below-market rates, without paying gift taxes on it, in exchange for perceived political favors. He did not pass illegally into the United States and reside here illegally by habitually lying on documents about his resident status. He did not go to the polls with clubs to intimidate voters. He did not bundle $500,000 to buy an ambassorship to Norway without knowing much of anything about Norway. He did not pitch green ideas to friends now in the Obama administration in order to land millions of dollars in federal loans that he would default on.

He did, though, make a movie critical of Barack Obama, and this is most likely what brought him under administration scrutiny, as did the activities of a video maker arrested for producing a politically incorrect video about Islam, or those of unduly audited Tea Party groups or Hollywood conservatives who have criticized the president. All of that, in this age of pen and phone, can get you arrested, audited, or on the IRS watch list.

Note the ripple effect, as partisans appreciate a new climate and a once-in-a-lifetime chance to even scores and advance the cause. The governor of New York announces that there is no place in his state for those whom he derides as “extreme conservatives” — only to be seconded by the new mayor of New York City. (Imagine the governor of Utah suggesting to liberal residents that their support for gun control, late-term abortion, and gay marriage might be good reasons for them to leave the state — and being seconded by the mayor of Salt Lake City. Or imagine a Republican president arbitrarily deciding that he does not like the DREAM Act component of a recently passed comprehensive immigration-reform bill, and so simply choosing to ignore it and deport students who are illegal aliens anyway.)

The first black senator from South Carolina since Reconstruction is blasted by a state NAACP official as a “dummy,” only to have that slur seconded by the national organization. On MSNBC, one newscaster hopes Sarah Palin ingests feces and urine; another takes a jab at Mitt Romney for having an African-American adopted grandchild; still another labels radio personality Laura Ingraham a “slut” — all convinced that the periodic presidential sermon about a new civility empowers their crudity and deters critics.

Under Obama, who you are and what you represent rather than what you have done are becoming the selective criteria for pen-and-phone legal enforcement. For the first time since 1974, America is no longer quite a lawful place.

More HERE

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Hollywood, Propaganda and Liberal Politics

Jonah Goldberg

The legendary media tycoon William Randolph Hearst believed America needed a strongman and that Franklin D. Roosevelt would fit the bill. He ordered his newspapers to support FDR and the New Deal. At his direction, Hearst's political allies rallied around Roosevelt at the Democratic convention, which some believe sealed the deal for Roosevelt's nomination.

But all that wasn't enough. Hearst also believed the voters had to be made to see what could be gained from a president with a free hand. So he financed the film "Gabriel Over the White House," starring Walter Huston. The film depicts an FDR look-alike president who, after a coma-inducing car accident, is transformed from a passive Warren Harding type into a hands-on dictator. The reborn commander in chief suspends the Constitution, violently wipes out corruption and revives the economy through a national socialist agenda. When Congress tries to impeach him, he dissolves Congress.

The Library of Congress summarizes the film nicely. "The good news: He reduces unemployment, lifts the country out of the Depression, battles gangsters and Congress and brings about world peace. The bad news: He's Mussolini."

Hearst wanted to make sure the script got it right, so he sent it to what today might be called a script doctor, namely Roosevelt. FDR loved it, but he did have some changes, which Hearst eagerly accepted. A month into his first term, FDR sent Hearst a thank-you note. "I want to send you this line to tell you how pleased I am with the changes you made in 'Gabriel Over the White House,'" Roosevelt wrote. "I think it is an intensely interesting picture and should do much to help."

I bring up this tale to note that Hollywood has never been opposed to propaganda. When Hollywood's self-declared auteurs and artistes denounce propaganda as the enemy of art, almost invariably what they really mean is "propaganda we don't like."

Consider the film "Lone Survivor," which tells the true story of heroic Navy SEALs in Afghanistan. The film has been denounced by some critics; a "jingoistic, pornographic work of war propaganda," in the words of one reviewer. Richard Corliss of Time chimed in: "That these events actually happened doesn't necessarily make it plausible or powerful in a movie, or keep it from seeming like convenient propaganda." Similar complaints (from non-conservatives, at least) about antiwar films made during the George W. Bush years are much harder to find.

Similarly, if Demi Moore proclaimed, "I pledge to be a servant to our president," at the dawn of the Bush presidency, it would have created a career-ending firestorm.

When it was owned by GE -- a company with billions of dollars invested in subsidy-dependent alternative energy technologies -- NBC began its "Green Week," seven days of sitcoms, sports shows and even news programs doing their part for the cause. There was nary a word of protest from TV critics or supposedly independent writers and producers about the corruption of art. I wonder, if Fox announced a "pro-life week," whether the same crowd would yawn as conspicuously.

In the book, "Primetime Propaganda," author Ben Shapiro quotes many TV producers boasting about blacklisting conservative actors and shilling for liberal issues. As Shapiro notes, perhaps no figure was more upfront -- or successful -- at yoking art to political proselytizing than Norman Lear, the creator of "All in the Family," "The Jeffersons" and other shows.

Which is fitting. Last fall, the California Endowment, which is spending millions to promote the Affordable Care Act, gave $500,000 to the Norman Lear Center at USC to work on ways to get Hollywood to do its part. In February, the center will cosponsor with the Writer's Guild of America an event in New York titled "The Affordable Care Act: Comedy, Drama & Reality," about portraying Obamacare in TV and film. The Obama administration, naturally, will be sending an emissary to help.

It's doubtful this will have any significant effect. The rollout has made its impression, and the changes wrought by Obamacare in the individual lives of millions of Americans won't be erased by a very special episode of "The Big Bang Theory." But it's a useful reminder that Hollywood is always eager to lend its services -- for the right president.

SOURCE

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Income gap? Not many are obsessed

by Jeff Jacoby

THOUGH PRESIDENT Obama keeps insisting that income inequality is the "defining challenge of our time," most Americans beg to differ.

"What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?" asked Gallup in a nationwide survey this month. Dissatisfaction with the federal government — its incompetence, abuse, dysfunction, venality — topped the list, with 21 percent of respondents saying it was their key concern. The overall state of the economy was second, at 18 percent. Unemployment and health care were tied for third, with each cited by 16 percent as the nation's most pressing problem.

How many shared Obama's view that the gap between rich and poor is the issue that should concern us most? Four percent.

The president has been banging this populist drum for years. As a candidate in 2008, he famously told "Joe the Plumber" that it was good for everybody when the government acts to "spread the wealth around." In 2011 he went to Osowatomie, Kan., site of a famous speech by Theodore Roosevelt a century earlier, to condemn the "gaping inequality" in modern America, where those at the top of the economic ladder are "wealthier than ever before," while everyone else struggles with growing bills and stagnant paychecks. He told the Center for American Progress last December that "increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American Dream," and warned that America's basic bargain — "if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead" — is disintegrating.

Class-war rhetoric excites the Democratic base. There have always been some voters for whom nothing is more repellent than a growing gap between the rich and the non-rich, or a stronger justification for more government regulation. But most Americans don't react that way. "When is the last time you heard a shoeshine person or a taxicab driver complain about inequality?" asks economist John C. Goodman. "For most people, having a lot of rich people around is good for business."

Obsessing over other people's riches isn't healthy. In a relatively free society, wealth is typically earned. There are exceptions, of course. Some people cheat their way to a fortune; some are just lucky; some pull political strings.

But on the whole, Americans with a lot of money have usually produced more, worked harder, aimed higher, or seen further than the rest of us. Inequality is built into the human condition, and the world is generally better off when people of uncommon talent and industry are free to climb as high as their abilities will take them.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 3, 2014

Having sisters: Another elephant discovered

An NYT writer, Charles Blow, has come across some survey findings by Andrew Healy and Neil Malhotra to the effect that people who have sisters are more "sexist" and more likely to vote Republican. There have been all sorts of efforts to turn that finding into something discreditable to conservatives. One theory is that where there are girls around boys get let off from helping with housework and think that is a good racket for the rest of their lives.

