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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 |
The original of this mirror site is HERE. My Blogroll; Archives here or here; My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here. NOTE: The short comments that I have in the side column of the primary site for this blog are now given at the foot of this site.
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31 March, 2015
Obamacare blocks patients paying for treatment
Care can be denied 'even if patient is willing,' able to cover costs
A new report by the Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics at National Right to Life warns that one of the Obamacare provisions that ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Americans would discover if Congress passed the bill is that some seniors will not be allowed to spend as much as they wish on their health care.
The extreme position was revealed in a special report by the NRLC titled “The Affordable Care Act and Health Care Access in the United States,” which analyzes four fundamental policy areas of Obamacare.
It finds several ways that the federal health care law “will drastically limit access to life-saving medical treatment under the law.”
“These four areas include: the ‘excess benefit’ tax coming into effect in 2018, the current exclusion of adequate health insurance plans from the exchanges, present limits on senior citizens’ ability to use their own money for health insurance, and federal limits on the care doctors give their patients to be implemented as soon as 2016.”
Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, said that “for pro-life Americans concerned about the impact on innocent life – both born and unborn – the policies of Obamacare couldn’t be worse.”
“Americans are just as concerned with the law’s impact on our ability to access life-saving medical treatment for ourselves, our family members, and our loved ones as with Obamacare’s funding of abortions. Obamacare is bad medicine for America,” she said.
Pelosi famously said Congress should pass the law so Americans could find out what was in it, and its unpleasant surprises have been shocking citizens ever since.
The study finds, for example, that the “Independent Payment Advisory Board,” which starting next January is supposed to make “recommendations to slow the growth in national health expenditures,” will set “quality and efficiency” standards for hospitals and demand that doctors meet government minimums in order to contract with any qualified health insurance plan.
“Essentially, doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers can be told by Washington just what diagnostic tests and medical care are considered to meet ‘quality and efficiency’ standards. These standards will be enforced not just for health care paid for by federally funded programs like Medicare, but also for health care paid for by private citizens and by the health insurance they or their employers purchase,” the study explains.
“These standards are specifically designed to limit the funds that Americans may choose to spend on health care so that they cannot keep up with the rate of medical inflation. Treatment that a doctor and patient deem needed or advisable to save the patient’s life or preserve or improve the patient’s health, but which runs afoul of the imposed standards, can be denied, even if the patient is willing and able to pay for it,” the study warns.
The study says that means that Washington “bureaucrats” will set a national standard for care “that is designed to limit what private citizens are allowed to spend to save their own lives.”
“On its face, the law maintains that this limitation does not amount to ‘rationing.’ Indeed, the [law] states, ‘The proposal [by the IPAB] shall not include any recommendations to ration health care.’ … However, the law never actually defines what it means by the word ‘ration.’
“Obamacare authorizes federal bureaucrats to impose limits on what life-saving medical treatments Americans are allowed to get. It may not call this ‘rationing.’ But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t,” the report says.
The report addresses several other limits on life-saving care in Obamacare, including the 40 percent excise tax on some employer-paid premiums.
“Consequently, insurance companies will be forced to impose increasingly severe restraints on policy-holders’ access to medical diagnosis and treatment – limits that will make it hard to get often-expensive treatments essential to combating life-threatening illnesses.”
Third, “Under Obamacare, consumers using the exchanges may only choose plans offered by insurers who do not allow their customers to spend what government bureaucrats deem an ‘excessive or unjustified’ amount for their health insurance – regardless of whether the insurers offer such plans.”
And fourth, there are provisions “allowing Washington bureaucrats to prevent [senior citizens] from making up the Medicare shortfall with their own funds by limiting their right to spend their own money to obtain insurance less likely to limit treatments that could save their lives.”
Burke Balch, director of the Powell Center, said Obamacare “authorizes Washington bureaucrats to create one uniform, national standard of care that is designed to limit what private citizens are allowed to spend to save their own lives.”
“We are convinced most Americans do not believe that the government should limit the right of Americans to use their own money for health care necessary to save their lives. Yet, that is exactly what Obamacare does,” he said.
In the study, Dr. Marc Siegel warns that Obamacare is threatening the future of health care and, consequently, the lives of Americans.
“The kind of insurance that is growing under Obamacare’s fertilizer is the exact kind that was jeopardizing the quality of health care in the first place: the kind that pays for seeing a doctor when you are well, but where guidelines and regulations predominate and choice is restricted when you are seriously ill,” he said.
“How can quality of care not be affected if the antibiotic or statin drug or MRI scan I feel you need isn’t covered under your plan?”
Obamacare’s limits on Americans’ health care often is done through trickery, the report says.
The law says Health and Human Services can “negotiate” premiums to be charged by private Medicare plans, but the government had no power to impose a premium price control on private fee-for-service plans.
“Thus, under the law before Obamacare, senior citizens could choose, if they wished, to add extra money of their own on top of the government payment in order to get health insurance less likely to ration, and Washington bureaucrats could not limit their right to do this,” the report says.
But that’s changed. Obamacare has a new provision that says: “Nothing in this section shall be construed as requiring the secretary to accept any or every bid submitted by an MA organization under this subsection.”
“This means,” says the report, “that the pre-existing law that effectively forbade the secretary to exclude a private fee-for-service plan on the basis that CMS considers its premiums to be too high has been trumped by the new ability of the secretary to reject ‘any or every’ premium bid submitted by a private fee-for-service plan.
“Thus, under Obamacare, Washington bureaucrats are given the authority to limit – or even eliminate – senior citizens’ ability, if they choose, to spend their own money on health insurance less likely to ration.”
SOURCE
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Government medicine
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The NAACP's Fomenters of Fear
They just can't help themselves — and their agenda-driven media enablers never, ever learn
This week, the NAACP made national front-page headlines with a local press release demanding that the feds investigate the hanging death of a local man in Port Gibson, Miss. Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP Mississippi State Conference, immediately invoked the specter of a "hate crime." In response, the Obama Justice Department flooded the zone with a whopping 30 federal agents.
News outlets grabbed the bait. USA Today asked ominously: "Was it a lynching?" The discovery of ex-con Otis Byrd's body swinging from a tree by a bed sheet "brought back unpleasant memories of America's violent, racially charged past," the paper's video reporter asserted. Voice of America similarly intoned: "Mississippi hanging death raises lynching specter." The Los Angeles Times leaped into the fray with: "Why this story haunts the nation."
Whoa there, teeth-gnashing Nellies. Didn't we just recently witness the implosion of an NAACP-incited non-hate crime with the same exact narrative? Why, yes. Yes, we did.
As I reported in January, the group was here in my adopted hometown of Colorado Springs hyping a so-called "bombing" at the city's chapter office. Local, state and federal NAACP leaders, amplified by political and media sympathizers, claimed the alleged hate crime "remind(ed) me of another period" (Georgia Democratic Rep. John Lewis); "undermines years of progress" (Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee); "harkens to bad old days" (MSNBC); and "evokes memories of civil rights strife" (Time magazine).
But the allegedly racist perpetrator of the "NAACP bombing" turned out to be a disgruntled client of a now-deceased tax accountant who once worked in the same office complex. The financially troubled suspect had unsuccessfully tried to contact the tax preparer for years to obtain past tax returns. But unbeknownst to the "bomber," who set off a pathetic improvised explosive device on the opposite side of the NAACP office, the accountant had been sent to prison for bilking other clients — and had passed away several years ago.
Confirming what only a few of us in the media dared to theorize out loud, race had absolutely nothing to do with the wildly inflated and cynically exploited incident in Colorado Springs. Zip, zero, nada.
None of this appears to have chastened the journalists who reflexively empower the NAACP agitators who reflexively cry racism. Just weeks after the not-NAACP bombing, here they are stoking fears of a probably-not-racist-not-lynching. Despite law enforcement reports that Byrd's hands were unbound, despite warnings from the local sheriff (who happens to be black) not to jump to conclusions, and despite the very real possibility that Byrd committed suicide, the papers and airwaves disseminated Blame Whitey and Blame Righty talking points without thinking twice.
The incident indeed "brought back memories" for me — memories of the embarrassing 1996 media malpractice of former USA Today reporter Gary Fields, who manufactured a purported epidemic of racist church-burnings in the South with 61 hysterical stories. A typical and familiar headline: "Arson at Black Church Echoes Bigotry of the Past." The NAACP jumped onboard and demanded that then-Attorney General Janet Reno investigate. President Clinton fanned the flames; panels were formed; federal spending programs were passed. But a year later, Fields' own paper was forced to admit that "analysis of the 64 fires since 1995 shows only four can be conclusively shown to be racially motivated."
Several of the crimes had been committed by black suspects; a significant number of the black churches were in fact white churches; and the Chicken Littles had obscured numerous complex motives including mental illness, vandalism and concealment of theft.
Same old, same old. Then, as now, for publicity and profit, the race hustlers stoke the very societal divisiveness they claim to abhor — and knee-jerk journalists suffering institutional amnesia aid and abet them.
SOURCE
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There are crooks everywhere
With a critical vote on a tax-incentive package looming, Indianapolis-based Angie's List has been hit with another class-action lawsuit, the company's third in four years. And unlike past allegations, this complaint cuts to the heart of the company's chief selling point: the trustworthiness of its consumer reviews.
Filed March 11 in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, the lawsuit alleges that Angie's, an online consumer review service, manipulates company ratings that are sold to its subscribers as impartial user reviews.
It does so, the lawsuit claims, by giving paid advertisers preferential treatment, such as boosting their visibility on the site and suppressing negative reviews.
"Angie's List does not help members find the 'best' service provider, but rather the one who paid the most money to Angie's List," the complaint says. "This certainly is not 'always placing the interests of the consumer first,' " as the company says in its public filings.
Debra DeCourcy, an Angie's spokeswoman, said it is company policy not to comment on pending litigation. The company's lawyers have not yet filed a response in court.
The lawsuit was brought by Pennsylvania resident Janell Moore, an Angie's member since 2012, according to court documents. Moore says she relied on Angie's reviews in 2014 to hire a remodeling contractor who didn't finish the work and refused to refund her $4,000.
According to the lawsuit, when she tried to file a negative review, she learned from an Angie's employee that other subscribers had given the contractor bad reviews as well — only they didn't show up on the site. The suit claims that's because Angie's suppresses bad reviews of paid advertisers by hiding them or not counting them toward the companies' A-F rating.
Advertising has become a substantial source of revenue for the company, dwarfing that of subscriptions, according to its annual reports. The company made $241.9 million from service providers in 2014 vs. $73.1 million from members.
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, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.
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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30 March, 2015
Are people who distrust troublesome minorities wrong in the head?
I would have thought it obvious that people who TRUST troublesome minorities are wrong in the head -- but I am just a cautious old conservative so I guess my views don't count in the fairytale world of Left-dominated academe.
The New York Times does push the view that people who distrust troublesome minorities are wrong in the head. But they do so amid such a flood of words that is difficult to pin down any clear claims. I am referring to the article "The Brain’s Empathy Gap" of March 19, 2015. It was so difficult to pin down any clear assertions in it that I initially gave up any attempt to write some sort of critique of it. Answering it seemed like doing battle with a giant marshmallow. So, initially, I simply referred readers to what the excellent Steve Sailer had to say about it. I do think however that I have a few things to add to Steve's comments so I am going to tackle the challenge after all.
The article moves from stories about gypsies in Romania to a disquisition on brain scanning and then back to stories about gypsies in Romania. Romania is a poor country and Romanian gypsies are apparently the poorest of the poor. And it's all caused by "discrimination", of course. The jump between brain scans and Romanian gypsies is rather startling -- but whatever floats your boat, I guess.
What the brain scans showed were some clear patterns but the article itself admits that interpreting such patters is still speculative. Here is a typical sentence from the article:
"And in both groups, a small region of the brain, the medial precuneus, which may be associated with the theory-of-mind network, responded more strongly"
And it also may be associated with airborne pork, I guess. I have been writing about such scans for some time and, at least among Leftist writers, they seem to be little more that a Rorschach Ink Blot test: What you see in the thing before you tells us more about you than it tells about the display before you. The NYT writer, Jeneen Interlandi, who is said to be a frequent contributor to the NYT magazine, soldiers on anyhow and proceeds to interpret the brain scans. She relies on some work by Emile Bruneau of MIT. It was he who found the enigmatic patterns in brain scans.
It was however an anomaly in the brain scans that caused the excitement. Three Israeli peace activists showed scans similar to Arabs. I can't imagine any Israeli being surprised by that but surprise it apparently did. The article goes on quite rightly to concede that the non-random and tiny sample precludes any generalizations from the findings but then goes on to make some mushy generalizations anyhow
When we get back to the gypsies there is a reasonably fair account of how the gypsies are in part the authors of their own problems. Their high level of petty crime and their unsavoury lifestyle are repellent to other Romanians. And the article admits that government programs designed to uplift the Gypsies have failed. We also read however that "racial prejudice was thwarting efforts to assimilate the Roma" -- where "Roma" is the politically correct word for Gypsy.
And, despite all its admissions, the article ends with a claim that by studying people's brain scans we might somehow be able to see where all that nasty prejudice is coming from and stop it -- presumanbly by sending the people with "bad" brain scans to Siberia or some such. That the main problem with gypsies is their known very low IQ is not of course mentioned. Leftists often give me cause to point out pachyderms in rooms.
And a final point I would like to make is that in elite thinking both inside and outside traditional gypsy lands, gypsies have long been appreciated. Despite their general intellectual limitations, many gypsies are brilliant musicians and their music is a substantial source of income for them. It is undoubtedly a rather eerie talent. There have been accounts of gypsies graduating from high-level music schools without being able to read a note of staff notation. They just memorize everything.
And in classical music circles, there have been many expressions of admiration for gypsies by reason of their musical talent. In the most famous opera of all time -- "Carmen" -- the leading lady is a gypsy, and she is certainly portrayed with overall admiration. And the gypsy lifestyle is also portrayed as admirable. And another well-known opera is "La Boheme", where "Boheme" is a French term for a gypsy. And the "Bohemian" lady is treated sympathetically there too. And in Lehar's operetta Zigeunerliebe, the gypsy lifestyle is again admired. And Kalman's operetta Graefin Maritza is one extended hymn of praise for gypsy music. And Kalman was a Hungarian -- and Hungary has a substantial population of Gypsies -- so it is unlikely that he had any illusions about them.
You can see the Moerbisch performance of Graefin Maritza online here. It's infinitely more entertaining than the NYT and the expressive Dagmar Schellenberger in the title role is a pleasure to watch and hear. She is both a most accomplished soprano and a superb actress.
So I would argue that in elite European opinion at least there has been much favourable disposition towards gypsies. That gypsies have been unable to parlay the favourable disposition towards them into any general uplift at all suggests that their own limitations are the problem -- rather than something bad in the heads of others.
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Are there at the moment worse enemies than Iran?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
The forces that do not want a U.S. nuclear deal with Iran, nor any U.S. detente with Iran, are impressive.
Among them are the Israelis and their powerful lobby AIPAC, the Saudis and their Sunni allies on the Persian Gulf, a near unanimity of Republicans and a plurality of Democrats in Congress.
Is there a case to be made for a truce in the venomous conflict that has gone on between us since the taking of U.S. hostages in 1979? Is there any common ground?
To both questions, President Obama and John Kerry believe the answer is yes. And they are not without an argument.
First, the alternative to a truce — breaking off of negotiations, doubling down on demands Iran dismantle all nuclear facilities, tougher sanctions — inevitably leads to war. And we all know it.
Yet Americans do not want another war in the Middle East, with a nation three times the size of Iraq, and its allies across the region.
Nor can Iran want such a war. Had the ayatollahs and mullahs wanted it, they could have had a war with the United States at any time in the third of a century since they seized power.
Yet as Ronald Reagan was taking the oath in 1981, our hostages were suddenly on their way home. With the accidental shoot-down of an Iranian Airbus by the cruiser Vincennes in 1988, the Ayatollah ended his war with Saddam Hussein, fearful the Americans were about to intervene on the side of Iraq.
Why Iran wants to avoid war is obvious. Given U.S. air, missile and naval power, and cyberwarfare capabilities, a war with the United States would do to Iran what we did to Iraq, smash it up, set it back decades, perhaps break up the country.
Some mullahs may be fanatics, but Iran is not run by fools.
Yet even if we have a mutual interest in avoiding a war, where is the common ground between us?
Let us begin with the Sunni terrorists of al-Qaida who brought down the twin towers, and the Islamic State that is beheading Christians, apostates, and nonbelievers, and intends to establish a Middle East caliphate where there are no Americans, no Christians, and no Shiites.
Americans and Iranians have a common goal of degrading and defeating them.
In the Syrian civil war, Iran and its Shiite allies in Hezbollah have prevented the fall of the Alawite regime of Bashar Assad.
For years, Iran has helped to keep the al-Nusra Front and ISIL out of Damascus.
When the Islamic State seized Mosul and most of Anbar, the Iranians helped to rally Shiite resistance to defend Baghdad, and are now assisting the Iraqi army in its effort to recapture Tikrit.
Until this week, the U.S. stayed out, as Shiite militias were mauled by fewer than 1,000 jihadis. Wednesday, however, we intervened with air power, thus exposing Iraq's reliance on us.
This does not contradict but rather reinforces the point. In the war to expel the Islamic State from Iraq, we and Iran are on the same side.
Does Iran wish to displace American influence in Baghdad?
Undeniably. But when we destroyed the Sunni Baathist regime of Saddam, disbanded his army and held elections, we greased the skids for a pro-Iranian Shiite regime. We can't walk that cat back.
Consider Yemen.
This week, the Saudis sent their air force against the Houthi rebels who had seized the capital of Sanaa, driven out the president, and have now driven south to Aden to take over half of the country.
Why is the Saudi air force attacking the Houthis?
The Houthis belong to a sect close to the Shiite and are supported by Iran. Yet the Houthis, who bear no love for us, began this war to expel al-Qaida from Yemen. And their hatred for ISIS is surely greater than it is for us or Israel, as, last week, 137 of their co-religionists were massacred in two mosque bombings in Sanaa. ISIS claimed credit.
In summary, though the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Shiite militia in Iraq, Iran, Hezbollah, and the Alawite regime of Assad may not love us, they look on al-Qaida and ISIS as mortal enemies. And, thus far, they alone have seemed willing to send troops to defeat them.
Where are the Turkish, Saudi, Kuwaiti or Qatari troops?
During World War II, the U.S. Navy and Merchant Marine shipped tanks, guns and munitions to a Soviet Union that was doing most of the fighting and suffering most of the casualties in the war against Hitler.
No matter all the "Uncle Joe" drivel at Tehran and Yalta, we were never true friends or allies, and shared nothing in common with the monster Stalin, save Hitler's defeat.
If President Nixon could toast Mao Zedong, can we not deal with Ayatollah Khamenei?
SOURCE
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Congress Asserts Itself in Iran Dealings
As Barack Obama races headlong toward whatever nuclear deal he can get with Iran, Congress has repeatedly reminded the former college lecturer and “constitutional scholar” that the Constitution does not grant him divine powers – that he is not an emperor, but merely the head of the executive branch of government. That same Constitution charges the Senate to approve or reject foreign treaties through its advice and consent role. And the Congress as a whole is the sole authority for passing legislation, including the legislation that put U.S. sanctions in place against Iran in recent years. Obama’s disdain for our system of checks and balances is well documented, and his “trust me” approach to the Iran negotiations is simply more proof of it.
Finally, it appears that both congressional chambers and both parties have had enough. Three recent events demonstrate the legislative branch’s distrust of the executive when it comes to a deal with Iran.
First, it was 47 Republican senators and their open letter to Iran, making clear that any non-binding deal could be negated at a moment’s notice by a future president. Because of the letter’s 100% Republican backing, it was easy for Obama and his fellow travelers to dismiss its authors as partisans and even “traitors.” As we said at the time, the letter would have been better addressed to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue than to Iran, but it was a significant and perfectly legal warning shot all the same.
Then, earlier this week, 367 members of the House, from both sides of the aisle, signed a letter to Barack Obama reminding His Eminence that Congress enacted sanctions on Iran and any relief of those sanctions as part of a deal would require new legislation – not just a wave of his hand. With a veto-proof majority of House members signing this letter, it will be impossible to spin as partisan politics, although we fully expect Obama and his sycophants to try.
Finally, on Thursday, the Senate unanimously endorsed an amendment to its budget that would make it easier to restore sanctions if Iran is caught cheating again. We repeat, a unanimous, 100-0, un-spinnable, no wiggle-room vote of the entire Senate.
California’s Barbara Boxer, not generally known as a foreign policy hawk, endorsed the amendment, saying, “I hope we can all vote for this because it doesn’t do anything to cause disarray in the negotiations. What it says is if there is a deal and there’s a break-out by Iran, we’d have a very quick way to restore sanctions.” The vote was held by roll call at the insistence of Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) and thus puts all 100 senators on record in favor of the amendment.
It’s unfortunate that the White House and Congress are having this food fight during such a critical moment in U.S. foreign policy, but Obama has only himself to blame. His treatment of Congress, his record of lies and his “we have to get a deal before we share the details” approach have finally exceeded the limits of congressional goodwill. It remains to be seen if Obama will press ahead anyway, but Congress has now drawn its own line in the sand. Let’s hope they stick to it.
SOURCE
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Saudis Clean Up Obama's 'Success' in Yemen
Remember when Yemen was a model of success for Barack Obama’s foreign policy? That’s what he called it last September before the Yemeni government fell to Iranian backed rebels. Among other things, U.S. intelligence in the region is seriously compromised after having had to pull its personnel from the country. Undeterred by this dramatic change in events, however, Obama still insists Yemen is a great example of a “successful counterterrorism strategy.”
After learning earlier this month about Saudi Arabia’s efforts to counter Iran’s nuclear ambitions through a deal with South Korea, we now know the Saudis are countering Tehran on another front: They’re leading a counterattack against Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen.
On Wednesday, the kingdom made it official, leading a coalition of at least 10 allied nations with airstrikes against its southern neighbor, reserving ground troops as needed. The U.S. is playing a small role, with a Joint Planning Cell to provide military and intelligence support.
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.
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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29 March, 2015
Christian identification with Israel
I went to a hymn-singing service at Wynnum Presbyterian church yesterday. I am deeply moved by music and hymns are meant to be moving so I love to hear and sing the great old Protestant hymns.
A famous hymn that I enjoyed was "Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah", sung to the marvellous "Cwm Rhondda" tune. It's been sung on many great occasions in England. Here it is being sung on a very great British occasion indeed. The last verse of it is below. At the link you can hear that verse sung by everybody who is anybody in Britain:
When I tread the verge of Jordan,
Bid my anxious fears subside;
Death of death and hell’s Destruction,
Land me safe on Canaan’s side.
Songs of praises, songs of praises,
I will ever give to Thee;
I will ever give to Thee.
So the identification with the Children of Israel is deep into Christian culture. God's gift of the land of Irael to the Jews is equated with salvation. For Christians not to love Israel makes them very dubious Christians indeed
Secular people sometimes say that the Jews of today are totally different from the people who came up out of Egypt -- but to say that is to disbelieve all the promises that the Lord made to the Children of Israel. Only pseudo-Christians or unbelievers could say that. There are however a lot of pseuds around.
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Gentrify!
No matter what you do, modern liberals will tell you you’re wrong.
For decades, liberals complained that American society is segregated because rich, white people don’t want to live in ethnically mixed neighborhoods. Sometimes, liberals had a point.
From the 1930s to 1960s, as rich white people moved into New York City, urban planner Robert Moses got city bureaucrats to condemn and destroy busy black neighborhoods. The city called the neighborhoods “blighted” and moved many of the poor into rent-subsidized apartment complexes called “projects.” Many quickly became slums.
Now times have changed. Some rich, white people want to move into poorer, non-white neighborhoods because they like diversity (and cheaper real estate). So today the newcomers are attacked by liberals because they cause “gentrification.”
Movie director Spike Lee, who lives in Brooklyn, said gentrifiers behave almost like “Columbus and kill off the Native Americans.” Of course, the new gentrifiers don’t actually kill anyone, but because their arrival often leads to rising real estate values, critics complain that they drive poor people out of the neighborhood.
Two women in Brooklyn got so angry about it, they pulled out a gun, forced two white people out of an apartment and moved in (they were later arrested).
Columbia urban planning professor Stacey Sutton calls gentrification a “manifestation of inequality” that may “fundamentally alter the culture and character of the neighborhood” in ways that hurt the poor.
Yet her own school did something worse. Columbia colluded with politicians to use eminent domain law to take pieces of the Harlem neighborhood that surrounds Columbia. In court, the school argued that it had the right to take neighbors' land because it would “benefit West Harlem.”
Who owns the land is something that ought to be decided not by government but by free people making their own decisions about where they wish to live. When gentrification happens that way, spontaneously, price rises are often accompanied by drops in crime, new job opportunities and better connections to the rest of the culture. What the left calls “gentrification” is often called “improvement” by people who live there.
Another Columbia urban planning professor, Lance Freeman, found to his surprise that gentrification didn’t even mean significant displacement of the previous population. In his book “There Goes the ‘Hood,” Freeman writes, “poor residents and those without a college education were actually less likely to move if they resided in gentrifying neighborhoods.”
That’s because gentrification often means the neighborhood gets safer and more interesting. That’s something the old residents enjoy as much as new ones.
The Economist reports that a 2008 study of census data found “no evidence of displacement of low-income non-white households in gentrifying neighborhoods” and found that black incomes “soared” in gentrifying neighborhoods.
That doesn’t stop some people – often rich, white liberals – from complaining that gentrification destroys the quaintness of the neighborhood. They sound almost like the people who think that the developing world should never be sullied by modern technology. Actually, sometimes the same people make both arguments.
In San Francisco, some longtime residents got so angry about Google employees moving in that they surrounded Google employee shuttle buses, waving protest signs.
It’s a fight between hippies and tech geeks, with the hippies calling for regulations to prevent change. Such regulations have perverse effects, however. They lead to long waits for building permits and subsidies for housing that end up getting used by the well-connected and rich.
When regulation makes it harder to build or to alter old buildings, the effect is higher costs and reduced choices, which only makes things harder for the poor. Regulation saves some old things people like, but those people will never even know what new things they missed out on.
If nothing like gentrification ever happened in the world, we all still would be living in the same caves our ancestors lived in thousands of years ago. I say, let free people keep transforming the neighborhood.
SOURCE
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Washington, DC, Comics: Dr. Ignoro vs. Bibi
White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough recently spoke to J Street, a left-wing organization that fancies itself the headquarters of the tough-love-for-Israel crowd. J Street’s critics would phrase it a bit differently. In a charitable mood, they’d say J Street is all about loving Israel to death.
Regardless, J Street is the perfect think tank for the Obama administration to get its message out. Which is why McDonough was there to deliver harsh criticism of Israel and to signal that the U.S., under President Obama at least, will not be as reliable an ally to Israel as it once was, particularly at the United Nations.
The ostensible reason for the breakdown in relations is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won re-election by saying things the White House didn’t like. Specifically, Netanyahu said that there would not be a two-state solution on his watch if he were re-elected. Netanyahu’s point was merely that given the current circumstances in the Middle East and the disastrous experience of handing Gaza to Hamas, it’s unlikely we’d see a two state solution anytime soon. But even if you were inclined to read something more nefarious into his remarks, Netanyahu has since modified – or “walked back,” as they say in diplomatic circles – his statement.
Too bad, says the White House. Bibi said what he said. “We cannot simply pretend that those comments were never made,” McDonough told the crowd at J Street.
There’s nothing in the news accounts about whether the J Street audience burst into laughter or even if McDonough intended this as a laugh line. But intentional or not, it is hilarious.
For if there is one thing we know about Obama, it is this: He is very good at ignoring things he wants to ignore. If he were a superhero, he might be The Ignorator or perhaps Dr. Ignoro, complete with a cape, a giant “I” on his chest and his signature blinders blocking out all the inconvenient bits of life.
While the White House claims that it cannot pretend Netanyahu didn’t make those remarks, it has no problem playing make-believe with comments from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (currently serving out the 10th year of his four-year term), who has repeatedly said the Palestinians will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Abbas, who literally has a Ph.D. in Holocaust denial, is what counts as a Palestinian moderate. Nonetheless, he formed a unity government with Hamas, the terrorist group openly determined to slaughter the Israelis.
But such facts are no match for Obama’s limitless powers to pretend away annoying details. Why, just last week, Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, responded to chants of “Death to America” by saying, “Of course, yes, death to America.” The White House is pretending he didn’t make such comments. And when the administration gets a deal with the Iranians on their nuclear program, the president will take it to the U.N., not the Senate, because ignoring Congress – and the Constitution – is simply what he does on days that end with “y.”
Barely six months ago, Obama cited Yemen as a great example of how successful his counterterrorism approach is. This week, as Yemen spiraled toward civil war and American military forces fled, Obama went golfing, ignoring the whole mess. (For Dr. Ignoro, the golf course is like his Batcave or Fortress of Solitude).
When his own advisers, military and civilian, warned Obama that fully bugging out of Iraq would be calamitous, leaving a vacuum for terrorists and Iranian meddling, the president ignored the advice and pretended everything was fine.
When a reporter for The New Yorker asked him about the Islamic State gobbling up Iraq, Obama explained why they should be ignored: They’re just a “jayvee team,” he said.
Obama is at his best when ignoring his own comments. His “red lines” are drawn in disappearing ink as far as he’s concerned. Twenty-two times Obama said he didn’t have the authority to unilaterally legalize immigrants. He did it anyway. You can keep your doctor and your insurance, he said – before he stopped saying it.
So the notion this White House can’t pretend Netanyahu didn’t say what he said is simply hilarious, particularly given that what Netanyahu has said isn’t what the White House is pretending to hear.
Of course, no informed person believes the White House is angry about how Netanyahu won re-election. It’s angry that he was re-elected at all (unsurprising, given that Obama’s political allies worked to oust him). Obama detests Netanyahu and is letting that animosity poison a strategic alliance. He is making that choice while pretending he isn’t. That’s what he does
SOURCE
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Israel’s Leftist Losers
For thousands of years the Jews dreamed of reclaiming their country. The left had another dream.
It dreamed of a country run by bureaucrats that worked only three days a week. It dreamed of unions running monopolies that worked whenever they liked and charged whatever they wanted. It dreamed of children raised on collective farms without parents and of government as a Socialist café debate.
Most of all it dreamed of a country without conservatives. It still hasn't gotten that wish.
Netanyahu's victory hit hardest in Tel Aviv where, as Haaretz, the paper of the left, reports, "Leftist, secular Tel Aviv went to sleep last night cautiously optimistic only to wake up this morning in a state of utter and absolute devastation."
Tel Aviv is ground zero for any Iranian nuclear attack. Its population density makes it an obvious target and Iran threatened it just last month. A nuclear strike on Tel Aviv would not only kill a lot of Israelis, it would also wipe out the country's left.
Haifa and Tel Aviv are the only major cities in Israel that the left won in this election. And it was a close thing in traditionally "Red Haifa" whose union dockworkers these days are Middle Eastern Jews who vote right. The left took a quarter of the vote in Haifa to a fifth for Netanyahu's conservative Likud party.
In Tel Aviv however, the Labor coalition and Meretz, the two major leftist parties, took nearly half of the vote. Amos Oz's daughter told Haaretz that everyone in the left had been upbeat because everyone they knew was voting for the left. Now the leftist elite is once again forced to come to terms with the tragedy that much of the country doesn't want to hand over land to terrorists, live on a communal farm or turn over the country to Marc Rich's lawyer and his American backers who make Slim-Fast and KIND bars.
There are however days when they think Israel might be better off without certain parts of Tel Aviv.
The left doesn't want a country. It wants a Berkeley food co-op. It wants a city with some ugly modernist architecture. It wants a campus with courses on media studies and gender in geography. It wants an arcade where unwashed lefties can tunelessly strum John Lennon songs on their vintage guitars. It wants cafes with Russian Futurist prints on the walls. It wants to be about excited about political change. Its only use for Israel was as a utopian theme park.
Its allegiance was not to Jewish history or democracy, but to its crackpot leftist fantasies. Now its fantasies are dead and it wants to kill Israel.
The left spitefully alienated every immigrant group from Holocaust survivors to Middle Eastern Jews to Russian Jews. It also had slurs for each of them. The Holocaust survivors were ‘Sabon' (soap) and the Middle Eastern Jewish refugees were ‘Chakhchakhim'. That particular slur at an election rally cost Peres and Labor the 1981 election. Another slur at an election rally now hurt the left and boosted Netanyahu. But if you ask the left why it lost, it will blame Israeli racism.
The Israeli left slurred Middle Eastern Jews as "primitives" and used them as cheap labor to maintain the Kibbutz collectivist lifestyle until they stood up for themselves and the experiment in ‘equality' ended. It slurred Russian immigrants as "prostitutes", Settlers in '67 Israel as "bloodsuckers" and Ultra-Orthodox as "parasites".
Netanyahu's likely coalition will lean heavily on parties that draw their support from Middle Eastern Jews, Settlers, Russian Jews and the Ultra-Orthodox. These groups are also known as the majority of the country. That's why the left lost. Again.
The left wants its clubhouse back and it can't get it back. Demographics and immigration turned the ideal Israeli leftist, a wealthy secular Ashkenazi urbanite from an important family, into a minority. The only reason the left still exists is because its phantom Apartheid State of media outlets, courts and academics still maintains a death grip on the system.
The other reason that the Israeli left exists is that its malicious oppression of new immigrants splintered them into warring groups, much as the Democratic Party's Tammany Hall did in the United States. The left couldn't own them, but it did set them against each other in order to maintain a dysfunctional political system in which the strongest form of central authority comes from an unelected judiciary.
The left hasn't managed to conquer Israel, but it has succeeded in dividing it. Every new group of immigrants has been indoctrinated, not with allegiance to the left (that was a lost cause early on) but with resentment of each other. The Russian Jews are told that they live badly because of the Ultra-Orthodox Jews. The Middle Eastern Jews are told that they live badly because of the Russian Jews. The Ultra-Orthodox are told that they live badly because of the Settlers. There's plenty of overlap between these groups, but the tactic still works well enough for the left to stay in the game.
The real Apartheid State in Israel is this Deep State of the left. It's the one you see on display when former heads of the Mossad and Shabak denounce Israel and Netanyahu. It's in the phony media polls and exit polls that were skewed in favor of the left. It's in the candidacy of a cretin like Herzog with his high voice and his old guard last name promising to do whatever Obama and the left tell him to do. The left tried to sell Herzog, the errand boy for international leftist criminals like Marc Rich and Octav Botnar, as the future of Israel. The public never bought it.
The left has no leadership. It has nothing to offer. It has no reason to exist except malice and spite.
More HERE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.
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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27 March, 2015
The latest IQ study
The latest IQ study (below) has a slightly defensive air. Despite ferocious efforts by Leftists to suppress findings that pop the bubble of Leftist claims, it seems that the genetic contribution to IQ has now become well-known and generally accepted. So the effort nowadays seems to have moved towards proving that there are environmental influences too. Previous IQ researchers have never doubted that and usually estimate that around one third of IQ is determined by environmental factors.
And the conclusions below disturb nothing. Both genetic and environmental influences on IQ were found. The main interest of the findings in this study therefore is *how much* influence environment had. The researchers report that a wealthy childhood environment gave the kid an extra 4 points of IQ -- about a quarter of a standard deviation -- over a kid brought up in a poor family.
If anything, that figure is perhaps a bit low. But the study is not a strong one anyhow. It used adopted full-brothers rather than twins so genetic differences could be only roughly controlled for. And assessing IQ in the late teens is not optimal either. The influence of genetics is not fully revealed until about age 30 -- after the influence of early environmental factors has largely worn off.
Family environment and the malleability of cognitive ability: A Swedish national home-reared and adopted-away cosibling control study
By Kenneth S. Kendler et al.
Significance
Individual differences in cognitive ability result from a complex admixture of genetic and environmental influences. Adopted children are one way to estimate the degree of malleability of cognitive ability in response to environmental change in the context of a scientific design that can control for genetic differences among individuals. Sibling pairs in which one member is adopted away and the other reared by biological parents are a particularly powerful research design. In a large population-based sample of separated siblings from Sweden, we demonstrate that adoption into improved socioeconomic circumstances is associated with a significant advantage in IQ at age 18. We replicate the finding in a parallel sample of half-siblings.
Abstract
Cognitive ability strongly aggregates in families, and prior twin and adoption studies have suggested that this is the result of both genetic and environmental factors. In this study, we used a powerful design—home-reared and adopted-away cosibling controls—to investigate the role of the rearing environment in cognitive ability. We identified, from a complete national Swedish sample of male–male siblings, 436 full-sibships in which at least one member was reared by one or more biological parents and the other by adoptive parents. IQ was measured at age 18–20 as part of the Swedish military service conscription examination. Parental educational level was rated on a 5-point scale. Controlling for clustering of offspring within biological families, the adopted siblings had an IQ 4.41 (SE = 0.75) points higher than their nonadopted siblings. Each additional unit of rearing parental education was associated with 1.71 (SE = 0.44) units of IQ. We replicated these results in 2,341 male–male half-sibships, in which, controlling for clustering within families, adoption was associated with a gain of IQ of 3.18 (SE = 0.34) points. Each additional unit of rearing parental education was associated with 1.94 (SE = 0.18) IQ units. Using full- and half-sibling sets matched for genetic background, we found replicated evidence that (i) rearing environment affects IQ measured in late adolescence, and (ii) a portion of the IQ of adopted siblings could be explained by the educational level of their adoptive parents.
SOURCE
Interesting that one of the co-authors above is Eric Turkheimer. Turkheimer is much loved on the left for his demonstration -- using a group of poor 7-year olds -- that genetics is not an important determinant of IQ among poor kids -- where "poor kids" is probably rightly interpreted to mean "blacks".
Turkheimer
What he found was probably little more than a restriction of range effect but he has repeatedly refused to release his raw data so we may never know. Refusing to release raw data is a breach of all scientific protocols. We see it in Warmist researchers too. It is pretty close to an admission of fraud.
The reason Leftists hate IQ tests is that they contradict the Leftist "equality" creed. The application of that creed to blacks is however relatively recent. Introductory psychology textbooks in the early '60s presented the black IQ findings without hesitation. I remember it well. It was presented as one of the accepted findings in psychology. As the great fantasy revolution of the '60s rolled on however, fact came to be replaced by righteous indignation. The fantasists said that blacks COULD NOT be less intelligent so therefore the tests were bunk.
Equality has always been a silly but seductive dream. It goes at least as far back as the "Levellers" of Cromwell's time. And the Cromwellian era was undoubtedly much loved among America's founding fathers. So Jefferson's "created equal" phrase in the Declaration of Independence is no surprise. But it is a pretty foggy phrase. Are there many acts of creation or is normal childbirth an act of creation? Or is it meant that God created Adam in such a way that all his descendants would be equal? If so "The Fall" has clearly disrupted that intention.
But we should not take that part of the Declaration too seriously, however. The Declaration, like most political documents, was a product of much debate and compromise so Jefferson's ambiguous phrase was just a device to keep happy both those with Leveller beliefs and those with more realistic beliefs.
However you look at it, however, equality is a faith-based belief, not a fact. It has no basis in fact. Rejection of IQ tests is therefore a faith-based act. And the low average IQ scores of blacks are in fact powerful validation of the tests as measures of intelligence.
From the test results we would hypothesize that blacks would be at the bottom of just about every heap -- and they are -- in income, education, status, health, lifespan and crime-incidence etc. What we know of black behaviour is powerful PROOF that the tests get it right. Leftists can only reject the tests by closing their eyes to black behaviour. But they are very good at that
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Why Is This Distinction So Difficult to Grasp?
Here’s a letter to the Washington Post by economist Donald J. Boudreaux:
It’s disappointing that Michael Gerson joins the crowd of confused people who mistake inequality for poverty (“The effects of inequality on America’s kids,” March 17). An unequal distribution of income does not mean that people at the bottom of the distribution are poor in any absolute sense. And in a world such as ours in which the amount of total wealth grows over time, everyone can become wealthier - indeed, become fabulously rich - even if income inequality increases.
It’s important to keep in mind the distinction between inequality and poverty. To confuse the two (as is common today) risks addressing the wrong malady. Just as we do not blame a cancer victim’s suffering on an unequal distribution of good health - that is, just as we recognize that a cancer victim’s illness is not caused by the good health of others and cannot be cured by making healthy people less healthy - we should recognize that a poor person’s poverty is not caused by the prosperity of others and cannot be cured by making wealthy people less wealthy. Indeed, recent research suggests that simply transferring more money to relatively poor people in rich societies does not provide much relief; poverty persists for reasons that run far more deeply than the fact that some people earn more income than do others.
SOURCE
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Israel Climbs the Ladder of Economic Freedom to Prosperity
In terms of skills and education, Israel probably has the highest level of human capital per person in the whole world. Yet it’s per capita output is mediocre – in the middle of the developed country pack. Why is that? Because Israel has been slow to adopt capitalism.
How do I know that? Because Bibi Netanyahu told me that in an interview in Dallas, several years before he became prime minister. Once he became Israel’s leader, he was been able to do something about it.
In recent years Israel has become a center for entrepreneurship, innovation and capitalist spirit. But it wasn’t always that way. Modern Israel began as a quasi-socialist society with a centrally controlled economy and a Histadrut labor federation. The Histadrut became a mainstay of the Labor Zionist movement and it wasn’t merely a trade union. It owned a number of businesses and, for a time, was the largest employer in the country. Until Israel began moving away from socialism, the Histadrut along with the government, owned most of the economy.
This is strange considering what Jews were doing elsewhere in the world. Like the Chinese in Southeast Asia, when the Jews migrated to Europe and North America, where ever they found free markets they thrived and prospered. Both the Chinese and the Jews excelled as entrepreneurs – except in their home countries, where entrepreneurship wasn’t allowed.
Mati Wagner writes in the Jerusalem Post:
“While it may be true that socialism was the dominant articulated ethos in the first decades of the State of Israel’s existence, the Jews of Israel – like Jews elsewhere – always had a predisposition to capitalism and free markets.”
“Even before the modern era, wherever Diaspora Jews were given a chance to compete on a level playing field, they have excelled… Their high levels of literacy made them particularly well-positioned to take advantage of the increasing importance of learned knowledge as a means of making money.”
Israel’s transformation to a market economy was led by government efforts to sell off state-owned companies, deregulate markets and reduce state spending. How well is it working? Wagner writes:
“Today the Jewish state’s industries – particularly hi-tech – compete as equals in international markets. In hindsight, the short-lived era of socialism was nothing but an unrepresentative blip.”
The Heritage Foundation’s lndex of Economic Freedom report ranks Israel the 33rd freest economy in the world. While that’s nothing to brag about, Israel posted 10th largest score increase. Heritage comments:
“Broad, sustained improvements in property rights and the regulatory sectors over the past five years have propelled Israel into the ranks of the “mostly free” for the first time.”
You might think that someone like Paul Krugman would applaud all this. I know most economists would. Instead Krugman refers to Israel’s socialist past as “the gilded age” and complains that:
“Key measures of inequality have soared; Israel is now right up there with America as one of the most unequal societies in the advanced world.”
Here is what everyone needs to understand about free markets and people at the bottom of the income ladder: capitalism is really good for poor people. For almost 20 years, the Fraser Institute, along with a network of other think tanks has been publishing the Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) annual reports, which present an economic freedom index for more than 120 nations. Based on that accumulated evidence, Robert Lawson writes:
“While there is no clear evidence that economic freedom creates greater income inequality, there is clear evidence that lowest-income people in freer countries are better off than their counterparts in less free countries. [The figure below] shows the average income level of the poorest tenth of the population by economic freedom quintile. Clearly, as Adam Smith recognized more than 230 years ago, economic freedom and the economic prosperity it brings work to the advantage of the poor.”
SOURCE
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The America-hater
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Menachem Begin on the Lessons of the Holocaust
In May 1981, a group of young American Jewish leaders asked Prime Minister Begin what he thought were the lessons of the Holocaust. This was his answer:
First, if an enemy of our people says he seeks to destroy us, believe him. Don’t doubt him for a moment. Don’t make light of it. Do all in your power to deny him the means of carrying out his satanic intent.
Second, when a Jew anywhere is threatened, or under attack, do all in your power to come to his aid. Never pause to wonder what the world will think or say. The world will never pity slaughtered Jews. The world may not necessarily like the fighting Jew, but the world will have to take account of him.
Third, a Jew must learn to defend himself. He must forever be prepared for whenever threat looms.
Fourth, Jewish dignity and honor must be protected in all circumstances. The seeds of Jewish destruction lie in passively enabling the enemy to humiliate us. Only when the enemy succeeds in turning the spirit of the Jew into dust and ashes in life, can he turn the Jew into dust and ashes in death. During the Holocaust it was after the enemy had humiliated the Jews, trampled them underfoot, divided them, deceived them, afflicted them, drove brother against brother, only then could he lead them, almost without resistance, to the gates of Auschwitz. Therefore, at all times and whatever the cost, safeguard the dignity and honor of the Jewish people.
Fifth, stand united in face of the enemy. We Jews love life, for life is holy. But there are things in life more precious than life itself. There are times when one must risk life for the sake of rescuing the lives of others. And when the few risk their own lives for the sake of the many, then they, too, stand the chance of saving themselves.
Sixth, there is a pattern to Jewish history. In our long annals as a nation, we rise, we fall, we return, we are exiled, we are enslaved, we rebel, we liberate ourselves, we are oppressed once more, we rebuild, and again we suffer destruction, climaxing in our own lifetime in the calamity of calamities, the Holocaust, followed by the rebirth of the Jewish State.
So, yes, we have come full circle, and with God’s help, with the rebirth of sovereign Israel we have finally broken the historic cycle: no more destruction and no more defeats, and no more oppression – only Jewish liberty, with dignity and honor. These, I believe, are the underlying lessons to be learned from the unspeakable tragedy of the Holocaust.
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.
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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26 March, 2015
America's Left-Wing Jews Ashamed of Israel's Jews
By Dennis Prager ·
American Jews on the left were beside themselves last week. Israel’s Jews did something that utterly infuriated these American Jews: Israel’s Jews overwhelmingly voted for a man of the right (or for other right-of-center parties). And not just any right-winger, but the only leader in the Western world to publicly differ from their hero, President Barack Obama.
To understand their fury, one must first understand that no one is more certain of their moral superiority than the left. This is true the world over, and among Jews it is particularly so. For the leaders of the American Jewish religious left (Reform, Reconstructionist, and now Conservative Judaism) Jews who are politically or socially conservative are a disgrace to Judaism, which, for left-wing Jews, is essentially the same as leftism. Both religious and secular Jews on the left regard Jewish conservatives as moral traitors to the Jewish people.
But certitude of their moral superiority is not the only reason American Jews on the left went ballistic last week. There are deeper, psychological, reasons.
Left-wing Jews live, work and socialize with left-wing non-Jews, and they believe that they are – to their great regret – identified with the Jewish state in the eyes of fellow leftists. Now, when Israel has left-wing governments – as it did in its first few decades and periodically after that – being identified with Israel is not problematic. But with Israel’s Jews repeatedly electing conservative governments, American Jews on the left believe that they must make it as clear as possible that they in no way support a right-wing Israel. Their moral self-esteem needs it and their left-wing credentials need it. Just look at how Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, a lifelong Democratic activist and fervent liberal, has been ostracized from polite left-wing company solely because he is an outspoken defender of Israel.
As American Jews on the left see it, their moral credibility in the eyes of fellow leftists in the news media, Hollywood, and academia is threatened by Israel. They must therefore make it abundantly clear that a) they not only do not support the right-wing government of Israel; they do not even support Israel at this time; b) they regard Benjamin Netanyahu as a vile human being; and c) they are ashamed – simply ashamed – of Israel’s Jews for having voted for a right-winger.
Thus, to cite only a few examples:
In Time Magazine, Joe Klein wrote: "The great majority of Israel’s Jews are bigots. [Netanyahu] “won because he ran as a bigot. … The public ratification of Netanyahu’s bigotry [confirmed this].”
Most Israeli Jews are as contemptible as history’s anti-Semites: “A great many Jews have come to regard Arabs as the rest of the world traditionally regarded Jews.”
Israel’s very founding was steeped in evil: “[Read about] the massacres perpetrated by Jews in 1948 to secure their homeland.”
These Israeli Jews embarrass me. Don’t consider me one of them: "This [victory] is shameful and embarrassing.”
In Israel’s Haaretz last week, left-wing American Jewish writer Peter Beinart actually advocated that America punish Israel and join the international fight against Israel:
“[This means] backing Palestinian bids at the United Nations. It means labeling and boycotting settlement goods. It means joining and amplifying nonviolent Palestinian protest in the West Bank. … It means pushing the Obama administration to present out its own peace plan, and to punish – yes, punish – the Israeli government for rejecting it. It means making sure that every time Benjamin Netanyahu and the members of his cabinet walk into a Jewish event outside Israel, they see Diaspora Jews protesting outside.”
In The Washington Post, Harold Meyerson, another American Jewish left-wing columnist, joined the hysteria with these calumnies against Netanyahu (and the equally reviled Republicans): “At the rate he was going, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might have called for stripping Israeli Arabs of the right to vote altogether.” “Bibi [is] henceforth the Jewish George Wallace.” “Perhaps Likud and the Republicans can open an Institute for the Prevention of Dark-Skinned People Voting.”
Of course, as Charles Krauthammer, an American Jewish conservative, wrote last week, “There would be no peace and no Palestinian state if Isaac Herzog were prime minister either. Or Ehud Barak or Ehud Olmert for that matter. The latter two were (non-Likud) prime ministers who offered the Palestinians their own state – with its capital in Jerusalem and every Israeli settlement in the new Palestine uprooted – only to be rudely rejected.
"This is not ancient history. This is 2000, 2001 and 2008 – three astonishingly concessionary peace offers within the past 15 years. Every one rejected.”
But none of that matters to the left. The left lives in John Lennon’s song “Imagine.” Thus, the left imagines that if Israel completely withdrew from the West Bank and allowed a Palestinian state to be created now, it would be completely unlike Gaza and completely unlike Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and Libya; it would be a peaceful Arab Muslim island in the midst of the cruel sea of Arab Muslim countries that surrounds it.
But what if they were wrong and rockets then rained down on Israel? The Kleins and the Beinarts and the Meyersons wouldn’t retract a word. As I wrote some 30 years ago: “Being on the left means never having to say you’re sorry.”
Anyway, only those bigoted Israelis would pay the price.
SOURCE
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The modern day slavers
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More government waste and incompetence
This is getting to be a rival of Boston's "big dig"
As we have noted several times, the new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was $5 billion over budget and ten years late. Despite all that time and money, safety issues with the bridge seem to be getting worse, as Jaxon Van Derbeken of the San Francisco Chronicle explains. For example, the high-strength steel rods that secure the base of the tower “show more widespread cracking than Caltrans officials had previously acknowledged.” Further, “rust and microscopic cracking were found after one of 424 fasteners intended to keep the tower from being damaged in an earthquake was removed for testing last year.” A “botched grouting and caulking job” left “many of the 25-foot-long fasteners stewing in water for several years.” And as Van Derbeken notes, cracks were also found at the top, a troubling development “because such cracks can get worse over time, leading to total failure, possibly during a quake.”
Caltrans bosses Will Kempton and Malcolm Dougherty told the reporter they had no record of overseeing the manufacturing process or testing the tower rods before they were installed. Chief engineer Brian Maroney lamented that Caltrans can’t even conduct ultrasonic tests that could reveal whether one of the tower rods has already snapped. And for Steve Heminger of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission it was the construction budget that was “under severe stress.”
Charles McMahon, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on steel embrittlement, told Van Derbeken that those in charge of the bridge were “clueless” on the selection of materials and “had no idea what they were doing. The whole thing is a disaster.” Such concerns emerged last year in Sacramento hearings, where whistleblowers called for a criminal investigation. None took place. Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, who conducted the hearings, has moved on to Congress. And as we observed, Tony Anziano, the lawyer who managed the bridge construction for Caltrans, has conveniently retired.
So here’s how it all adds up: $5 billion in excess costs, plus 10 years, equals an increasingly troubled bridge. And as Rep. DeSaulnier told reporters, “it’s frustrating that there’s never been anyone in the management of the bridge who has been held accountable.”
SOURCE
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This Longtime IHOP Owner Sold His 16 Restaurants Because of Obamacare
The IHOP in Terre Haute is located on South 3rd Street, just a few minutes from the Interstate 70 interchange and a short drive from the Holiday Inn where we had stayed the night before. As we sat in the back of the bustling restaurant waiting for Womack to arrive, we ordered french toast, omelettes and other IHOP specialities.
At the time, Womack employed about 1,000 people at his 12 restaurants. When the Affordable Care Act became law on March 23, 2010, he had big plans for his franchise. He had purchased a development agreement in 2006 that would expand the company to 14 new IHOP locations in Ohio.
“You have to fund your development through your profits,” Womack said during my 2011 visit to Terre Haute. “And if you have no profits, you’re not building restaurants.”
During his testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, Womack said those plans were now in jeopardy—and with it hundreds of jobs, not just at his restaurants but also in industries such as construction and manufacturing that would support his expansion. “Let me state this bluntly,” Womack told lawmakers, “this law will cost my company more money than we make.”
The cost of Obamacare’s mandates—Womack estimated it would be $7,000 to provide health care coverage for each full-time employee—left him with few options: cut costs, eliminate staff, reduce hours or convert workers to part-time status.
Womack, a 30-year restaurant veteran, faced unique challenges in the industry, where profit margins ranged from 5 percent to 7 percent. Restaurants already produce the lowest revenue per employee, meaning there was a high labor cost associated with implementing the new law.
Four Years Later
Facing the prospect of Obamacare’s employer mandate on Jan. 1, 2015, Womack opted to sell his 16 IHOP restaurants last year to Romulus Restaurant Group. (The company, which operates 74 restaurants in nine states, didn’t get back to me but Womack believes everyone who worked at his restaurants remains employed.)
The restaurateur who got his start as a busboy and cook, then landed a job as an IHOP manager, decided the cost of running casual-dining restaurants under Obamacare wasn’t profitable.
“We had to keep evaluating the nature of the business and the impact of Obamacare along with all the other pressures on labor,” Womack told me. He cited actions by the National Labor Relations Board and the threat of a minimum-wage hike as other challenges.
Womack said he was able to weather the recession. He remained hopeful Congress would make changes to the law or the 2012 election would usher in a president who would repeal it.
When that didn’t happen, he simply wasn’t confident about the long-term prospects of running a casual-dining operation. IHOP, with servers and cooks, is a labor-intensive business. At the time he sold last year, Womack had 16 restaurants and more than 1,000 employees. “We felt that environment was not the place to be for the next 10 to 20 years,” he said.
Much more HERE
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ELSEWHERE
Benjamin Netanyahu forms majority Israeli government "Benjamin Netanyahu has already been able to form a majority Israeli government after he crushed the socialist Zionist Union (with Obama funding) in the Israeli election. There are only two factions of the Knesset that wouldn’t join Netanyahu’s coalition government: The Joint Arab union and the socialist Zionist Union party.
Brain Scientist Tries to Uncover Why White People Are Prejudiced Against Gypsies: "From the New York Times, an article about how a brain scientist is going to use brain scans to try to figure out the mystery of white flight in Hungary from heavily Roma (Gypsy) schools. What kind of brain defect causes white Hungarian parents to hold delusional stereotypes about Gypsy children being lazy, dishonest, and less interested in academics? Perhaps Science can someday figure out why white Hungarians hallucinate so bizarrely about Gypsies!
The food-security charade: "Federal spending on food aid has skyrocketed in recent decades, and the feds are now feeding more than 100 million Americans. Yet, according to the Agriculture Department (USDA), far more Americans are 'food insecure' now than before the mushrooming of subsidized feeding programs. But rather than seeing this as evidence of a government failure, a chorus of activists and pundits insist that it proves that even more people should be encouraged to depend on Uncle Sam for their next meal."
New Mexico Passes a Sweeping Bill to Protect Innocent People's Property from Civil Asset Forfeiture: "The New Mexico Legislature passed a sweeping civil asset forfeiture reform bill last week to protect innocent people's property and due process rights. The bill, HB 560, effectively bans the pernicious practice, requiring a criminal conviction before property can be forfeited to the state. Before the passage of HB 560, New Mexico had relatively bad laws on the books concerning this issue, basically empowering overzealous police departments to seize assets through a relatively low standard. In its 2010 report, Policing for Profit, the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest firm, gave the Land of Enchantment a "D+" for its civil asset forfeiture laws.
Supreme Court lets Wisconsin voter ID law stand: "The Supreme Court refused Monday to hear a major challenge to Wisconsin's voter ID law, delivering a victory to Republicans who favor tougher election laws. The decision is a setback for civil rights groups that contend the law could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of residents who lack proper ID — particularly racial minorities, seniors, students and people with disabilities.
The excitement's gone for the Left. Murder of black homosexual politician was just another black on black crime: "A Mississippi man on Thursday was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after a jury found him guilty of murder in the 2013 slaying of an openly gay candidate for mayor of Clarksdale. Jurors in Quitman County deliberated less than two hours before convicting Lawrence Reed, 24. Reed testified that he strangled Marco McMillian, but said he did so because he feared McMillian was trying to rape him. "I'm sorry for what happened, but I can't take it back," Reed told Circuit Court Judge Charles Webster"
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.
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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25 March, 2015
New Book Investigates Failures of Health Care Industry?
HealthScare: Why Health Care Is NOT About Your Health is a controversial new book looking into the failures of the health care industry.
How well do you understand what defines your health? Can you wake up one morning and make the decision to go purchase good health? Where would you go? Can you tell Santa Claus that you want him to bring you the gift of good health for Christmas? The federal government and health insurance companies want us to believe that having “health care” can make you healthy. They have presented health care as a means to your health, but it has turned out to be a con job to take over each American’s access to medical care—decimating health professionals’ ability to treat their patients effectively and at a reasonable cost.
HealthScare: Why Health Care Is NOT About Your Health details the history and ultimate failure of government and insurance involvement in the health industry. Using over four decades of experience in the health industry as a pharmacist, Fritz Scheffel argues that we can make the health system efficient, cost effective, and beneficial to all by regaining power over our own health from power-hungry politicians.
With HealthScare, Fritz Scheffel offers a balanced and honest appraisal of the history and politics of the health industry; Fritz Scheffel provides us a path to saving our health and, ultimately, our nation.
Press release. $14.95 on Amazon
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An odd thing
I have watched on video many American patriotic occasions and noted the songs sung. But I have never seen "I vow to thee my country" sung on such occasions. Have I missed performances of it? It is both intensely patriotic and intensely Christian. It basically says how unreservedly the singers love their country but also goes on to say that the Kingdom of God is better still. I welcome email from readers to enlighten me about it. It is of course massively popular in Britain, where it originated just after WWI. Below is a video of a beautiful young British soprano singing it. And the wonderful music was written by Gustav Holst, an eminent British composer.
There is also a choral performance here where just about everybody who is anybody in British politics can be seen.
The words:
I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;
The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.
I heard my country calling, away across the sea,
Across the waste of waters, she calls and calls to me.
Her sword is girded at her side, her helmet on her head,
And around her feet are lying the dying and the dead;
I hear the noise of battle, the thunder of her guns;
I haste to thee, my mother, a son among thy sons.
And there's another country, I've heard of long ago,
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.
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Liberalism Is Your Crotchety, Judgmental Aunt Wagging Her Finger At You
Ever been pinned down at Thanksgiving Dinner by a crabby relative who goes on a tirade about trivial complaints which are laced with biting criticism? "Why are skirts so short these days?" "You've gained a few pounds." "Ugh, next you'll be talking to those 'negroes!' You're barely able to tolerate it because she's old, out of it and you only have to be around her for a few hours before she goes home to her 12 cats and you don't have to see her for another year.
Well, liberals have become the equivalent of your b*tchy spinster aunt, but the worst offenders are young, their self-righteous whining is incessant and they never seem to go away.
Don't believe it? Well, you already do if you're not a liberal because you've long since gotten tired of their nagging.
"The Redskins’ name is unfair to Indians! It must be changed!" "How dare you refuse to bake a cake for a gay wedding! We're going to run you out of business!" "You disagree with a black man! That means you're rraacccisssst!"
Pretty much EVERYTHING is racist these days. In fact, half the time when you hear something called racist, you have to wait for the explanation to figure out why it's supposed to be bigoted. One of my recent favorites is a claim that hoop skirts are racist. Why? Who knows? Maybe it’s the same reason that The Lord of the Rings or Devil’s Food Cake is supposedly racist. Even if there isn't a professional race hustler around who's creative enough to come up with something you've done or said that's supposedly racist, they tag you as a bigot anyway because of some supposed "white privilege" you have.
If the incessant cries of racism don’t get to you, then the increasingly hyper-sensitive feminists will. That pack of harpies ruining men’s lives for putting up a swimsuit calendar at work was annoying enough in the sixties, but if anything, they have even more trivial, pampered, first world complaints to nag everyone about today.
Of course, they can’t say that; so everything is “rape culture.” Men and women are having sex drunk? That’s rape. You’re anti-abortion? Probably because you want women to bear the children of men that raped them. You think rapes on college campuses should be investigated by the police instead of women’s studies professors? You must be pro-rape!
Liberals complain incessantly about racism because almost everyone in America is against it and they constantly accuse people for fomenting “rape culture” for the same reason. As long as people they don’t like are spending all their time defending themselves against charges that they’re racist and love rape, they’re hoping everyone else won’t notice that liberals have gone CRAZY.
Crazy enough that the word “mansplaining” is actually a thing. That’s when a man explains something to a woman that she already knows. There are even whole TUMBLR pages dedicated to criticizing “manspreading,” which is men who spread their legs on the subway, presumably because they don’t want to squash their junk. By doing that, they’re apparently asserting their male privilege…or something. Then there’s “Gamergate,” which long story short, is a gaggle of liberal hens incessantly clucking at men who want to play video games in peace because guys who spend all their free time playing Madden and Street Fighter apparently aren’t sufficiently deferential to the nagging of a bunch of harpies who want to lecture them about feminist trivia.
Of course, the list of issues that set off liberals goes far beyond race and feminism. Lefties demanded that Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich lose his job for being opposed to gay marriage. The liberals at Planet Fitness banned a woman at the gym because the women’s bathroom should be for women as opposed to men who identify as women. A liberal Muslim at the University of Missouri demanded that the incredibly popular war movie American Sniper be banned because it made her feel “unsafe.” Support for the 2nd Amendment was declared “homophobic” at Kalamazoo College.
Libs block conservative speakers at college campuses when possible and often throw things. They chant and try to disrupt their speeches if that doesn’t work because their tender liberal ears can’t handle a contrary opinion. Asking someone from another country where he’s from is considered a “micoaggression” by liberals, which basically is just another term for, “We don’t have enough things to cry about already.” Mount Holyoke College is even pulling The Vagina Monologues because it’s not sensitive enough to men with vaginas. I know, I know, if you have a vagina, you’re not a man, but you have to humor these loons a bit; they’re coo coo for Cocoa Puffs.
As you’re discussing all these issues, you have to be careful because you might accidentally use a “trigger” word that upsets some terribly sensitive liberal soul. Oberlin College can tell you all about it.
Oberlin College has published an official document on triggers, advising faculty members to "be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression," to remove triggering material when it doesn't "directly" contribute to learning goals….
That’s no small matter because once liberals, the world’s most easily offended people, have been “triggered” by something you’ve done, then they view themselves as victims who have a right to go to insane lengths to fight back against your grievous attack.
Last March at University of California–Santa Barbara, in, ironically, a “free-speech zone,” a 16-year-old anti-abortion protester named Thrin Short and her 21-year-old sister Joan displayed a sign arrayed with graphic images of aborted fetuses. They caught the attention of Mireille Miller-Young, a professor of feminist studies. Miller-Young, angered by the sign, demanded that they take it down. When they refused, Miller-Young snatched the sign, took it back to her office to destroy it, and shoved one of the Short sisters on the way.
Speaking to police after the altercation, Miller-Young told them that the images of the fetuses had “triggered” her and violated her “personal right to go to work and not be in harm.” A Facebook group called “UCSB Microaggressions” declared themselves “in solidarity” with Miller-Young and urged the campus “to provide as much support as possible.”
Incidentally, those last two paragraphs are from liberal writer Jonathan Chait who wrote a column complaining about how intolerant liberalism has become now that his fellow travelers have moved on from going after Duck Dynasty and Rush Limbaugh to *** gasp *** targeting liberals like him, too.
Liberals are like Iran’s morality police, but instead of screaming at women for showing their ankles or going out in public without a male relative, libs yell at you for wanting to play video games without feminist jargon in them or wanting to only have women in the women’s bathroom. They’re nasty, quarrelsome and many of them are young, which means they may have those sticks wedged in their behinds for life. Maybe Obamacare should be authorized to yank them out – at least until we get rid of it and give the whiners something to REALLY complain about.
SOURCE
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It's Election 'Day' for a reason
by Jeff Jacoby
EXCEPT FOR diplomats posted abroad, early voting isn't an option in Israeli elections. So when Israel's election day dawned on Tuesday, with impressions of the campaign's home stretch fresh in voters' minds, no one in the country had yet cast a ballot. The giant pre-election rallies in Tel Aviv, the final flurry of ads, the polls showing the main opposition party in the lead, the prime minister's unexpected repudiation of a Palestinian state: Together Israelis had taken it all in, and together Israelis would put it all to a vote.
Over the past two decades, early voting has become routine in American elections, with citizens in 36 states and the District of Columbia permitted to cast their ballots well in advance of Election Day, either by mail or at early-voting polling stations. In 2012, according to the United States Election Project at the University of Florida, at least 32 million votes were banked early, a whopping one-fourth of all ballots cast nationwide that year. Other calculations range even higher: A presidential commission on election administration reported last year that the number of votes cast before Election Day in 2012 was 47 million, nearly one-third the US total.
Is this wise? Does the metamorphosis of Election Day into Election Month strengthen the machinery of democratic self-government? Plainly, many Americans think so. "Whenever we have a law that expands access to the ballot and makes it easier for people to register and to vote," former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said last year after signing a law to authorize early voting in the state beginning in 2016, "it makes our democracy better."
Except that it doesn't. At best, it only makes it more convenient — and that convenience comes with downside tradeoffs.
First, far from motivating more citizens to participate in elections, early-voting laws actually decrease turnout. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, in a study published in the American Journal of Political Science, have shown that early voting "lower[s] the likelihood of turnout by three to four percentage points." Why? Because by dragging out for weeks what had been the concentrated, communal experience of a single decision day, early-voting laws wind up "dissipating the energy of Election Day" and "reducing the civic significance of elections for individuals." The Tuesday after the first Monday in November used to be a climactic moment when the nation turned out to choose its leaders. Now it's merely when the voting stops.
A second tradeoff, even more unfortunate, is the loss of informational equality. In some states, the early-voting window opens more than six weeks before Election Day — a month and a half! Think of what can happen in the last 45 days of a campaign: a high-stakes debate, an outrageous gaffe, an international crisis, a late-in-the-game promise, a surge of momentum, a demoralizing admission, a spectacular endorsement.
"Early voters are in essence asked a different set of questions from later ones," argued Eugene Kontorovic and John McGinnis, law professors at Northwestern University, in an essay in Politico last year. "They are voting with a different set of facts." That isn't the way to make democracy better.
Like a jury retiring to consider its verdict, Israel turned out en masse to elect a new parliament — and only after all the testimony was in. No voters had cause to regret a vote cast weeks earlier, or to wish they had known then what they knew now. Israelis don't vote when they decide they've heard enough. They vote, as Americans used to vote, on Election Day.
You don't have to look to Israel to know that a campaign's last innings are often the most enlightening or game-changing. Just think of the revelation, days before the 2000 election, of George W. Bush's drunk-driving arrest. Or John Silber's prickly interview with Natalie Jacobson as the 1990 Massachusetts governor's race neared its climax. Or Lyndon Johnson's bombing halt in North Vietnam on the eve of the razor-sharp election in 1968. Or Ross Perot's wild claim, late in the 1992 campaign, of his daughter's wedding being sabotaged by Republicans.
Elections are more meaningful when voters act collectively, coming together at one time to make their political choices. We may disagree sharply over whom ultimately to choose, but the choosing should be done when the campaign ends — on a clearly defined Election Day, not a long-drawn-out election season.
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.
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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24 March, 2015
Race And The American Millennial’s Brain Rot
Ilana Mercer is an expert at writing scarifying prose. She is supreme at ripping people to pieces verbally. So what she writes below seems rather exaggerated to me. She grew up in Israel so may be more critical because of that. I am also in no doubt however that there is a large element of truth in what she writes below. The Left have been dumbing down and distorting American education for so long that any other state of affairs could hardly be expected.
I am more optimistic than she appears to be, however. And I am optimistic because of one thing: IQ. IQ is largely hereditary so is not readily susceptible to destruction by the Fascists that American "liberals" have become. So I think that, as they grow up, the brighter part of the Millennial cohort will work things out pretty well for themselves. That will be assisted by the large gap that always exists between Leftist beliefs and reality.
And societal progress is not strongly dependant on the mental state of the masses. It very largely depends on the "smart fraction" of society. As long as the top 5% of any population are on the ball, the society as a whole will do well.
Israel is a prime example of the centrality of the smart fraction. Largely because of the Sephardi and Mizrachi element in the overall population, the average IQ in Israel is just that: average, around 100 IQ points. But the Ashkenazim are another matter. They average out roughly half a standard deviation above the mean, which is a lot. And it is primarily they who have made Israel into the brilliant society that it is
So I think that, where it exists, American talent will continue to thrive
“Silence; We’re Studying for Our Pregnancy Test” (2008), “Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult and Dispensable” (2010), “Higher Education Is A Hard Row To Ho” (2014): The author of such titles is well aware of how stupid, on average, American millennials are. She has been for some time.
The 2010 piece aforementioned warned that “the electronic toys our dim, attention-deficient darlings depend on to sustain brain waves are made, for the most, by older people,” and that “the hi-tech endeavor consist in older Americans and Asians uniting to supply young, twittering twits with the playthings that keep their brainwaves from flatlining.”
According to my sources in the high-tech industry, for every useless, self-aggrandizing Gen Yer, a respectful, bright, industrious (East) Asian, with a wicked work ethic, waits in the wings. The millennial generation will be another nail in the coffin of the flailing American productivity.
Encounters over the years with a relatively smart cohort, through this column, have solidified these impressions. Oh yes: I did my patriotic part. I attempted to employ a Millennial or two. I found them to be incapable of following simple written instructions. Their interactions were, moreover, pathologically personal, never professional.
Now, confirmation of these anecdotal impressions comes courtesy of researchers at the Princeton-based Educational Testing Service (ETS). Sponsored by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the ETS researchers found that, “Not only do Gen Y Americans trail their overseas peers by every measure, but they even score lower than other age groups of Americans.”
Millennials in the U.S. lag in literacy, “including the ability to follow simple instructions, practical math, and—hold on to your hat—a category called ‘problem-solving in technology-rich environments.’” Worse yet: “Even the best-educated Millennials stateside couldn’t compete with their counterparts in Japan, Finland, South Korea, Belgium, Sweden, or elsewhere. … Altogether, the top U.S. Gen Yers, in the 90th percentile, scored lower than their counterparts in 15 countries.”