The key to understanding the finding is however the word "sexist". It is of course largely a term of abuse. The factual content to it is however that the "sexist" person thinks men and women are different. Thinking that way does of course have all the evidence on its side but what Leftist ever cared about evidence? So, to the Leftist, people who think that way are evil and are rightly referred to with a term of abuse.

Once we get past the abuse, however, the implications of the finding become self-evident: Growing up with girls leaves you in no doubt about how different they are. It is a reality check. Those evil sexists are simply more in touch with how things actually are.

And that also explains the Republican orientation. It is in fact probably more an anti-Democrat orientation. Democrats are always preaching feminist nonsense so people who know from experience how much nonsense it is turn to the realistic party -- the Republican party.

So I am once again a discoverer of elephants in rooms. I have only pointed out the bleeding obvious -- but nothing as simple as "sexism" being realistic can enter a Leftist mind, of course. To them the elephant is invisible.

Steve Sailer has some useful notes on the matter

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The Poison of Postmodern Lying

All presidents at one time have fudged on the truth. Most politicians pad their resumes and airbrush away their sins. But what is new about political lying is the present notion that lies are not necessarily lies anymore -- a reflection of the relativism that infects our entire culture.

Postmodernism (the cultural fad "after modernism") went well beyond questioning norms and rules. It attacked the very idea of having any rules at all. Postmodernist relativists claimed that things like "truth" were mere fictions to preserve elite privilege. Unfortunately, bad ideas like that have a habit of poisoning an entire society -- and now they have.

Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis was recently caught fabricating her own autobiography. She exaggerated her earlier ordeals, lied about the age at which she divorced and was untruthful about how she paid for her Harvard Law School education.

When caught, Davis did not apologize for lying. Instead, she lamely offered that, "My language should be tighter." Apparently, only old fogies still believe in truth and falsehood -- period. In contrast, Davis knows that promoting a progressive feminist agenda is "truth," and she only needs to be "tighter" about her fabrications to neutralize her reactionary critics.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren for years falsely claimed that she was a Native American. That fabricated ancestry proved useful in upping her career trajectory. When pressed about her racial background during her 2012 campaign, the Harvard law professor denied any deliberate misrepresentation and went on to be elected. Such progressive crusaders assume that they serve the greater truth of social change.

In the gospel of postmodern relativism, what did it matter if the president of the United States promised that Obamacare would not alter existing health-care plans when it was clear that it would? Instead, the good intentions of universal health care are the only truth that matters.

For that matter, the "law" that requires a president to enforce legislation passed by the Congress is likewise a construct. If ignoring bothersome laws -- whether the individual mandate and timetable of Obamacare, or federal immigration law -- serves a greater social justice, then such dereliction also becomes "truth." Blindly enforcing legalistic details of the law that are deemed no longer in the interest of the people would be the real lie, or so the reasoning goes.

Without notions of objective truth, there can never be lies, just competing narratives and discourses. Stories that supposedly serve the noble majority are true; those that supposedly don't become lies -- the facts are irrelevant. When Sen. Hillary Clinton in 2007 heard the factual details of the successful Iraq surge as related by Gen. David Petraeus, she said it required a "suspension of disbelief." In her postmodern sensibility, fighting an unpopular war was a lie, but opposing it was the truth -- and the actual metrics for whether the surge was working or not were simply an irrelevant narrative.

Later, as secretary of state, Clinton dismissed the circumstances surrounding the murders in Benghazi with the callous exclamation, "What difference does it make?" She had a postmodern point. If President Obama, then-United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice and Clinton herself all wrongly and deliberately assured the nation that a politically incorrect video had triggered the attacks in Benghazi, were they not on the right side of opposing religious bias and helping a progressive president to be re-elected? How could that good intention be a lie?

If Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied under oath to the Congress that the National Security Agency does not snoop on American citizens, how can that be perjury if Clapper's goal was to silence Obama's right-wing critics? For that matter, if Clapper wanted to show tolerance for Islamists, how could it be a lie when he testified earlier that the radical Muslim Brotherhood was "largely secular"?

By what arbitrary rules can one claim that "Piss Christ" or other provocative anti-Christian art is blasphemous or inferior, if its apparent purpose is to lessen the influence of a purportedly pernicious religion? Was Obama's autobiography truth or fiction, or something in between -- as hinted by the president himself when he was caught in untruths and then backed away from some of his stories, claiming they were now just "composites"?

Part of old America still abides by absolute truth and falsity. A door is either hung plumb or not. The calibrations of the Atlas rocket either are accurate and it takes off, or inaccurate and it blows up. Noble intentions cannot make prime numbers like 5 or 7 divisible.

But outside of math and science, whose natural truth man so far cannot impugn, almost everything else in America has become "it depends." Admissions, hiring, evaluations, autobiographies, and the statements of politicians and government officials, all become truthful if they serve the correct cause -- and damn any reactionary discrepancies.

To paraphrase George Orwell, everything is relative, but some things are more relative than others.

SOURCE

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Progressives Without Progress

There isn't very much progress in the progressive movement. Progress is the expansion of possibilities. Progressives however have a Malthusian obsession with the scarcity of all things. They believe that we are about to run out of everything from energy to water to wealth and education and that like starving survivors on a lifeboat we have to redistribute everything.

The progressive outlook predates the notion of progress. Its ideal is a static society, sustainable in its material practices and so utterly moral in its social attributes that it becomes immune to change. It is founded on the intertwining of the material and the moral through the insistence that the scarcity of material things makes their redistribution mandatory by an activist moral elite.

There is nothing as reactionary as utopia and no group as reactionary as utopians. A perfect society is a place that is immune to change. The search for such a society is the quest for an absolute way of living. Both the quest and the way of living become as unchallengeable as any theological utopia founded not on bad economics and political parochialism, but on a deeply spiritual faith.

The progress of progressives is not a rocket to the stars, but a slow elevator climbing up a constricted shaft to their ideal society. It's only progressive in the same sense that a television channel that moves from one show to the next within the confines of its programming is. It's programmed progress, not the progress of exploring infinitely expanding possibilities.

The left is actually deeply conservative. It is difficult for people in countries being contested by the left to see this because they observe the left as revolutionary and destructive. But every attempted conquest is accompanied by violent disruptions. The domestic left destroys everything it does not control as part of a cultural war; not because it seeks an open society of perpetual creative ferment.

Once the left achieves its dream of absolute power in a nation, that nation becomes socially backward, technologically backward and culturally backward. There is a reason that the USSR, Cuba and North Korea were not producing compelling new cultural products for export the way that their sympathizers in Hollywood did and do. It's the same reason that they don't keep having revolutions.

The creative energies harnessed by the left are a revolutionary tool for achieving an ideal society. Once that miserably ideal society is achieved, everything is regimented and unplanned change is locked out of the equation because reactionary progressive utopias have to be relentlessly planned. Science and culture are forcibly slowed down. Individuality is discouraged. Conformity produces mediocrity in all fields. Time slows down and utopia sinks into its own progressive muck.


Americans had trouble believing that the left of the counterculture had much in common with the conformist cultural factory of the USSR until the flower children became professional activists and politicians and ran a system of stale conformity interspersed with tedious displays of traditionally transgressive arts. The very slogan, Keep Berkeley Weird, is not revolutionary. It's traditionalist.

Nothing is more conservative than keeping things the way that they used to be.

On the opposite coast, the old radical artists and poets complain that the East Village isn't what it used to be and landmark everything in sight. Men and women who once did mountains of cocaine fight every bar liquor license with the outraged spleen of suburbanites threatened with a landfill.

The paradox of keeping weird things weird is that weird then just becomes another tradition and another proprietarian cultural impulse to avert a changing world by clinging to the way things used to be when you were young and everything made sense. It's not really keeping things weird, it's keeping the weird things that come from a changing outside world, out.