This includes millennials with masters degrees and doctorates. Our best and brightest managed to best their peers in only three countries: Ireland, Poland and Spain. Much as Charles Murray has documented in his seminal “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” the results obtain irrespective of class and race.
Rejoice! America is becoming an egalitarian Idiocracy.
Let us anchor these general findings about the nature of the Gen Y Beast in particular examples from the passing week.
A few students at the University of Oklahoma were caught in flagrante, singing a racist ditty while white. The cretins of cable were in high dudgeon. CNN’s Brianna Keilar crisscrossed a black student, Meagan Johnson, about her experience with racism on the UO campus.
Oh yes, replied the girl. She had indeed endured the indignities of racism at the UO. “We experience forms, different forms of racism on our campus all the time. It wasn’t shocking at all.” Keilar requested examples. Right away, the student replied that her “overall experience at OU has been a great one.” It was vital, she added, for “the University of Oklahoma … to focus on diversity across our campus. … it needs to be a campus wide effort to make OU [a] more diverse and more inclusive place.”
Here was an example of an educated lass who was incapable of comprehending and answering a straightforward question. Encouraged by Keilar’s effusive praise—”I love your perspective on this Meagan,” she gushed—the girl went on to cop to experiencing “racial microaggression”: She had been asked for lessons in twerking and complimented on her weave.
A pedagogue, presumably, had taught the girl about “microaggression.” Race Robocop Keilar responded with compliments. Thus was this Millennial’s mindlessness reinforced.
Millennials have been pre-programmed and praised for stupidity. They’ve acquired an education yet they remain uneducated. For an educated young American would know that racist speech, too, is constitutionally protected speech. And an educated young American would know that, as professor Eugene Volokh teaches, “It’s unconstitutional for the University of Oklahoma to expel students for racist speech.”
It would appear that when the neocortex is underused, the reptilian brain takes over.
Hysteria and heightened emotions are the hallmarks of the Millennial Mind. They can “whip up a false sense of mass outrage” with ease. The Spectator’s Brendan O’Neill calls these walking dead dodos “The Stepford Students.” They sit “stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously police beer-fueled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up.”
Black, liberal and bright—oops; I committed a “microaggression”—comedian Chris Rock recently confessed that he avoids doing his stand-up routine in front of millennial audiences. “You can’t say ‘the black kid over there.’ No, it’s ‘the guy with the red shoes.’ You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.”
In the Orwellian universe in which your kids are suspended, words speak louder than actions. Drunken youths sang a nine-second ditty while white—they did not defraud, steal, vandalize, beat, rape or murder anyone; they merely mouthed ugly words.
Unkind cuts, however, called for an exorcism. On cue, a petrified Waspy man, OU President David Boren, proceeded to perform the rituals that would soothe his unhinged charges. While Boren failed to fumigate the fraternity, tear his clothes; rub earth and ashes on his noggin and dress in sackcloth—he did shutter the doors to the dorm and board up its windows. A vice president of diversity was appointed. Soviet-style investigations launched, and summary expulsions sans due process carried out.
Tyranny, as we know, strives for uniformity.
In synch with their pedagogic pied piper, University of Oklahoma students gathered for prayer vigils, marches, demonstrations and lamentation. Burly athletes wept. One Oklahoma football lineman “decommitted,” or was committed.
This menagerie of morons—this institutionalized stupidity—would be comical were it not so calamitous, as shown by the research commissioned by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
SOURCE
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Here’s a classic conversation that perfectly demonstrates what liberals really mean when they talk about “rights”:
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Obama’s Private Army: Militarizing the Federal Agencies
Currently there are 73 federal agencies that have full-time armed officers with arresting authority. According to a 2008 report by the Department of Justice, there were 120,000 full-time law enforcement officers working for federal agencies and 24 different federal agencies employed at least 250 full-time officers. Federal agencies with at least 250 full-time officers included the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Mint, U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Veterans Health Administration.
While speaking before the Constitutional Convention in 1787, James Madison said, “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.” Despite this strong warning from our founders more than 200 years ago, today’s federal government has quietly accrued significant policing powers in a wide array of agencies.
These federal enforcement officers are authorized to carry weapons and make arrests from Section 812 of the 2002 Homeland Security Act. This law authorizes the Offices of the Inspector General within each federal agency, which traditionally look for fraud and waste within the agency, to have officers that carry firearms, seek and execute warrants for arrests and makes arrests without a warrant while engaged in official duties. This section is rarely discussed because the actual language seems somewhat inconsequential. But in practice this law has changed how law enforcement is carried out at the federal level.
While there are federal agencies that should carry weapons and have arresting authority, such as the FBI, Secret Service, DEA and US Marshals, these agencies had this authority before the 2002 Homeland Security Act. They would keep this authority even if the agencies not traditionally involved in law enforcement activities lost their arresting powers. Unfortunately, the expansion of federal enforcement authority has been accompanied by an increase in the abuse of that power. There have been many examples of abuses by different agencies that have not traditionally had law enforcement officers and have been in a rush to use their new authority:
* The Department of Education raided the home of Kenneth Wright looking for his estranged wife who was accused of misusing federal aid for students. Officers from the Department dragged Mr. Wright out of his house in his boxers at 6 a.m., threw him to the ground and handcuffed him. While this occurred his children -- ages 3, 9 and 11 -- were left in a patrol car for two hours. His estranged wife no longer lived at the house and was not there at the time of the raid.
* Officers in full SWAT gear from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service stormed the home of Kathy and George Norris. The agents instigated the raid for George’s failure to file the proper paperwork for orchids he imported. Kathy and George were grandparents in their 60s when the raid took place.
* The EPA led a joint raid along with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Coast Guard, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (the guys that predict the weather) and the U.S. Park Service on a mining operation for possible violations of the Clean Water Act.
* The Bureau of Land Management had a long standoff with Cliven Bundy, a rancher, over his use of federal land to graze his cattle.
* In 2010 the FDA raided Dan Allyger’s Rainbow Acres Farm, an Amish farm in Pennsylvania, because he had been selling unpasteurized milk across state lines.
The potential for abuse increases as more federal agencies establish armed law enforcement officers. In addition to those already mentioned, agencies with police power include: the Small Business Administration, Social Security Administration (which three years ago asked to purchase 174,000 rounds of .357 Sig 125 grain bonded jacketed hollow point bullets), Federal Reserve Board, Department of Energy, Office of Personnel Management and the Railroad Retirement Board, among others.
This is not to say that these agencies do not encounter circumstances where armed officers would be prudent, or even necessary, but under such circumstances they should call federal agencies with experience, such as the FBI, or coordinate with local law enforcement.
Like Madison, the rest of our Constitution’s framers would be extremely uncomfortable with federal executive agencies carrying out police raids. Most were students of history and recalled the horrors that a standing militarized police force brought to Europe and ancient Rome. The framers were especially concerned with the British practice of sending troops to the Colonies, and using them as a police force to harass the Colonists. The Third Amendment was as much a response to the use of the military to police the citizenry as it was a response to the forced housing of soldiers.
Last year, Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) sponsored the Regulatory Agency Demilitarization Act, which would have removed arresting authority from agencies not traditionally authorized to carry weapons or make arrests.
In a press release announcing the bill, Rep. Stewart said, “When there are genuinely dangerous situations involving federal law, that’s the job of the Department of Justice, not regulatory agencies like the FDA or the Department of Education. Not only is it overkill, but having these highly-armed units within dozens of agencies is duplicative, costly, heavy handed, dangerous and destroys any sense of trust between citizens and the federal government.” The president and a majority in both houses of Congress should be able to support this sentiment.
Under the 2002 Homeland Security Act we have seen a massive expansion of police activities carried out by federal agencies. The agents carrying out these activities generally take the form of militarized SWAT teams. This has left Americans wondering why officials from the Department of Education or EPA are barging into their homes and businesses dressed in full SWAT gear.
Our framers faced these same abuses at the hands of the British military during the lead up to the Revolutionary War. They designed the Constitution to protect us from these abuses. We should support a commonsense law, like the Regulatory Agency Demilitarization Act, because it would do much to protect us from these abuses.
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, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.
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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23 March, 2015
Which was worse, WWI or WWII?
I understand that the death toll in WWI was greater than WWII but I am not going to base anything on that. Instead I want to submit that the major tragedy of WWI was the Bolshevik revolution and that the major tragedy of WWII was the holocaust. That is of course arguable but, given that, I think the answer is clear.
But first let me spell out why the Bolshevik revolution was attributable to WWI. There are two reasons. The first is that Germany deliberately and with malice aforethought transported the exiled Lenin in a sealed train across Europe to Russia. The German High Command rightly assessed Lenin as a major threat to the Russian war effort and therefore facilitated his trouble-making in that country as part of their own war effort.
Secondly, before the Bolshevik takeover, Russia had become a real parliamentary democracy. The Mensheviks were democrats who believed in elections. The overthrow of the Mensheviks during the war by the Bolsheviks was therefore a violent overthrow of democracy -- which resulted in many millions of deaths both then and across the next 70 years -- and also condemned the world's largest country to tyranny and poverty for all that time.
I am the last to minimize the death of 6 million Jews. But it seems clear to me that the Bolshevik revolution was much more widely harmful.
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A leftist mind on display
Feel the hate. The image is from Australia. Tony Abbott is the conservative Prime Minister of Australia
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Western press hasn’t noticed Israel’s rapidly growing clout around the world
“Two years from now, Obama will be gone, to be remembered as the worst president in American memory”
Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s triumph in Israel’s election this week, so shocking and appalling to the Western press, is many other things, too.
It is a recognition by Israelis of Netanyahu as the Churchill of our times, a statesman who stands apart from virtually all other Western leaders who, whether out of cravenness or wilful blindedness, downplay the gathering storm from Iran.
It is a repudiation by Israelis of those same Western leaders, who funded the “anyone-but-Netanyahu” campaign that tried to install in his place a compliant Jew to endorse their policies of appeasement.
And it is a back of the hand to monopolies and other special interests that oppose Netanyahu’s march to freer markets. At root, Israelis understand that they’re better off with Bibi.
Israel under the rule of socialist parties, which dominated the country’s first half century of existence, was a country of heavy handed state control and of Big Labour — the Histradrut labour federation represented 85 percent of all wage earners in the 1980s. Under Netanyahu’s influence, starting in the late 1990s with his first term as prime minister, Israel systematically began dismantling the welfare state, tackling both the social safety net and the vested corporate interests.
He sold off Israel’s interests in state enterprises, abolished foreign exchange controls and otherwise liberalized the economy, attracting foreign capital and turning Israel into an entrepreneurial marvel that, according to The Economist, has the world’s highest density of startups and, next to Silicon Valley, the largest number of startups. High tech companies now beat a path to this Start-Up Nation’s door — an astonishing 250 from the U.S. alone have made Israel home to their R&D centres.
2014 set records for Israeli high-tech and biotech startups — 52 Israeli startups sold to the tune of some $15-billion plus 18 IPOs worth another $10-billion — according to end-of-year reports by accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ethosia Human Resources, who expect 2015 to be even bigger. This January alone saw foreign giants such as Microsoft and Amazon shell out $900-million for companies rich in Israel’s only abundant renewable resource: ingenuity.
The Western press, operating as it does from its echo chamber, likes to describe Israel as increasingly isolated in the world due to its supposed failure to make peace with the Palestinians. Israel has never been less isolated, never been more embraced. In its immediate neighbourhood, Israel for the first time has de facto allies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the leaders of the Arab Sunni world.
In black Africa, Israel now is tight with countries such as Nigeria, Kenya and Rwanda. In Asia, Israel is becoming tight with India, the world’s largest democracy, and with China, the world’s second largest economy, both of which are establishing free trade deals with Israel. Israel has been expanding trade with Japan, the world’s third largest economy. And Israel has close relations with countries of the former East Bloc, including Russia, once a Cold War adversary, now a partner in countering Islamic terrorism.
The watchful Arab press knows exactly why Israel has become so welcome around the world, even if the blinkered Western press doesn’t. As explained earlier this year in Al-Araby al-Jadid, a London-based Qatari daily, “Israel’s advanced technology developments have become its most prominent soft power tool for boosting diplomatic ties and improving its position in the world, enhancing its own security in the process.”
Because of Israel’s prowess in both military and civilian fields, it explained, China is cozying up to Israel, India is relying on Israeli instead of U.S. weaponry, and African countries are supporting Israel at the United Nations. Also because of this prowess, Al-Araby al-Jadid expects to see countries that once diplomatically sided with the Palestinians to flip and take pro-Israeli positions.
Israel’s technological prowess, and thus the welcome mat it now enjoys in ever-growing regions of the world, comes as a byproduct of Netanyahu’s dismantling of the welfare state. That dismantling may now accelerate because in this week’s election another dismantler shone — Moshe Kahlon, the Kulanu party leader who ran on an unabashedly pro-business, pro-competition “economic freedom” platform predicated on downsizing government while breaking up Israel’s remaining public monopolies and private oligopolies. The Western press may be surprised to learn that Kahlon, who is widely expected to become Netanyahu’s next finance minister, is considered centrist in Israeli politics.
Israel, once the darling of the Socialist Internationale, is fast becoming the darling of all but Socialist-leaning Europe, Iran and the ISIS wannabe set. Australia is stalwartly in Israel’s corner; Canada’s commitment to Israel is at an all-time high; America’s remains as strong as ever, President Obama and the American left notwithstanding.
Two years from now, Obama will be gone, to be remembered as the worst American president in memory. Prime Minister Netanyahu will remain in power and on the world stage, to be seen as one of Israel’s greatest prime ministers and one of the world’s few true statesmen.
SOURCE
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Sanctimony and Grandstanding Are More Fun Than Free Speech
By Ann Coulter
After police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown last summer in Ferguson, Missouri, the media erupted in terror at the prospect of young black men being gunned down by over-excitable white cops.
After two separate, wide-ranging, phenomenally expensive, months-long investigations, including one by Eric Holder’s Justice Department, it turned out: Brown had attacked Officer Wilson, he did not have his hands up, he was charging the officer when he was shot, and Wilson acted in justifiable self-defense.
Frustrated at their inability to locate evidence of the endemic racism in America we keep hearing so much about, liberals have turned with a vengeance on the kids. Instead of armed policemen gunning down blacks, we got a secretly recorded video of few drunk 19- and 20-year-olds at the University of Oklahoma singing the n-word. (Everyone assumes the students were racists, but my theory is they were trying to record their own rap video.)
Apparently, the new national sport is destroying the lives of young people.
Today’s adults are held responsible for nothing. The president and attorney general aren’t held accountable for ginning up frenzied mobs based on a lie, leading to two cops being assassinated in New York City and two cops being shot in Ferguson, in addition to the $250 million in property damage.
Hillary Clinton isn’t responsible for Americans being murdered at our embassy in Benghazi as a result of her incompetence.
Democratic senators aren’t accountable for passing Obamacare without reading it, and Republican senators aren’t accountable for promising voters they’d stop Obama’s amnesty and then voting to fully fund it.
Even people who commit violent crimes are given a second chance – especially if they’re athletes at the University of Oklahoma, as the Daily Caller has reported.
But 19- and 20-year olds must be punished without mercy for their drunken song using an ugly word. To quote Hillary Clinton, WHAT DIFFERENCE, AT THIS POINT, DOES IT MAKE?
Mr. Third Chance, David Boren, president of the university, proudly rushed to violate the First Amendment rights of these students. Even observers who condemned Boren’s laughably unconstitutional move felt compelled to vilify the louts.
Protesters have shown up at the kids' homes in Texas to rail against their parents. (As always, I marvel at the protesters' ability to get so much time off of work.)
I don’t remember adults caring this much about what college kids said when we were trying to get their attention with pompous editorials, manifestos and lists of demands. This wasn’t a college thesis – and even a college thesis wouldn’t be worth so much national angst. This was drunk college kids singing on a bus.
Is this the kind of society we want to live in, where a student can record his intoxicated friends singing a nasty song, and the whole country applauds the Nazi block-watcher and joins in the denunciation of his marks?
Liberals were hopping mad about Linda Tripp secretly recording Monica Lewinsky, but at least she was exposing the wildly felonious obstruction of justice by the president of the United States in a sex discrimination case. She wasn’t recording Monica to prove the president had used a bad word.
But no one objects to the aspiring Stasi member recording his friends' drunken song, then broadcasting it to the world, allowing us a joyous round of universal condemnation.
Instead of judging society by the inebriated songs of 19- and 20-year olds, perhaps we should judge it by how cultural and political elites treat their young people.
SOURCE
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Finally, A Bank Stands Up To Obama's Shakedown
After 16 banks caved in to White House demands to refund billions in losses to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, one outlier remains unrepentant. Nomura Holdings refuses to succumb to the political shakedown.
The Japanese bank's U.S. unit won't give in to the extortionist regulators protecting Fannie and Freddie who claim it hoodwinked the toxic twins into buying pools of subprime mortgages, like it claimed Bank of America, JPMorgan and other U.S. banks did in the run-up to the mortgage crisis.
The government demands $1 billion in damages. Nomura says it won't give a dime toward the $18 billion ransom the feds already have shaken out of other banks who settled with the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Instead, it will make government prove it in court.
In opening arguments this week, the defendants argued Fannie and Freddie bought the mortgages knowing they were subprime and did so to meet "affordable housing" quotas of their political masters at HUD.
Unfortunately for Nomura, the game is rigged. The federal judge hearing the case — Clinton appointee Denise Cote — is a ringer for the administration.
In recent filings, Cote has shown extreme prejudice in her decisions — virtually all rendered against Nomura.
Even though she concedes that, in buying subprime securities from Nomura, "Freddie Mac considered the extent to which the underlying mortgage loans satisfied these housing goals," Cote claims such evidence is "immaterial" to the case. She argues the regulatory mandates, purchasing quotas and other political pressures heaped on Fannie and Freddie were merely "idiosyncratic" and therefore irrelevant.
Please. The HUD goals are highly relevant to this case. Internal documents from both HUD and Fannie and Freddie show the goals were driving them deeper into the subprime securities market and both complained about a growing risk of losses. So clearly, they understood the risks. There was no "misrepresentation."
And if they failed to perform the proper due diligence, it's because it wouldn't have mattered — they had to buy risky subprime securities to meet HUD quotas for loans to low-income borrowers with bad credit. They were culpable in the recklessness, and therefore culpable in the losses they suffered when those loans defaulted. Nomura shouldn't be on the hook for those losses.
In its defense, Nomura plans to call former Fannie and Freddie officials, including former Fannie CEO Daniel Mudd, to testify about how it was Fannie and Freddie who on orders from HUD lowered underwriting standards, not Nomura.
SOURCE
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Guess What Canada’s Oh-So-Wonderful Single-Payer System Doesn’t Cover?
Canadian Alheli Picazo is a writer and former elite gymnast who has suffered from a severe digestive tract problem. Her condition caused her to suffer “from severe acid reflux. This wore down the enamel of her teeth and caused the equivalent of osteoporosis in her oral cavity.
The 30-year-old needs urgent oral surgeries, including bone and tissue grafts, to remove and replace what she described painfully as ‘the increasingly diseased bone.’” Unfortunately, “Picazo has to wait until she can amass the $100,000 needed to pay for the procedures” because Canada’s system does not cover dental care.
The article, which appeared in Vox, noted that “This is similar to a gap in Obamacare: health plans on the exchange aren’t required to offer dental coverage.” Guess what? There is another plan in the U.S. that doesn’t cover dental care. Here’s a hint: it’s the program that activists point to when they want to promote single-payer here in America.
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.
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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22 March, 2015
A very good sign
Google have put some sort of caution on access to A WESTERN HEART. It must be causing heartburn where I want it to cause heartburn!
Fun!
JR
A problem vocabulary -- and a partial solution
Many stages in my life have added to my vocabulary. I was born into an Australian working class home so I speak the vivid Australian slanguage with joy -- but I don't usually write it.
And I am basically a literary type so I know the difference between a dactylic and an anapaestic rhythm. And neither "eleemosynary" nor "emoluments" are mystery words to me
And I have studied 3 languages so have many words from them in my brain. For instance, I can use Volk and Reich with accuracy and sometimes use words of Latin origin in their Latin meaning. And a lot of people don't like the ungracious English name "Eggplant" for a rather desirable fruit so call it by the French name instead: "Aubergine". But I don't like much about the French but do rather like Italians. The vastly "incorrect" Silvio Berlusconi is something of a hero of mine. So I call the vegetable "Melanzane", which is both the Italian word and a version of its botanical name (Solanum melongena).
My odd food words mostly oppress Anne, the lady in my life. But she has got used to them and even makes her own Liptauer these days -- and has even tried to make cevapi. But she and I share similar geographical and social origins so I can talk to her in broad Australian -- which is pleasing to us both. When I call someone a "galah" or a "drongo" she knows what I mean.
And my early very intensive studies of the Bible have left me with an extensive knowledge and appreciation of the wonderful words and phrases of the King James Bible, plus a knowledge of theology and textual criticism. So I know what Masoretic and paraclete means.
And at university I did some studies in linguistics and came out of that with an appreciation of both Old English and Middle English. So I occasionally use constructions from those sources. One of my favourite proverbs in fact uses Middle English: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans, there'd be no room for tinkers" ("an" means "if" in Middle English). And I am prone to reciting Chaucer in the original Middle English.
And my doctorate in the social sciences has left me with a useful statistics vocabulary -- so I am inclined to talk about "orthogonal" factors and "leptokurtic" curves, for instance.
So with that wonderful treasure of words available to me, I am inclined to use it, where appropriate. The big problem with that, however, is that if I used my vocabulary as I am inclined to do, I would render a lot of what I write barely intelligible a lot of the time. Most people have backgrounds quite different from mine.
So what I have long done is to write something out fairly spontaneously and then go back through it replacing the uncommon words with simple words of mainly Anglo-Saxon origin. And I am pleased to say that such simplification often clarifies my thought and rarely obscures it.
But I am getting old and no longer have the time and energy I once did so lately I have tended on some occasions to let my original words stand rather than revise them. And that will probably get gradually worse as time goes by.
So this is just an apology if what I write is not immediately clear. I am however consoled by the thought that everybody has Wikipedia and various online dictionaries at their fingertips these days so can clarify any obscure words with considerable celerity (Latin: "celer" = "quick").
Just for fun, here are a few odd words I have been using lately -- either in writing or in speech: narthex, vietato, endorheic, spinto, exegesis, rhotic.
Another small matter: Most of what I put up on my various blogs is articles from others that say something I like. Most days however I also write my own comments on some subject. It is unpredictable on which blog I will burst into prose, however, so lately I have been putting up on A WESTERN HEART the stuff that I have currently been writing -- regardless of which blog was its originally intended home. So if you want to see what I personally have been writing lately, you only have to go to one place.
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Another exoneration for aspartame
The bad effects were found to be all in the mind of the food-freaks concerned. I had a considerable correspondence once with the anti-aspartame brigade and they were definitely a kooky lot
Aspartame, the controversial sweetener linked to a range of health problems, does not cause harm.
A study commissioned by Britain’s food watchdog found eating the sweetener had no impact on the body or behaviour of people who claimed to be sensitive to it.
The artificial sweetener, used in fizzy drinks and diet products, has been at the centre of critical reports dating back decades linking it to everything from cancer to premature birth.
Despite this, it has been ruled a safe food ingredient by food watchdogs in Britain, the EU, the USA and around the world.
These assurances have failed to convince many people, who continue to report adverse reactions, such as headaches and nausea after consuming foods containing the sweetener.
As a result, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) commissioned experts from Hull York Medical School to examine people who reported just such problems to establish if their fears were backed up by medical evidence.
The trial involved 48 people who self-reported as being sensitive to aspartame and another 48 control participants who have never had any problem.
All received two specially prepared cereal bars, one of which contained aspartame, on two separate sessions at least one week apart.
The human guinea pigs were put through a series of biological and psychological tests, which included taking blood and urine samples.
Participants rated a range of 14 symptoms over four hours after eating the bars, including headache, mood swings, hot or flushed sensation, nausea, tiredness, dizziness, nasal congestion, visual problems, tingling, bloating, hunger and thirst.
Participants were also asked to rate levels of happiness and arousal, which are the two main dimensions of their mood.
Today, the FSA said: ‘The study concluded that the participants who were self-diagnosed as sensitive to aspartame showed no difference in their response after consuming a cereal bar, whether it contained aspartame or not.’
The experts who carried out the research suggested those people who were self-reported aspartame sensitive (SRAS) tended to be more emotional.
SOURCE
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Ruinous 'Compassion'
It is fascinating to see brilliant people belatedly discover the obvious – and to see an even larger number of brilliant people never discover the obvious.
A recent story in a San Francisco newspaper says that some restaurants and grocery stores in Oakland’s Chinatown have closed after the city’s minimum wage was raised. Other small businesses there are not sure they are going to survive, since many depend on a thin profit margin and a high volume of sales.
At an angry meeting between local small business owners and city officials, the local organization that had campaigned for the higher minimum wage was absent. They were probably some place congratulating themselves on having passed a humane “living wage” law. The group most affected was also absent – inexperienced and unskilled young people, who need a job to get some experience, even more than they need the money.
It is not a breakthrough on the frontiers of knowledge that minimum wage laws reduce employment opportunities for the young and the unskilled of any age. It has been happening around the world, for generation after generation, and in the most diverse countries.
It is not just the young who are affected when minimum wage rates are set according to the fashionable notions of third parties, with little or no regard for whether everyone is productive enough to be worth paying the minimum wage they set.
You can check this out for yourself. Go to your local public library and pick up a copy of the distinguished British magazine “The Economist.”
Whether it is the current issue or a back issue doesn’t matter. Spain, Greece and South Africa will be easy to locate in the table near the back, which lists data for various countries. Just look down the unemployment column for countries with unemployment rates around 25 percent. Spain, Greece and South Africa are always there, whether or not there is a recession. Why? Because they have very generous minimum wage laws.
While you are there, you can look up the unemployment rate for Switzerland, which has no minimum wage law at all. Over the years, I have never seen the unemployment rate in Switzerland reach as high as 4 percent. Back in 2003, “The Economist” magazine reported: “Switzerland’s unemployment neared a five-year high of 3.9% in February.”
In the United States, back in what liberals think of as the bad old days before there was a federal minimum wage law, the annual unemployment rate during Calvin Coolidge’s last four years as president ranged from a high of 4.2 percent to a low of 1.8 percent.
Low-income minorities are often hardest hit by the unemployment that follows in the wake of minimum wage laws. The last year when the black unemployment rate was lower than the white unemployment rate was 1930, the last year before there was a federal minimum wage law.
The following year, the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 was passed, requiring minimum wages in the construction industry. This was in response to complaints that construction companies with non-union black construction workers were able to underbid construction companies with unionized white workers (whose unions would not admit blacks).
Looking back over my own life, I realize now how lucky I was when I left home in 1948, at the age of 17, to become self-supporting. The unemployment rate for 16- and 17-year-old blacks at that time was under 10 percent. Inflation had made the minimum wage law, passed ten years earlier, irrelevant.
But it was only a matter of time before liberal compassion led to repeated increases in the minimum wage, to keep up with inflation. The annual unemployment rate for black teenagers has never been less than 20 percent in the past 50 years, and has ranged as high as over 50 percent.
You can check these numbers in a table of official government statistics on page 42 of Professor Walter Williams' book “Race and Economics.”
Incidentally, the black-white gap in unemployment rates for 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds was virtually non-existent back in 1948. But the black teenage unemployment rate has been more than double that for white teenagers for every year since 1971.
This is just one of many policies that allow liberals to go around feeling good about themselves, while leaving havoc in their wake.
SOURCE
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Minimum wage folly in Britain too
We’ve the sad news that the minimum wage is being raised yet again: "The national minimum wage will increase by 20p an hour to £6.70 from October, the government has announced. The changes will benefit more than 1.4 million workers."
And will disbenefit some unknown number of workers who will lose their jobs. True, a modest rise will leave only a modest number losing their jobs but as they therefore lose 100% of their income that’s still quite a large effect. However, we also have another report today:
"The number of young people from ethnic minority backgrounds who have been unemployed for more than a year has risen by almost 50% since the coalition came to power, according to figures released by the Labour party. There are now 41,000 16- to 24-year-olds from black, asian and minority ethnic [BAME] communities who are long-term unemployed – a 49% rise from 2010, according to an analysis of official figures by the House of Commons Library."
The effects of a minimum wage will be hardest felt where that minimum wage actually binds. Among the young and untrained and among those who are unfavoured for any other reason (like, here, perhaps ethnicity for all that we would desire that there is no such discrimination). Which make this news about the new minimum wage even worse:
The hourly rate for younger workers will also rise, and for apprentices it will go up by 20% – or 57p – to £3.30 an hour.
Yes, of course the correct minimum wage is a rate of zero. But we’re unlikely to win that argument but at least we can argue for a rate that doesn’t do so much damn damage to the least favoured portions of our society. The minimum wage discriminates against those black, asian and minority ethnic youths. Indeed, such discrimination was a stated reason for the introduction of the minimum wage in the United States back in the times of Jim Crow. It’s actually a racist government policy. We should therefore end it.
Every time the NMW increases, another rung is cut from the bottom of the societal ladder leaving more people out in the cold.
SOURCE
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Twenty Blacks Victimized in Shootings
You’ve probably heard about the 20 black victims in numerous shootings between Sunday afternoon and Monday morning. The violence helped propagate the “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative and further riled Barack Obama, Eric Holder and their co-conspirators in the Leftmedia, all of whom raised alarm over the recent deaths of blacks involving white police officers.
Well, the first part is true anyway – though you’d be forgiven for having no idea what we’re talking about. The shootings, all of which took place during a 24-hour period, bloodied the streets of Chicago but were largely absent from the headlines.
Obama hasn’t said a word about these deaths, probably because it was black-on-black crime, which doesn’t translate into political constituency race-bait like a good cop killing a street thug does.
Here’s what we know about Chicago murder rates from the latest year of data: The black murder rate was approximately 34 per 100,000, the Hispanic rate was 11 per 100,000, and the white rate 3 per 100,000. Translation: This isn’t a “gun problem”; it’s a young black male problem. And it’s a cultural epidemic the mainstream media largely ignores.
Of course, if this recent black-on-black bloodletting had instead been white-on-black crime, Al Sharpton and Co. would be there faster than you can say “Racist!”
More HERE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.
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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20 March, 2015
The disgusting Leftist media again -- campaigning hard against the Prime Minister of Israel -- but Bibi had the last laugh
MSNBC Denounces Netanyahu as a 'Panicking' 'Racist'
Reporting live from Tel Aviv and campaigning hard against the re-election of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on her MSNBC show on Tuesday, host Andrea Mitchell invited on one guest after another to denounce the Likud party leader.
Turning to New York Times Tel Aviv bureau chief Jodi Rudoren, Mitchell declared of Netanyahu: "He's clearly fearing that this center-left coalition and the prominence of, for the first time, a united Arab voting policy, Arab-Israelis who can vote, might make a difference."
Rudoren replied: "This morning he posted on his Facebook a video saying that Arabs were flocking to the polls and he called on right-wing supporters to come out and block them. And the left came and said that that was a racist remark, sort of comparing it to suppressing African-American votes in the United States. So it's been a very provocative and ugly last few days..."
Moments later, Mitchell spoke to former Congresswoman and president of the liberal Wilson Center Jane Harman:
Let's talk about what Netanyahu has done in the last forty-eight hours, which is to reverse decades and decades of U.S./Israeli policy, which is negotiations towards a two-state solution. A Palestinian homeland and of course Israel. And by reversing that, if he sticks – let's say he wins – and he sticks with his commitments of the last forty-eight hours, there'll be hell to pay.
Harman said of the Jewish leader: "I would call it a Hail Mary pass."
In a separate segment later on the program, Mitchell brought on former Israeli General Danny Yatom and touted his opposition to Netanayhu: "You are one of more than a hundred retired generals who came out against Netanyahu because you don't think that his positions are good for security....You just said to me he's panicking."
Yatom argued: "Yes, it looks to me that he feels as if the polls that were published until two days ago are real, realistic, and that he's going to lose....So it looks as if I don't have any other explanation but to say that probably he's caught in panic."
Mitchell then teed up James Zogby, president of the Arab-American Institute: "I know that you've been a long proponent of having a two-state solution....What is going to be the reaction in the Palestinian community – let's say that Netanyahu is elected or is in part of a unity government, a coalition government – to the end of any hope of having their own state?" Zogby ranted:
"In the animal kingdom there's nothing more dangerous than a panicked politician and Netanyahu is panicking. And so he's scaring people about foreign conspiracies, about security threats, and about the Arabs. And if you take his words about the Arab vote and translate it into American politics and call it "the black vote," you see how racist this is. And it's – it's, I think, a very difficult problem right now for Israel is to deal with this bigotry towards the Arab population, which is just 20% of the country"
Not a quote but maybe a thought
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The courts will again strike down attempts by the FCC to regulate the internet
It's just another attempt by the Obama administration to do an end-run around Congress
This FCC Title II legal case and process is an obvious mess. It is the functional legal equivalent of a parent getting caught doing something wrong and then scolding an inquisitive child with “because I say so” answers — over and over again.
In a nutshell, the FCC’s core purpose for asserting Title II authority is to permanently ban any price/compensation for edge downstream Internet service, which is illegally confiscatory. And the FCC’s Title II legal case is built upon de facto claims of legal immunity to disregard due process, the law, facts, definitions, precedents, fair notice, reliance interests and proportionality.
Simply the FCC seeks an illegal end via multiple illegal means, and serial sweeping “Chevron Deference” to evade legal and constitutional accountability. Multiple wrongs do not make a right.
The rest of this analysis will answer three questions central to anticipating the likely legal outcome of the FCC’s assertion of Title II authority. How could this FCC legal charade happen? Why is the FCC’s core purpose illegal? And what are the FCC’s Title II serial ends-justify-the-means violations of due process?
How could this FCC legal charade happen?
This is actually not the third, but the FCC’s fourth proposed legal theory to assert direct authority to regulate the Internet. The first three cases, by three different FCC Chairman and their General Counsels — Martin in 2008, Genachowski in 2010, and Wheeler initially in early 2014 — all decided that Title II reclassification was not likely a legally sustainable source of FCC authority.
The first two legal cases failed in court, Chairman Martin’s in Comcast v. FCC in 2010, and Chairman Genachowski’s in Verizon v. FCC in 2014.
Many forget that the third proposed FCC legal case was Chairman Wheeler’s in February of last year.
In response to the FCC’s loss in Verizon v. FCC, FCC Chairman Wheeler stated February 19, 2014 that the FCC would not appeal and would accept the Court’s “invitation by proposing rules that will meet the court’s test for preventing improper blocking of and discrimination among Internet traffic…” under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Thus Chairman Tom Wheeler and his General Counsel Jonathan Sallet originally did not believe that Title II reclassification was a legally sustainable legal alternative to solve the FCC’s net neutrality legal authority problem. In late April 2014, FCC Chairman Wheeler continued to reject Title II reclassification as a source of FCC legal authority in his proposed draft NPRM for his fellow commissioners’ review.
However, after a widely-reported lobbying campaign for Title II reclassification of broadband, the FCC passed an NPRM 3-2 in May 2014, which included consideration of Title II reclassification as a potential source of FCC legal authority.
In a November 2014 public call for FCC regulation of the Internet as a utility, President Obama publicly and specifically urged: “I believe the FCC should reclassify consumer broadband service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act,” which is exactly what the FCC majority dutifully voted to do February 26th.
Simply, the FCC decided to reclassify the Internet as “telecommunications” not based on its independent, objective, expert legal opinion, but based on outside political pressure.
Here is the crux of my 90% confidence that the FCC’s legal case will crumble under scrutiny in court.
The FCC’s decision to reclassify is wholly predicated on the FCC political imperative (or “end”) to find some new assertable FCC legal authority to ban paid prioritization or fast-lanes (i.e. economically impose a permanent “price of zero” for edge downstream traffic without cost recovery). That’s because Verizon v. FCC (page 60) ruled that the FCC did not have authority under Section 706 “to impose per se common carrier obligations.”
Political pressure to turn currently-illegal zero-price regulation into legal anti-discrimination regulation without the involvement of Congress or new legislation, created immense political pressure for FCC lawyers to justify using most any “means” necessary to justify the desired political “end.”
Thus whenever the FCC encounters a fact, definition, precedent, law or constitutional principle that contradicts or thwarts the FCC’s desired end, the FCC serially dismisses them with claims of agency discretion allowed by various court precedents.
However, the FCC’s expectation of deference in this case is so cumulatively serial and sweeping — in reversing a plethora of legally-settled findings of fact, definitions, precedent, law and constitutional interpretation — that a court could ask sarcastically what role the FCC believes remains for the Judicial Branch to adjudicate?
Much more HERE (See the original for links)
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Obamacare’s Second Open Season: Average Premium Up 23 Percent – After Subsidies
With enrollment data through February 22, the administration finally declared Obamacare’s second enrollment season closed and released its report on the results. (Although, people who have to pay Obamacare’s mandate/penalty/fine/tax as a result of information disclosed in their 2014 tax returns will have a special open enrollment in April).
Obamacare’s supporters cheered that enrollment hit 11.7 million people, exceeding the low-ball estimate of 9.1 million the administration made last November. Lost in the enthusiasm for Obamacare’s new high-water mark are a few uncomfortable facts.
First, the average premium — net of subsidies — has jumped 23 percent from 2014. In both years, insurers covering almost nine in ten Obamacare subscribers received subsidies to reduce premiums. The average monthly premium, before insurers receive subsidies, across all “metal” plans, is $364 in 2015. The average subsidy is $263, resulting in a net premium of $101 (Table 6). In 2014, the administration reported an average premium of $346, less an average tax credit of $264, for a net premium of $82 (Table 2). Therefore, the gross premium increased 5 percent but the subsidy declined by a scratch. Due to the power of leverage, this resulted in subscribers seeing an average premium jump of 23 percent.
Second, Obamacare continues to “churn” peoples’ insurance coverage. Like last year, we can expect a significant share of this year’s 11.7 million enrollees will never pay a premium, often because they will receive employer-based coverage if they move up in the world, or fall into Medicaid dependency if they drop.
For the states using healthcare.gov, only 4.2 million of the 8.8 million 2015 enrollees were enrolled at the end of 2014. After Obamacare’s first open season closed, the administration reported that 5.4 million of the 8.1 million enrollees had signed up through healthcare.gov (Table 1). (That figure was later revealed as somewhat contaminated by the inclusion of standalone dental plans.).
So, over one fifth of those who were enrolled by April 2014 had vanished from Obamacare by February 2015. Maybe some of them did re-enroll for 2015: Someone could have signed up in April 2014, dropped out during 2014 and signed up again this time around. This fragmentation of coverage in working and lower middle-class households is surely frustrating to them and harms the quality of care.
Third, a loss for the administration in the Supreme Court’s King vs. Burwell lawsuit will deal a mortal blow to Obamacare. This is the lawsuit asserting what the Administration is paying out of subsidies to insurers in state-based exchanges is illegal. Of the 11.7 million new enrollees, 8.8 million enrolled through healthcare.gov and only 2.8 million through state exchanges. The Supreme Court is expected to make a decision by July. If the administration loses, three quarters of Obamacare beneficiaries will be in states in which insurers lose their subsidies. To resolve the resulting inequity between states, Congress will have to respond with amendments to the Affordable Care Act that President Obama will sign.
Third, Obamacare subscribers are less satisfied with their plans than beneficiaries of other government or private health plans are:
The 29 percent of re-enrollees who switched plans is higher than that seen in other programs. For example, studies show approximately 13 percent of Medicare Part D enrollees change plans in a given year; 12 percent of those active employees with Federal Employee Health Benefit Plan coverage switch plans each year and only about 7.5 percent of those with employer sponsored coverage switch plans for reasons other than a job change during a given year. (p. 6)
Fourth, both the Obamacare subsidies and the Affordable Care Act’s big increase in Medicaid spending are higher than necessary to get people covered. Although the average net premium jumped 23 percent, subscribers were nevertheless willing to pay up for a higher level of coverage. While 77 percent of the 7.65 million subsidized subscribers who used healthcare.gov could have bought plans for less than $50, only 38 percent did. While 89 percent could have bought plans for less than $100, only 63 percent did (Table 7). Obamacare subscribers have enough discretionary income to pay for health insurance and need not be so dependent on taxpayers.
This is strikingly apparent among low-income households, which are eligible for Medicaid in states that chose to expand that type of welfare. (Medicaid is a joint state-federal welfare program that provides health coverage.) Table 5 (page 14) shows the income distribution of households enrolling in Obamacare, broken down into states that did or did not expand Medicaid.HA
Two cells are highlighted: Households between 100 percent and 150 percent of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) in states that expanded Medicaid dependency, and those that did not. Many of the latter would be in Medicaid if their states had expanded the program. In such states, only 47 percent of Obamacare enrollees are within this income range, versus only 22 percent in states that expanded Medicaid. This indicates that Medicaid expansion has trapped people into complete government dependency for health care, who would be able to buy private health insurance with some government subsidy.
Despite a successful headline number of subscribers, Obamacare is still deeply flawed.
SOURCE (See the original for links and graphics)
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Seattle Eateries Are Dying and Minimum Wage Killed Them
It’s just going to be that much harder to get some authentic Seattle salmon. Due to the city’s minimum wage hike that’s set to slam the city April 1 (April Fools!), Seattle restaurants are closing because they can’t pay workers the $15 an hour minimum wage.
Seattle Magazine reports, “Washington Restaurant Association’s [Anthony] Anton puts it this way: ‘It’s not a political problem; it’s a math problem.’ He estimates that a common budget breakdown among sustaining Seattle restaurants so far has been the following: 36 percent of funds are devoted to labor, 30 percent to food costs and 30 percent go to everything else (all other operational costs). The remaining 4 percent has been the profit margin, and as a result, in a $700,000 restaurant, he estimates that the average restaurateur in Seattle has been making $28,000 a year.”
While restaurants are not the economic lifeblood of any city, a city without good food is tasteless. This is a tangible example of what’s happening to Seattle’s economy with a government-mandated wage.
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.
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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19 March, 2015
Congratulations to Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu
He has been returned to office with an increased plurality for his Likud party and should have little trouble (by Israeli standards) in forming a new governing coalition
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Breastfeeding and IQ
There is an elegantly done study just out in Lancet Which shows that, among Brazilians, children who were breastfed for some time grew up to have slightly higher IQs. The study title is "Association between breastfeeding and intelligence, educational attainment, and income at 30 years of age: a prospective birth cohort study from Brazil".
I really hate to demolish such extensive and careful work but the study has a fatal flaw: Maternal IQ was not measured. And, surprising though it may seem IQ is hugely important to breastfeeding. High IQ mothers breastfeed a lot more. And IQ is of course mainly genetically transmitted. So all that the study really shows is that high IQ mothers have high IQ children, which is no news at all.
In the statistics section of the paper I was delighted to come across a word that I had forgotten I knew: "Heteroscedasticity". I must use it sometime.
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Western civilisation at stake amid growing threats
By Greg Sheridan, writing from Australia
WESTERN civilisation is in the midst of a profound crisis. Let me tell you how I get to that conclusion.
The most difficult task in any serious strategic analysis is to integrate factors from wholly different spheres of activity and to see how they play on each other. A failure to recognise the depth of the old Soviet Union’s economic crisis, for example, led many traditional Western strategic analysts, accustomed to measuring Soviet arsenals against US arsenals, to miss altogether the impending collapse of the entire Soviet system.
Today, the West, of which Australia is manifestly part, is beset by intractable, diverse challenges, each one of which could provide existential threat. It is solving none of them at the moment. Each threat multiplies the force of the others. Taken together, they constitute a long, systemic crisis. The West might solve these problems. But it might not, too.
First, Islamist terrorism. There are three ways this can be an existential threat. Terrorists could get material for a mass destruction attack, either a nuclear weapon or, much likelier, a radiation weapon, a dirty bomb. So far this hasn’t happened. But a strategic threat is not the common law. It’s not governed by precedent. A lot of determined and intelligent terrorists want to do this. Their chances increase radically when terrorists control the mechanisms of a state, as they do now in parts of Iraq and Syria, and as they did once in Afghanistan. This is one reason ungoverned space is so dangerous.
Second, terrorism could cripple social cohesion in Western societies. It’s impossible to know what social effects a few mass atrocity attacks would have.
Three, terrorists could produce disorder in the Middle East so chronic and widespread that it leads to state-on-state war, possibly involving nuclear weapons.
The West is not winning the war on Islamist terror. Since 9/11 al-Qa’ida has flourished in the Middle East and North Africa. It is now in danger of being supplanted by the even more murderous franchise of Islamic State. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of young men, including thousands from the West, have rallied to these banners.
The second big external threat to the West is the rise of new powers, or old powers newly emboldened, taking advantage of the weak and feckless leadership provided by Barack Obama. The US President is the de facto head of Western civilisation. Not since Jimmy Carter has there been a leader of such little strategic consequence. He is a President of fine words and strategic failure.
Russia is conquering slices of territory from its neighbours. There is no knowing what is the end of Vladimir Putin’s ambition. Reducing his “near abroad” to strategic subservience to Moscow is part of it. China is constructing military installations in disputed territories in the South China Sea hundreds of kilometres from the Chinese mainland.
Both Moscow and Beijing, and others, are testing not only American resolve but the whole efficacy of the US alliance system. China and Russia, and most nations in Asia, are ramping up military spending. In so far as there has been any principle of international security order since World War II, it has been the US alliance system.
Although the US is the leader of this system and does most of the heavy lifting, the power of its allies feeds into and magnifies US strategic power. If the US loses credibility the system becomes hollow.
The third big external threat is nuclear proliferation. There is no plausible economic justification for Iran’s big nuclear industry. Its true purpose is to acquire nuclear weapons, or the ability rapidly to produce nuclear weapons. It is about to secure relief from sanctions, already greatly watered down, in a deal with the US that will allow it to keep its nuclear establishment. Iran will get nuclear weapons in due course. Almost nothing is surer. Saudi Arabia has arrangements with Pakistan to follow suit when that happens. The governments of Egypt and some of the Gulf states will then face their own existential questions, especially if they feel they can no longer rely on the US.
Almost all the nuclear powers except the US are increasing the number of their nuclear warheads. The more these weapons proliferate, the greater the chance of their eventual use.
The fourth big external threat is the democratisation of destructive technology (beyond nuclear technology). The digital economy and all its associated inventions are a wonderful boon for humanity, not least in their applications to human health. But the power to use this technology destructively is also rising. The computing power of every smartphone in everybody’s pocket is greater than all the computing effort deployed to put a man on the moon in 1969. The most destructive people in our society so far have not been techno geniuses. But you wouldn’t need very many before terrorism and other antisocial movements switch to massive infrastructure disruption.
At the military level, asymmetry is the new reality, the power of numerically small and financially weak players to wreak enormous strategic damage. Size and money, which have traditionally helped the West, will be less decisive than they used to be, and are in any event moving against the West.
Then there are a series of internal factors that are hurting the West and its prospects. Western economies have recovered from the global financial crisis to some extent but they are not the primary sources of global economic growth. More than that, throughout the West there is an interlinked crisis of governance, budgets and social and economic sustainability.
In governance, the West is a terrible mess. Look at Europe, now a byword for chronic misgovernance and an inability to come to grips with the limitations of budgets and the excess of entitlements. Europe is one of the wealthiest regions of the planet, but its system cannot provide work for huge portions of its young people and cannot meaningfully integrate a large minority of immigrants. And it cannot match expenditure to income.
The US has a milder version of the same syndrome. Australia is running through prime ministers at a rate that would make postwar Italy proud.
Finally, there is this question: how long can the West live off the moral capital of religious conviction that it is now abandoning? The West is the only part of humanity abandoning religious belief. Can societies in which there is no overarching idea beyond the individual compete successfully in the long run?
Temperamentally, I’m an optimist. But no one should doubt a civilisational crisis exists.
SOURCE
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How One Man Turned Americans Against Government
Gallup conducted a poll of 1,025 Americans March 5-8 that captured the nation’s growing disgust with the federal government. But the Leftmedia stopped one question short of finding the real reason for this discontent.
“Dissatisfaction with government” now beats out concerns of the economy, terrorism, illegal immigration and unemployment, despite the direct influence of these pocketbook and kitchen-table issues. Don’t underappreciate these rankings. Survey participants most frequently respond to questions through the prism of, “I’m concerned because this issue impacts me directly.”
So why, Mr. or Mrs. American, do you have this increasing dissatisfaction with government?
It boils down to one word, and, no, it’s not racism. It’s “Obama.”
When Barack Obama declared with glee that we are “days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” most voters failed to fully realize the magnitude of his plans. Few understood that a community organizer raised on the milk of anger, hate and socialist indoctrination would so quickly shred the Constitution. But our Founders warned of such tyranny.
How many Democrats or even Republicans back in 2008 imagined Obama would so egregiously overstep the jurisdiction of the executive branch through ObamaCare’s implementation and effective amnesty? Or that today he would be on the verge of a nuclear agreement with Iran, giving the world’s leading terrorist sponsor much of what it wants?
Have you ever dined at a restaurant described as some delightful experience or marketed to fulfill your culinary dreams only to leave with an excessive tab, disastrous service and a meal you could’ve cooked better at home?
Obama marketed himself with promises of transparency, a government that serves all Americans, and all-around, feel-good “Hope ‘n’ Change™.
Yet after six years, the American people have endured lie after lie. To name but a few:
"If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”
“I didn’t set a red line on Syria.”
“I didn’t call the Islamic State a ‘JV team.’”
“Republicans have filibustered 500 pieces of legislation.”
“The sequester is not something I’ve proposed.”
“Here’s what happened [at Benghazi]. … You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here, sort of a shadowy character who – who made an extremely offensive video directed at – at Muhammad and Islam.”
And then there was, for example, the political targeting by the IRS and the politicization of the Department of Justice by his criminal co-conspirator, Attorney General Eric Holder.
The distrust that has been sown, watered, fertilized and is now at full harvest is a testament to Obama’s successful “transformation” of America. He has left Americans with buyer’s remorse of monumental proportions. Voters didn’t bargain for this mess – even if some of us tried to warn them.
Democrats were walloped in two straight midterm elections, which served notice to everyone but a petulant Obama that his policies, his tactics and his results were rejected. Those Democrats who remain in elected office either have to distance themselves from the radical in the White House, or they represent districts where voters embrace Obama’s radical policies.
The Obama approach to elections has been to place each voter in some interest group – black, homosexual, pro-abortion, illegal immigrant, etc. – and win by mobilizing those groups nationally. Identity politics worked for Obama but failed most Americans.
If there’s a silver lining, it’s that Chief Radical Obama’s failed policies have resulted in a weak bench of leftist extremists down the ballot. The Republican wave was so thoroughly successful that it wiped out vast numbers of state and local Democrats around the nation, from whom the next generation of the party’s leaders will come. It is by no means a permanent defeat, but it’s most certainly a real setback.
Americans are fed up by government because Obama overpromised and under-delivered. His solution to everything is a government program, and, increasingly, Americans are seeing that as the wrong approach.
Now, imagine a nation led by those who say what they mean, mean what they say, and follow through on principled policy. Americans want that type of government leadership and are waiting, impatiently.
SOURCE
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The apparent insanity of American liberals
Western liberals keep being so “open minded” about Muslims and Islam their brains have now completely fallen out of their heads. They just don’t seem to get the fact they will be the first casualties of any kind of Islamic take-over anywhere in the world. As for these self-hating Jews that are part of the pseudo-religion movement of the left who continue to condemn Jews, Judaism, and Israel – what do they think would happen to them if any of the Islamic sects took over western cultures?
Since they’re all leftists they hate capitalism and will support any system that attacks the paragon of capitalism and its allies - the United States.
They work unendingly to destroy the system that gave the world the only stable moral foundation in the world. A system based on Judaic/Christian principles, which was the fertilizer for the only economic system the world ever knew that was capable of bringing so many people out of misery squalor, suffering, disease and early death – American capitalism.
They want to “fundamentally” change the only place in the world where they could spout their inflammatory nonsense without being thrown into jail or worse. I know, I know, they could spout their claptrap in many western nations, but does anyone really believe this would be tolerated anywhere else if America’s Constitution system wasn’t such a dominant force in the world? A system they’re trying to overturn.
Historically we know the concepts they believe in, subscribe to - and demand all others believe it - are worldwide failures, whether it involves religion, economics or the environment. These are concepts so stupid only intellectuals could believe in them. Is it any wonder leftism, in all of its manifestations, are the movements so heavily infested with so many intellectuals?
They reject history - they reject all the evidence of their failures and the devastatingly negative outcomes their policies have inflicted on humanity, and continue to passionately and adamantly promote those concepts! We can only conclude one thing by way of explanation.
The left must truly be insane!
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog
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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18 March, 2015
A warning from the author of "The Prince"
When one considers how much corruption there was in those kings, if two or three successive reigns had continued the same way, and that corruption which was in them had spread to members of the body politic, it would no longer have been possible to reform [Rome].”
That was Niccolo Machiavelli, commenting in his Discourses on Livy published in 1517, almost 500 years ago, on what might have happened if the ancient Roman monarchy had not been overthrown by Brutus and a republic established. Although better known for his masterpiece of political violence, The Prince, here in Discourses Machiavelli’s clear preference for republican government and liberty can be found.
But, writes Machiavelli, freedom has a prerequisite, and that is virtue — a love of liberty. Lacking this virtue, then, a people become ambivalent to politics and those who wield power. Politics becomes the province of the powerful that participate, and lacking power, is something to otherwise be avoided out of fear. There are those who have access, and then there is everyone else.
If such a form of government persists for long, the freedom of the republic as a whole is ultimately lost, and the people themselves are corrupted. Not in the sense that they are accepting bribes — although public forms of subsistence duly enacted can be common in these cases to sweeten the deal of wearing a yoke — but in that inherent inability and unwillingness of the people and their representatives to affect the outcome of public decisions.
The true corruption occurs when politics only serves private or narrow interests far beyond reach, and power is concentrated into the hands of a few, and so the people only concern themselves with their private lives. This is when the people and their representatives no longer have any means of wielding true power, and thus become disconnected from the process.
Is Congress on the outside, looking in?
Today, the dust continues to settle from the Obama administration’s most recent executive action to grant unconstitutional, executive amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants without Congressional assent — and Congress’ subsequent decision to provide the public funds necessary for the executive branch to carry on its action.
Many, including this author, question openly what purpose Congress still serves, if not to make law or amend existing law. For it must be noted that this usurpation by Obama has not been limited to simply to this most recent outrage. It extends through his two terms, and through that of his predecessors.
It can also be seen in the recent move by the Federal Communications Commission to reclassify broadband Internet access as a telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act, after the agency had previously determined broadband to be exempt in 2002.
Congress’ response? So far, it has done nothing. Later this year, it will most likely continue to fund the agency. But the abdication really came when the agency’s broad powers to make such determinations were created by Congress in the first place in 1934.
Or it can be found in the administration decision to allow federal exchanges under the health care law to distribute insurance subsidies, when the law explicitly forbade it — an issue now before the Supreme Court. Or to postpone implementing the law’s employer mandate when no such exception was even considered under the law.
Here, in the latter example, the House of Representatives did file a federal lawsuit in 2014, but it has also abdicated along with the Senate by continuing to fund the law’s administration.
Or one could look at the prior Bush administration’s decision to apply $17 billion of Troubled Asset Relief Fund monies to troubled automakers GM and Chrysler when the law only ever allowed funds for financial institutions caught in the mortgage meltdown, and Congress had already explicitly rejected an auto bailout. Announcing his decision in 2008, then President George W. Bush said, “Congress was unable to get a bill on my desk before adjourning for the year. This means the only way to avoid a collapse of the U.S. auto industry is for the executive branch to step in.”
At the time, Congress did nothing to rein in the bailouts. It allowed them to continue.
Or consider the rapid expansion of so-called “affordable housing goals” by Government Sponsored Enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac through the 1990s and 2000s that helped fuel the subprime housing bubble that brought the global economy to its knees.
The companies had been given express authorization to act as they did by Congress when it passed the GSE Act of 1992. Here, the abdication had been at the outset.
Or there is also the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 carbon endangerment finding that regulated carbon dioxide as a harmful pollutant under the terms of the Clean Air Act even though the original law never contemplated such a regulation.
Congress’ response has been, again, to provide the funds necessary for the agency to continue making up rules. Yet, the original problem was really created when Congress gave the agency such vast powers to regulate when it created it in 1970.
Or then there is the outsourcing of the nation’s monetary policy to the unelected Federal Reserve, as happened 102 years ago in 1913 when the Federal Reserve Act was adopted.
In 2010, under Dodd-Frank, Congress did order an audit of the central bank’s many bailouts during the financial crisis. It even turned up some $442.7 billion of money being created and simply given to foreign banks — quite a smoking gun of crony corruption. But then Congress did nothing with the findings.
Or one might also ponder that more than 86 percent of the federal budget gets spent whether Congress votes to appropriate any monies at all, as occurred in the most recent partial government shutdown of 2013.
Here, again, is an abdication of Congress’ lawmaking and appropriating powers to an automatic, permanent funding of governmental institutions that would go on functioning if Congress was dissolved.
I could go on, but in each instance, Congress has abdicated its constitutional lawmaking powers, either outright or through tacit acceptance of each executive usurpation.
This lack of participation by the people’s representatives — who constitutionally are supposed to be the nation’s lawmaking body — and yet who appear to have little role in actually governing, is as destructive to the liberty of the polity as a whole as anything else.
Congress, like the people, are on the outside, looking in. For, what can one do but merely observe our presidential system, to look upon an executive branch that over generations has progressively been delegated the power to act independently of the other branches. If Congress is ambivalent about exercising its own constitutional power, it will surely continue to lose it.
This dilution of the separation of powers is the very loss of liberty Machiavelli warns against. Consider his description of the later republic that fell to Caesar: “Such contrasting results in the same city arose from nothing other than the fact that the Roman people were still uncorrupt at the time of the [kings], while they were most corrupt in these later times; in the early days, in order to keep the people firm and disposed to rejecting a king it was enough merely to have them swear that they would never consent to another king…”
Later, the people had been so corrupted, Caesar “was able to blind the multitude so that they did not recognize the yoke which they themselves were placing on their necks,” Machiavelli writes. Then, even Caesar’s assassination was not enough to stop what had begun. The latter Brutus who stabbed him ultimately just traded one prince for another. The reign of the emperors was solidified after years of civil war.
So, what to do?
As has been seen in history, the concentration of power seen today in the executive branch is extraordinarily dangerous in republican systems of government. So, what must be done?
The separation of powers, particularly Congress’ power to make law — all of the laws — must be restored. And it must be happen soon. No more broad grants of discretionary authority. No more lawmaking agencies. No more panels of experts. No more automatic budgets. The administrative state must be broken up.
The sort of insulated decision-making taking place was only originally ever envisioned to extend to the President’s Commander-in-Chief war powers upon a Congressional declaration of war. Now it has become an expansive executive, regulatory state with no real role for elected representatives. Sure, sometimes Congress gets a few crumbs, but for the most part, the legislative branch has become a rubber stamp in our presidential, administrative system.
All along this process, the American people have been told sit back, wait for the next presidential cycle. To be patient. There is some truth to this. It probably will take a new presidential administration to fix this. But there are a few caveats.
First, time matters, Machiavelli warns. The situation must not persist for too long, or the whole body politic will be corrupted. Meaning, whichever party wins elections, the Leviathan will continue of its own accord.
Second, not even a single president may be able to fix it: “If a city has begun to decline because of the corruption of its material, and if it ever happens to pull itself up again, this happens because of the ability of a single man living at the time and not because of the ability of the people supporting its good institutions; and as soon as that man is [gone] it returns to its former ways… unless the reformers, before passing on… have managed to bring about her rebirth.”
Meaning, winning an election will not be enough. Whoever the next president is, regardless of political party, he or she has to be dedicated to ensuring that the people’s elected representatives are the ones who make laws and appropriate funds on an annual basis.
This is not a matter of capturing the bureaucracy and governing “smarter.” It is a matter of dissolving the rulemaking bodies.
Barring that, there are few other methods under our constitutional system to restore the separation of powers. There is the Article V convention for proposing amendments by the states, and that is even being attempted now. Many states have already called for the convention. But to succeed, the movement will require leaders at the state level who, unlike Congress, are willing to exercise their constitutionally delegated powers.
If, through their own ambivalence, however, state legislators decide to take a pass on a process for restoring constitutional legislative powers to elected representatives, they will have proven themselves no better than Washington, D.C. It will be just another surrender of liberty.
Whether via the presidential process or a states-ordered convention, whoever leads this effort must have true virtue — an unshakeable love for liberty. Not just a love of individual rights, as we think of in the Bill of Rights and others retained by the people — but the determination to restore true lawmaking power to Congress. There is no greater task facing the nation.
Otherwise, as has been the case in republican systems throughout history that fall into decline, and as Machiavelli warns, “A corrupt people which lives under a prince will never be able to regain its freedom.”
That, from the author of The Prince.
SOURCE
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Campaign contributions and double standards
by Jeff Jacoby
WHAT DOES Massachusetts have against the First Amendment?
A lawsuit filed in Superior Court by two family-owned companies — 1A Auto Inc., an auto-parts vendor in Pepperell, and 126 Self Storage Inc., a storage-unit rental firm in Ashland — challenges state campaign-finance rules so crazily lopsided they should be equipped with grab bars. Massachusetts law has long banned businesses from contributing to political candidates or parties, but under rules dating back to the 1980s, labor unions are free to spend up to $15,000 per year in direct political contributions with no disclosure required. Labor unions can also set up PACs — political action committees — to funnel money to candidates and parties they support. Businesses in Massachusetts aren't allowed to do that either.
The sheer unfairness of such regulations speaks for itself. Whatever your view of unions or businesses — or of any interest group — there should be only one standard for determining whether they can engage in political expression. In 15 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, businesses and unions alike are prohibited from making direct campaign contributions. Nearly twice as many states permit both to contribute on equal terms. If you didn't know better, you might think it a no-brainer that a state like Massachusetts — a cradle of American liberty, the home of such free-speech champions as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Louis Brandeis — would be in the second group, holding the marketplace of ideas open to all comers.
Instead Massachusetts is one of a handful of states that blatantly discriminates, blocking campaign contributions from businesses while clearing the way for unions to get involved in electoral contests. The $15,000 no-disclosure loophole is especially egregious. "More than any other state," argues Jim Manley, a senior litigator with the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, a pro-bono legal group representing the plaintiffs, "Massachusetts' campaign contribution restrictions are tilted in favor of unions and against businesses."
This isn't the first time the state has faced legal action over its disregard for First Amendment freedoms
In McCullen v. Coakley, a case decided last June, the US Supreme Court unanimously struck down the Massachusetts "buffer zone" law, which prohibited even peaceful speech or silent protest within 35 feet of abortion clinics. The justices rejected the state's claim that the sweeping ban made it easy to preserve public order. "A painted line on the sidewalk is easy to enforce," the court observed dryly, "but the prime objective of the First Amendment is not efficiency."
Massachusetts was likewise rebuked by the high court in 1995, when the justices slapped down attempts to force organizers of the South Boston St. Patrick's Day parade to include a gay and lesbian group among the marchers. Such behavior "grates on the First Amendment," wrote Justice David Souter. Government "is not free to interfere with speech for no better reason than promoting an approved message or discouraging a disfavored one."
An even earlier free-speech landmark, the 1978 case of Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, is especially relevant to the new lawsuit over contributions. Massachusetts had made it illegal for businesses to give money to ballot initiative campaigns. The Supreme Court ruled that under the Bill of Rights, no such ban could stand: There is "no support in the First or Fourteenth Amendment . . . for the proposition that speech that otherwise would be within the protection of the First Amendment loses that protection simply because its source is a corporation."
The key teaching of the Bellotti case — that the First Amendment does not allow political speech restrictions based on a speaker's corporate identity — is not one that the Supreme Court has backed away from. If anything, it is even more secure today than just a few years ago. Massachusetts cannot get away with treating political spending by organized labor as so sublime that unions can donate $15,000, no questions asked, to a single candidate, while individual donors are held to $1,000 — and businesses are deemed too impure to be allowed to donate one red cent. Nor can the state justify its green light for union-financed PACs, while it warns businesses against giving anything to a PAC, not even a business name.
"Massachusetts needs extraordinarily good reasons to discriminate against businesses' political speech," the plaintiffs' lawyers contend, "and there is no reason good enough to justify Massachusetts' total ban."
Will Beacon Hill once again dig in its heels and defend an unconstitutional law? Or will it this time defer to the Constitution — and rectify its campaign-finance injustice voluntarily, before it's forced to do so in court?
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog
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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17 March, 2015
Years of Western meddling pushed Ukraine over the edge
It is beyond wrong to hold Russia responsible for the Ukrainian instability
The current mainstream argument in the West about Ukraine is seriously misguided and dishonest. According to Western media and politicians, Russia has become an aggressive, reckless and expansionist power. Yearning for the glory days of the Soviet Union, Russia has ramped up tensions with the West with a series of bold and cunning moves directed by that inscrutable master strategist, Vladimir Putin.
Post-Cold War, so the story continues, the West had dreamed that a new and better world order was dawning, one in which the European Union and America could act as forces for good in the world, bringing order and human rights to all. But Russia squandered that opportunity. And now it is dragging Western nations back into the old world, forcing them to respond to Putin’s aggressive and reckless policies.
Virtually everything about this argument is false. The only thing that is true is that military and political tensions between Russia and the West have escalated to a level unprecedented since the end of the Cold War. But blame here lies, largely, with the West, not Russia.
The first thing to understand is that the Ukrainian crisis comes after a decade of escalating tensions. The crisis is therefore an expression of the worsening relationship between Russia and the West, rather than a cause of it. However, this worsening relationship cannot be attributed to the behaviour of Russia. In fact, it is the West that has embarked on a number of reckless and catastrophic follies that have had devastating effects on international stability.
From the 1990s onwards, Western states have promoted the idea that state sovereignty should be conditional upon a state’s treatment of its population. Under this banner, the West has embarked on several military interventions, breaching sovereignty in the name of human rights in Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo and, of course, Libya, where the catastrophic intervention of 2011 has opened Libya up to the Islamic State.
Kosovo was particularly significant. Russia had refused to support a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution supporting the intervention, arguing that allowing human rights to trump sovereignty, as US attorney Kenneth Roth put it, would permit Western states to intervene at will in weaker states. Moreover, the bombing was conducted by NATO. This marked a change in the role of NATO, from a formally defensive institution to one that could be used to engage in aggressive military operations.
Over a decade later, Russia did support UNSC resolution 1973, which paved the way for NATO to conduct a humanitarian intervention in Libya. However, NATO went beyond the mandate given by the UNSC, and aided the removal of Colonel Gaddafi from power with no thought as to what would happen next. Following this, Russia stated clearly that it would no longer support any similar Western initiatives and blocked UNSC resolutions over Syria. While many laughed when Putin cited the Responsibility to Protect doctrine when annexing Crimea, he was only reading from a script that was written in the West.
When it comes to Western interventions justified in hard security terms as opposed to humanitarian terms, you do not have to be a member of Putin’s inner circle to think the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq were out of control and clueless. It is clear when one looks at Iraq that the US and its allies have destroyed a country on the basis of known lies for no clear reason (Saddam Hussein did not want to stop selling oil to the West), and the consequences are only getting worse. As Patrick Cockburn points out in his excellent new book on the Islamic State, immediately after 9/11 al-Qaeda was a marginal force. Today, the al-Qaeda offshoot IS and other related jihadi groups control vast territories containing millions of people.
NATO membership has been expanded regardless of the entirely legitimate fears and interests of Russia. However, as John Mearsheimer has pointed out, when in 2008 NATO announced that Georgia and Ukraine would become NATO members, it was a step too far for Russia. The Georgian War can be understood as a direct consequence of NATO’s provocative expansion.
Ukraine is a country of particular importance to Russia. A recent House of Lords report on the Ukraine crisis says that the West constantly misread Russia and failed to understand the importance of Ukraine. Yet in fact, Russia made it very clear (as it did over Georgia) that Ukraine joining NATO or moving closer to the EU was unacceptable.
The EU deposed Ukraine’s elected head of state with no thought as to what the consequences might be in a complicated and divided nation. Speaking in November last year about the crisis, outgoing European Commission president José Manuel Barroso said: ‘We were perfectly aware of all the risks… I spoke with Putin several times, and he told us how important for him was the customs union, the specific role he saw for Ukraine.’ Thankfully, Ukraine is no Iraq, but the war there has already cost thousands of lives and destroyed thousands of homes.
In comparison, Russia’s aggressive military exploits have been very limited, and clearly linked to maintaining a buffer zone between itself and NATO. Now, one may think that this is not a good principle for international affairs and that powerful states have no right to control their neighbours. But do you think that Mexico would be free to join the Eurasian Union? Or Greece? Moreover, the real consequences of Russia’s intervention in Georgia, for example, are nothing compared to the devastating consequences of the West’s follies in the Middle East and North Africa. This is because Russian intervention in Georgia and Ukraine has been guided by a straightforward strategy: to establish control of a buffer zone.
What we have today is a strange kind of shadow of the Cold War. Tensions between the West and Russia are very high, and the current crisis in Ukraine is frightening because it creates a situation in which tensions can easily escalate. But what is lacking, certainly in the West, is any kind of public engagement with the conflict. The Cold War played a key role in both East and West in terms of giving meaning to a specific set of differing social and political arrangements; in this sense, the whole of society was involved in the conflict. Today, however, there is little evidence of such engagement.
Rather, Western policy over Ukraine seems to be conducted largely at an elite level. Cameron’s bizarre off-the-cuff decision to send 75 military advisers to Ukraine was not done in reaction to public demands, but rather in response to a House of Lords report advising Britain to take more of a diplomatic role. I do not think that many British people would support a war in Ukraine, let alone a potential war with Russia.
There have been some half-baked attempts to talk up some kind of grand moral division between Russia and the West. For example, Western politicians attempted to use the Sochi Winter Olympics as an opportunity to bash Russia over its record on gay rights. Beyond the liberal media, this narrative utterly failed to take root in people’s minds. It’s simply not enough to try to recreate the existential battle of the Cold War.
It is also unfair. For all Putin’s talk about the decline of the West and orthodox Christian values, the Russia of today is very different to the Russia of 40 years ago. It is going through rapid social changes. The BBC loves to present Russians as some kind of race apart, brainwashed by state media, listening to folk music and crying into their vodka about how great they once were. This is nonsense and should be ignored. Russians have internet access, including to the BBC (lucky them) and to international newspapers, and many more Russians speak English than Europeans do Russian.
Currently, there seems to have been a rare outbreak of common sense within the EU. It is beginning to recognise the need for a political settlement in Ukraine. Let’s hope a settlement is reached soon, one which will eventually lead to the EU and NATO limiting their ambitions in this part of the world and allowing Ukraine to decide its future for itself.
SOURCE
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What's Fair?
By John Stossel
Donald Trump’s kids and Paris Hilton’s siblings were born rich. That gave them a big advantage in life. Unfair!
Inequality in wealth has grown. Today the richest 1 percent of Americans own a third of the assets. That’s not fair!
But wherever people are free, that’s what happens.
Some people are luckier, smarter or just better at making money. Often they marry other wealthy, well-connected people. Over time, these advantages compound. Globalization increases the effect. This month’s issue of Forbes says the world now has 1,826 billionaires, and some struggle to find enough parking places for their jets.