Utopians always carry that narrow-minded fragility with them. Their perfect society is always doomed by the rising tide of morality in the affairs of men. The more they try to hold on to it, the more it breaks apart right in front of their eyes. The left only believes in change when it moves in their direction. But once change has been achieved, then their ideal is a static changeless society.

Progress is confidence in human capabilities. The progressive movement however is tragic. It depends on the egocentric tantrums of individuals for its philosophy, its art and its activism; but it firmly believes that only the collective can make society work. And only the collective can lock it in.

Progressive utopians project their sense of fragility onto all material things. Fuel, water and even the atmosphere are all on the verge of running out. Everything must be safeguarded, counted and put in a locked box where qualified personnel will only distribute it at need. And that includes any and all human activities which might cause the warming of the planet.

Socially they are just as bad. Not only is wealth finite (except when they're spending it) but so is everything from education to employment.

The left doesn't think in terms of making more, but of redistributing what is available. Its goal is a static society in which everything is "fair", rather than a rapidly progressing society society that is unfairly distributed, but that focuses on creating, rather than sharing, and produces more for all.

Progressives equate progress to redistribution. They view the planet and every microcosmic society within it as a lifeboat with a finite amount of supplies to pass around for survival's sake. Their idea of progress is achieved when the redistribution achieves their ideal of fairness and no further bouts of redistribution are needed. Since that day will never come, utopia becomes an economic police state.

The progressive idea of progress is a sack race with a hundred feet in one sack. Progress must be communal. It must meet the needs of all stakeholders. It must comply with every detail of the plan. And so it is no wonder that we hardly build big things anymore or dream great dreams. Vision is individual and it's deeply disruptive. It changes the way that everyone lives.

Visions lead to utopias, but once utopia is achieved, there is no more room for vision. Visions, like viruses, are competitive creatures. When a Vision achieves a static order by killing all other visions, then vision dies, but that Vision remains with its dead hand on the wheel of history.

The vision of the left is a dead utopia, a tradition of weirdness and a hoarder's obsession with storing everything from the economy to the atmosphere in one lockbox before the sky falls. The utopian is really a cynic, certain that individualism will unleash everyone's worst impulses, and offering instead the iron order of his vision.


Utopia believes the worst of everyone and everything. It fears its own mortality and scents the taste of death on everything. It is convinced that the sky will fall, that everyone will starve and that the utter undoing of humanity is only a land use resolution or unrecycled plastic bottle away.

Progressives lock everyone into their narrow regimented and regulated idea of progress because they distrust people and they even distrust the universe. They are children certain that everything they love is about to be taken away from them and closet fascists obsessed with their moment of heroism when they rush out of the phone booth, biodegradable cape blowing in the wind, and save humanity from itself through a benevolent police state that extends into absolutely every area of human activity.

There is no progress in progressivism. There is instead a deep fear of progress. Utopians fear the unregulated and unplanned and they replace the true expansive progress of the human spirit with the false progress of social controls. Human genius is sold on the block in exchange for bureaucracy.

Progressives view every element of the world, from the grand vistas of oceans and skies to the minute intersections of human society as too fragile and limited for unregulated progress. Under their rule, progress in this country, once its secular faith, has slowed to a crawl outside of a few select industries that are able to move faster than the speed of progressive regulations.

The only way to resume progress is to fight the progressive movement.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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February 2, 2014

The growing distance between Washington and the public it dominates

The State of the Union was a spectacle of delusion and self-congratulation in which a Congress nobody likes rose to cheer a president nobody really likes. It marked the continued degeneration of a great and useful tradition. Viewership was down, to the lowest level since 2000. This year's innovation was the Parade of Hacks. It used to be the networks only showed the president walking down the aisle after his presence was dramatically announced. Now every cabinet-level officeholder marches in, shaking hands and high-fiving with breathless congressmen. And why not? No matter how bland and banal they may look, they do have the power to destroy your life—to declare the house you just built as in violation of EPA wetland regulations, to pull your kid's school placement, to define your medical coverage out of existence. So by all means attention must be paid and faces seen.

I watched at home and thought: They hate it. They being the people, whom we're now supposed to refer to as the folks. But you look at the polls at how people view Washington—one, in October, had almost 9 in 10 disapproving—and you watch a kabuki-like event like this and you know the distance, the psychic, emotional and experiential distance, between Washington and America, between the people and their federal government, is not only real but, actually, carries dangers. History will make more of the distance than we do. Someday in the future we will see it most vividly when a truly bad thing happens and the people suddenly need to trust what Washington says, and will not, to everyone's loss.

In the country, the president's popularity is underwater. In the District of Columbia itself, as Gallup notes, it's at 81%. The Washington area is now the wealthiest in the nation. No matter how bad the hinterlands do, it's good for government and those who live off it. The country is well aware. It is no accident that in the national imagination Washington is the shallow and corrupt capital in "The Hunger Games," the celebrity-clogged White House Correspondents' Dinner, "Scandal" and the green room at MSNBC. It is the chattering capital of a nation it less represents than dominates.

Supposedly people feel great rage about this, and I imagine many do. But the other night I wondered if what they're feeling isn't something else.

As the president made his jaunty claims and the senators and congressmen responded semirapturously I kept thinking of four words: Meanwhile, back in America . . .

Meanwhile, back in America, the Little Sisters of the Poor were preparing their legal briefs. The Roman Catholic order of nuns first came to America in 1868 and were welcomed in every city they entered. They now run about 30 homes for the needy across the country. They have, quite cruelly, been told they must comply with the ObamaCare mandate that all insurance coverage include contraceptives, sterilization procedures, morning-after pills. If they don't—and of course they can't, being Catholic, and nuns—they will face ruinous fines. The Supreme Court kindly granted them a temporary stay, but their case soon goes to court. The Justice Department brief, which reads like it was written by someone who just saw "Philomena," suggests the nuns are being ignorant and balky, all they have to do is sign a little, meaningless form and the problem will go away. The sisters don't see the form as meaningless; they know it's not. And so they fight, in a suit along with almost 500 Catholic nonprofit groups.



Everyone who says that would never have happened in the past is correct. It never, ever would have under normal American political leadership, Republican or Democratic. No one would've defied religious liberty like this.

The president has taken to saying he isn't ideological but this mandate—his mandate—is purely ideological.

It also is a violation of traditional civic courtesy, sympathy and spaciousness. The state doesn't tell serious religious groups to do it their way or they'll be ruined. You don't make the Little Sisters bow down to you.

This is the great political failure of progressivism: They always go too far. They always try to rub your face in it.

Meanwhile, back in America, disadvantaged parents in Louisiana—people who could never afford to live in places like McLean, Va., or Chevy Chase, Md.—continue to wait to see what will happen with the state's successful school voucher program. It lets poor kids get out of failed public schools and go to private schools on state scholarships. What a great thing. But the Obama Justice Department filed suit in August: The voucher system might violate civil rights law by worsening racial imbalance in the public schools. Gov. Bobby Jindal, and the parents, said nonsense, the scholarship students are predominately black, they have civil rights too. Is it possible the Justice Department has taken its action because a major benefactor of the president's party is the teachers unions, which do not like vouchers because their existence suggests real failures in the public schools they run?

Meanwhile, back in America, conservatives targeted and harassed by the Internal Revenue Service still await answers on their years-long requests for tax exempt status. When news of the IRS targeting broke last spring, agency officials lied about it, and one took the Fifth. The president said he was outraged, had no idea, read about it in the papers, boy was he going to get to the bottom of it. An investigation was announced but somehow never quite materialized. Victims of the targeting waited to be contacted by the FBI to be asked about their experience. Now the Justice Department has made clear its investigation won't be spearheaded by the FBI but by a department lawyer who is a campaign contributor to the president and the Democratic Party. Sometimes you feel they are just laughing at you, and going too far.

In the past five years many Americans have come to understand that an agency that maintained a pretty impressive record for a very long time has been turned, at least in part, into a political operation. Now the IRS has proposed new and tougher rules for grassroots groups. Cleta Mitchell, longtime attorney for many who've been targeted, says the IRS is no longer used in line with its mission: "They're supposed to be collecting revenues, not snooping and trampling on the First Amendment rights of the citizens. We are not subjects of a king, we are permitted to engage in First Amendment activities without reporting those activities to the IRS."

All these things—the pushing around of nuns, the limiting of freedoms that were helping kids get a start in life, the targeting of conservative groups—all these things have the effect of breaking bonds of trust between government and the people. They make citizens see Washington as an alien and hostile power.

Washington sees the disaffection. They read the polls, they know.

They call it rage. But it feels more like grief. Like the loss of something you never thought you'd lose, your sense of your country and your place in it, your rights in it.

SOURCE

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Politics of Hate and Envy

Walter E. Williams

Part of the progressive agenda is to create hate and envy. One component of that agenda is to attack the large differences between a corporation's chief executive officer's earnings and those of its average worker. CNNMoney published salary comparisons in "Fortune 50 CEO pay vs. our salaries"

Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf's annual salary is $2.8 million. CNN shows that it takes 66 Wells Fargo employees, whose average salary is $42,400, to match Stumpf's salary. It takes 57 Wal-Mart employees, who earn $22,100 on average, to match CEO Michael Duke's $1.3 million. At General Electric, 44 employees earning $75,300 a year match CEO Jeff Immelt's $3.3 million salary. For people with little understanding, such differences seem patently unfair. Before touching on the fairness issue, let's look at some high salaries that progressives ignore.

Forbes lists the "Highest-Paid Football Players 2013". Drew Brees, quarterback for the Saints, earned $40 million. If the average Saints organization employee earned $45,000, it would take almost 900 of them to match Brees' salary. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady earned $31.3 million, and Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant earns $23.5 million for playing basketball. It would take the earnings of more than 1,200 workers making $45,000 a year to match the earnings of Brady and Bryant.

But the "unfair" salaries of sports players pale in comparison with movie stars. According to Forbes' listing of the highest-paid actors, Robert Downey Jr. earned $75 million from June 2012 to June 2013. Channing Tatum: $60 million. Hugh Jackman: $55 million. Let's suppose the cameraman working with Downey earned $60,000. It would take the salaries of 1,250 of them to equal his salary. Oprah Winfrey's 2012 salary came to $165 million, thousands of times what the earnings of people who work for her are.

Though sports and Hollywood personalities earn multiples of CEO salaries, you'll never find leftists and progressives picketing and criticizing them. Why? The strategy for want-to-be tyrants is to demonize people whose power they want to usurp. That's the typical way tyrants gain power. They give the masses someone to hate. In 18th-century France, it was Maximilien Robespierre's promoting hatred of the aristocracy that led to his acquiring dictatorial power. In the 20th century, the communists gained power by promoting public hatred of the czars and capitalists. In Germany, Adolf Hitler gained power by promoting hatred of Jews and Bolsheviks.

I'm not equating America's progressives and liberals with Robespierre, Josef Stalin and Hitler. I am saying that promoting jealousy, fear and hate is an effective strategy for leftist politicians and their followers to control and micromanage businesses. It's not about the amount of money top executives earn. If it were, politicians and leftists would be promoting jealousy, fear and hatred toward multi-multimillionaire Hollywood actors, celebrities and sports stars. But there is no way that politicians could usurp the roles of Drew Brees, Kobe Bryant, Robert Downey Jr. and Oprah Winfrey. That means celebrities can make any amount of money they want and it matters not one iota politically. Do you think President Barack Obama would stoke the fires of hate and envy by remarking that he thinks that "at a certain point, you've made enough money" -- as he did in a 2010 Quincy, Ill., speech -- in regard to the salaries of Winfrey, Brees and Hollywood celebrities?

Why the high salaries? Ask yourself: If a corporate board of directors could hire a person for $45,000 who could do what a CEO could do, why would they pay CEOs millions? If an NFL team owner could hire a person with the athletic ability and decision-making capacity of Drew Brees for $100,000, why would he pay Brees $40 million? If some other actor could have created as many box-office receipts, why would movie producers have paid Downey $75 million?

There's another important issue. If one company has an effective CEO, it is not the only company that would like to have him on the payroll. In order to keep him, the company must pay him enough so that he can't be lured elsewhere.

SOURCE

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The case against early voting

To the delight of anyone who’s ever waited in line to cast a vote, a bipartisan election commission convened by President Obama concluded last week that states across the country should increase their use of early voting.

But early voting run amok is bad for democracy. The costs to collective self-governance — which the report refers to only in passing, in a single sentence — substantially outweigh the benefits. Instead of expanding the practice, we should use this moment as an opportunity to establish clear limits on it before it becomes the norm.

Why? For all its conveniences, early voting threatens the basic nature of citizen choice in democratic, republican government. In elections, candidates make competing appeals to the people and provide them with the information necessary to be able to make a choice. Citizens also engage with one another, debating and deliberating about the best options for the country. Especially in an age of so many nonpolitical distractions, it is important to preserve the space of a general election campaign — from the early kickoff rallies to the last debates in October — to allow voters to think through, together, the serious issues that face the nation.

The integrity of that space is broken when some citizens cast their ballots as early as 46 days before the election, as some states allow. A lot can happen in those 46 days. Early voters are, in essence, asked a different set of questions from later ones; they are voting with a different set of facts. They may cast their ballots without the knowledge that comes from later candidate debates (think of the all-important Kennedy-Nixon debates, which ran from late September 1960 until late October); without further media scrutiny of candidates; or without seeing how they respond to unexpected national or international news events — the proverbial “October surprise.”

The 2008 election, for example, could have ended differently had many voters cast their ballots before the massive economic crisis that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers that September. Similarly, candidates often seek to delay the release of embarrassing information, or the implementation of difficult policies, until after votes have been cast. A wave of votes starting months before the election date makes this easier.

Early voting not only limits the set of information available to voters; to the extent that it decreases the importance of debates, it might also systematically help incumbents and quasi-incumbents like vice presidents, who generally have the advantage of having been in the public eye longer.

More fundamentally, early voting changes what it means to vote. It is well known that voters can change their minds — polls always go up and down during a campaign season. A single Election Day creates a focal point that gives solemnity and relevance to the state of popular opinion at a particular moment in time; on a single day, we all have to come down on one side or the other. But if the word “election” comes to mean casting votes over a period of months, it will elide the difference between elections and polls. People will be able to vote when the mood strikes them — after seeing an inflammatory ad, for example. Voting then becomes an incoherent summing of how various individuals feel at a series of moments, not how the nation feels at a particular moment. This weakens civic cohesiveness, and it threatens to substitute raw preferences and momentary opinion for rational deliberation. Of course, those eager to cast early will be the most ideological — but these are precisely the voters who would benefit most from taking in the full back and forth of the campaign.

Moreover, there are other ways of achieving some of the benefits of early voting, such as old-fashioned absentee ballots or setting up more polling places. Even a limited few-days-early voting period could convey most of the advantages of the practice while limiting the most severe democratic costs.

Early voting is a matter of degree: Even Election “Day” lets people cast ballots at different times. But at the moment, there is no upper bound at all on the growing practice, and the president’s commission made no mention of such an option. With the group’s report opening a new round of discussion over voting policy, now is the time to consider whether the “quiet revolution” of early voting has gone too far.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party.

MESSAGE to Leftists: Even if you killed all conservatives tomorrow, you would just end up in another Soviet Union. Conservatives are all that stand between you and that dismal fate. And you may not even survive at all. Stalin killed off all the old Bolsheviks.