President Obama calls inequality “the defining issue of our time.” Really? Not our unsustainable debt? Not ISIS? The president also said, “No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change!”
Politicians constantly find crises they will solve by increasing government power. But why is inequality a crisis?
Alexis Goldstein, of a group called The Other 98%, complains that corporations got richer but workers' wages “are lower than they’ve been in 65 years.”
That’s a common refrain, but it’s wrong. Over the past 30 years, CBO data shows that the average income of the poorest fifth of Americans is up by 49 percent. That doesn’t include all the innovations that have dramatically improved everyone’s life. Today even the poorest Americans have comforts and lifespans that kings didn’t have a century ago.
George Mason University economist Garett Jones says, “If I was going to be in the bottom fifth in the America of today versus the bottom fifth of America in 1970 or 1960, it’s hard to imagine that anybody would take that time machine into the past.”
And despite America’s lousy government schools and regulations that make it tough to start a business, there is still economic mobility. Poor people don’t have to stay poor. Sixty-four percent of those born in the poorest fifth of the U.S. population move out of that quintile. Eleven percent of them rise all the way to the top, according to economists at Harvard and Berkeley. Most of the billionaires atop the Forbes richest list weren’t born rich. They got rich by innovating.
Rich people aren’t guaranteed their place at the top, either. Sixty-six percent fell from the top quintile, and eight percent fell all the way to the bottom.
That mobility is a reason most of us are better off than we would have been in a more rigid society, controlled by central economic planners.
Life will always be unfair. I want to play pro basketball. It’s unfair that LeBron James is bigger and more talented! It’s also unfair that George Clooney is better looking! It’s unfair that my brother is smarter than me.
Jones points out, “I was born with an advantage, too. Being born in the United States … totally unfair.” He also has two married parents – another huge advantage.
The question is not whether people start out life in homogeneous circumstances, he adds. “The question is whether government policies that try to fix this actually make things better or worse.”
Worse, in most cases. Government “help” encourages poor people to be dependent and passive. Dependent, people stay poor. Also, most government handouts don’t even go to the poor. They go to the middle class (college loans, big mortgage tax deductions, Medicare) and the rich (corporate welfare, bailouts to banks “too big to fail”).
Instead of making government more powerful, let’s get rid of those handouts. Left and right ought to agree on that.
America has prosperity and innovation because we have relatively free markets.
Progressives say, “Keep the innovation but have government make us more equal.” But that doesn’t work. It’s been tried. Government-enforced equality – socialism – leaves everybody poor.
Equality is less important than opportunity. Opportunity requires allowing people to spend their own money and take their own risks.
Instead of talking about “fairness,” it would be better to talk about justice: respecting other people, respecting their freedom and their property rights.
Real fairness requires limiting government power.
SOURCE
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Here We Go Again: Online Sales Tax Resurrected
An online sales tax bill passed the Senate (with 27 mostly Republicans voting "no") in 2013 but flamed out in the House. Its sponsors, however, are undeterred. The Hill reports, "Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) and Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) rolled out the Marketplace Fairness Act on Tuesday, which would give states more power to collect sales taxes from businesses that don't have a physical location within their borders."
As Mark Alexander explained two years ago, the MFA is designed to force states to collect taxes for the states in which a purchaser resides, and this amounts to taxation without representation.
Clearly, politicians want this bill passed to raise new tax revenue for broken state governments facing budget shortfalls. Mitch McConnell opposed the bill as Senate minority leader. Now that he's majority leader, we'll see if he holds true.
SOURCE
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Leftists Hail Flawed Gun Ownership Survey
Anti-gun advocates hailed the findings of a new study released this week that claims firearm ownership in America is fading. NBC News writes, "According to the latest General Social Survey, 32 percent of Americans either own a firearm themselves or live with someone who does, which ties a record low set in 2010. That's a significant decline since the late 1970s and early 1980s, when about half of Americans told researchers there was a gun in their household."
If that sounds strikingly odd considering gun purchases remain near historic highs, that's because it is. Steve Sanetti, president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, says, "GSS isn't actually counting the number of firearms in each household. Rather it is counting the number of individuals willing to disclose to a stranger at their front door how many firearms they own." That's important because "it is far more likely that the political climate is driving down self-reporting."
By comparison, Gallup, which relies on anonymous phone surveys, puts gun ownership at 42%, a percentage that's more or less remained constant over the last decade. The Left is attempting to twist this survey as proof today's America just isn't that into guns. The last few election cycles suggest otherwise.
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, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog
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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16 March, 2015
The Farcical Ferguson Report
The NBA consists of 76 percent black players. But blacks are just 13 percent of the country. Clearly, the league engages in racial discrimination against whites. Silly, right? Well, this is exactly what the sleight-of-hand Department of Justice pulled off to find that the Ferguson Police Department engages in “implicit and explicit racial bias”!
The report insults anybody who’s ever studied the statistics – or logic. The 105-page report concludes:
“Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs. This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of Ferguson’s police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing, and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the Ferguson community.
Further, Ferguson’s police and municipal court practices both reflect and exacerbate existing racial bias, including racial stereotypes. Ferguson’s own data establish clear racial disparities that adversely impact African Americans. The evidence shows that discriminatory intent is part of the reason for these disparities. Over time, Ferguson’s police and municipal court practices have sown deep mistrust between parts of the community and the police department, undermining law enforcement legitimacy among African Americans in particular.”
The Washington Post immediately put out an article headlined “The 12 key highlights from the DOJ’s scathing Ferguson report.” Per the Post, the “scathing” statistic first listed is this: Ferguson is 67 percent black, but blacks comprised 85 percent of the traffic stops and 93 percent of the arrests. Incontrovertible proof that the Ferguson PD engages in institutional racism!
Reporters, in describing the Ferguson report, used adjectives that include “shocking,” “stunning” and “eye-popping.”
But if Ferguson’s numbers are “eye-popping,” what adjective applies to the New York City Police Department. New York City is 25 percent black. However, of the traffic stops, blacks comprise 55 percent. The statistical “gap” is 30 points. In Ferguson, as stated, the black population is 67 percent, but 85 percent of the traffic stops. The statistical “gap” is 18 points – far smaller than New York’s 30-point “gap.”
Why aren’t Messrs. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Eric Holder marching on Times Square?
The answer is that the liberal former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who governed for 12 years, defends the aggressive policing of the NYPD – and the resulting “statistical disparities.” Bloomberg says:
“Unlike many cities, where wealthy areas get special treatment, the NYPD targets its manpower to the areas that suffer the highest crime levels. Ninety percent of all people killed in our city – and 90 percent of all those who commit the murders and other violent crimes – are black and Hispanic. It is shameful that so many elected officials and editorial writers have been largely silent on these facts.
"Instead, they have argued that police stops are discriminatory because they do not reflect the city’s overall census numbers. By that flawed logic, our police officers would stop women as often as men and senior citizens as often as young people. To do so would be a colossal misdirection of resources and would take the core elements of police work – targeting high-crime neighborhoods and identifying suspects based on evidence – out of crime-fighting. …
"That the proportion of stops generally reflects our crime numbers does not mean … that the police are engaged in racial profiling; it means they are stopping people in those communities who fit descriptions of suspects or are engaged in suspicious activity.”
The National Institute of Justice is the research and evaluation agency of the DOJ. In 2013, the NIJ published its study called “Race, Trust and Police Legitimacy.” Unlike when responding to dispatch calls, police officers exercise more discretion when it comes to traffic stops. Thus, the supposedly “racial profiling” cops can have a field day when it comes to traffic stops, right?
But according to the NIJ, 3 out of 4 black drivers admit being stopped by police for a “legitimate reason.” Blacks, compared to whites, were on average more likely to commit speeding or other traffic offenses. “Seatbelt usage,” said the NIJ, “is chronically lower among black drivers. If a law enforcement agency aggressively enforces seatbelt violations, police will stop more black drivers.” The NIJ conclusion? Numerical disparities result from “differences in offending” in addition to “differences in exposure to the police” and “differences in driving patterns.”
President Obama, backed by research from the left and from the right, said, “Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.”
Richmond, Virginia, is a city of 214,000, with a black population of 50 percent. Eighty-six percent of black Richmond families are headed by a single parent. Of Ferguson’s 67 percent black population, how many kids grew up in fatherless homes?
Whatever the answer, isn’t this a far more relevant statistic?
SOURCE
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With unions politically weakened, Republicans launch blizzard of legislative attacks
It's not just Gov. Scott Walker. Republican lawmakers in statehouses nationwide are working to weaken organized labor, sometimes with efforts that directly shrink union membership. Walker's signing of right-to-work legislation in Wisconsin on Monday puts his defiance of organized labor even more at the center of his nascent presidential campaign. And the inability of unions to exact a price for the first round of legislation targeting them in 2011 is encouraging even more proposals to limit their power.
The Republican wave in the November elections left many unions nationwide looking exceptionally vulnerable. In West Virginia, a union PAC spent $1.4 million trying to keep the statehouse in Democratic hands but couldn't reverse the cultural trends turning the state red. Exit polls found that even union members were almost evenly split between the Republican and the Democrat in the major statewide race for U.S. Senate.
Now Republicans, in control of the state legislature for the first time since 1931, are taking advantage of their opportunity, pushing measures to expand non-union charter schools and scale back requirements that public projects pay higher, union-scale wages.
In Wisconsin, Walker beat back attempts to recall him after he signed a law limiting collective bargaining by public sector workers in 2011. His signature on the right-to-work law now makes Wisconsin the 25th state to ban contracts that force all workers to pay union dues. Both he and Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, who signed a right-to-work law in 2012 and was also opposed by unions, won re-election in November.
"Their examples were inspiring," said Victor Joecks of the Nevada Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank whose ideas for limiting labor power have been embraced by Republicans who have taken over that state's legislature for the first time since 1929. The message, he said, was, "Hey, this is possible, and it's better for the state, and the taxpayers appreciate it."
With many legislative sessions just beginning, nearly 800 union-related bills have been proposed in statehouses, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
President Barack Obama expressed his concern about the latest Wisconsin move and the general assault on unions.
"It's inexcusable that, over the past several years, just when middle-class families and workers need that kind of security the most, there's been a sustained, coordinated assault on unions, led by powerful interests and their allies in government," Obama said in a statement Monday. "I'm deeply disappointed that a new anti-worker law in Wisconsin will weaken, rather than strengthen workers in the new economy."
A right-to-work bill passed the lower house of the Missouri Legislature, though it's likely to be vetoed by the state's Democratic governor. Indiana is also moving to eliminate requiring union-level wages on public projects. Nevada is considering a wide range of proposals, including legislation that would let local governments dissolve collective bargaining agreements in times of economic hardship. Illinois' new Republican governor, Bruce Rauner, signed an order prohibiting government unions from automatically collecting dues from members.
Even local governments are getting in on the action — several Kentucky counties are implementing right-to-work measures even though the state, with its House still controlled by Democrats, does not have such a law.
The proposals' sponsors say they want to save taxpayers money and create jobs. There is also a political consequence.
Labor provides Democrats with crucial cash and volunteers in campaigns, but its political value to the party extends even farther. Belonging to a union increases the odds of a voter supporting Democrats, and labor increases the participation of lower-income voters who tend to back Democrats, said Roland Zullo of the University of Michigan's Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations. "If you have more unions, you have higher rates of voting, especially in places that are poor," he said.
Much of the impact of new laws has come in the vote-rich rust belt, where Republicans hope states with whiter and older populations, such as Wisconsin and Michigan, will eventually side with them in presidential elections to counter the loss of states in the South and West with younger and more diverse populations. In Wisconsin, public-sector union membership shriveled after Walker's 2010 law and the proportion of workers in unions shrank from 14 percent to 11 percent. Hundreds of union members protested against the right-to-work legislation in the state capitol recently but admitted most were demoralized.
"People have lost faith," said Eric Gates, a union member from the town of Menasha, 35 miles southwest of Green Bay.
Michigan experienced the sharpest loss of union members in the nation in the last two years, when its right-to-work law went into effect, according to federal data. But union officials also trace the loss to another 2012 measure, which received less attention: a law declaring that 42,000 in-home health care workers were no longer eligible to be represented by a union. Unions were unable to overturn the measure at the ballot box.
"They're decreasing our ability to back supporters of our issues, whether they're Democrats or Republicans," said Marge Robinson, president of SEIU Health Care Michigan, which lost four-fifths of its membership as a result but still tries to communicate with many of the aides. "Even though we try to keep them as much engaged as possible, they're all on their own, they're not in an organization that works together."
In Ohio, where unions reversed an effort to eliminate collective bargaining by government workers, GOP Gov. John Kasich still cruised to re-election last year.
Union membership has been steadily declining since the 1980s, when it measured at 20 percent of all workers. In 2014, only 11.1 percent nationally belonged to a union. James Sherk, a labor economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the shrinkage in membership in Michigan may be due to trends other rather than the recent legislation. He noted that Democrats have joined Republicans on some measures that unions oppose, like pension reform and tougher standards for teachers.
If there's a bright side for labor, it's that things could be even worse. Given how many states Republicans control, Sherk said, there could be many more challenges to labor than have emerged.
SOURCE
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Sen. Cotton's Letter to Iran Is Firmly Constitutional
After the Senate sent its letter to Iran explaining whatever deal John Kerry is currently negotiating would not be a lawful treaty, the Left and its "constitutional scholars" think the 47 senators should be tried for treason. In a White House petition, over 200,000 people said, "United States Senators committed a treasonous offense when they decided to violate the Logan Act, a 1799 law which forbids unauthorized citizens from negotiating with foreign governments." And they actually think this petition will get legal legs.
Let's start with the Constitution, which says in Article II Section 2 that the president "shall have Power by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur."
John Yoo writes at National Review that Obama could make some kind of agreement with Iran, namely a sole executive agreement, which would only be binding with the Obama administration itself. He continues,
"But as a matter of constitutional law, the Cotton letter should be no more controversial than a letter that simply enclosed a copy of the U.S. Constitution (without President Obama's editing)." No, it is the Obama administration that is circumventing the Constitution, as even Kerry admitted that "we're not negotiating a legally binding plan."
SOURCE
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Kerry's Hypocritical Indignation
Secretary of State John Kerry really wasn't happy with the 47 Senate Republicans who wrote a letter to Iran warning of the temporary nature of any deal with the Obama administration. Testifying before Congress Wednesday, Kerry said his reaction to the letter was "utter disbelief" because it "ignores more than two centuries of precedent in the conduct of American foreign policy."
He added, "During my 29 years here in the Senate, I never heard of -- nor even heard of it being proposed -- anything comparable to this. ... This risks undermining the confidence that foreign governments, in thousands of important agreements, commit to between the United States and other countries."
Funny that he's "never even heard of it" because an open letter to Iran restating the obvious hardly compares to Kerry's own record of going it alone on foreign policy. While he was in the Senate, he traveled to Nicaragua to meet with the communist Sandinistas and then returned home to shill on their behalf.
And let's not forget his most infamous moment: meeting with the North Vietnamese in 1970 and 1971 while still a Navy reserve officer. Few are now willing to bring up this treasonous behavior, but it's unbelievable hypocrisy for Kerry to attack this letter now.
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog
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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15 March, 2015
Economic Delusions, Political Demagoguery, and Ideological Deceptions
By economist Richard Ebeling
We live in a time, as, indeed, mankind has lived already for a long time, in which economic delusions, political demagoguery, and ideological deceptions abound due to the power lusting of those who wish to gain control of government to serve their own ends at others’ expense.
Suppose someone were to ask you the easiest and quickest way to drive by car from New York City to San Francisco, California. Since the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, the most reasonable answer would be for this person to take Interstate Highway 80, which runs East-West between these two cities.
Now suppose that this person, instead, starts driving south from New York City on Interstate Highway 95, which would get him, eventually, to Miami, Florida. You tell him that he is on the wrong route; not only will it take him much longer to get to California if he stays on Interstate 95, but he may end up never getting to San Francisco at all.
Rather than thanking you for correcting him and figuring out the best and most timesaving way to get back onto Interstate 80, he accuses you of not wanting him to get to California. He wants to know what you have against him and the people of California. Why are you sabotaging his chance to finally find “happiness” in California?
You assure him that you have nothing against either him or California. Indeed, you explain, you’ve even been to California and it’s a very nice place to visit and maybe even to live. You are just pointing out that he is following the wrong route to get to his desired destination, and in that easiest and quickest way as he had originally asked.
He responds by asserting that you clearly have something against him and have some hidden agenda to prevent people from getting to California.
Accusations Thrown at the Free Market Advocate
A person saying such things would, to most of us, seem strange or even bizarre. It is, however, the way many critics of the free market respond when an economist or some other proponent of economic liberty explains that government intervention in the market, regulation of business enterprises or redistribution of income and wealth are not the best and most efficient policies to provide an economic and social climate most conducive to opportunity, prosperity, and freedom for as many people in society as is possible.
Free market critics frequently assert that the free market advocate “hates the poor,” “doesn’t care for humanity,” is “insensitive to human suffering,” and only wants to help “the rich.” And how can we know this? Because he dissents from the governmental interventionist, regulatory, and redistributive policies proposed to cure the ills of society.
In other words, they impugn the motives and benevolence of the advocate of individual liberty and free markets because of his disagreement with the proposed means to achieve the stated end – improvement in the personal and material conditions of mankind.
Why has this been so frequently the case over the years and decades? Let me suggest some of the possible reasons. To begin with, there are those who may very well confuse a disagreement over means as meaning a disagreement over the desired ends.
What is Seen and Not Seen in Government Policies
This harks back to the argument made long ago by the French classical liberal economist of the 19th century, Frederic Bastiat, when he said that people often only see what is seen and not what is unseen. If the government hires workmen to build a bridge, or repair a road, or to reroof a schoolhouse the jobs created are “seen.” Here are people working on these government projects, earning an income, and able to buy things from others that improves their family’s circumstances.
What is not seen are the jobs that would have come into existence, the income that would have been earned and the improvements in some other peoples’ lives if, instead, the taxes collected to pay for the bridge to be built or the schoolhouse to be reroofed had remained in the hands of the taxpayers.
With more money left in their pockets those taxpayers would have demanded a new pair of shoes for their son or daughter, or used that money to do some improvement around their own home, or, maybe, used it to invest in an existing or new business enterprise. Any or all of these, would also have put people to work.
But in this latter case it would have been work reflecting the private consumer desires and demands of those who had earned that money in earlier productive activities in the competitive marketplace.
Because some people fail to think beyond what is right in front of them, they conclude that the only person who would be against helping people get a job and earning a living are those who callously don’t care about the misfortune of others looking for employment. Why else would someone oppose a humane, government “stimulus” program to put people to work?
They don’t see that either the income earners themselves can use the dollars for consumption or investment activities, or the government can spend them after taxing or borrowing them away from private hands. So either private citizens create a demand for labor, or the government does, but there need be no net gain in jobs opportunities and that is what focusing only on what is easily seen prevents many people from understanding.
Plunder-Lusting, Not Just Economic Ignorance
If it was only a matter of economic ignorance and conceptual misunderstanding, then one could hope that better ways of sharing and communicating what are sometimes difficult and counter-intuitive ideas could win over more people to an appreciation as to why such government policies as “make-work” projects and minimum wage laws do not help many of those the proponents say they wish to assist, and in fact end up making the circumstances of some even worse.
However, there are those who may or may not understand the reality of how the market works and that such interventionist policies are false routes to where the policy advocate says he wants to go. They don’t really care.
Their concern is with using the “what is seen” arguments as steppingstones to power, influence, and wealth. They are the policy demagogues, the political opportunists, who merely wish to play upon the fears, misunderstandings, resentments and envies of others in society to acquire government position and authority.
They will lie, distort, manipulate, and confuse as their stock and trade to win elections, gain positions in government, or get on the government gravy train that follows from economic policies resulting in more and more taxed or borrowed dollars being offered at the trough of government spending.
The Plunder-Lusters Offer False Policy Elixirs
They are like the huckster in the old west who stood on the back of the wagon promising the naïve and gullible listeners in the crowd that the “magic elixir” that he was holding in his hand would cure their rheumatism, make hair grow again on their bald head, guarantee they would be more attractive to the opposite sex, and slow down the aging process. “And, yes, my friends,” the huckster assures the crowd, “this can all be yours for a only a mere $2 a bottle. And, my friends, if you buy more than one bottle, I will also sell you for the low price of ‘four bits’ this diving rod that is guaranteed to find water under the ground where it has never been found before.”
The only difference between the old west huckster and the modern-day democratically elected politician is that the huckster would clear out of the town as soon has it had gotten people’s money for those phony bottles of colored and scented water before they figured out the truth of how they had been taken in by “the con.”
The democratic demagogues not only don’t leave town, they stick around hoping and planning to keep fooling the naïve and gullible voter so they can be elected again and again, rationalize bigger budgets in the government departments in which they are employed, or keep the government subsidies, contracts and regulatory benefits continuing and growing over time for their special interest purposes at taxpayers’ and consumer’s expense.
These democratic demagogues have their task made that much easier precisely because the untrained eye can be fooled into thinking and believing that there is only “what is seen” in terms of the apparently beneficial and immediate effects of the snake-oil economic policy elixirs promised and imposed by government.
The free market opponents of these policies can be tarred and feathered as either themselves ignorant or the paid apologists for “greedy businessmen,” the “one-percent,” or the “selfish and profit-grabbing,” who care nothing for “the people.”
Far Worse are the Collectivist Ideologues
But worse are the ideological demagogues. They are the ones who hate freedom, despise the free choices of the ordinary citizen, who have contempt for the individual, and believe all should be made to submit to a greater design and plan for humanity which they see, consider good, and know they are called to impose on all in society for the well-being of mankind whose real and true interest they just know they know.
They are the philosophical and political collectivists. They want to rule and control. They want all to submit to their power and will. They are the face of evil. They are “Big Brother,” who is not only to be obeyed but also worshipped, as the secular divinities, the elect and the elite, to whom all in society are to submit and praise as their saviors and paternalistic good guardians.
Theirs is the personality of the psychopath and the sadist, who really cares about nothing other than their own desire for power and enjoy it, like it, that all others must bow and grovel before them.
And just like many psychopaths and sadists they are able to successfully hide their perverse power- and pain-giving lusting behind a mask of crusading for “social justice” or desire to “serve mankind,” and wish to “give back to society,” by accepting the “sacrifice” of holding political office or governmental position for the betterment of their fellow men.
To return to the original analogy about the traveler claiming he wanted to go to California but set out on a route going to Florida, neither the democratic demagogues nor the philosophical and political collectivists want to reach the destination to which they publicly give lip service – a “free, just, and prosperous society.” They are merely using the words as the rhetorical means to their actual power-lusting and power-abusing ends.
This is what makes the task of the friends of freedom so crucially important. Our fellow citizens must understand that what they are being promised cannot be achieved with the means offered by those pursuing their own ends in government.
Bastiat’s insight and lesson about “what is seen, and what is not seen” must be explained, persuasively clarified and applied to all of the current interventionist, regulatory, and redistribution policies in place and being advanced. More of our fellow citizens must be made to see them for the snake oil and phony elixir that they all are.
Equally if not more importantly, the friend of freedom must challenge others in society to ask why they should have to sacrifice their life, their liberty, and their pursuit of happiness for illusionary and vacuous assertions about a collectivist “common good,” or “general welfare,” or “national interest.”
By what right does the collectivist assert that the individual cannot peacefully and productively live for himself in his own way guided by his own reason, values and beliefs? By what right does that collectivist claim to know when and how that individual should be required – even compelled – to sacrifice his own dreams, hopes and valued purposes for those of the group, tribe, or “society” that the collectivist says he speaks for and represents?
At the end of the day, the collectivist’s claims lead to nothing but political nooses around the necks of the citizenry with the end of the ropes in the hands of the political charlatans and psychopathic power lusters who want to break the spirit of the free individual and make him the implicit slave to self-selected “demigods” wishing to rule over mankind.
SOURCE
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The machine that is waiting to take over when politicians raise the minimum wage
A lot of minimum wage workers work in hamburger joints
A company called Momentum Machines has built a robot that could radically alter the fast food industry and have some line cooks looking for new jobs.
The company’s robot can “slice toppings like tomatoes and pickles immediately before it places the slice onto your burger, giving you the freshest burger possible.” The robot is “more consistent, more sanitary, and can produce ~360 hamburgers per hour.” That’s one burger burger every ten seconds.
The next generation of the device will offer “custom meat grinds for every single customer. Want a patty with 1/3 pork and 2/3 bison ground to order? No problem.”
Momentum Machines co-founder Alexandros Vardakostas told Xconomy “our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient. It’s meant to completely obviate them.” Indeed, marketing copy on the company’s site reads that their automaton “does everything employees can do, except better.”
This directly raises a question that a lot of smart people have contemplated: Will robots steal our jobs? Opinion is divided, of course. Here’s what Momentum Machines has to say on the topic:
The issue of machines and job displacement has been around for centuries and economists generally accept that technology like ours actually causes an increase in employment. The three factors that contribute to this are 1. the company that makes the robots must hire new employees, 2. the restaurant that uses our robots can expand their frontiers of production which requires hiring more people, and 3. the general public saves money on the reduced cost of our burgers. This saved money can then be spent on the rest of the economy.
If we are to undertake the lofty ambition of changing the nature of work by way of robots, the fast food industry seems like a good place to start, considering its inherently repetitive tasks and minimal skill requirements. Any roboticist worth his or her salt jumps at tasks described as repetitive and easy — these are perfect undertakings for a robot.
Here’s a schematic of what the burger-bot looks like and how it works. It occupies 24 square feet, much smaller than most assembly line fast food operations. It boasts “gourmet cooking methods never before used in a fast food restaurant” and will even deposit your completed burger into a bag. It’s a veritable Gutenberg printing press for hamburgers.
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog
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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13 March, 2015
Is giving more significant than we think?
“Civilization begins as human beings 'reach for the stars'. The development of civilization did not grow out of survival needs; was not based upon practical motives (Marshall Sahlins called hunters and gatherers the 'original affluent society'). Civilization begins when human beings project their existence into structures that contain the possibility of immortality. Herein lies the essence of the motive to sacrifice.”
In the world of fantasy, human beings initiate wars because they seek to “gain” something. In reality (scroll down and look at the table below), warfare generates extraordinary, monumental loss. What is the meaning of this human tendency to create events that result in monumental loss?
Economists analyze human activity typically in terms of the desire for gain, an assumption that underlies the theory of “rational choice.” Norman O. Brown, on the other hand, suggests that the desire to possess is superimposed over a deep psychology of giving. The archaic institution of the gift, Brown says, leads to an understanding of the “sacred superfluous.”
Prestige and power are conferred by the ability to give. Gifts are sacred and the gods exist to receive gifts (do ut des). The compulsion to produce an economic surplus is created in order to have something to give.
Archaic gift giving, according to Brown (the famous potlatch being only one example) refutes the notion that the psychological motive of economic life is utilitarian egoism. Archaic man gives because he wants to lose; the psychology is not egoist, but self-sacrificial. Hence there is an intrinsic connection between economic life and the sacred. The gods exist “to receive gifts,” that is to say, sacrifices. Gods exist in order to “structure the need for self-sacrifice.”
The ambition of civilized man, Brown says, is revealed in the pyramids. In their creation, we see how economic activity may have little to do with practical considerations or survival. In the case of the pyramids, monumental efforts were directed toward creation of the “sacred superfluous.”
Egyptians devoted a large proportion of their wealth and psychic energy toward creating these gigantic structures—that are essentially useless. Pyramids serve no practical purpose whatsoever. The creation of these useless structures lay at the dawn of civilization.
Civilization begins as human beings “reach for the stars.” The development of civilization did not grow out of survival needs; was not based upon practical motives (Marshall Sahlins called hunters and gatherers the “original affluent society”).
Civilization begins when human beings project their existence into structures that contain the possibility of immortality. Herein lies the essence of the motive to sacrifice.
The workmen who built the pyramids devoted a large proportion of their lives toward the creation of these gigantic structures that symbolized the immortality of the Pharaoh. They sacrificed their concrete existence in order to feed the Pharaoh’s fantasy. Death was overcome, Brown says, on condition that the “real actuality of life pass into these immortal and dead things.”
Civilization began with the creation of these “dead things;” monumental stone structures that had no purpose whatsoever. The pyramids represented an escape from concrete existence—denial of death. The pyramids were built based on the fantasy that the Pharaoh might live forever.
Pyramids are the place in which “history” begins. Kings create history as they carve out a space or domain into which fantasies of immortality may be projected. The sacred space of history provides the illusion that it is possible to escape everyday (mortal) existence.
Brown suggests that much of civilized activity takes the form of “sublimation:” energy deflected away from the “real, actuality of life” in devotion to symbols of immortality. He writes of the poet Horace, who viewed poetry as a career characterized by self-sacrifice.
Horace felt, however, that renunciation was worthwhile—if success would allow him to “strike the stars sublime.” At the end of his third book, he celebrates his success:
"I have wrought a monument more enduring than bronze, and loftier than the royal accumulation of the pyramids. Neither corrosive rain nor raging wind can destroy it, nor the innumerable sequence of years nor the flight of time. I shall not altogether die."
Horace’s motive for writing poetry was not unlike the motivation that generated the building of pyramids. Brown comments on the passage from Horace above: “I shall not altogether die—the hope of the man who has not lived, whose life has been spent conquering death, whose life has passed into those immortal pages.”
Source: An email from Richard Koenigsberg at The library of social science
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Obamacare's 1095-A Nightmare
By Michelle Malkin
Tax season is stressful enough. But if you are like countless miserable Americans trapped in the Obamacare 1095-A abyss, it's hell on stilts on a Segway teetering over the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.
The screw-ups, incompetence and bureaucratic blame avoidance over the health insurance exchange tax forms make the healthcare.gov website fiasco look like a flawless product launch.
How do I know? My family inexplicably got ensnared in the 1095-A paperwork pit. It's a government roach motel: Taxpayers check in, but they can never check out.
In 2013, our private high-deductible PPO from Anthem Blue Cross got canceled because of "changes from health care reform (also called the Affordable Care Act or ACA)." Millions of others like us in the individual market for health insurance -- including self-employed people, small-business owners, writers, artists and home-based entrepreneurs -- suffered the same fate.
My husband reluctantly contacted Colorado's state health insurance exchange, "Connect for Health Colorado," just to see what our options were. Months later, we settled on purchasing a new non-Obamacare plan directly from a different private insurer, Rocky Mountain Health.
The provider network is much narrower than the Anthem plan we had before the feds intervened. Our two kids' dental care is no longer covered, and we've had our insurance turned down at an urgent care clinic -- something that had never happened before.
Better off? Bullcrap. But wait, it gets worse.
Somewhere along the way, the worker bees at Connect for Health Colorado dragooned us into an Obamacare exchange plan offered by Rocky Mountain Health without our knowledge or consent. (How else has the White House inflated Obamacare enrollment figures? Things that make you go "hmm.")
Last month, we received an IRS 1095-A form, which, much to our shock and chagrin, indicated that we had paid Obamacare premiums every month during 2014.
It took hours of time on the phone and Internet to receive an explanation from Connect for Health Colorado on how exactly this happened. Here was the government's response, word for incomprehensible word:
"We apologize for the delay in responding to your email. After checking your account we are showing you might have had coverage from October 2014 to June 2014. Please call the number below to speak with a Customer Service Representative if this information is incorrect."
"Might" have had coverage? From "October 2014 to June 2014"?
The saga continues. We were finally able to un-enroll after being auto-enrolled in the Obamacare plan. Then, after being bounced around by the state government health exchange to various voicemail dead ends and back, with hours of migraine-inducing, on-hold music in between, we were told there's absolutely nothing wrong with the 1095-A form -- which shows payment of premiums we didn't pay to an Obamacare plan we never enrolled in and didn't want in the first place!
This is just one little horror story. In Minnesota, thousands are still waiting for 1095-A forms that were supposed to arrive on Jan. 31. In California, at least 800,000 taxpayers received screwed-up 1095-As. As a result, some 50,000 people filed the wrong form. Another 750,000 are being told they'll get corrected forms this month. Hah. Good luck with that.
The costs in time, money and anxiety to hardworking families dealing with this paperwork perdition are enormous. Unknown numbers of people are still waiting for their forms as the April 15 tax-filing deadline looms. More face the added expense and aggravation of filing amended returns through no fault of their own.
Where's the rest of the media -- most of whom have been insulated from these problems because they get their health insurance through their employers?
At least one other journalist smacked head first into reality. Laura Krantz, a former NPR staffer, is now a Scripps Fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Earlier this month, she found out that Connect for Health Colorado had mysteriously canceled her health and dental insurance. After four days and eight hours in Obamacare Phone Hell (OPH), she learned she had lost her insurance coverage and her tax credit -- and had to redo all of her paperwork.
Poor Krantz still believes the ultimate solution is "single payer." But another liberal who encountered 1095-A hell has seen the light. San Francisco resident and former Obama supporter Melissa Klein exposed her ordeal with Covered California last week. The state exchange botched her 1095-A and then insisted she had never enrolled despite invoices she showed them documenting her premium payments.
After hours in OPH, her case remains unresolved, and she can't file her taxes. How is it, she wondered, that "Amazon can ship something to NYC in an hour," but the White House and Covered California "can't create a health care system that functions"?
Klein concluded, better late than never: "I no longer believe that the government should mandate health care. ... A great idea is just an idea if you can't execute. And the government has proved time and time again, it can't execute.
Feelin' your pain, sister. Is D.C. listening?
SOURCE
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Right-to-Work comes to lucky Wisconsin
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker on Monday signed right-to-work legislation, making “America’s Dairyland” the 25th state with laws preventing mandatory union membership and payment of dues. It’s both good for Wisconsin’s economy and is a feather in Walker’s presidential cap.
Through a section of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, states were permitted to enact legislation that allowed contracts to be signed between unions and businesses requiring workers at the particular company to pay labor fees, and legally binding those companies to fire workers who refused to join the union. Section 14B of this Act specifically noted that a right-to-work law would prevent such extortion.
Union members make up about 8% of Wisconsin’s current labor force. Just 30 years ago that number was 22%. Indeed, nationwide, labor unions are losing the muscle that once made them mighty – because their numbers have dwindled for the last three decades.
Walker’s tenure as Wisconsin governor has been marked by freeing the entire labor market from the chokehold of union membership. Upon his initial election in 2010, Walker went to work with the State Assembly to dismantle public-sector unions. The Wisconsin Act 10 eliminated collective bargaining for state workers, including teachers, addressed extravagant benefits and pension promises, and protected the state from a $3.6 billion budget deficit. That battle sent Walker to national prominence.
The 2011 Republican-led reform successfully implemented by Walker hit the same funding mechanism in public-sector unions as will now impact private-sector unions: forced dues payment.
Currently, detractors of right-to-work laws argue wage suppression will result without mandatory labor union representation. But that’s just not backed up by the facts.
For example, in 2012, Michigan became a right-to-work state under the leadership of Republican Governor Rick Snyder, also elected in 2010, and the Michigan Legislature. By 2013, its per-capita personal income rose to $39,215 from $38,291 in 2012. And by 2014, more than 8,000 teachers had made the decision not to pay union dues, while total union membership dropped almost two percentage points in the first full year of the law’s implementation.
It’s certainly interesting that as soon as people have the right to work without union interference union participation drops and incomes rise. It implies that, unless unions have some legal leverage enabling forced participation and extortion, they are undesirable and ineffective.
The reason is simple: Right-to-work laws give workers the opportunity to pursue employment without having to pay dues to unions, who frequently use that money to secure political power at the expense of worker protections. Right-to-work allows for greater access to jobs, while a government mandated minimum wage prices some prospective workers out of those jobs. Which one makes more sense if creating jobs is the objective?