MYTH BUSTING:


The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

Just the name of Hitler's political party should be sufficient to reject the claim that Hitler was "Right wing" but Leftists sometimes retort that the name "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" is not informative, in that it is the name of a dismal Stalinist tyranny. But "People's Republic" is a normal name for a Communist country whereas I know of no conservative political party that calls itself a "Socialist Worker's Party". Such parties are in fact usually of the extreme Left (Trotskyite etc.)

Who said this in 1968? "I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the Left and is now in the centre of politics". It was Sir Oswald Mosley, founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

The Zimmerman case is an excellent proof that the Left is deep-down racist

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.



R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

FDR appointed a known KKK member, Hugo Black, to the Supreme Court

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter: The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.



IN BRIEF:

A good short definition of conservative: "One who wants you to keep your hand out of his pocket."

Beware of good intentions. They mostly lead to coercion

A gargantuan case of hubris, coupled with stunning level of ignorance about how the real world works, is the essence of progressivism.

The U.S. Constitution is neither "living" nor dead. It is fixed until it is amended. But amending it is the privilege of the people, not of politicians or judges

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong - Thomas Sowell

Leftists think that utopia can be coerced into existence -- so no dishonesty or brutality is beyond them in pursuit of that "noble" goal

When using today's model of society as a rule, most of history will be found to be full of oppression, bias, and bigotry." What today's arrogant judges of history fail to realize is that they, too, will be judged. What will Americans of 100 years from now make of, say, speech codes, political correctness, and zero tolerance - to name only three? Assuming, of course, there will still be an America that we, today, would recognize. Given the rogue Federal government spy apparatus, I am not at all sure of that. -- Paul Havemann

Economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973): "The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office."

It's the shared hatred of the rest of us that unites Islamists and the Left.

American liberals don't love America. They despise it. All they love is their own fantasy of what America could become. They are false patriots.

The Democratic Party: Con-men elected by the ignorant and the arrogant

The Democratic Party is a strange amalgam of elites, would-be elites and minorities. No wonder their policies are so confused and irrational

Why are conservatives more at ease with religion? Because it is basic to conservatism that some things are unknowable, and religious people have to accept that too. Leftists think that they know it all and feel threatened by any exceptions to that. Thinking that you know it all is however the pride that comes before a fall.

The characteristic emotion of the Leftist is not envy. It's rage

Leftists are committed to grievance, not truth

The British Left poured out a torrent of hate for Margaret Thatcher on the occasion of her death. She rescued Britain from chaos and restored Britain's prosperity. What's not to hate about that?

Something you didn't know about Margaret Thatcher

The world's dumbest investor? Without doubt it is Uncle Sam. Nobody anywhere could rival the scale of the losses on "investments" made under the Obama administration

"Behind the honeyed but patently absurd pleas for equality is a ruthless drive for placing themselves (the elites) at the top of a new hierarchy of power" -- Murray Rothbard - Egalitarianism and the Elites (1995)

A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. -- G. Gordon Liddy

"World socialism as a whole, and all the figures associated with it, are shrouded in legend; its contradictions are forgotten or concealed; it does not respond to arguments but continually ignores them--all this stems from the mist of irrationality that surrounds socialism and from its instinctive aversion to scientific analysis... The doctrines of socialism seethe with contradictions, its theories are at constant odds with its practice, yet due to a powerful instinct these contradictions do not in the least hinder the unending propaganda of socialism. Indeed, no precise, distinct socialism even exists; instead there is only a vague, rosy notion of something noble and good, of equality, communal ownership, and justice: the advent of these things will bring instant euphoria and a social order beyond reproach." -- Solzhenitsyn

"The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left." -- Ecclesiastes 10:2 (NIV)

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government. -- Thomas Jefferson

"Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power" -- Bertrand Russell

Evan Sayet: The Left sides "...invariably with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success." (t=5:35+ on video)

The Republicans are the gracious side of American politics. It is the Democrats who are the nasty party, the haters

Wanting to stay out of the quarrels of other nations is conservative -- but conservatives will fight if attacked or seriously endangered. Anglo/Irish statesman Lord Castlereagh (1769-1822), who led the political coalition that defeated Napoleon, was an isolationist, as were traditional American conservatives.

Some useful definitions:

If a conservative doesn't like guns, he doesn't buy one. If a liberal doesn't like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.
If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn't eat meat. If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone.
If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation. A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.
If a conservative doesn't like a talk show host, he switches channels. Liberals demand that those they don't like be shut down.
If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn't go to church. A liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced. (Unless it's a foreign religion, of course!)
If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it. A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.

There is better evidence for creation than there is for the Leftist claim that “gender” is a “social construct”. Most Leftist claims seem to be faith-based rather than founded on the facts

Leftists are classic weak characters. They dish out abuse by the bucketload but cannot take it when they get it back. Witness the Loughner hysteria.

Death taxes: You would expect a conscientious person, of whatever degree of intelligence, to reflect on the strange contradiction involved in denying people the right to unearned wealth, while supporting programs that give people unearned wealth.

America is no longer the land of the free. It is now the land of the regulated -- though it is not alone in that, of course

The Leftist motto: "I love humanity. It's just people I can't stand"

Why are Leftists always talking about hate? Because it fills their own hearts

Envy is a strong and widespread human emotion so there has alway been widespread support for policies of economic "levelling". Both the USA and the modern-day State of Israel were founded by communists but reality taught both societies that respect for the individual gave much better outcomes than levelling ideas. Sadly, there are many people in both societies in whom hatred for others is so strong that they are incapable of respect for the individual. The destructiveness of what they support causes them to call themselves many names in different times and places but they are the backbone of the political Left

Gore Vidal: "Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little". Vidal was of course a Leftist

The large number of rich Leftists suggests that, for them, envy is secondary. They are directly driven by hatred and scorn for many of the other people that they see about them. Hatred of others can be rooted in many things, not only in envy. But the haters come together as the Left. Some evidence here showing that envy is not what defines the Left

Leftists hate the world around them and want to change it: the people in it most particularly. Conservatives just want to be left alone to make their own decisions and follow their own values.

The failure of the Soviet experiment has definitely made the American Left more vicious and hate-filled than they were. The plain failure of what passed for ideas among them has enraged rather than humbled them.

Ronald Reagan famously observed that the status quo is Latin for “the mess we’re in.” So much for the vacant Leftist claim that conservatives are simply defenders of the status quo. They think that conservatives are as lacking in principles as they are.

Was Confucius a conservative? The following saying would seem to reflect good conservative caution: "The superior man, when resting in safety, does not forget that danger may come. When in a state of security he does not forget the possibility of ruin. When all is orderly, he does not forget that disorder may come. Thus his person is not endangered, and his States and all their clans are preserved."

The shallow thinkers of the Left sometimes claim that conservatives want to impose their own will on others in the matter of abortion. To make that claim is however to confuse religion with politics. Conservatives are in fact divided about their response to abortion. The REAL opposition to abortion is religious rather than political. And the church which has historically tended to support the LEFT -- the Roman Catholic church -- is the most fervent in the anti-abortion cause. Conservatives are indeed the one side of politics to have moral qualms on the issue but they tend to seek a middle road in dealing with it. Taking the issue to the point of legal prohibitions is a religious doctrine rather than a conservative one -- and the religion concerned may or may not be characteristically conservative. More on that here

Some Leftist hatred arises from the fact that they blame "society" for their own personal problems and inadequacies

The Leftist hunger for change to the society that they hate leads to a hunger for control over other people. And they will do and say anything to get that control: "Power at any price". Leftist politicians are mostly self-aggrandizing crooks who gain power by deceiving the uninformed with snake-oil promises -- power which they invariably use to destroy. Destruction is all that they are good at. Destruction is what haters do.

Leftists are consistent only in their hate. They don't have principles. How can they when "there is no such thing as right and wrong"? All they have is postures, pretend-principles that can be changed as easily as one changes one's shirt

A Leftist assumption: Making money doesn't entitle you to it, but wanting money does.

"Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money -- only for wanting to keep your own money." --columnist Joe Sobran (1946-2010)

Leftist policies are candy-coated rat poison that may appear appealing at first, but inevitably do a lot of damage to everyone impacted by them.

A tribute and thanks to Mary Jo Kopechne. Her death was reprehensible but she probably did more by her death that she ever would have in life: She spared the world a President Ted Kennedy. That the heap of corruption that was Ted Kennedy died peacefully in his bed is one of the clearest demonstrations that we do not live in a just world. Even Joe Stalin seems to have been smothered to death by Nikita Khrushchev

I often wonder why Leftists refer to conservatives as "wingnuts". A wingnut is a very useful device that adds versatility wherever it is used. Clearly, Leftists are not even good at abuse. Once they have accused their opponents of racism and Nazism, their cupboard is bare. Similarly, Leftists seem to think it is a devastating critique to refer to "Worldnet Daily" as "Worldnut Daily". The poverty of their argumentation is truly pitiful

The Leftist assertion that there is no such thing as right and wrong has a distinguished history. It was Pontius Pilate who said "What is truth?" (John 18:38). From a Christian viewpoint, the assertion is undoubtedly the Devil's gospel

Even in the Old Testament they knew about "Postmodernism": "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" - Isaiah 5:20 (KJV)

Was Solomon the first conservative? "The hearts of men are full of evil and madness is in their hearts" -- Ecclesiastes: 9:3 (RSV). He could almost have been talking about Global Warming.

"If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action." - Ludwig von Mises

The naive scholar who searches for a consistent Leftist program will not find it. What there is consists only in the negation of the present.

Because of their need to be different from the mainstream, Leftists are very good at pretending that sow's ears are silk purses

Among intelligent people, Leftism is a character defect. Leftists HATE success in others -- which is why notably successful societies such as the USA and Israel are hated and failures such as the Palestinians can do no wrong.

A Leftist's beliefs are all designed to pander to his ego. So when you have an argument with a Leftist, you are not really discussing the facts. You are threatening his self esteem. Which is why the normal Leftist response to challenge is mere abuse.

Because of the fragility of a Leftist's ego, anything that threatens it is intolerable and provokes rage. So most Leftist blogs can be summarized in one sentence: "How DARE anybody question what I believe!". Rage and abuse substitute for an appeal to facts and reason.

Because their beliefs serve their ego rather than reality, Leftists just KNOW what is good for us. Conservatives need evidence.

Absolute certainty is the privilege of uneducated men and fanatics. -- C.J. Keyser

Hell is paved with good intentions" -- Boswell's Life of Johnson of 1775

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

THE FALSIFICATION OF HISTORY HAS DONE MORE TO IMPEDE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT THAN ANY ONE THING KNOWN TO MANKIND -- ROUSSEAU

"Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him" (Proverbs 26: 12). I think that sums up Leftists pretty well.

Eminent British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington is often quoted as saying: "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." It was probably in fact said by his contemporary, J.B.S. Haldane. But regardless of authorship, it could well be a conservative credo not only about the cosmos but also about human beings and human society. Mankind is too complex to be summed up by simple rules and even complex rules are only approximations with many exceptions.

Politics is the only thing Leftists know about. They know nothing of economics, history or business. Their only expertise is in promoting feelings of grievance

Socialism makes the individual the slave of the state -- capitalism frees them.

Many readers here will have noticed that what I say about Leftists sometimes sounds reminiscent of what Leftists say about conservatives. There is an excellent reason for that. Leftists are great "projectors" (people who see their own faults in others). So a good first step in finding out what is true of Leftists is to look at what they say about conservatives! They even accuse conservatives of projection (of course).

The research shows clearly that one's Left/Right stance is strongly genetically inherited but nobody knows just what specifically is inherited. What is inherited that makes people Leftist or Rightist? There is any amount of evidence that personality traits are strongly genetically inherited so my proposal is that hard-core Leftists are people who tend to let their emotions (including hatred and envy) run away with them and who are much more in need of seeing themselves as better than others -- two attributes that are probably related to one another. Such Leftists may be an evolutionary leftover from a more primitive past.

Leftists seem to believe that if someone like Al Gore says it, it must be right. They obviously have a strong need for an authority figure. The fact that the two most authoritarian regimes of the 20th century (Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) were socialist is thus no surprise. Leftists often accuse conservatives of being "authoritarian" but that is just part of their usual "projective" strategy -- seeing in others what is really true of themselves.

"With their infernal racial set-asides, racial quotas, and race norming, liberals share many of the Klan's premises. The Klan sees the world in terms of race and ethnicity. So do liberals! Indeed, liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race. Conservatives champion a color-blind society" -- Ann Coulter

Politicians are in general only a little above average in intelligence so the idea that they can make better decisions for us that we can make ourselves is laughable

A quote from the late Dr. Adrian Rogers: "You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

The Supreme Court of the United States is now and always has been a judicial abomination. Its guiding principles have always been political rather than judicial. It is not as political as Stalin's courts but its respect for the constitution is little better. Some recent abuses: The "equal treatment" provision of the 14th amendment was specifically written to outlaw racial discrimination yet the court has allowed various forms of "affirmative action" for decades -- when all such policies should have been completely stuck down immediately. The 2nd. amendment says that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed yet gun control laws infringe it in every State in the union. The 1st amendment provides that speech shall be freely exercised yet the court has upheld various restrictions on the financing and display of political advertising. The court has found a right to abortion in the constitution when the word abortion is not even mentioned there. The court invents rights that do not exist and denies rights that do.

"Some action that is unconstitutional has much to recommend it" -- Elena Kagan, nominated to SCOTUS by Obama

Frank Sulloway, the anti-scientist

The basic aim of all bureaucrats is to maximize their funding and minimize their workload

A lesson in Australian: When an Australian calls someone a "big-noter", he is saying that the person is a chronic and rather pathetic seeker of admiration -- as in someone who often pulls out "big notes" (e.g. $100.00 bills) to pay for things, thus endeavouring to create the impression that he is rich. The term describes the mentality rather than the actual behavior with money and it aptly describes many Leftists. When they purport to show "compassion" by advocating things that cost themselves nothing (e.g. advocating more taxes on "the rich" to help "the poor"), an Australian might say that the Leftist is "big-noting himself". There is an example of the usage here. The term conveys contempt. There is a wise description of Australians generally here

Some ancient wisdom for Leftists: "Be not righteous overmuch; neither make thyself over wise: Why shouldest thou die before thy time?" -- Ecclesiastes 7:16

Jesse Jackson: "There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery -- then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved." There ARE important racial differences.

Some Jimmy Carter wisdom: "I think it's inevitable that there will be a lower standard of living than what everybody had always anticipated," he told advisers in 1979. "there's going to be a downward turning."



The "steamroller" above who got steamrollered by his own hubris. Spitzer is a warning of how self-destructive a vast ego can be -- and also of how destructive of others it can be.

Heritage is what survives death: Very rare and hence very valuable

Big business is not your friend. As Adam Smith said: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary

How can I accept the Communist doctrine, which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete textbook which I know not only to be scientifically erroneous but without interest or application to the modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, who with all their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human achievement? Even if we need a religion, how can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the red bookshop? It is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of Western Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has first suffered some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all his values. -- John Maynard Keynes

Some wisdom from "Bron" Waugh: "The purpose of politics is to help them [politicians] overcome these feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power"

"There are countless horrible things happening all over the country, and horrible people prospering, but we must never allow them to disturb our equanimity or deflect us from our sacred duty to sabotage and annoy them whenever possible"

The urge to pass new laws must be seen as an illness, not much different from the urge to bite old women. Anyone suspected of suffering from it should either be treated with the appropriate pills or, if it is too late for that, elected to Parliament [or Congress, as the case may be] and paid a huge salary with endless holidays, to do nothing whatever"

"It is my settled opinion, after some years as a political correspondent, that no one is attracted to a political career in the first place unless he is socially or emotionally crippled"

Two lines below of a famous hymn that would be incomprehensible to Leftists today ("honor"? "right"? "freedom?" Freedom to agree with them is the only freedom they believe in)

First to fight for right and freedom,
And to keep our honor clean

It is of course the hymn of the USMC -- still today the relentless warriors that they always were. Freedom needs a soldier

If any of the short observations above about Leftism seem wrong, note that they do not stand alone. The evidence for them is set out at great length in my MONOGRAPH on Leftism.