SOURCE
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Walker and Obama Tussle Over Right-to-Work
After Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signed right-to-work legislation Monday, Barack Obama bashed the Republican presidential hopeful. “Wisconsin is a state built by labor, with a proud pro-worker past,” Obama said. “So even as its governor claims victory over working Americans, I’d encourage him to try and score a victory for working Americans – by taking meaningful action to raise their wages and offer them the security of paid leave. That’s how you give hardworking middle-class families a fair shot in the new economy – not by stripping their rights in the workplace, but by offering them all the tools they need to get ahead.”
Walker quickly fired back. “On the heels of vetoing Keystone Pipeline legislation, which would have paved the way to create thousands of quality, middle-class jobs, the President should be looking to states, like Wisconsin, as an example for how to grow our economy,” Walker replied in a statement.
“Despite a stagnant national economy and a lack of leadership in Washington, since we took office, Wisconsin’s unemployment rate is down to 5.0 percent, and more than 100,000 jobs and 30,000 businesses have been created.”
Obama has spent more than six years undermining working Americans all while claiming to be in their corner – his magic “middle-class economics.” But higher taxes based on class warfare aren’t going to grow the economy. Encouraging work will.
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog
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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12 March, 2015
Was Hitler rational?
I have taken various courses in history over the years but sitting and listening to someone lecturing on a given historical period is in my view at best merely an introduction to that period. I like to do what all historians are supposed to do -- go back to the original documents and actually read them. And by doing that I often come to conclusions which are well outside what is popularly believed.
For instance, I have remarked at times on this blog that both the American Declaration of Independence and the Magna Carta are quite different to how they are popularly conceived and that the generally unknown content is in fact very enlightening and gives us a different view of the times.
And the same goes for an understanding of Hitler. It is quite clear to me that many historians of the period have not read Mein Kampf. Yet that is where Hitler explains himself at great length. Is how he himself saw the world of no interest when we want to explain what he did? Reading Mein Kampf certainly kicks the legs out from under the usual tale about Hitler and the Vienna art school -- and that tale still seems to be the most usual account of Hitler's motivations.
But my reading in the history of the Nazi period rather pales into insignificance compared with the massive reading that psychohistorian Richard Koenigsberg has undertaken. I have put up some of his articles here. And Koenigsberg comes to some clear conclusions that are well supported in Nazi writings. Like the earlier American Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th century, Hitler was much seized with the analogy between a nation and a human body. He saw Germany as a living body that had been infected by a dangerous Jewish parasite that had to be removed for the sake of the nation's health.
Koenigsberg goes further, however. He says that Hitler had no rational objectives as they would normally be conceived. I think I need to quote him at some length here:
In spite of Hitler’s nearly psychotic anti-Semitism, historians often write about his decision to go to war as if it grew out of "rational" considerations. Questions are posed regarding Hitler’s strategies and tactics: Why did he attack the Soviet Union in the midst of Germany’s struggle to defeat Great Britain? Why were British forces allowed to escape at Dunkirk? Why did Hitler gratuitously declare war against the United States? Why did Hitler launch the Final Solution in the midst of war—causing massive diversion of human and material resources?
These kinds of questions grow out of the assumption that Hitler more-or-less knew what he was doing. He sought to achieve certain objectives, but made "mistakes" along the way that prevented him from reaching his goals. In my view, the assumption that Hitler understood why he wished to wage war—and knew what he expected to accomplish by doing so—is unfounded.
Hitler’s words and thoughts on warfare bear an eerie resemblance to the words and thoughts of Saddam Hussein. Like Hussein, Hitler rarely spoke of warfare in terms of winning or "victory." Rather, Hitler’s thinking about war revolved around the idea that individuals are obligated to sacrifice their lives for their nation.
Hitler asserted that any man who loves his people proves it solely by the "sacrifices which he is prepared to make for it." To be "national," Hitler said, was to be willing to act with a "boundless and all-embracing love for the people" and if necessary "to die for it." Giving one’s life for one’s country, Hitler believed, constituted the "crown of sacrifice."
Hitler declared war on September 1, 1939. Speaking before the Reichstag as German planes and troops crossed the Polish borders in a devastating Blitzkrieg, he said:
As a National Socialist and a German soldier, I enter upon this fight with a stout heart! My whole life has been but one continuous struggle for my people, and that whole struggle has been inspired by one single conviction: Faith in my people! I ask of every German what I myself am prepared to do at any moment: to be ready to lay down his life for his people and for his country. If anyone thinks that he can evade this national duty directly or indirectly, he will perish.
Hitler does not begin the Second World War by telling the German people that he is embarking on a quest to conquer the world. Rather, insisting that his fight is inspired by "faith in his people," he asks every German to be willing to: "lay down his life" for his people and country. Hitler goes on to say that if anyone tries to evade this national duty (to lay down one’s life), this person would "perish."
In his declaration of war, Hitler tells everyone what he is going to do—what will happen. What he said he was going to do—eventually is what did happen. The Second World War provided the occasion for the German people to sacrifice their lives for Germany. What’s more, Hitler acted to bring about the death of anyone whom he imagined refused to embrace the sacrificial imperative. The essence of Hitler’s ideology was: die for Germany—or we will kill you.
Hitler’s concept of self-sacrifice for Germany does not differ substantially from the Islamic concept of martyrdom for Allah. Willingness to forfeit one’s life—in each instance—is understood as a way of demonstrating the depth of one’s faith in and devotion to a sacred object. The individual gives witness to the sincerity of his belief by virtue of his willingness to make the "supreme sacrifice."
People become attached to ideologies conceived as absolutes. These ideologies or symbolic objects have names such as "Communism," or "Germany," or "Allah." Collective forms of violence— warfare, genocide and terrorism—come into being when a group (inspired by a leader) seeks to demonstrate its devotion to the ideology or symbolic object with which the group identifies. By killing and dying in the name of a sacred ideology, the group "gives witness" to the significance of its ideology.
So all Hitler was trying to do was to assert the rightness of a belief system. I would put it slightly differently by saying that Hitler was trying to prove that Germany was lovable, or at least respect-worthy. And as a response to the shame of defeat in WWI that is understandable. The obvious retort to that, however, is that Hitler sure had a strange way of getting Germany loved and respected! But, don't forget, Leftists often achieve the opposite of what they appear to want. So Hitler can be seen as just a typical muddle-headed socialist.
One cannot dispute Koenigsberg's reading. Hitler did say the things that Koeingsberg says he said. But Koenigsberg is Left-leaning so we also have to look at the other things that Hitler said to get a balanced picture. And Hitler's Drang nach Osten (push Eastwards) is justified by him quite lucidly -- in a way that every Greenie would understand. He saw that Germany's population was growing while resources were fairly static so thought that famine loomed for Germany. To this day, Greenies are still screeching about how we are about to run out of various resources. Hitler was a good Greenie.
So Hitler was in fact quite clear about his war objectives. He was a shallow thinker but not an irrational one. He wanted to get Lebensraum (Living space, agricultural land, food resources) for Germany by taking it off Poland and Russia. And it was of course his attack on Poland that caused the reluctant Neville Chamberlain and others to declare war on Germany.
I have shown elsewhere that Hitler was not insane but I think it is clear that he was not particularly irrational either. Sane people can do irrational things at times and perhaps Hitler did too, but his going to war was not irrational.
I think that Koenigsberg has to a degree been misled by Hitler's propaganda. Hitler justified his demands in various ways and many of them were emotional appeals rather than anything that stood up to rational analysis. He pulled every trick out of the hat that he could in order to get Germans to go along with him. He was even a great preacher of "peace", for instance, and antisemitism was popular worldwide at the time. And he succeeded brilliantly, to our everlasting horror. And Leftism IS very emotional and in slight touch with reality. Remember the ecstasy of Obama's first Presidential campaign? "We are the ones we have been waiting for". Very Hitlerite -- JR.
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Another Illegal ObamaCare Action - This Time Bailing Out Insurers
While the Supreme Court is considering the King v. Burwell case about the IRS illegally funding a part of ObamaCare (the subsidies), last week it was revealed that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has… illegally funded another part of ObamaCare.
At issue is nearly $3 billion in payments made to insurers to help cover losses caused by ObamaCare’s various regulations and insurance mandates – effectively a bailout to prevent insurers from raising prices as much next year. The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein writes:
“The U.S. Treasury Department has rebuffed a request by House Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, R- Wis., to explain $3 billion in payments that were made to health insurers even though Congress never authorized the spending through annual appropriations.”
As Klein also notes, the Obama Administration itself acknowledged that they needed Congressional funding for this bailout money, by including a request for that money in its annual budget. Thus, the Treasury's response to Ryan, which was effectively a middle finger to Congress.
All this is just the latest instance of the Obama Administration blatantly ignoring the law with respect to their signature accomplishment, ObamaCare. As previously mentioned, the IRS chose to literally rewrite the law to allow them to distribute tens of billions of dollars in insurance subsidies to 36 states. And the White House has made over two dozen other unilateral changes to the law since its passage in 2010.
Congress has the clear, unambiguous, and sole legal power to authorize how much and where the federal government may spend our money. This illegal bailout should not even be a partisan issue - it is about whether Congress is any longer relevant in a government increasingly dominated by the executive branch.
SOURCE
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Social Security Continuing to Implement Amnesty Actions
It was the logical next step. If illegal immigrants are getting Social Security numbers, then they are going to collect benefits. Stephen Goss, chief actuary for the Social Security Administration, wrote a letter to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) claiming that by 2017 some 16,000 illegal immigrants amnestied by Barack Obama's executive action would start receiving Social Security benefits.
Furthermore, Goss admitted the agency is ignoring the injunction blocking the implementation of Obama's executive decrees. In the letter, Goss wrote, "Based on the best advice and counsel we have gotten, we're working on the assumption that these [mass amnesty actions] will persist. Most indications we seem to get are that it's likely that this will get back on track, with some delay."
SOURCE
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SCOTUS Upholds Religious Liberty in ObamaCare Case
Before the Hobby Lobby case, the court system told the University of Notre Dame it had to comply with ObamaCare’s contraception mandate – even if doing so violated the Catholic university’s collective conscience. But in a ruling by the Supreme Court Monday, the case was sent back to the lower court with instructions that the court must decide the case based on the Hobby Lobby ruling.
Mark Rienzi, senior counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, said, “This is a major blow to the federal government’s contraception mandate. For the past year, the Notre Dame decision has been the centerpiece of the government’s effort to force religious ministries to violate their beliefs or pay fines to the IRS. As with the Supreme Court’s decisions in Little Sisters of the Poor and Hobby Lobby, this is a strong signal that the Supreme Court will ultimately reject the government’s narrow view of religious liberty.”
SOURCE
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IG Audit: 6.5 Million People With Active Social Security Numbers Are 112 or Older
Many people are living longer, but not to age 112 or beyond -- except in the records of the Social Security Administration.
The SSA's inspector general has identified 6.5 million number-holders age 112 -- or older -- for whom no death date has been entered in the main electronic file, called Numident.
The audit, dated March 4, 2015, concluded that SSA lacks the controls necessary to annote death information on the records of number-holders who exceed "maximum reasonable life expectancies."
"We obtained Numident data that identified approximately 6.5 million numberholders born before June 16, 1901 who did not have a date of death on their record," the report states.
Some of the numbers assigned to long-dead people were used fraudulently to open bank accounts.
And thousands of those numbers apparently were used by illegal immigrants to apply for work:
"During Calendar Years 2008 through 2011, SSA received 4,024 E-Verify inquiries using the SSNs of 3,873 numberholders born before June 16, 1901," the report said. "These inquiries indicate individuals' attempts to use the SSNs to apply for work."
“It is incredible that the Social Security Administration in 2015 does not have the technical sophistication to ensure that people they know to be deceased are actually noted as dead,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“Tens of thousands of these numbers are currently being used to report wages to the Social Security Administration and to the IRS. People are fraudulently, but successfully, applying for jobs and benefits with these numbers. Making sure Social Security cleans up its death master file to prevent future errors and fraud is a good government reform we can all agree on,” Johnson said.
Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), the committee's ranking member, called the findings a "major problem" that wastes taxpayers' money, exposes citizens to identity theft and undermines confidence in government:
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog
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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11 March, 2015
Intellectuals
Why are there few conservative intellectuals? I guess George Will and the late Bill Buckley qualify but that's about it, as far as I can see. Thomas Sowell is a great treasure that we are lucky to still have with us (he is 84) but what he says flows directly from his academic background as a Chicago school economist.
And that brings me swiftly to my main point. Intellectuals are actually shallow thinkers. They are gifted amateurs who use popular knowledge -- or at least easily accessible knowledge -- to create new explanations of something or other. It is of course a talent to be able to do that but in the absence of specialized knowledge the conclusions reached are rarely profound or very innovative. And that is how Leftists think. They don't accept that they actually need to learn stuff. They think that they know it all already. They think the truth is obvious.
Conservatives, by contrast, are acutely aware of how complex and unpredictable the world is and so mostly confine their writing to matters where they have detailed knowledge. In my own case I often comment on economics -- but I am a former High School economics teacher. I sometimes comment on issues in psychology, but I have a doctorate in it.
I often talk about dubious research methods that I see in environmentalism and in the medical literature -- but I taught research methods and statistics for many years in a major Australian university and the thinking in both the medical and climatological literature violates some of the most basic principles about what research should be and do. And the statistics I see in climatology and in the medical literature are frankly ludicrous. Their errors could hardly be more basic -- ignoring statistical significance, assuming correlation is causation etc.
And I have in fact myself had papers published in the medical journals and I have also had research reports on environmentalism published in the academic journals. So I am NOT an intellectual. I have specialized knowledge in the areas that I write most about.
V.I. Lenin is quite a good example of an intellectual. He wrote at length about the issues of his day but without any evident benefit of detailed knowledge in any field. But he was bright. He even started out as something of a libertarian. He once wrote: “The bureaucracy is a parasite on the body of society, a parasite which ‘chokes’ all its vital pores…The state is a parasitic organism”. Lenin wrote that in August 1917, before he set up his own vastly bureaucratic state in Russia. He could see the problem but had no clue about how to solve it when he had the chance to do so.
How could he be so stupid? How could he do what he himself saw as a huge problem? Leftist stupidity is a special class of stupidity. The people concerned are mostly not stupid in general but they have a character defect (mostly arrogance) that makes them impatient with complexity and unwilling to study it. So in their policies they repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot; They fail to attain their objectives. The world IS complex so a simplistic approach to it CANNOT work.
At the time of the 1917 revolution, Russia was a rapidly modernizing country with railways snaking out across the land and a flourishing agricultural sector that made it a major wheat exporter. After the revolution agricultural production dropped by about one third and right through the Soviet era Russia never managed to feed itself. Europe's subsidized food surpluses were a Godsend to it. A lot of those food surpluses went East.
And Lenin really had no excuse for his stupidity. There were both writers and practical men in his era who DID understand how economies work and how to get the best out of them. Eugen Böhm, Ritter von Bawerk, was even a market-oriented economic theorist who was a practical man as well. He was the Austrian Minister of Finance in the late 19th century and also wrote a series of extensive critiques of Marxism. And the Austrian economy worked unusually well while he was in charge. But Böhm's ideas were non-obvious and even counter-intuitive from a layman's viewpoint and it was only a layman's viewpoint that Lenin had. How sad.
UPDATE: A few additional thoughts about Lenin's disastrous stupidity
Austria in general and Wien (Vienna) in particular was arguably the world's greatest intellectual and cultural center in Lenin's day -- so a prominent Austrian thinker and politician like Böhm should have come to the attention of Lenin.
And if that general context is not enough, the fact that Böhm was an influential teacher who politely shredded Marxism should have drawn Lenin's attention Austria-ward -- if genuine intellectual exploration had been of interest to Lenin.
And people forget that famous American "Progressive" thinkers such as Croly and President Woodrow Wilson had to be major inputs into Lenin's thinking. They had well-developed ideas about the importance of the State and were also enthusiasts for world government. Lenin wanted that too -- as Leftists do to this day. Bolshevism was to a significant extent American. Even Marx and Engels were fascinated by America. Marx wrote over 300 articles for American newspapers -- writing which was his main livelihood for a time. Did you know that?
Lenin was disappointed by "socialism in one country" but he and his successors made unstinting efforts to expand their reach. It took Ronald Reagan to terminate that.
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The Liberal Circus
V.D. Hanson
Lately liberalism has gone from psychodrama to farce.
Take Barack Obama. He has gone from mild displeasure with Israel to downright antipathy. Suddenly we are in a surreal world where off-the-record slurs from the administration against Benjamin Netanyahu as a coward and chickensh-t have gone to full-fledged attacks from John Kerry and Susan Rice, to efforts of former Obama political operatives to defeat the Israeli prime minister at the polls, to concessions to Iran and to indifference about the attacks on Jews in Paris. Who would have believed that Iranian leaders who just ordered bombing runs on a mock U.S. carrier could be treated with more deference than the prime minister of Israel? What started out six years as pressure on Israel to dismantle so-called settlements has ended up with a full-fledged vendetta against a foreign head of state.
Hillary Clinton likewise has gone from a rather run-of-the-mill liberal grandee to a political grafter. She apparently solicited donations from foreign government officials and wealthy foreign nationals to contribute to the Clinton Foundation — and this was while she was secretary of State conducting the foreign policy of the United States. If those charges are proven accurate, how could she ever be trusted to become commander in chief? Unfortunately, in the last year almost every cause that Hillary Clinton has taken up has been belied by her own actions.
Inequality and fairness? At time when students struggle under a collective $1 trillion-plus student debt, much of it because of universities hiking fees and tuitions above the inflation rate, Hillary has serially charged universities well over $200,000 for 30-minute boilerplate speeches.
Women’s issues? We learn that women on Senator Clinton’s staff once made considerably less than their male counterparts. Had Bill Clinton worked at a university, corporation or government bureau, his sexual peccadillos long ago would have had him thrown off the premises. The latest disclosures about his junkets with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein are so bizarre that no one quite knows what to make of them — the would-be first female and feminist president married to a man who serially cavorted with a convicted sexual pervert?
Transparency? Consider the recent disclosures that Hillary knew almost immediately that the Benghazi killings were the preplanned work of terrorists and not due to spontaneous rioters angry over a video — and yet continued to deceive the public that just the opposite was true. The problem with Hillary’s scandals are not just that they reveal a lack of character, but that they are illiberal to the core on hallmark progressive issues of concern for equality, transparency and feminism.
We no longer live in an age of debate over global warming. It has now transmogrified well beyond Al Gore’s hysterics, periodic disclosures about warmists’ use of faked data, embarrassing email vendettas, vindictive lawsuits, crony green capitalism, and flawed computer models. Now Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, has taken the psychodrama to the level of farce in a two-bit McCarthyesque effort to demand from universities information about scientists who do not embrace his notions of manmade global warming. Where are the ACLU and fellow Democratic congressional supporters of free speech and academic freedom to censure such an Orwellian move? Finally, even the American Meteorological Society had to condemn the unhinged Grijalva for his bizarre efforts.
Attorney General Eric Holder came into office alleging racism and calling the American people cowards, and six years later is exiting, still blaming racism for his own self-inflicted failures. In between, Holder became the first attorney general to be cited for contempt by Congress. He stonewalled the Fast and Furious investigations. His plans to try terrorists in federal civilian courts were tabled almost immediately. He ordered electronic taps and surveillance on the communications of Associated Press and Fox reporters for supposed leaks. He ignored wrongdoing in the IRS mess, a scandal that continues to grow. He got caught using his government jet to take his daughters and their boyfriends to the Belmont Stakes.
But Holder will be remembered largely for his racialist tenure. He dropped a strong case of voting intimidation by armed Black Panthers at the polls. In congressional testimony, he referred to blacks as “my people”; anyone else — except Joe Biden — who had said the same would have been asked to resign. He promised federal action on Ferguson and the Trayvon Martin shootings — and then quietly backed off when the evidence for civil rights violations did not meet his own rhetorical excesses. The problem, he pleaded, was not that his targets were not guilty under the law, but that the law itself had to be changed to make them guilty. Holder claimed repeatedly that opposition to Obama was race-based, and he leaves office as a caricature of incompetence and racial divisiveness.
The IRS scandal likewise went from melodrama to farce. The president said there was not a “smidgeon” of corruption in the selective targeting of conservatives. Lois Lerner, the focus of investigations, pled the Fifth Amendment after having received over $100,000 in merit bonuses. When congressional investigators wanted to subpoena her computer records, IRS officials claimed both that her hard drive had crashed and that its data was unrecoverable. The latter proved untrue; but then so far so has everything the IRS has said. The only lesson is that any private citizen who replied to IRS inquiries in the manner that the IRS responded to public subpoenas would be jailed.
Debt? Barack Obama stated out in 2008 calling George W. Bush unpatriotic for piling up nearly $5 trillion in eight years; he may be on target to double that amount — and trump the combined red ink of all prior presidents. Obama raised taxes, slashed defense, and still ended up with over a $500 billion annual deficit, as he declared the age of austerity over.
So it has become with most liberal issues. The debate over illegal immigration has gone from arguments over closing the border to Social Security cash rebates to illegals and presidential threats to punish Border Patrol officers who enforce existing law. State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf assures us that poverty and unemployment are catalysts to terrorism, just as so-called Jihadi John, the psychotic ISIS beheader, is revealed to be a preppie British subject from the upper middle class. The president brags that gas prices have gone down because frackers ignored his efforts to stop them — and then vetoes the Keystone Pipeline.
The Trayvon Martin controversy descends from the purportedly preteen of released photos who was shot down in cold blood by a white vigilante into doctored NBC tapes, airbrushed photos, the New York Times’ invented rubric “white Hispanic,” the president weighing in on Trayvon’s shared racial appearance, girlfriend Rachel Jeantel’s explanation of Trayvon’s violence as a sort of homophobic act of “whoop ass” — only to be echoed by MSNBC talking head Melissa Harris-Perry’s ugly sanction of violence on Martin Luther King Day with the amplification of Jeantel’s term “whoop”: “I hope [Martin] whooped the sh-it out of George Zimmerman.” It would be hard for a satirist to make all that up.
Michael Brown goes from the icon of a “gentle giant” in vain calling out “hands up, don’t shoot” only to be gunned down by a white racist cop — to a thug who strong-armed a store clerk, walked out into the middle of the road under the influence and then attacked a police officer. Conspiracists once warned us that the government was buying up ammo to prevent private gun owners from purchasing it; now we learn that Obama by executive order may ban the most popular type of sporting ammunition. Is there one element of Obamacare that has not been modified, delayed, or ignored — from the employer mandate to the fine for noncompliance?
Why this descent into travesty?
The liberal left got what it wanted in 2009 with a supermajority in the Senate and large majority in the House, a subservient mainstream media, the good will of the American people, and the most liberal president in American history. It only took that liberal hierarchy six years to erode the Democratic Party to levels that we have not seen since the 1920s. Almost every policy initiative we have seen — whether climate change, foreign policy, health care, or race relations — has imploded.
The answer to these failures has not been introspection, humility, or reevaluation why the liberal agenda proved unpopular and unworkable, but in paranoid fashion to double-down on it, convinced that its exalted aims must allow any means necessary — however farcical — to achieve them.
The logical result is the present circus.
SOURCE
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Another long-overdue hit at statins
Taking statins can increase your chance of developing diabetes by up to 46 per cent, research has shown.
The cholesterol-lowering drugs are thought to prevent the hormone insulin from working properly, which can trigger type 2 diabetes.
The risk, which is far higher than previously believed, has prompted fresh concern about the side effects of the pills.
The findings are particularly worrying as last year the NHS recommended that up to 17million adults should be on statins to prevent heart attacks and strokes.
The drugs’ rationing body NICE published guidance last July urging GPs to prescribe them to anyone with a 10 per cent risk of developing heart disease in a decade.
This represents around 40 per cent of adults in the UK, and academics said the advice was ‘foolhardy’ when so little was known about the side effects.
In the latest study, scientists from the University of Eastern Finland studied 8,749 men aged 45 to 73 over a six-year period.
Just under a quarter were taking statins when the study started. Some had only been on the pills for a few months, others for several years.
Over the course of the study, the scientists found that taking statins increased the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 46 per cent.
Their research, published in the journal Diabetologia, found that statins reduced the ability of insulin to break down blood sugar.
This is known as insulin sensitivity, and was on average 24.3 per cent lower in men who were taking statins.
The researchers believe that if insulin does not break down blood sugar, and the body’s sugar levels rise too high, then it can trigger type 2 diabetes.
They concluded: ‘Statin therapy was associated with a 46 per cent increased risk of type 2 diabetes.
'The association of statin use with increased risk of developing diabetes is most likely directly related to statins decreasing both insulin sensitivity and secretion.’
Dr Aseem Malhotra, a consultant cardiologist in London, said that contrary to the NHS guidance, healthy adults should not be taking statins, adding: ‘I personally wouldn’t take it or recommend it to friend or family member who is otherwise healthy but let them make up their own minds after giving them all the information.
‘Eating a handful of nuts or four tablespoons of olive oil may be a more effective way at reducing risk of a heart attack, stroke or death and without the side effects.’
Professor Peter Weissberg, Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, said healthy patients prescribed statins to prevent heart disease should take the ‘lowest possible dose’.
He went on to warn that people with existing heart conditions should not stop taking the pills, saying: ‘It is important that people taking statins because of existing cardiovascular disease should continue to take them as the benefits will outweigh the risks.’
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog
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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10 March, 2015
Governments use fear to sabotage liberties
I have always wondered why people seem so impressed by the line "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". It has always seemed to me to be both glib and utter BS. So it is interesting to see it put into context below- JR
"[F]irst of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory"
Many people will recognize these as the words of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After taking the oath of office on Saturday, March 4, 1933, Roosevelt delivered his inaugural address, containing the now famous line. In his speech, the President spoke to a crowd in the early throws of the Great Depression. High unemployment and an uncertain future had many Americans wondering, “What’s next?”
My late grandfather was 21 at this time, the only one in his family with a job, making a small wage—even for the time. Put simply, this experience would impact him for the rest of his life.
He was reluctant to throw anything away or buy anything new. In fact, he didn’t like to spend money if he could avoid it and saved all that he could. He had a lifelong distrust of the stock market and banks. In 1999, at the height of the Y2K scare, my grandfather withdrew some five figures from his bank and stashed it in his house. (Upon learning this, my mother and my aunt managed to convince him that the bank was in fact a safe place for his savings, and he re-deposited the money in his account.)
The fact of the matter is that my grandfather wanted to make sure he could provide for his family (and he did). As much as I hate to think of it this way—I think my grandfather was afraid. He was afraid of once again being in a position of having practically nothing, of being that 21 year old kid and knowing that, if he lost his job, his family was in trouble.
In reading FDR’s speech, in hearing his discussion about fear, I think about my grandfather.
I also think about the complete and utter—uh, bologna—contained in FDR’s famous address.
I’m referring to the President’s attempt to discourage fear among U.S. citizens. The fact is, FDR, like members of government before and after him, thrived on fear to push his agenda. Government uses fear as a means to expand the scale and scope of its power in unprecedented ways. FDR is their poster child.
As Robert Higgs has discussed, the growth and maintenance of government requires fear on the part of U.S. citizens. Fear means people will clamor for the government to “do something” to assuage their anxiety. As a result, the government steps in to supposedly provide a remedy. He states:
[Governments] exploit it [fear], and they cultivate it. Whether they compose a warfare state or a welfare state, they depend on fear to secure popular submission, compliance with official dictates, affirmative cooperation with the state’s enterprises and adventures.
Fear is useful for government actors for two distinct but related reasons. First, fear has a “neutralizing” effect on citizens. If someone is afraid of X, for example, they are more likely to tolerate, or even demand expansions in state activities to control or eliminate X. This includes the use of methods, which, under other circumstances, would not be tolerable.
Second, those working within and with the state to provide security and defense (i.e., government actors or private contractors, etc.) will actively look to promote people’s fear and exploit it for their own personal advantage.
Examples of this abound. FDR, despite his message of “freedom from fear,” cultivated fear throughout his presidency and set the stage for future executives to do the same. On March 6, 1933, President Roosevelt issued Proclamation No. 2039 and declared a state of emergency in the U.S. (it was continued by Proclamation No. 2040 on March 9, 1933). Over the next several years, FDR would push through some of the worst policies in U.S. history (despite what your high school civics teacher told you).
These proclamations have become a staple of U.S. presidencies since this time. They grant the President hundreds of powers normally reserved for the Congress. Patrick Thronson, a J.D. candidate at University of Michigan Law School, identified at least 160 laws that immediately expand the President’s authority to act during an “emergency.”
Since 1976, 53 states of emergency have been declared, not counting those issued in the wake of natural disasters. Most of these orders remain in effect, including the one issued by President Roosevelt—in 1933.
Clinton enacted states of emergency in 1995 and 1998. President Bush continued these orders, and he added a healthy crop of his own. Not to be outdone by his predecessors, Obama continued both Clinton AND Bush’s declarations, while adding his own. In fact, Obama has issued or continued a state of emergency regarding terrorism in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013.
The result of these declarations is disastrous for civil liberties. These orders, all “necessary” in the face of crisis, allow the President to freeze an individual’s assets, confiscate private property, and limit trade. These directives can force retired veterans into military service, and allow for unlimited, secret patents for the military. In some cases, these laws allow the suspension of Habeas Corpus, meaning that the President can arrest, imprison, and detain individuals without review.
Fear is a powerful tool. This is not only well-known by those in positions of power, but exploited. Just like a child makes a parent check under his bed for the monster, U.S. citizens, out of fear, have called upon their elected leaders to be “proactive” against monsters like “drugs” and “terrorism.” Except, while a parent encourages teaches her child to reason, to not fear his imagination, the government tells the child the monster is not only real, but has friends. At any moment, these friends are going to come from under the bed, the closet, and the bedroom door to devour you. Unless, of course, Big Brother steps in to save you.
SOURCE
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We Can Deport 11 Million Illegal Aliens
The Obama Administration, Jeb Bush, John McCain, Lindsay Graham and the media's take on why Congress needs to enact "comprehensive immigration reform" is that it's impossible to deport the 11 million plus illegal aliens here, or as the president calls them, "Americans in waiting."
Of course, it's possible. The notion that this country can't find these people is simply ridiculous. Here's why.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are over 461,000 local, county, and State law enforcement officers in the country. There are also about 120,000 federal law enforcement agents. If Congress gave state and local police officers the authority to enforce federal immigration laws, most of the 11 million illegal aliens could be identified and deported in about a year. Let's do the math.
I'll round down to not count about 61,000 State and local officers who are probably managers, sheriffs or chiefs of police. Eleven million divided by the remaining 400,000 is 27.5. That's the number each law enforcement officer, on average, would have to apprehend to get to the 11 million goal. It's been my experience that uniformed police officers and sheriff's deputies encounter an illegal alien at least one a week, or often daily, during his or her normal work day. Most of those encounters result in the illegal alien's arrest for drunk driving or crimes such as shoplifting, drinking in public, vandalism, domestic violence, hit and run accidents, peace disturbance, driving without a license, drug possession and the like. Without even trying, an average uniform police officer will run across an illegal alien at least 52 times a year, based on my theory that they encounter illegals at least once a week. If all 400,000 police officers arrested just one illegal alien a week for a year, more than 20 million illegals could be identified and deported, far exceeding the estimated 11 million that are here.
The real challenge is to locate the estimated 40 percent of illegal aliens that have overstayed their visas. That's where the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and other federal agents could concentrate their efforts.
In places where there are large numbers of illegal aliens such as in Los Angeles County, police encounter illegal aliens far more often than the police in say, Oshkosh, Wisconsin. According to the Los Angeles Times, L.A. is the "hit and run capital of the nation." Nearly half of the 40,000 traffic accidents reported in Los Angeles were hit and runs, well above the national average, according to the LAPD. I'd estimate that nearly all the hit and runs in Los Angeles were committed by illegal aliens who have no drivers license, no insurance, and fear they'll be deported. But, illegal aliens flourish where municipalities, such as Los Angeles, declare themselves "sanctuary cities" and won't allow their police officers to cooperate with immigration authorities. That needs to change. Congress should hold back federal funding to these cities until they stop running interference for illegal aliens.
Where I live in Monterey County, California, the largest industry besides tourism is agriculture. The National Agricultural Workers Survey estimates that 48 percent of farm workers in the country have no legal status. Mexican-American Cesar Chavez, the founder of the United Farm Workers, was very vocal about not hiring illegal aliens for farm work because it undermined the wages of legal immigrants and American Citizens. If there are not enough American workers available to plant and harvest the Salinas Valley, why not fill the void by allowing farmers to hire non-violent, volunteer state prisoners, at minimum wage, and pay for their correctional officer escorts. Paying these prisoners minimum wage would give them the ability to pay any court ordered restitution to their victims and provide them a nest egg for when they are eventually released.
Since California and other states have prison overpopulation problems, why not let convicted illegal aliens do their time in their home countries? About 30 percent of all federal prisoners are illegal aliens.
Altogether, federal, state and local governments spend about $338 billion dollars a year on illegal aliens. I think that money could be better spent on other things.
None of what I'm suggesting will happen during this current Administration. The U.S. immigration system isn't broken, it's being ignored. The country needs to get a handle on illegal immigration before promoting legal immigration, with very few exceptions.
Securing the southern border while deporting illegal aliens will go a long way in freeing up jobs, reducing crime, enhancing public education, reducing disease, and providing security for American Citizens.
We need a leader to take action so the rule of law and quality of life for American Citizens can be restored.
SOURCE
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You can live longer if you don't have kids (?)
The report below is another example of the old human dream that you can improve your lifespan by choosing what you put in your mouth. The research is however a rodent study and relies therefore on the fairly ludicrous proposition that you can make generalizations about lifespan from how a short-lived creature like a mouse responds to how a long-lived creature like a human being responds. Needless to say, most rodent/man generalizations fail
It may be possible to live longer and increase fertility by manipulating diet, according to world-first research in mice from the University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Centreand ANZAC Research Institute.
Researchers showed for the first time in mammals that there is an ideal balance of macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fat) for reproduction and another, different ideal balance for increasing lifespan.
The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), calls into question the long-standing theory that animals are forced to trade-off between reproduction and longevity when resources are limited. According to the researchers, it is possible to manage diet at different life stages to both optimise fertility and extend lifespan, rather than sacrificing either.
"This study takes a very big step in explaining why trade-offs between reproduction and longevity are not inevitable in mammals," said Dr Samantha Solon-Biet from the Charles Perkins Centre, who co-led the research with Dr Kirsty Walters from the ANZAC Research Institute.
"Rather than a trade-off, we now know that each evolutionary function has different nutrient requirements. That means that as our nutrient requirements change with our life stage, we can change our diet to suit our current requirements, for example by increasing our protein to carbohydrate ratio when in our reproductive prime and lifting our carbohydrate to protein ratio in later life.
"Animals don't have to choose between high fertility and a long life. By managing diet throughout our life cycle, we can have both."
The findings open the door for the development of dietary treatments for infertility in humans.
"As the findings based on insects are now shown to be true in mammals, we are hopeful that they will be equally true in humans," said Dr Solon-Biet.
"As women increasingly delay child-bearing, the demand for assisted reproductive technologies increases. With further studies, it's possible that instead of women with subfertility resorting immediately to invasive IVF techniques, an alternative strategy may be developed to change the ratio of dietary macronutrients to improve female fertility. This would avoid the need for medical intervention, except in the most severe cases."
The study is the most comprehensive nutritional trial ever conducted in mammals exploring the relationship between macronutrients, reproduction and lifespan.
Researchers placed 858 mice on one of 25 ad-libitum diets with varying levels of protein, carbohydrate, fat and energy content. At 15 months, they measured the male and female mice for reproductive function. In both male and female mice, they found that lifespan was enhanced on a high carbohydrate, low protein diet, and reproduction was enhanced on a high protein, low carbohydrate diet.