3 memoirs of "Supermac", a 20th century Disraeli (Aristocratic British Conservative Prime Minister -- 1957 to 1963 -- Harold Macmillan):

"It breaks my heart to see (I can't interfere or do anything at my age) what is happening in our country today - this terrible strike of the best men in the world, who beat the Kaiser's army and beat Hitler's army, and never gave in. Pointless, endless. We can't afford that kind of thing. And then this growing division which the noble Lord who has just spoken mentioned, of a comparatively prosperous south, and an ailing north and midlands. That can't go on." -- Mac on the British working class: "the best men in the world" (From his Maiden speech in the House of Lords, 13 November 1984)

"As a Conservative, I am naturally in favour of returning into private ownership and private management all those means of production and distribution which are now controlled by state capitalism"

During Macmillan's time as prime minister, average living standards steadily rose while numerous social reforms were carried out



JEWS AND ISRAEL

The Bible is an Israeli book

"And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed" -- Genesis 12:3

If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy -- Psalm 137 (NIV)

My (Gentile) opinion of antisemitism: The Jews are the best we've got so killing them is killing us.

I have always liked the story of Gideon (See Judges chapters 6 to 8) and it is surely no surprise that in the present age Israel is the Gideon of nations: Few in numbers but big in power and impact.

If I were not an atheist, I would believe that God had a sense of humour. He gave his chosen people (the Jews) enormous advantages -- high intelligence and high drive -- but to keep it fair he deprived them of something hugely important too: Political sense. So Jews to this day tend very strongly to be Leftist -- even though the chief source of antisemitism for roughly the last 200 years has been the political Left!

And the other side of the coin is that Jews tend to despise conservatives and Christians. Yet American fundamentalist Christians are the bedrock of the vital American support for Israel, the ultimate bolthole for all Jews. So Jewish political irrationality seems to be a rather good example of the saying that "The LORD giveth and the LORD taketh away". There are many other examples of such perversity (or "balance"). The sometimes severe side-effects of most pharmaceutical drugs is an obvious one but there is another ethnic example too, a rather amusing one. Chinese people are in general smart and patient people but their rate of traffic accidents in China is about 10 times higher than what prevails in Western societies. They are brilliant mathematicians and fearless business entrepreneurs but at the same time bad drivers!

Conservatives, on the other hand, could be antisemitic on entirely rational grounds: Namely, the overwhelming Leftism of the Diaspora Jewish population as a whole. Because they judge the individual, however, only a tiny minority of conservative-oriented people make such general judgments. The longer Jews continue on their "stiff-necked" course, however, the more that is in danger of changing. The children of Israel have been a stiff necked people since the days of Moses, however, so they will no doubt continue to vote with their emotions rather than their reason.

I despair of the ADL. Jews have enough problems already and yet in the ADL one has a prominent Jewish organization that does its best to make itself offensive to Christians. Their Leftism is more important to them than the welfare of Jewry -- which is the exact opposite of what they ostensibly stand for! Jewish cleverness seems to vanish when politics are involved. Fortunately, Christians are true to their saviour and have loving hearts. Jewish dissatisfaction with the myopia of the ADL is outlined here. Note that Foxy was too grand to reply to it.

Fortunately for America, though, liberal Jews there are rapidly dying out through intermarriage and failure to reproduce. And the quite poisonous liberal Jews of Israel are not much better off. Judaism is slowly returning to Orthodoxy and the Orthodox tend to be conservative.

The above is good testimony to the accuracy of the basic conservative insight that almost anything in human life is too complex to be reduced to any simple rule and too complex to be reduced to any rule at all without allowance for important exceptions to the rule concerned

"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here. For roughly two centuries now, antisemitism has, throughout the Western world, been principally associated with Leftism (including the socialist Hitler) -- as it is to this day. See here.

Leftists call their hatred of Israel "Anti-Zionism" but Zionists are only a small minority in Israel

Some of the Leftist hatred of Israel is motivated by old-fashioned antisemitism (beliefs in Jewish "control" etc.) but most of it is just the regular Leftist hatred of success in others. And because the societies they inhabit do not give them the vast amount of recognition that their large but weak egos need, some of the most virulent haters of Israel and America live in those countries. So the hatred is the product of pathologically high self-esteem.

Their threatened egos sometimes drive Leftists into quite desperate flights from reality. For instance, they often call Israel an "Apartheid state" -- when it is in fact the Arab states that practice Apartheid -- witness the severe restrictions on Christians in Saudi Arabia. There are no such restrictions in Israel.

If the Palestinians put down their weapons, there'd be peace. If the Israelis put down their weapons, there'd be genocide.


Alfred Dreyfus, a reminder of French antisemitism still relevant today

Eugenio Pacelli, a righteous Gentile, a true man of God and a brilliant Pope


ABOUT

Many people hunger and thirst after righteousness. Some find it in the hatreds of the Left. Others find it in the love of Christ. I don't hunger and thirst after righteousness at all. I hunger and thirst after truth. How old-fashioned can you get?

The kneejerk response of the Green/Left to people who challenge them is to say that the challenger is in the pay of "Big Oil", "Big Business", "Big Pharma", "Exxon-Mobil", "The Pioneer Fund" or some other entity that they see, in their childish way, as a boogeyman. So I think it might be useful for me to point out that I have NEVER received one cent from anybody by way of support for what I write. As a retired person, I live entirely on my own investments. I do not work for anybody and I am not beholden to anybody. And I have NO investments in oil companies, mining companies or "Big Pharma"

UPDATE: Despite my (statistical) aversion to mining stocks, I have recently bought a few shares in BHP -- the world's biggest miner, I gather. I run the grave risk of becoming a speaker of famous last words for saying this but I suspect that BHP is now so big as to be largely immune from the risks that plague most mining companies. I also know of no issue affecting BHP where my writings would have any relevance. The Left seem to have a visceral hatred of miners. I have never quite figured out why.

I imagine that few of my readers will understand it, but I am an unabashed monarchist. And, as someone who was born and bred in a monarchy and who still lives there (i.e. Australia), that gives me no conflicts at all. In theory, one's respect for the monarchy does not depend on who wears the crown but the impeccable behaviour of the present Queen does of course help perpetuate that respect. Aside from my huge respect for the Queen, however, my favourite member of the Royal family is the redheaded Prince Harry. The Royal family is of course a military family and Prince Harry is a great example of that. As one of the world's most privileged people, he could well be an idle layabout but instead he loves his life in the army. When his girlfriend Chelsy ditched him because he was so often away, Prince Harry said: "I love Chelsy but the army comes first". A perfect military man! I doubt that many women would understand or approve of his attitude but perhaps my own small army background powers my approval of that attitude.

I imagine that most Americans might find this rather mad -- but I believe that a constitutional Monarchy is the best form of government presently available. Can a libertarian be a Monarchist? I think so -- and prominent British libertarian Sean Gabb seems to think so too! Long live the Queen! (And note that Australia ranks well above the USA on the Index of Economic freedom. Heh!)