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, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog
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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9 March, 2015
Obama's Canadian predecessor: Pierre Trudeau showed how destructive Leftist leaders can be
David Frum
Canada today is a very successful country. It has suffered less from the global economic crisis than any other major economy.
So Canadians may be tempted to be philosophical about disasters in their own past. Hasn’t all come out right in the end? Of course you could say the same about the invasions of Ghengis Khan.
I don’t draw any personal comparison between Pierre Trudeau and Ghengis Khan, obviously. But I want to stress: Canada’s achievement overcoming Trudeau’s disastrous legacy should not inure Canadians to how disastrous that legacy was.
Three subsequent important prime ministers – Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien and Stephen Harper – invested their energies cleaning up the wreckage left by Pierre Trudeau. The work has taken almost 30 years. Finally and at long last, nobody speculates any more about Canada defaulting on its debt, or splitting apart, or being isolated from all its major allies.
Yet through most of the adult lives of most people in this room, people in Canada and outside Canada did worry about those things.
And as you enjoy the peace, stability and comparative prosperity of Canada in the 2010s just consider – this is how Canadians felt in the middle 1960s. Now imagine a political leader coming along and out of ignorance and arrogance despoiling all this success. Not because the leader faced some overwhelming crisis where it was hard to see the right answer. But utterly unnecessarily. Out of a clear blue sky. Like a malicious child on the beach stomping on the sand castle somebody else had worked all morning to build.
That was the political record of Pierre Trudeau.
I want to examine the Trudeau record in 3 dimensions: What Trudeau did to the Canadian economy, what Trudeau did to Canada’s standing in the world, and what Trudeau did to Canadian political stability.
I’ll conclude by offering some thoughts about the personal and intellectual traits that animated Trudeau’s destructive career. And I hope you’ll agree with me at the end that Trudeau deserves at least this much credit: There was nothing small-scale or parochial about him. As a political wrecker, he was truly world class.
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Pierre Trudeau inherited a strong, growing and diversified Canadian economy.
When Trudeau at last left office for good in 1984, Canadians were still feeling the effects of Canada’s worst recession since the Great Depression. Eight years later, the country would tumble into another and even worse recession.
The two recessions 1981-82 and 1992-93 can both fairly be laid at Trudeau’s door.
Pierre Trudeau took office at a moment when commodity prices were rising worldwide. Then as now, rising commodity prices buoyed the Canadian economy. Good policymakers recognize that commodity prices fall as well as rise. A wise government does not make permanent commitments based on temporary revenues. Yet between 1969 and 1979 – through two majority governments and one minority – Trudeau tripled federal spending.
Nemesis followed hubris. Commodity prices dropped. Predictably, Canada tumbled into recession and the worst federal budget deficits in peacetime history.
Trudeau’s Conservative successor Brian Mulroney balanced Canada’s operating budget after 1984. But to squeeze out Trudeau-era inflation, the Bank of Canada had raised real interest rates very high. Mulroney could not keep up with the debt payments. The debt compounded, the deficits grew, the Bank hiked rates again – and Canada toppled into an even worse recession in 1992. By 1993, default on Trudeau’s debt loomed as a real possibility. Trudeau’s next successors, Liberals this time, squeezed even tighter, raising taxes, and leaving Canadians through the 1990s working harder and harder with no real increase in their standard of living.
Do Canadians understand how many of their difficulties of the 1990s originated in the 1970s? They should.
To repay Trudeau’s debt, federal governments reduced transfers to provinces. Provinces restrained spending. And these restraints had real consequences for real people: more months in pain for heart patients, more months of immobility for patients awaiting hip replacements.
If Canada’s health system delivers better results today than 15 years ago, it’s not because it operates more efficiently. Canada’s health system delivers better results because the reduction of Trudeau’s debt burden has freed more funds for healthcare spending. The Canadian socialist Tommy Douglas anticipated the Trudeau disaster when he said that the great enemy of progressive government was unsound finance.
Pierre Trudeau was a spending fool. He was not alone in that, in the 1970s. But here’s where he was alone. No contemporary leader of an advanced industrial economy – not even the German Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt or the British socialist James Callaghan – had so little understanding as Pierre Trudeau of the private market economy. “Little understanding?” I should have said: “active animosity.”
Trudeau believed in a state-led economy, and the longer he lasted in office, the more statist he became. The Foreign Investment Review Agency was succeeded by Petro-Canada. Petro-Canada was succeeded by wage and price controls. Wage and price controls were succeeded by the single worst economic decision of Canada’s 20th century: the National Energy Program.
The NEP tried to fix two different prices of oil, one inside Canada, one outside. The NEP expropriated foreign oil interests without compensation. The NEP sought to shoulder aside the historic role of the provinces as the owner and manager of natural resources. I’ll return in a moment to the consequences of the NEP for Canada’s political stability. Let’s focus for now on the economic effects.
Most other Western countries redirected themselves toward more fiscal restraint after 1979. Counting on abundant revenues from oil, the Trudeau government kept spending. Other Western governments began to worry more about attracting international investment. Canada repelled investors with arbitrary confiscations. Other Western governments recovered from the stagflation of the 1970s by turning toward freer markets. Under the National Energy Policy, Canada was up-regulating as the US, Britain, and West Germany deregulated. All of these mistakes together contributed to the extreme severity of the 1982 recession. Every one of them was Pierre Trudeau’s fault.
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Pierre Trudeau had little taste for the alliances and relationships he inherited in 1968. Canada had taken a lead role in creating the institutions of the postwar world, from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to the General Organization for Tariffs and Trade. Those institutions were intended in great part to contain the aggressive totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union and China. In 1968, Canada remained a considerable military power and an important voice in the councils of the West.
Trudeau repudiated that inheritance. His spending spree did not include the military. He cut air and naval capabilities, pulled troops home from Europe, and embarked on morale-destroying reorganizations of the military services. In 1968, Canada was a serious second-tier non-nuclear military power, like Sweden or Israel. By 1984, Canada had lost its war-fighting capability: a loss made vivid when Canada had to opt out of ground combat operations in the first Gulf War of 1990-91.
Something more was going on here than a left-of-center preference for butter over guns. Throughout his life – now better known than ever thanks to John English – Pierre Trudeau showed remarkable indifference to the struggle against totalitarianism that defined the geopolitics of the 20th century.
Indifference may be too polite a word.
Pierre Trudeau opted not to serve in World War II, although of age and in good health. He traveled to Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union to participate in regime-sponsored propaganda activities. He wrote in praise of Mao’s murderous regime in China. Trudeau lavishly admired Fidel Castro, Julius Nyere, and other Third World dictators. The Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik scathingly recalled Trudeau’s 1971 prime ministerial visit: Trudeau visited the Siberian city of Norilsk and lamented that Canada had never succeeded in building so large a city so far north – unaware, or unconcerned, that Norilsk had been built by slave labor.
As prime minister, Trudeau to the extent he could tried to reorient Canada away from the great democratic alliance.
It’s telling I think that Trudeau came to the edge of endorsing the communist coup against Solidarity in Poland in December 1981. Hours after the coup, Pierre Trudeau said: “If martial law is a way to avoid civil war and Soviet intervention, then I cannot say it is all bad.” He added “Hopefully the military regime will be able to keep Solidarity from excessive demands.”
Trudeau’s neutralism negated Canada’s former influence. Probably few remember now his farcical “peace initiative” of 1982. Convinced that Ronald Reagan was leading the world toward nuclear war, Trudeau shuttled between Western capitals to appeal for some kind of concession to soothe the Soviets. Results? Unconcealed disdain from the Americans, unconcealed boredom from the Soviets.
Canada had often before played an important go-between role. Not this time. Canada’s most important geopolitical asset is its unique relationship with the US. Trudeau had squandered that asset, and with it, his own influence.
Obviously, Canada and the United States will disagree sometimes. Canadians of different points of view will favor a more or less intimate relationship with the United States. But even the most US-skeptical Canadian nationalist would agree: it’s reckless and foolish to offend the Americans gratuitously. In fact, the more nationalist the Canadian prime minister, and therefore the more likely to conflict with the Americans on large issues – the more carefully you would expect that prime minister to avoid giving offense over inessentials.
Yet Trudeau made it clear to Presidents Nixon and Carter that he personally disliked them, and to President Reagan that he personally despised him. When it came to foreign affairs, there was always a deep strain of frivolity and irresponsibility in Pierre Trudeau.
What Trudeau did take seriously was our third ground of indictment: the stability and unity of the country. And it was here that he did perhaps his greatest harm.
***
Pierre Trudeau had a unique approach to national unity. He ascertained what each of Canada’s regions most dearly wanted – and then he offered them the exact opposite.
Did Quebeckers want to live and work in French in Montreal? Trudeau said no to that – and instead promised that they could live and work in French in Vancouver.
Did Albertans want a less exploitive economic deal within Confederation? Trudeau said no – and instead offered a more exploitive economic deal within Confederation.
Unsurprisingly, Trudeau’s flip-them-the-finger approach to national unity did not yield positive results.
In fact, he nearly blew apart the country – and his own party.
At the beginning of the Trudeau years, separatism was a fringe, radical movement in Quebec. A decade later, Canada faced a referendum on “sovereignty-association.”
In 1968, Trudeau’s Liberals won 25 seats west of Ontario. In 1980, they won 2.
And in the end it was Trudeau’s own policies that destroyed his vision of the country. By dramatically increasing immigration, Trudeau made irrelevant his vision of a bilingual Canada. Lester Pearson famously expressed a hope that he would be Canada’s last unilingual prime minister. It’s very possible that sometime in the 2040s Canada will see its last bilingual prime minister, at least if the second language is French. On current trends, by the 2040s the proportion of French speakers in Canada will be lower than the proportion of Spanish speakers in the United States today.
Defenders of Trudeau’s disastrous governance habitually rally around one great accomplishment: the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Well, Herbert Hoover had some excellent wilderness conservation policies, but we don’t excuse the Great Depression on that account.
Would it really have been impossible to combine the adoption of the Charter with a less destructive economic policy, a less destructive foreign policy, a less destructive national unity policy?
Yet there is a sense in which the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a very characteristic Trudeau project.
The Charter addressed a deficiency in Canadian constitutionalism: checking the powers of government. It’s possible to imagine a lot of solutions to that problem. The solution contained in the Charter is to give unelected judges the power to void acts of Parliament.
Unelected judges chosen by the prime minister at the prime minister’s sole discretion, unscrutinized by any elected body.
The Charter encapsulates the grand theme of Trudeau’s political life: his lack of respect for the people who returned him to office again and again – his instinctive sympathy for power, the less accountable the better.
SOURCE
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How the worm has turned: Salt is now good for you
As we age our skin looses elasticity and that means we’re more susceptible to cuts and then, infections and skin problems. However a team of German scientists from the University of Regensburg has found that one simple diet change could improve that.
A diet high in salt causes sodium levels to build up in the skin. This can boost the immune system to fight off the germs that cause infections. The research involved testing on mice and the team found that the bodies of mice with a high sodium diet cleared up infections on the feet faster than those who had less sodium in the diet.
Many years ago salt was used to prevent and rid infections in the body so this research could be supporting the practices of hundred of years ago.
The findings were published in the journal Cell Metabolism and late last year it was proven that salt doesn’t have an adverse affect on the heart condition and disease in older people making this a diet change that we can implement without too much fear of side effects!
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog
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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8 March, 2015
Leftists don't understand much
Leftists are people who know and understand a lot less than they think they do. The classical example of that is of course in economics. Even when they gained unfettered control of such vast countries as Russia and China, they made a hash of it.
At the time of the 1917 revolution, Russia was a rapidly modernizing country with railways snaking out across the land and a flourishing agricultural sector that made it a major wheat exporter. After the revolution agricultural production dropped by about one third and right through the Soviet era Russia never managed to feed itself. Europe's subsidized food surpluses were a Godsend to it. A lot of those food surpluses went East.
And in China, Mao's Great Leap Forward was an unmitigated disaster that achieved nothing but millions of deaths from starvation. An understanding of economics as poor as Communist economics could hardly be a better proof that Leftists are people who know and understand a lot less than they think they do.
And what libertarian said this? “The bureaucracy is a parasite on the body of society, a parasite which ‘chokes’ all its vital pores…The state is a parasitic organism”. It was V.I. Lenin, in August 1917, before he set up his own vastly bureaucratic state. He could see the problem but was quite incapable of solving it.
And Leftists understand people so badly that they judge everyone by themselves (projection) -- leading to the generalization that to understand what is true of Leftists you just have to see what they say about conservatives. That is even true of Leftist psychologists (i.e. around 95% of psychologists).
For example, a book by Leftist psychologists called "The Authoritarian personality" (under the lead authorship of a prominent Marxist theoretician) was a huge hit among psychologists in the '50s and '60s and is still well-spoken of among them to this day. The basic theme of the book was that conservatives are authoritarian. What a towering example of projection! It was written while the vastly authoritarian regimes in Russia and China were still extant and just after another hugely authoritarian socialist regime had collapsed, Hitler's. Yet it was conservatives who were supposed to be authoritarian?
The fact of the matter is that Leftism is fundamentally authoritarian. Whether by revolution or by legislation, Leftists aim to change what people can and must do. When in 2008 Obama said that he wanted to "fundamentally transform" America, he was not talking about America's geography or topography but rather about American people. He wanted them to stop doing things that they wanted to do and make them do things that they did not want to do. Can you get a better definition of authoritarianism than that?
And remember Obama's 2008 diagnosis of the Midwest:
"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
That Midwesterners could be sincere Christians who need guns for self defence and hunting clearly did not figure in Obama's understanding of the Midwest -- and the remarks have become a byword for Leftist incomprehension. To this day conservatives often sarcastically refer to themselves as "bitter clingers". As all the surveys show, conservatives tend to be happy people, not "bitter". The uproar caused by his uncomprehending remarks led Obama himself to backpedal.
And the stock Leftist explanation for all social ills -- It's due to poverty -- got really hilarious in the aftermath of the 9/11/2001 attacks on America by Osama bin Laden and his followers. Leftists insisted that bin Laden's hatred was also due to poverty. It took some months before they could get it into their brains that bin Laden was actually a billionaire
Leftism is the politics of rage. They see things about them that seem wrong to them but rather than seek to understand why that state of affairs prevails, they simply condemn it and propose the first simplistic solution to the problem that comes into their heads -- usually some version of "MAKE people behave better". They are incurious and impatient people and the destruction they can cause as a result is huge.
German philosopher Leibniz proposed many years ago that we live in "the best of all possible worlds" as a way of drawing attention to the fact that some good things necessarily have bad effects as well. So stomping on the bad things will also destroy good things. The whole of Leftism is an example of that in action. To improve the world you first have to understand it. Leftists don't.
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Boris Nemtsov and the rise and rise of Russia-bashing
Putin as a boogeyman
Aside from the culprits and maybe the investigators, nobody really knows much about the death of 55-year-old Boris Nemtsov. We do know that he was shot four times. And we do know that it happened on the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky bridge, in the shadow of Saint Basil’s cathedral, just metres from the Kremlin wall and Red Square. But beyond that, nothing, nada, nyet.
Not that the absence of knowledge has stopped Western media and politicians from indulging in dark, conspiratorial speculation. In fact, ignorance seems to have been indispensable for those wanting to suggest that, in some as-yet obscure, nefarious way, Russian president Vladimir Putin was responsible for Nemtsov’s death. That just makes sense, right? Nemtsov was a vocal, liberal critic of Putin. Therefore Putin, as a more ruthless, blu-ray version of Uncle Joe, must have killed him. Because that’s what Putin the Impaler does: he destroys enemies; he knocks off opponents; and he assassinates critics. ‘It has become a cliché to compare Putin’s Russia with Nazi Germany’, writes columnist Simon Heffer mid-cliché, ‘but the murder of political opponents with impunity was one tactic of that regime that it has in common with the one now prevailing in Russia’.
To give the Western media coverage of Nemtsov’s death its due, it has tended to be a little more subtle than Hitler analogies and puce-faced condemnation. The preferred approach of many pundits has been to imply guilt by association. Putin may not have ordered the hit himself, so the story runs, but he has created a climate in which the murder of political opponents, by, for example, some super-nationalist, Russian bear-hugging biker gang, has effectively become state-approved.
The Western media, complemented by the many Western politicians keen to weep over the death of this ‘dogged fighter against corruption’, as François ‘le incorruptible’ Mitterrand described Nemtsov, seem incapable of seeing anything other than a manifestation of what they’re certain they already know: that is, Russia is a nation in the grip of Putin’s macho-nationalist mania, a society willing to stick the jackboot into liberals’ soft, treacherous bellies.
Putin and his henchmen may not be pulling the triggers themselves, but they’re licensing those who are. This Russia, this aggressive, backward beast, pursuing imperial dreams without and persecuting gays and liberals within, is Putin’s Russia. He is a bad man, ‘a psychopath’, as one columnist described him, and today’s Russia is very much in his image.
So unquestioned is the narrative of Putin’s evil-doing that thought is no longer necessary. Ironies abound here. Russia’s state-controlled media are frequently criticised by the Western commentators for telling a one-sided story. But the Western media are no better; their conformist, no-deviation-allowed, Red Menace redux is voluntary, their anti-Putin myopia is willing. Unlike their Russian counterparts, their Pravda-like reiteration of the one and only truth is by choice.
It shouldn’t be a surprise. Beyond the grotesquely wilful misunderstanding of the Ukraine crisis, the Western media have long proved themselves all too willing to believe the worst of Russia and Putin. Think, for example, of Surrey-based Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who was found dead in his bathroom in March 2013. Newspapers described Berezovsky rather fancifully as ‘a latter-day Trotsky figure for the Russian authorities’, a figure whose ‘feud with Putin… would lead ultimately to his death at the age of 67 in exile’.
There was no evidence to suggest he had been executed by the motherland. But that didn’t stop the speculation. Incredibly, even now, after a coroner said there was ‘compelling evidence’ of suicide; even now, after Berezovsky’s financial problems became apparent; even now, after news of his depression emerged; even now, after friends revealed he had talked about killing himself, some still cling to the idea that Putin probably ordered his death. Because that makes more sense to them than the idea that an ageing, depressed and financially ruined man with suicidal thoughts might just have killed himself.
This narrative, in which the evil hand of Putin is behind everything, from the innocuous to the tragic, makes a certain sense for Western pundits and politicians groping around for the moral highground. In Russia and Putin, they find their useful antithesis. Russia is posited as an aggressive, evil empire adventuring abroad, and an aggressive evil state at home, intent on picking off political opponents, anarcho-feminist punk bands, and Guardian journalists. The West… well, we’re the good guys – gay-friendly and all for press freedom.
There is one big problem with such juvenile, see evil, speak evil, hear evil posturing: it’s simply not true. Russia, surrounded by hostile groups – its Islamist problem, as Beslan and other recent events provided awful testament to, dwarfs that of Western Europe – and, increasingly, nations, is more beleaguered than belligerent. And Putin is not the revamped, rainbow-flag trashing Hitler or Stalin of liberals’ wet nightmares. He is simply an authoritarian, populist, and, yes, popular leader, looking to shore up support, ironically enough, by counterposing his own affected traditionalism to that of his Western caricaturists’ permissiveness.
But there is another big problem with the relentless anti-Russian posturing, in which the tragic murder of a politician is just another chance to damn Putin and invoke the 1930s: it makes mature diplomacy, in which opposing interests are calibrated, and compromises struck, increasingly impossible. What prevails instead is a far more volatile, unpredictable situation, a situation in which both sides increasingly confront each other as mortal enemies – moral antagonists in a war to the death. The easy demonisation of Putin’s Russia may make Westerners feel good, but it makes for potentially calamitous foreign policy.
More HERE
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No Justice for Ferguson
As expected, the Justice Department released its report on endemic racism in the Ferguson Police Department, determining that blacks were treated unfairly in “nearly every aspect of Ferguson’s law enforcement system.” The DOJ’s findings were virtually a foregone conclusion. Attorney General Eric Holder and his merry band set out to find racism among white cops and, lo and behold, their witch hunt was successful.
Right up front, it’s important to reiterate that the vast majority of law enforcement officials at the local, state and federal level abide, first and foremost, by their oaths “to Support and Defend” our Constitution and the Liberty it enshrines.
But that doesn’t mean a few haven’t forgotten who they are obligated to “protect and serve.” We’ve warned previously about the over-militarization of police. It’s a problem for several reasons, and one is the tendency to amplify aggression when encountering citizens and suspects. As we said in August, a situation that was already tense thanks to the racial imbalance between the city and its police department, was made worse by the paramilitary police response to the riots after Michael Brown’s death.
Furthermore, as Mark Alexander, a police veteran himself, wrote in December, “Clearly, there are some police officers calloused by constant exposure to oppressive urban criminal cultures. Consequently, some may over-generalize racial assumptions and abuse their authority.”
But the problem in Ferguson isn’t quite, well, black and white.
According to the DOJ, “African Americans experience disparate impact in nearly every aspect of Ferguson’s law enforcement system. Despite making up 67% of the population, African Americans accounted for 85% of FPD’s traffic stops, 90% of FPD’s citations, and 93% of FPD’s arrests from 2012 to 2014.”
“Disparate impact” is one of Obama’s favorite phrases, but does this mean police are racist? Not necessarily. As Alexander noted, “[W]hen 90% of murders in urban centers are ‘people of color’ and 90% of perpetrators are ‘people of color,’ cops of any color are going to be more cautious with ‘people of color.’ This is not ‘racism,’ this is reality, driven by a desire to make it home safely at the end of one’s shift.”
Still, the DOJ’s accounts of police overstepping bounds are too numerous to ignore. Just to name a couple:
A black man who was sitting in his car cooling off from playing basketball was accused by an officer of being a pedophile because there were children nearby. He was ordered out of his car for a pat-down, seemingly without cause, and then arrested for “eight violations of Ferguson’s municipal code,” including not wearing a seatbelt in a parked car. The man lost his job as a result.
A black woman illegally parked her car and ended up in a six-year battle, paying more than $1,000 in fines and spending six days in jail.
Were there extenuating circumstances in these cases? Prior arrests? Perhaps, but the report is careful not to elaborate on the citizens' backgrounds.
There are plenty of other anecdotes of general harassment – police seeming to escalate otherwise innocuous situations, police dogs biting blacks (and only blacks), officers arresting people based solely on verbal exchanges, and cops uttering racial epithets. We’re sure none of Ferguson’s black citizens ever hurled racial epithets at officers.
The report found that “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs.” The city’s finance director emailed the police chief to see if the police department could raise enough revenue for a 10% budget increase. For a town of 21,000 with a median income around $36,000, that’s not hard to believe. In fact, one might ask why Ferguson has a police department of its own, rather than deploying the St. Louis County PD.
The problems in Ferguson did not, however, extend to Officer Darren Wilson’s deadly encounter with Michael Brown. He was cleared of criminal charges in November, and the DOJ went to great lengths explaining why Wilson was justified in shooting Brown. While that defense is all well and good, Obama, Holder and their race-baiting friends ended Wilson’s career in the police department and effectively endangered him for life by countenancing (until now) the false “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” meme.
It wasn’t long before two New York police officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, lost their lives at the hands of a black racist.
Don’t miss the timing of the two reports. The one absolving Wilson was released alongside the political consolation prize – discrediting the entire department.
The trouble here is that the Justice Department’s report doesn’t resolve anything. Those who see police as racist, jackbooted thugs now have a lengthy report full of horrible anecdotes to back that up. Others who see the Obama administration as the racist, jackbooted thugs will summarily dismiss the report. Based on Obama’s and Holder’s untrustworthiness, this is understandable.
More HERE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog
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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6 March, 2015
Iris pigmentation
Iris pigmentation sounds like an obscure area of scientific investigation, does it not? Among evolutionary biologists it is an obscure area of scientific investigation but there is more to it than that. In everyday English it is the study of blue eyes. Caution, caution! I think I am already in an area of political incorrectness. But I discuss all areas of scientific interest without fear or favor so political correctness can go hang.
It's not long go that having blue eyes was commented on favorably. There is a stellar example of that in Im weissen Roessl, the hit operetta known in English as "The White Horse Inn", though more accurately translated as "The little white horse". There is a recent big-budget performance of it at Moerbisch (In the original German). At the 36 minute mark of the video you will see the ultra-feminine Anja-Katharina Wigger and big Marco Jentzch singing "die ganze Welt ist himmelblau" to one another (The whole world is sky blue). The point of the song is how inspired they are by one-another's blue eyes. It's a piece of romanticism that's well worth watching whatever color your eyes are but those of us who have blue eyes probably get a little more out of it.
So what is the significance of blue eyes? Just that question must be ringing loud alarms to anyone impressed by political correctness but, as ever, I will plow on. Yes. I have "checked my privilege" and am quite pleased with it.
Blue eyes seem to have arisen as a genetic mutation somewhere in the Black sea area but natural selection moved them steadily Northwards. At some early stage, the whole Northern European population probably had blue eyes. Northern Europe and its descendant populations are of course the main loci of them to this day.
Why did that gene move North? Because blue eyes function better than dark eyes in low light levels and function less well in high light levels. Blue eyed people could see better in the low light levels that often prevail in chilly Northern Europe, particularly in the Baltic sea area and Russia. We Anglo-Saxons trace our ancestry to German tribes that moved from the South Baltic to Britannia, later known as England.
But it's not only iris pigmentation that cold climates select for. Cold climates are not very good at growing crops -- so the blue-eyed Volk largely fed themselves by hunting. So they kept their hunter-gatherer mores (customs) much longer than did the Southern European and Mesopotamian populations. And hunter-gatherer mores are democratic. Issues are settled by discussion, not by imperial edict.
And the ancient parliaments of Northern Europe and Iceland reflect that. The Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britannia brought their democratic customs with them and their "Witangemot" evolved in due course into the Westminster parliament on the Thames, sometimes called "the mother of parliaments". So most long-established parliaments serve people with predominantly azure iris pigmentation: Democracy as we know it today arose in the cold climates of Northern Europe.
While they retained something of their hunter-gatherer traditions, Greece and Rome were also democratic -- but democracy there eventually succumbed to imperialism. The big bureaucratic governments that characterize the modern world threaten a similar fate for us. Democracy can be lost. And if the Left have their way, it will be. All the great tyrants of the 20th century -- Stalin, Hitler and Mao -- were socialists.
And there is yet another thing that cold climates select for: IQ. To survive a Northern winter you need to do a lot of thinking ahead and thinking ahead involves abstract and symbolic thought. You have to imagine yourself in the midst of a Northern winter with no wood to burn to keep you warm. Only if you can imagine it will you provide against it. Blue eyed people were people who tended to think ahead, and, mostly, they still do.
AS a small coda to this ramble through evolutionary history, I will say a word about a recent claim about the color blue in general. The claim is that people could not see the colour blue until recently. The claim is based on the curious fact that words meaning blue are largely absent from ancient writings. Homer's well-known reference to a "wine-dark sea" is held up as an example. That Homer was simply not talking about its color is discounted.
Since the human eye does contain cones specifically devoted to being activated by blue wavelengths, it is clear, however, that any deficiency about blue-perception is social rather than physical. People could always see blue so the question is why did they say so little about it? And the article does point us towards an answer to that: It was only the ancient Egyptians who had a way of dying things blue. And the ancient Egyptians do use blue color words freely. So it was because they could not produce it that ancient peoples tended not to refer to it.
The whole thing boils down to a version of the old Sapir/Whorf "codability" hypothesis in linguistics. The strong version of that hypothesis says that your thinking is dictated by your language. It is reminiscent of Marx's claim that your thinking is dictated by your social position. The current "check your privilege" accusation reprises Marx. But Marx is easily refuted by the simple fact that people of the same social class can have radically different opinions and by the fact that people from different social classes can have similar opinions.
British sociologists have long been puzzled by the fact that about a quarter of the British working class vote Tory. They are seen as voting for the "wrong" party, not "their" party (the Labour party). Only a Marxist would be puzzled by that however. People are NOT blinded by their class origins. I wrote about that some time ago. And the strong Sapir/Whorf hypothesis can be rejected on similar grounds.
Does anyone, for instance, think that Germans are in any way incommoded or limited by the fact that their language has no word for pink, heaven or happy? They just give double duty to their words for rosy, sky and lucky. They are many happy Germans who sometimes wear pink and none of them expect to float up into the sky when they die.
The weak form of the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis is however informative: People "cut up" their perceptual world according to what is important to them. Eskimos have several different words for different types of snow while we do not. For us, snow is snow but for Eskimos recognizing different types of snow can have survival implications.
So ancient people did not mention blue because it was not important to them. They could not produce it so they largely ignored it. It was not a useful category in their lives and hence also not important in their speech.
So let me end with a tease: The first American to step on the moon (Neil Armstrong) and the first Russian in space (Yuri Gagarin) both had blue eyes. What should we make of that?
Footnote: My large academic background does at times cause me to lapse into academic jargon -- but I try to explain myself when I do that. The Latin word mores above, for instance, is used by social scientists to mean the full range of attitudes and behaviors that is characteristic of some human group. Even people who know what it means sometimes pronounce it as if it were the plural of the English word "more". There is no such plural, however. mores is the plural of the Latin word mos and is pronounced as "morays" (just like the eel).
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Cause of strain U.S./Israel relations: Obama’s hostile policies
In an interview on the PBS television ‘Charlie Rose’ program, President Barack Obama’s National Security Adviser, Susan Rice, said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to accept the invitation of House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress on the issue of Iran’s looming nuclear threat had “injected a degree of partisanship, which is not only unfortunate, I think it’s destructive of the fabric of the [U.S./Israeli] relationship.”
Nothing can further from the truth: it’s Mr. Obama’s partisanship which has produced a crisis in relations between the White House and Jerusalem, not Mr. Netanyahu’s –– and the record shows it.
Mr. Obama doesn’t mind foreign leaders speaking to Congressmen –– as long as they support his policy. That’s why he was happy for British Prime Minister David Cameron to do just that. But he deeply objected to Mr. Netanyahu critiquing his Iran policy to Members of Congress. It is not hard to see why: in his address to Congress, Mr. Netanyahu demolished the Obama claim that negotiations with Iran are going to lead to a deal that stops Iran going nuclear.
Yet, in truth, even that isn’t the reason Obama has refused to meet Mr. Netanyahu during his visit. People forget that, without any upcoming speech to Congress to rationalize his pique, Obama also declined to meet Mr. Netanyahu during his September 2012 visit to the U.S.
Yes, there were tensions back then, too –– Mr. Obama was pressing Israel not to militarily strike Iran, to which Mr. Netanyahu acceded –– but this only shows that policy, not merely personalities, is driving the friction between them.
Indeed, Mr. Obama has elevated to crises disagreements that previous administrations tamped down.
Mr. Obama has continually criticized and even “condemned” as anti-peace Israel merely announcing the building of homes in Jewish neighborhoods of eastern Jerusalem –– a bipartisan Israeli policy –– that would remain Israeli under any conceivable peace agreement.
Conversely, there has been no condemnation of the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas for incitement to hatred and murder –– though the Obama Administration said it would hold it accountable. Last week, a U.S. federal court held the PLO and Abbas’ PA are liable for six terrorist attacks in Israel that killed and wounded Americans more than a decade ago –– but Obama has been silent about this.
The record of six years shows a president who has often spoiled for a spat with Israel over policy disagreements, involving refusal of photos ops; Mr. Netanyahu being compelled to exit the White House by a side entrance; having to cool his heels while Mr. Obama took dinner without him; an unidentified aide (never fired or reprimanded) calling Mr. Netanyahu a “chickenshit” and “coward” –– for acceding to Mr. Obama’s demand that Israel not strike Iran, of all things –– and other petty indignities which seem to be the hallmark of Obama’s meta-language towards insufficiently pliant allies.
Just recall former British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who in March 2009 received no White House dinner, no family get-together and a mere impromptu media conference, instead of the traditional joint press conference. Worse, in September 2009, Mr. Brown’s five requests for a private meeting with Mr. Obama were humiliatingly turned down.
The current problem therefore does not lie in Mr. Netanyahu accepting an invitation from the House Speaker to address Congress. Rather, it goes to the heart of Western security, which is why Congress was entitled to seek and hear the views of the prime minister of the country that stands to be most drastically affected by Iran becoming a nuclear threshold state.
That’s why Obama’s overwrought efforts to cast Mr. Netanyahu’s acceptance of the invitation to address Congress as a partisan slap in the face ring hollow. The issue is entirely a product of President Obama’s policy on Iran, which engenders bipartisan concern in Israel. Put simply, President Obama seems willing to tolerate an Iranian nuclear weapons threshold capacity –– but Israel is not.
Thus, veteran Israeli analyst, Ehud Yaari, an Israeli Labor Party supporter, actually urged Israeli Labor leader, Yitzhak Herzog, to accompany Netanyahu to Congress.
Moreover, the Israeli Prime Minister is scarcely alone in finding Obama’s approach deeply troubling. A McLaughlin poll only the other day found that 59% of Americans supported Mr. Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, while only 23% opposed.
The sheer hollowness of the Obama Administration’s criticism of the Netanyahu speech is admirably laid bare when one recalls Mr. Obama’s homilies on the duties of honesty and forthrightness that allies owe to each other over policy differences.
Has not Mr. Obama said that allies sometimes have the obligation to speak out, even when their advice is uncomfortable? Did he not tell Jewish leaders that “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel might be necessary?
This would seem to be such a moment. It’s just that President Obama only ever imagined himself advising Israel, not Israel advising him.
SOURCE
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Socialist ideals of purity
Haidt says that concerns about purity are primarily a conservative thing, with liberals largely indifferent to it. But Haidt is naive enough to believe that liberals describe their dismal motivations honestly. Others have pointed out that Leftists have purity concerns too -- and the article below is another shot in that direction
Hitler and other Nazi leaders conceived of Jews as a “disease” within the body politic whose continued presence would lead to the death of the nation. Jews, in the mind of Hitler and other Nazi ideologues, constituted alien or “not-self” cells within the German body politic.
In The Body Soviet: Propaganda, Hygiene, and the Revolutionary State (2008), Tricia Starks conveys the biological metaphors that defined the Soviet revolution. Revolutionary rhetoric, Starks observes, took the form of the binaries of pure/polluted and healthy/diseased. Seeking utopian purity, communism framed its ideology in terms of hygienic metaphors and the “language of purification.” In his attacks against the bourgeois, kulaks (rich peasants) and the priesthood, Lenin compared these classes to “diseases, parasites, or vermin.”
He called for attacks on the “parasites that suck the blood of the working people.” In a tirade delivered in 1917, Lenin referred to the rich and the idlers as “hopelessly decayed and atrophied limbs”—this “contagion, this plague, this ulcer that socialism has inherited from capitalism.”
Lenin insisted that the people take collective action to “clean the land of Russia of all vermin, of fleas, of bugs—the rich.” In his speeches, Starks says, he described the bourgeoisie variously as “filth”, “rot”, “infection”, and even “crippled limbs”, connecting capitalism to disease and degeneracy.
Extending the metaphor of parasites and disease to his political opponents in his article “The Itch” (1918), Lenin portrayed unacceptable political thought as “scabies” (a contagious skin infection caused by the human itch mite), presenting cleansing as the solution: “Put yourself in a steam bath and get rid of the itch.” Starks concludes that Lenin portrayed capitalism as a “disease plaguing the entire world,” and that dread of this infection saturated Soviet propaganda in the 1920s.
Ideological deviation was medicalized as a perversity that endangered both the individual and the entire social body. Sick party members—if they could not be rehabilitated or reeducated—would have to be “excised” before they endangered the party body. The primary method used to accomplish this was the purge, or ochistka (literally “cleansing”). Purging the party of those subject to “illnesses” allowed the party to remain pure and inviolate.