Throughout Europe there is an association between monarchism and conservatism. It is a little sad that American conservatives do not have access to that satisfaction. So even though Australia is much more distant from Europe (geographically) than the USA is, Australia is in some ways more of an outpost of Europe than America is! Mind you: Australia is not very atypical of its region. Australia lies just South of Asia -- and both Japan and Thailand have greatly respected monarchies. And the demise of the Cambodian monarchy was disastrous for Cambodia

Throughout the world today, possession of a U.S. or U.K. passport is greatly valued. I once shared that view. Developments in recent years have however made me profoundly grateful that I am a 5th generation Australian. My Australian passport is a door into a much less oppressive and much less messed-up place than either the USA or Britain

Following the Sotomayor precedent, I would hope that a wise older white man such as myself with the richness of that experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than someone who hasn’t lived that life.

IQ and ideology: Most academics are Left-leaning. Why? Because very bright people who have balls go into business, while very bright people with no balls go into academe. I did both with considerable success, which makes me a considerable rarity. Although I am a born academic, I have always been good with money too. My share portfolio even survived the GFC in good shape. The academics hate it that bright people with balls make more money than them.

I have no hesitation in saying that the single book which has influenced me most is the New Testament. And my Scripture blog will show that I know whereof I speak. Some might conclude that I must therefore be a very confused sort of atheist but I can assure everyone that I do not feel the least bit confused. The New Testament is a lighthouse that has illumined the thinking of all sorts of men and women and I am deeply grateful that it has shone on me.

I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age. Conservatism is in touch with reality. Leftism is not.

I imagine that the RD are still sending mailouts to my 1950s address

Most teenagers have sporting and movie posters on their bedroom walls. At age 14 I had a map of Taiwan on my wall.

"Remind me never to get this guy mad at me" -- Instapundit

It seems to be a common view that you cannot talk informatively about a country unless you have been there. I completely reject that view but it is nonetheless likely that some Leftist dimbulb will at some stage aver that any comments I make about politics and events in the USA should not be heeded because I am an Australian who has lived almost all his life in Australia. I am reluctant to pander to such ignorance in the era of the "global village" but for the sake of the argument I might mention that I have visited the USA 3 times -- spending enough time in Los Angeles and NYC to get to know a fair bit about those places at least. I did however get outside those places enough to realize that they are NOT America.

"Intellectual" = Leftist dreamer. I have more publications in the academic journals than almost all "public intellectuals" but I am never called an intellectual and nor would I want to be. Call me a scholar or an academic, however, and I will accept either as a just and earned appellation


My academic background

My full name is Dr. John Joseph RAY. I am a former university teacher aged 65 at the time of writing in 2009. I was born of Australian pioneer stock in 1943 at Innisfail in the State of Queensland in Australia. I trace my ancestry wholly to the British Isles. After an early education at Innisfail State Rural School and Cairns State High School, I taught myself for matriculation. I took my B.A. in Psychology from the University of Queensland in Brisbane. I then moved to Sydney (in New South Wales, Australia) and took my M.A. in psychology from the University of Sydney in 1969 and my Ph.D. from the School of Behavioural Sciences at Macquarie University in 1974. I first tutored in psychology at Macquarie University and then taught sociology at the University of NSW. My doctorate is in psychology but I taught mainly sociology in my 14 years as a university teacher. In High Schools I taught economics. I have taught in both traditional and "progressive" (low discipline) High Schools. Fuller biographical notes here

I completed the work for my Ph.D. at the end of 1970 but the degree was not awarded until 1974 -- due to some academic nastiness from Seymour Martin Lipset and Fred Emery. A conservative or libertarian who makes it through the academic maze has to be at least twice as good as the average conformist Leftist. Fortunately, I am a born academic.

Despite my great sympathy and respect for Christianity, I am the most complete atheist you could find. I don't even believe that the word "God" is meaningful. I am not at all original in that view, of course. Such views are particularly associated with the noted German philosopher Rudolf Carnap. Unlike Carnap, however, none of my wives have committed suicide

Very occasionally in my writings I make reference to the greats of analytical philosophy such as Carnap and Wittgenstein. As philosophy is a heavily Leftist discipline however, I have long awaited an attack from some philosopher accusing me of making coat-trailing references not backed by any real philosophical erudition. I suppose it is encouraging that no such attacks have eventuated but I thought that I should perhaps forestall them anyway -- by pointing out that in my younger days I did complete three full-year courses in analytical philosophy (at 3 different universities!) and that I have had papers on mainstream analytical philosophy topics published in academic journals

As well as being an academic, I am an army man and I am pleased and proud to say that I have worn my country's uniform. Although my service in the Australian army was chiefly noted for its un-notability, I DID join voluntarily in the Vietnam era, I DID reach the rank of Sergeant, and I DID volunteer for a posting in Vietnam. So I think I may be forgiven for saying something that most army men think but which most don't say because they think it is too obvious: The profession of arms is the noblest profession of all because it is the only profession where you offer to lay down your life in performing your duties. Our men fought so that people could say and think what they like but I myself always treat military men with great respect -- respect which in my view is simply their due.

A real army story here

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day and there is JUST ONE saying of Hitler's that I rather like. It may not even be original to him but it is found in chapter 2 of Mein Kampf (published in 1925): "Widerstaende sind nicht da, dass man vor ihnen kapituliert, sondern dass man sie bricht". The equivalent English saying is "Difficulties exist to be overcome" and that traces back at least to the 1920s -- with attributions to Montessori and others. Hitler's metaphor is however one of smashing barriers rather than of politely hopping over them and I am myself certainly more outspoken than polite. Hitler's colloquial Southern German is notoriously difficult to translate but I think I can manage a reasonable translation of that saying: "Resistance is there not for us to capitulate to but for us to break". I am quite sure that I don't have anything like that degree of determination in my own life but it seems to me to be a good attitude in general anyway

I have used many sites to post my writings over the years and many have gone bad on me for various reasons. So if you click on a link here to my other writings you may get a "page not found" response if the link was put up some time before the present. All is not lost, however. All my writings have been reposted elsewhere. If you do strike a failed link, just take the filename (the last part of the link) and add it to the address of any of my current home pages and -- Voila! -- you should find the article concerned.

COMMENTS: I have gradually added comments facilities to all my blogs. The comments I get are interesting. They are mostly from Leftists and most consist either of abuse or mere assertions. Reasoned arguments backed up by references to supporting evidence are almost unheard of from Leftists. Needless to say, I just delete such useless comments.

You can email me here (Hotmail address). In emailing me, you can address me as "John", "Jon", "Dr. Ray" or "JR" and that will be fine -- but my preference is for "JR"




Index page for this site


DETAILS OF REGULARLY UPDATED BLOGS BY JOHN RAY:

"Tongue Tied"
"Dissecting Leftism" (Backup here)
"Australian Politics"
"Education Watch International"
"Political Correctness Watch"
"Greenie Watch"
"Food & Health Skeptic"
"Eye on Britain"
"Immigration Watch International" blog.


BLOGS OCCASIONALLY UPDATED:

"Marx & Engels in their own words"
"A scripture blog"
"Recipes"
"Some memoirs"
"Paralipomena"
To be continued ....
Queensland Police -- A barrel with lots of bad apples
Australian Police News
Of Interest


BLOGS NO LONGER BEING UPDATED

"Leftists as Elitists"
Socialized Medicine
Western Heart
OF INTEREST (2)
QANTAS -- A dying octopus
BRIAN LEITER (Ladderman)
Obama Watch
Obama Watch (2)
Dissecting Leftism -- Large font site
Michael Darby
The Kogarah Madhouse (St George Bank)
AGL -- A bumbling monster
Telstra/Bigpond follies
Optus bungling
Vodafrauds (vodafone)
Bank of Queensland blues


There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)



Main academic menu
Menu of recent writings
basic home page
Pictorial Home Page (Backup here).
Selected pictures from blogs (Backup here)
Another picture page (Best with broadband. Rarely updated)



Note: If the link to one of my articles is not working, the article concerned can generally be viewed by prefixing to the filename the following:
http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/42197/20121106-1520/jonjayray.comuv.com/