Weitz observes that Stalin’s penchant for biological metaphors was greater even than Lenin’s, evoking some of the “worst horrors of the Twentieth Century.” Stalin (like Lenin) depicted kulaks as “bloodsuckers, spiders and vampires.” As Hitler described Germany as an organism, so Stalin described the Communist party as “a living organism.” Cadres who did not take up the struggle against the opposition “drive sores into the inside of the party organism,” and the party “falls ill.” As in every organism “metabolism takes place: old, obsolete stuff falls off; new, growing things flourish and develop.”
Much more HERE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog
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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5 March, 2015
Netanyahu to Congress: Deal with Iran paves way to bomb
In his address to Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued that the proposed nuclear deal being negotiated with Iran will lead inexorably to a nuclear-armed Iran and war in the Middle East.
“This deal has two major concessions: One, leaving Iran with a vast nuclear program, and two, lifting the restrictions on that program in about a decade,” Netanyahu said in his speech Tuesday morning. “That’s why this deal is so bad. It doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb, it paves Iran’s path to the bomb.”
Netanyahu argued that the deal under consideration, which is being negotiated with Iran by the United States and other world powers, would let most of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure stay in place, including thousands of centrifuges. That would leave Tehran with a very short “breakout time” with which it could produce nuclear weapons, he said.
The Israeli leader also said that the inspection regime under negotiation would be insufficient because inspectors can only document violations, not stop them, and Iran has a history of maintaining secret nuclear facilities.
“Like North Korea, Iran, too, has defied international inspectors,” Netanyahu said. “Iran has proven time and again that it cannot be trusted.”
Because Iran threatens many of its neighbors, other countries in the region likely would develop their own nuclear weapons to keep pace with the Islamic Republic, Netanyahu warned, leaving the region “crisscrossed with nuclear tinder-wires.”
“If anyone thinks this deal kicks the can down the road, think again,” he said. “When we get down that road, we will face a much more dangerous Iran, a Middle East littered with nuclear bombs and a countdown to a potential nuclear nightmare.”
Netanyahu urged Congress to reject the deal. “For over a year, we’ve been told that no deal is better than a bad deal,” Netanyahu said. “Well, this is a bad deal. It’s a very bad deal. We’re better off without it.”
The audience responded with a standing ovation.
SOURCE
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IAEA Warns of Possible Iranian 'Activities Related to Development of a Nuclear Payload'
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has “further corroborated” information indicating that Iran “has carried out activities that are relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device,” the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog says in its most recent report on Iran.
Yet not only does Iran continue to deny inspectors access to a key suspect site, it has carried out work there that the agency says will make it more difficult to determine what has been going on there, should they ever be admitted in the future.
Even couched in the staid language favored by U.N. bureaucrats, the Feb. 19 report underlines the still-unresolved concerns about alleged nuclear weapons activity, even as the P5+1 group – the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany – draws closer to a late March deadline for a proposed nuclear agreement that will allow Iran to keep much of its nuclear infrastructure intact.
“The agency remains concerned about the possible existence in Iran of undisclosed nuclear related activities involving military related organizations, including activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile,” IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano writes to the Vienna-based agency’s board of governors.
Those suspected activities, first outlined in a Nov. 2011 IAEA report and “assessed by the agency to be, overall, credible,” have since been “further corroborated,” he said.
The missiles which the IAEA has concerns about boast a range that encompasses Israel as well as U.S. forces in the Arabian Gulf.
In a bipartisan letter to President Obama, circulating on Capitol Hill Monday, House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) and ranking member Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) pointed to Iran’s lack of cooperation, arguing that “[t]he potential military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program should be treated as a fundamental test of Tehran’s intention to uphold the final comprehensive agreement.”
Iran is obliged to allow IAEA monitors access to Parchin, a military site near Tehran, where the U.S. suspects testing of high explosive components for a nuclear weapon has been carried out.
That obligation is spelled out in a 2010 U.N. Security Council resolution, which called on Iran to “cooperate fully with the IAEA on all outstanding issues, particularly those which give rise to concerns about the possible military dimensions of the Iranian nuclear program, including by providing access without delay to all sites, equipment, persons and documents requested by the IAEA …”
Meanwhile, Iran’s evident failure to comply with this requirement is outlined in Amano’s report:
--“Iran has not provided any explanations that enable the agency to clarify the two outstanding practical measures relating to the initiation of high explosives and to neutron transport calculations.” (Neutron transport studies, which determine how neutrons are moving and interacting with other materials, can be relevant to nuclear weapons development.)
--“Since the director-general’s previous report [three months ago], at a particular location at the Parchin site, the agency has observed, through satellite imagery, the presence of vehicles, equipment and probable construction materials, but no further external changes to the buildings on the site.”
--“As previously reported, the activities that have taken place at this location since February 2012 are likely to have undermined the agency’s ability to conduct effective verification.”
--“It remains important for Iran to provide answers to the agency’s questions and access to the particular location at the Parchin site.”
Iran all along has denied the IAEA allegations about suspect activities, calling them “mere allegations” and saying they “do not merit consideration.” At the same time, however, Iranian officials have repeatedly pledged to cooperate with the agency to resolve the ambiguities.
Why Iran is not doing so is unclear, but fuels suspicions that despite its denials it does indeed have something to hide.
The Nov. 2011 IAEA report that first spelled out the concerns spoke of “credible” evidence that Iran carried out “activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device” as part of a “structured program” until the end of 2003 – and that there were indications that some of those activities had continued after 2003 and “may still be ongoing.”
“The agency is concerned because some of the activities undertaken after 2003 would be highly relevant to a nuclear weapon program,” it said.
Among the alleged PMD activities identified in that report, some of it carried out at Parchin, was work on detonator designs, including detonator devices that could be used in a nuclear weapon and could fit in a ballistic missile warhead.
Specifically, it said the Iranians were believed to have worked on a project aimed at fitting a “spherical payload” into the payload chamber of a Shahab-3 missile. (The fusion device in a nuclear warhead is typically spherical in shape.)
The Shahab-3 missile, developed with North Korean assistance according to the CIA, and first test-fired by Iran in 1998, has a range of around 800 miles, potentially threatening Israel as well as U.S. forces in the Gulf.
Although Kerry and others in the administration say Iran has met its commitments under the JPOA, the PMD issue remains unaddressed.
SOURCE
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Cardinal Dolan: ISIS Carrying Out 'Targeted Genocide' of Christians
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York City, agreed with CNN's Chris Cuomo today that Islamic State jihadists are engaging in "targeted genocide," a "holy war" against the Christian population in the Middle East, with Dolan adding that these extremists are indeed "Muslims" however "perverted" their form of Islam.
On CNN Live this morning, Mar. 3, host Chris Cuomo asked Cardinal Dolan, "Obviously, ISIS is going after everybody who doesn’t agree with them. But do you believe that this is targeted genocide, this is holy war by these ISIS extremists on Christians?"
The cardinal said, "I do. I think it’s time to talk turkey. I think it’s a systematic, well-choreographed, very well-focused attempt to eradicate the ancient Christian population in the Middle East."
"Now I’m quick to add, Chris, and I mean this, I also believe with all my heart and soul that these extremists do not represent genuine Islamic thought," said Cardinal Dolan.
Cuomo then asked, "But do you believe they are Muslims?"
Dolan said, "They are, they are for sure – I would say a particularly perverted form of Islam."
Cuomo interjected, "Because you know this has been a real problem, here, for the White House, in terms of defining who the enemy is? The president doesn’t want to give credibility to them as Muslims because they’re not really good Muslims – many believe it’s more confusing than clarifying."
Dolan, who oversees the Catholic community in New York City, then said, "No, they claim to be Muslims. Even the majority of temperate, peace-loving Muslims would say, ‘I’m afraid they have a particular strand of erroneous Islam.’ But I do think they are [Muslims]."
ISIS is the abbreviation for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; the Muslim group recently changed that name to the Islamic State.
The archdiocese of New York was established in 1808 and currently serves 2.6 million Catholics in 310 different parishes (churches), as well as dozens of schools, charities, and health care facilities.
SOURCE
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The Honesty Gap
By Thomas Sowell
There may be some poetic justice in the recent revelation that Hillary Clinton, who has made big noises about a “pay gap” between women and men, paid the women on her Senate staff just 72 percent of what she paid the men. The Obama White House staff likewise has a pay gap between women and men, as of course does the economy as a whole.
Does this mean that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both discriminate against women, that they are themselves part of the nefarious “war on women” that so many on the left loudly denounce? The poetic justice in the recent “pay gap” revelations is that the fundamental fraud in the statistics that are thrown around comes back to bite those who are promoting that fraud for political purposes.
What makes such statistics fraudulent is that they are comparing apples and oranges.
Innumerable studies, going back for decades, have shown that women do not average as many hours of work per year as men, do not have as many consecutive years of full-time employment as men, do not work in the same mix of occupations as men and do not specialize in the same mix of subjects in college as men.
Back in 1996, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that young male physicians earned 41 percent higher incomes than young female physicians. But the same study showed that young male physicians worked over 500 hours a year more than young female physicians.
When the study took into account differences in hours of work, in the fields in which male and female doctors specialized and other differences in their job characteristics, “no earnings difference was evident.” In other words, when you compare apples to apples, you don’t get the “gender gap” in pay that you get when you compare apples to oranges.
This is not peculiar to the medical profession. Nor was this a new revelation, even back in 1996. Many studies done by many scholars over the years – including female scholars – show the same thing, again and again.
A breakdown of statistics in an old monograph of mine – “Affirmative Action in Academia” – showed the pay differential between women and men evaporating, or even reversing, as you compared individuals with truly comparable characteristics. This was back in 1975, forty years ago!
There might have been some excuse for believing that income differences between women and men were proof of discrimination back in the 1960s. But there is no excuse for continuing to use misleading statistics in the 21st century, when their flaws have been exposed repeatedly and long ago.
Many kinds of high-level and high-pressure careers require working 50 or 60 hours a week regularly, and women with children – or expecting to have children – seldom choose those kinds of careers.
Nor is there any reason why they should, if they don’t want to. Raising a child is not an incidental activity that you can do in your spare time, like collecting stamps or bowling.
If you trace the actual history of women in high-level careers, you will find that it bears no resemblance to the radical feminist fable, in which advances began with the “women’s liberation” movement in the 1960s and new anti-discrimination laws.
In reality, women were far better represented in professional occupations in the first three decades of the 20th century than in the middle of that century. Women received a larger share of the postgraduate degrees necessary for such careers in the earlier era than in the 1950s and 1960s.
The proportion of women among the high achievers listed in “Who’s Who in America” in 1902 was more than double the proportion listed in 1958. The decline of women in high-level careers occurred when women’s age of marriage and child-bearing declined during the mid-century “baby boom” years.
The later rise of women began when the age of marriage and child-bearing rose again. In 1972 women again received as high a proportion of doctoral degrees as they had back in 1932.
The truth is not nearly as politically useful as scare statistics. The “gender gap” is not nearly as big as the honesty gap.
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog
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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4 March, 2015
Nutrition and IQ
One of the oldest claims about low IQ by Leftists is that it's all due to poverty. Sound familiar? More specifically, they say that low IQ just reflects poor nutrition. Considering that African Americans are on the whole even more overweight than Caucasian Americans, that rather clearly flies in the face of the facts. African Americans are on average 15 points behind white Americans but they aren't going hungry.
And in any case, if it were all due to nutrition, feeding up the children of poor people should make them all into Einsteins, should it not? There is no known example of anything like that being achieved, however.
Aha! But it's not the quantity alone that matters. It's quality too. People need to eat "healthily" rather than eat more. And the prime candidate for a "healthy" diet is the Mediterranean diet. We all know that, don't we? If we all ate like the Greeks with plenty of vegetables, plenty of garlic and plenty of olive oil we would be so much healthier -- and slimmer to boot. The main reason the Mediterranean diet is lauded is that accords with Ancel Keys' famous demonstration that red meat it bad for you (high red meat consumption is correlated with shorter lifespan).
Pesky fact: Keys only looked at death from cardiovascular events (heart attacks and strokes). He did not look at overall mortality. When you include all causes of death in the correlation, the correlation with red meat consumption vanishes.
Pesky fact: The traditional Australian diet (beef, beef and more beef in various forms) is about as opposite to the Mediterranean diet as you can imagine yet Australians live longer than any people of any Mediterranean nation -- so scrub the Mediterranean diet idea once and for all.
Another pesky fact: Eskimos eating a traditional diet eat little else than meat and blubber. It's hard to grow vegetables near the North Pole. Yet at any age point, Eskimos have LESS cardiovascular disease than we do.
So: There may be such a thing as a healthy diet but nobody so far has been able to track it down convincingly. Maybe some day somebody will find a magic vegetable that will make blacks as smart as whites but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Funnily enough, however, there is a SMALL element of truth in what Leftists say. In very nutritionally deprived people -- such as Africans whose dietary staple is "Mealie-pap" (corn-porridge) -- adding micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) to the diet of their children does bring about an IQ gain -- but only of about 5 points. On better nourished people, there is no such gain, however.
Some reinforcement of that story can be found here. The amount of red meat eaten by different nations is tabulated. And amount of red meat is a pretty good proxy for a high quality food supply generally.
And we find, of course, that the nations of Africa all have a low per capita meat consumption. They are too poor for anything else. And they are also nations that show very low IQs, as tabulated by Lynn and VanHanen. Compared to Africans, African Americans (who are about 20% white genetically) are an intellectual elite. So a largely vegetarian diet has not helped Africans much.
But there are some black countries that do have a high meat consumption. Saint Lucia in the Caribbean lives well off the back of American tourism so has one of the highest meat consumptions per capita (though not nearly as high as the New Zealanders with their seven tasty sheep per person). Yet the average IQ in St Lucia is an abysmal 62, very similar to what we see in Africa.
So vegetables are not the magic cure for low IQ in blacks nor is a rich diet. What else is there? Can we concede that diet is essentially irrelevant to IQ?
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Want to Know Why They Keep Calling You Racists?
Attorney General Eric Holder plans to push for a “new standard of proof for civil -rights offenses”. In an interview with Politico. he said that “he felt some of his own struggles with Republicans in Congress during his six years in office were driven partly by race.” Uh huh. Just not in the way he meant it.
The Democrat Party’s history with race is interesting. Andrew Jackson, 7th President of the United States, is generally considered the founder of the Democratic Party. He was one of the largest slaveholders in the South.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 divided the nation into free states and slave states, the South seceded, and we fought a long and very bloody war to preserve the Union and end slavery.
The Republican Party was founded as the party of abolition. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation into law. Republicans passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, ending slavery, with 80% of Democrats voting against it. Republicans passed the 14th Amendment granting freed slaves the rights of citizenship—unanimously opposed by Democrats. Republicans passed the 15th Amendment giving freedmen the right to vote.
Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 conferring U.S. citizenship on all African-Americans and according them the “free and equal benefit of all laws” unanimously supported by Republicans who had to override Democrat Andrew Johnson’s veto. Republicans passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867. Republicans sent federal troops to the Democratic South to enforce the constitutional rights of freed slaves. Republicans were the target of the Ku Klux Klan during the Reconstruction.
Republicans continued to try to pass federal civil rights laws in the next century — most were blocked by Democrats, including a bill banning racial discrimination in public accommodations (1875), guaranteeing the right to vote in the South (1890), anti-lynching (1922, 1935, 1938), anti poll-tax bills (1942, 1944, 1946).
Republican President Teddy Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House (1901), the first black to do so. Republican platforms starting in 1908 called for equal rights, equal justice, anti-lynching legislation, integration of the military (1940), endorsed Brown v. Board of Education, (1956), and Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock to desegregate the schools.
By the sixties, the civil rights movement was gaining ground, and Democrats became aware of the trends. To succeed in American politics, they would need black votes, and their record with matters of race was pretty bad, especially in the South. President John Kennedy sought a civil rights bill to outlaw discrimination, but then he was assassinated and Lyndon Johnson became president.
Johnson’s own record with civil rights wasn’t very good, and he pushed hard to pass the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, which outlawed discrimination by race, color, religion or national origin. equality in voter registration rights and outlawed racial segregation in the schools. Although Congress was controlled by Democrats, 61% of Democrats in the House voted for the bill, 29% against, 80% of Republicans voted for it, 20% against. In the Senate 69% of Democrats supported it with a long filibuster, and 31% against. 82% of Republicans voted for it and 18% against.
Well, the Sixties! Freedom Summer. Students came down south to march for civil rights, There was the Civil Rights Act of 1965 (voting rights ), 1968 (Fair Housing), and Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” which would end poverty and racial injustice, rebuild the entire urban United states, end boredom and restlessness, slake the hunger for community and enhance “the meaning of our lives” all by assembling “the best thought and broadest knowledge.”
When Johnson left office, 10 percent of Southern schools were desegregated. When Richard Nixon left office, the figure was 70 percent. But “the Southern Strategy” didn’t Nixon try to get Southern votes by appealing to the racist segregationists? Nixon helped to persuade the Senate to pass the Civil Rights act of 1957 and supported the civil rights acts of 1964, 1965, and 1968. In Nixon’s presidency , the civil rights enforcement budget rose by 800%, record numbers of blacks were appointed to federal office, an Office of Minority Business Enterprise was created, SBA loans to minorities soared by 1,000% and aid to black colleges doubled.
What happened was that Democrats, realizing that blacks were being registered to vote in big numbers, needed to disguise their past and become the party of civil rights and the war on poverty, the party that cared for minorities, and they did it by lying about history, their own and the Republicans’. Oddly enough, at the same time new terms like “Diversity” and “Multiculturalism” not only initially entered the political lexicon, but became the guiding factor throughout education, business and human resources departments everywhere. Coincidence?
Suddenly, Republicans, the party of abolition since its founding, became the party of racism, segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, poll taxes, and every time that Republicans disagree with Democrats they are called “racists.” This is the communist perfected technique of the BIG LIE. You just tell a whopper, and keep telling it and keep telling it, and embroidering it until it is considered to be plain fact. Progressives are very good at this kind of political warfare, and Republicans, who assume that Democrats are just misguided, are not.
Neurosurgeon Ben Carson is exploring a run for the presidency, and the Southern Poverty Law Center put him on their list of “dangerous extremists.” (They had to apologize, and deleted the “dangerous.”) Economist Thomas Sowell is called an Uncle Tom. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Senator Tim Scott, Economist Walter Williams, Representative Mia Love — any black who has succeeded in this country in reaching high office and is a Republican, is called an Uncle Tom, and receives death threats and slanders to their reputations.
The plight of Detroit, which is 85% black, is a shining example of 50 years of Democrat governance. They have reduced Detroit from one of the richest cities in the country to an example of urban blight and human despair. Their plan for “social justice” turned the once great city into a cesspool of racial politics and antibusiness practices, and poverty.
The War on Poverty has encouraged single black women to refrain from marrying the father of their children. Incentives keep women from getting off welfare, for if they get a job they will lose their higher benefits. The Democrat sponsored Community Reinvestment Act was designed to get more poor black people into their own homes, without regard to their ability to pay back the loans. Normal prudent banking rules were set aside and when the “Great Recession” hit, many middle class blacks lost their homes because they lost their jobs and couldn’t pay back their loans. The Obama administration swept into office on the wings of “the first black president,”promising help and caring for black Americans has, instead, devastated black families and returned race and racism to politics in new and troubling ways.
But why? The Progressives need blacks. If the Democratic Party lost just 30% of the black vote, it would mean an end to the liberal agenda. Walter Williams said:
That means blacks must be kept in a perpetual state of grievance in order to keep them as a one-party people in a two-party system. When black Americans finally realize how much liberals have used them, I’m betting they will be the nation’s most conservative people.
SOURCE
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Magna Carta lit the way
I add my comments on this article below it -- JR
For many, the Magna Carta is a beacon of liberty, protecting us from the arbitrary tyranny of our governments, even today.
Lord Denning, the celebrated English judge, once called the ancient peace treaty between King John and his barons - which is celebrating its 800th anniversary this year - "the greatest constitutional document of all time."
But how are those 800-year-old pieces of English calfskin still relevant to us?
After all, most of the charter was not filled with the sweeping rhetoric that we have come to expect of important political documents, but spoke of debtor's sureties, scutage, socage, burkage, paying money for castleward, and removing fish weirs from the Thames.
As a peace treaty, it lasted less than six weeks, ushering in a two-year civil war that devastated England, led to an attempted French invasion, and ended with King John dead, a 9-year-old boy on the throne, and the English significantly poorer, after paying off the French king to leave them alone.
Why then do we celebrate it?
Because the Magna Carta has come to stand for more than its provisions. Its impact has reverberated through the centuries.
No, it did not bring about democratic government in England. No, it did not end the venality of the English Crown. No, it did not guarantee trial by jury.
But it was cited by Henry VIII's Catholic opponents in the sixteenth century, by Sir Edward Coke, and other opponents of the grasping Stuart monarchy, in the seventeenth century, by the American Founding Fathers in the eighteenth century, and so on.
These reverberations are important.
Remembering the whole story of the Magna Carta might encourage us to play our own part in fostering liberty with greater humility. Rome was not built in a day, nor the rule of law established with one international human rights convention, or a UN General Assembly Resolution.
SOURCE
It's great to hear the bits of history that are not usually mentioned. And it is good to see that someone has actually read the document.
But the comments above go a bit too far in negativity. For instance, the first provision of the document was very similar to America' treasured First Amendment -- though not as concisely expressed. The MC could be said to contain the very first First Amendment. And it was first by a long way.
And the writer above complains that the MC is mainly concerned with minor matters like laws of inheritance. It is. It could be said in fact to be England's first systematic law of intestacy. And that is important to many people. If someone close to you has died without leaving a will, you will know all about that.
And America's revered Declaration of Independence is also mainly concerned with minor details, as anyone who has actually read it will know. People remember the few grand bits and ignore the rest. Much the same can be asked of the MC.
There is also in it a lot about setting up courts of justice and specifying the rules they are to follow. And the rules are surprisingly humane -- nothing like the atrocities Muslims perform in the name of justice to this day.
And how modern is this clause? "There shall be standard measures of wine, ale, and corn (the London quarter), throughout the kingdom. There shall also be a standard width of dyed cloth, russet, and haberject, namely two ells within the selvedges. Weights are to be standardised similarly"
I could go on but I think there is much to admire in the MC and I very much urge people to read it for themselves. There is a modern English translation here
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog
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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3 March, 2015
CNN, DHS and SPLC's Blame-Righty Hit Job
The Department of Homeland Security refuses to release a report on "right-wing" terrorism that somehow found its way into CNN's hands last week during the farcical White House summit on Don't Say Islamic Extremism.
Your tax dollars are once again hard at work — defaming conservatives, deflecting from worldwide murderous jihad and denying the public access to information they funded.
CNN splashed the big scoop on its website: "DHS intelligence report warns of domestic right-wing terror threat." The fear-mongering piece featured a huge map of 24 alleged acts of "violence by sovereign citizen extremists since 2010." CNN's Evan Perez and Wes Bruer prominently quoted Mark Potok of the widely disgraced propaganda outfit the Southern Poverty Law Center. Potok claimed that "there are as many as 300,000 people involved in some way with sovereign citizen extremism."
This is the same SPLC that was forced to apologize to famed neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson just last week for categorizing him as an "extremist" because he supports the traditional definition of marriage.
This is the same hate-instigating SPLC whose target map and list of social conservative groups were used by left-wing domestic terrorist Floyd Lee Corkins to shoot up the Washington, D.C., office of the Family Research Council in 2012.
This is the same SPLC whose explicit aim, according to Potok, is to "destroy" its political opponents and which admits it is "not really set up to cover the extreme left." Harper's Magazine's Ken Silverstein called the SPLC and its work "essentially a fraud" that "shuts down debate, stifles free speech, and most of all, raises a pile of money, very little of which is used on behalf of poor people."
None of these facts was mentioned in CNN's report promoting the threat of "right-wing" terrorism. So you can see why I was curious to know more about the "24 violent sovereign citizen-related attacks" the cable network kept citing without specifics. I asked both CNN and DHS for a copy of the assessment. CNN's Bruer brusquely told me on Twitter: "Not public doc. But not new that gov't lists sov. citizens as terror threat."
Sure, it's "not new." But CNN's report was new (and conveniently timed to coincide with the White House agenda of talking about every other kind of terrorism besides jihad). I wanted to read the new document, not just what CNN and the SPLC want the public to know and think about it.
Liberal media outlets have a bad habit of purposely misclassifying terrorist incidents as "right-wing." Last April, both CNN and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow joined with the SPLC to foment fear of conservative Americans by claiming that "right-wingers" have killed 34 people since 9/11 for "political reasons," while jihadists have killed 21.
But a closer look at the rigging of that phony factoid simply confirms the malevolent intention of so-called objective journalists and "hate watch" groups to marginalize conservative political speech and dissent. The CNN/MSNBC/SPLC smear job involved both the dishonest deflating of left-wing and jihadist incidents, and the dishonest inflating of "right-wing" incidents.
First, carving out the 3,000-person death toll from the 9/11 jihadist attacks is a rather convenient way to rig the scales, isn't it? So is omitting the 10-person death toll from the jihad-inspired Beltway sniper spree of 2002.
The conservatives-are-worse-than-jihadists casualty data counted Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter James Von Brunn, who killed a heroic security guard, as a "right-winger." But Von Brunn was neither "left" nor "right." He was a rage-filled maniac and 9/11 truther who hated Fox News, the Weekly Standard and Rupert Murdoch.
Also counted as "right-wing" in the CNN/MSNBC/SPLC data: Andrew Joseph Stack. He's the lunatic who flew a small plane into an Austin, Texas, office complex that contained an Internal Revenue Service office in 2010. Stack's ranting suicide manifesto targeted George W. Bush, health care insurers, the pharmaceutical industry and the "capitalist creed."
Also listed as "right-wing:" Richard Andrew Poplawski. He was the disgruntled, unemployed loser who shot and killed three Pittsburgh police officers in a horrifying bloodbath in 2009. Left-wing publications asserted that the "heated, apocalyptic rhetoric of the anti-Obama forces," along with Fox News and Glenn Beck, motivated Poplawski to slay the officers. But Poplawski was a dropout from the Marines who threw a food tray at a drill instructor, had beaten his girlfriend, and demonstrated violent, racist tendencies that had nothing to do with politics. Poplawski was outraged that his mother wanted to kick his unemployed ass out of the house.
Joshua Cartwright, another serial woman abuser, also murdered two police officers in the aftermath of a domestic violence call. Left-wing operatives focused on a single remark from Cartwright's victim about his views on President Obama to paint him as a "right-wing radical," whitewashing his long history of violence against his partner and senseless paranoia.
Were any of these falsely classified incidents included in the DHS assessment hyped by CNN and SPLC last week? We'll never know. When I asked DHS public affairs officer S.Y. Lee for the document, he told me it's "not for public release" because it's "an FOUO document (for official use only). Same as many DHS products to law enforcement."
I asked whether CNN now qualifies as "law enforcement." No response.
SOURCE
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Questions the Press Doesn't Ask Democrats
Gov. Scott Walker has leapt to the top of polls in Iowa. As day follows night, he has moved to the center of the liberal press’s crosshairs. This is the world we inhabit: When a Democrat is perceived as popular, the press discovers layers of humor and elan we never suspected. When a Republican is gaining strength, the press sharpens its bayonets.
Based on his response to trap-door questions in the past few days, we’ve been instructed that Walker a) is a crypto young Earther (or, just as bad, a panderer to same); b) that he ought to have answered the question regarding President Obama’s faith with a resounding affirmation of Obama’s fitness for sainthood; and c) that he is some sort of coward for not grabbing Rudy Giuliani by the scruff of the neck and escorting him off stage when the former mayor questioned the president’s love of country.
Let’s stipulate that Walker gave B-minus answers to D-minus questions. I agree with Ramesh Ponnuru that, while questions about evolution have zero relevance to governing, Republicans ought to be prepared to answer them without “punting.” (A raised eyebrow to show you understand the game afoot wouldn’t be misplaced.) For a politician, the only seemly way to answer a question about something as intimate as someone else’s faith is, “I can’t see into other people’s souls. Can you?” (As a non-politician and reader of “Dreams from My Father,” I have my doubts about Obama’s piety, just as I never believed he opposed gay marriage – but that’s neither here nor there.)
Presumably, Walker, a talented pugilist and no novice to hardball politics, will get his national sea legs soon. But the fuss over the Giuliani comments is a reminder of the ferocious, unrelenting bias of the press. When Obama called President Bush “unpatriotic” in 2008, it was a non-story, just as then Sen. Joe Biden’s description of Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean” went undenounced.
Any Republican who imagined that the sickening double standard the press applies to Democrats and Republicans would have been sated by six years of genuflection to Obama should now be fully awake.
One practical lesson Republicans should draw from this is to minimize, wherever possible, the participation of left-leaning journalists in Republican debates. This isn’t to say that Republicans should run scared – just that they offer prized roles in nationally significant events to journalists who will be fair. I have a list if they need one.
Still, most members of the press are partisans, and one cannot avoid them completely. Republicans should accordingly come prepared to any press encounter with a list of questions they would ask Democrats. If the journalist doesn’t ask, the candidate can offer suggestions. For example:
1) You say you’re in favor of “comprehensive immigration reform.” How many legal immigrants should we welcome every year? As many as can get here? Do you think that presents any problems for unskilled Americans who are having trouble finding work?
2) Democrats say they want to ensure that women get equal pay for doing the same work as a man. Do you know the date when that became federal law? (1963)
3) Obamacare was passed to solve the problem of the uninsured. Yet the GAO projects that 31 million will remain uninsured by 2021. What would you propose to solve that problem? Do you favor forcing doctors to see Medicaid patients as some Democrats propose?
4) President Obama’s team praised the Veterans Administration as the model of efficient government health care. In light of the scandals that have come to light in the VA, do you agree? If not, can you point to a government-run health system you admire?
5) Dodd/Frank was passed to solve the “too big to fail” problem. Yet since passage, the biggest banks have gotten bigger, while community banks have withered. The five largest banks by assets now hold 44.0 percent of U.S. banking assets and 40.1 percent of domestic deposits – up from 23.5 percent and 19.5 percent, respectively, in early 2000. With the biggest banks having gotten even larger, was Dodd/Frank a mistake?
6) A recent survey by Education Next found that a strong plurality of African Americans, 47 percent, support charter schools, while just 29 percent oppose them. Do you support vouchers and charters even if the teachers' unions oppose them?
Finally, for some candidates:
7) You opposed the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act. How does what you support differ from what sent Dr. Kermit Gosnell to prison for first-degree murder?
SOURCE
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Sen. Ted Cruz: Top Priority to ‘Abolish the IRS’
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said among his top five priorities for the United States is to “abolish the IRS” at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Oxon Hill, Md., on Thursday.
Sean Hannity of Fox News asked Cruz what his top five agenda items are for the country.
“Number one,” said Cruz. “Repeal every blasted word of Obamacare.”
“Number two, abolish the IRS, take all 125,000 IRS agents and put them on our southern border,” said the senator. “Number three, stop the out of control regulators at the EPA and the alphabet soup of Washington. Number four, defend our constitutional rights - all of them, and number five, restore America’s leadership in the world as a shining city on a hill.”
Hannity also asked Cruz to say the first words that came to his mind when he mentioned some names.
“Hillary Clinton,” Hannity said.
“Washington,” replied Cruz.
“Bill Clinton,” Hannity said.
“Youth outreach,” Cruz joked.
“Barack Hussein Obama,” Hannity said.
“Lawless Imperator,” said Cruz.
SOURCE
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The resveratrol craze is dying
Dubbed the 'elixir of youth', it's the red wine ingredient which has prompted debate for years. Now it seems resveratrol really does make you live longer, but only in small doses - and too much could actually speed up the ageing process rather than slowing it down.
Scientists looked at how the chemical interacted with 'satellite cells', which play a role in repairing damaged muscle as part of the body's natural regeneration.
The team discovered the chemical, which is found in red wine, chocolate and health supplements, had a different effect depending on the concentration they used.
Laboratory tests showed that small doses supported cells in the repair process but higher doses had the opposite effect.
The findings, led by Dr Hans Degens of Manchester Metropolitan University, could strike a blow to those who tout resveratrol as fighting heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's. Dr Degens said: 'Stronger muscles and the ability of the muscle to repair damage are important for a healthy lifestyle, especially in older age where muscle decline can have a series of implications for a reduction in our quality of life.
'So we analysed if resveratrol was able to promote the repair of muscle and reduce oxidative stress where free radicals (destructive molecules) speed up the ageing process. 'Local muscle stem cells undergo a cycle when they repair and ultimately fuse with the damaged muscle fibre.
'At low doses, resveratrol did help the regeneration. However, if the dose is higher, it doesn't mitigate ageing from oxidative stress and even hampers the repair cycle.
'The results showed that the effects are dependent on the dose and it is unclear from the equivocal results if drinking wine or eating chocolate would have anti-ageing properties and repair muscle or the opposite.'
The researchers, whose findings appear in the journal Scientific Reports, conducted experiments in the laboratory using muscle cells. They tested the cycle of muscle regeneration which starts with the activation of muscle precursors called 'satellite' cells.
A low 10 micromolar dose of resveratrol stimulated satellite cell activation and migration while higher concentrations of 40 to 60 micromolars stopped it, and even damaged the cells.
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, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog
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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2 March, 2015
More on the Islamic "lone wolves"
The report below very much confirms what I said yesterday
This summer, Thomas Mücke managed a coup: he dissuaded a young German from joining the Islamic State.
The teenager, a Kurd whose family is originally from Turkey but now living in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, had landed in prison after committing a petty crime. Angry, confined, and looking to lash out, he “had pretty much given up with life and was ready to pack his bag" for Syria, Mr. Mücke says.
But Mücke, a street worker and head of the Berlin-based Violence Prevention Network (VPN) in Berlin, challenged the aspiring jihadi. Did he know that Islamic State fought against Kurds? No, the boy didn’t. In fact, he had no idea about his religion. It was a prison inmate that gave him the idea to go to Syria.
Recommended: How much do you know about Germany? Take our quiz!
"In the end he said, 'If IS fights against the Kurds I can’t go with them,'" says Mücke. The youth is out of prison now, and while he will receive counseling for months to come, he is no longer seen as in imminent danger of radicalization.
The success that Mücke and his organization, a nonprofit group that helps incarcerated young people with extremist biographies find a way out, has experienced in dissuading would-be jihadis is significant. But the VPN did not originally target radical Islamists. Rather, it had a much more familiar German radical in mind: violent neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists.
But advocates like Mücke say that just like that fascist ideology, fighting Islamic extremism among the young has less to do with religion than with young people’s vulnerability to the ideology. When dealing with extremists, be they neo-Nazis or jihadis, it is crucial to work with each person individually. And with at least 550 Germans in Syria, part of a swelling group of several thousand Europeans, Germany's lessons in fighting the spread of neo-Nazi ideology could prove key to stopping Islamic radicalization.
“They are both fascist ideologies,” says Mücke, who has counseled hundreds of imprisoned young people, often from the violent right extremist scene. ”One is using a certain idea of the nation, the other is using religion as its instrument.”
SOURCE
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Social justice warriors
If social justice were justice it would not need the "social" in front of it
The term "social justice" is usually dated back to the mid-19th century when it was coined by the Jesuit priest and scholar Luigi Taparelli. Taparelli believed that law should serve morality because unrestrained freedom harmed the cohesiveness of society even if the expression of freedom was nonviolent. A virtuous society required "positive law" that did not merely protect person and property but which also imposed moral standards.
More recently, a spin-off term has entered the popular vocabulary: social justice warrior (SJW). SJWs embody a radical left-wing ideology that expresses an aggressive political correctness by which 'incorrect' behavior and words are suppressed by the force of law whereas 'correct' behavior is promoted by law and tax-funding. PC feminists and other advocates of a progressivism tend to be SJWs that target white males as the nexus of oppression in Western society.
The term has become a pejorative because of the prominent harassment used by SJWs on forums such as the Internet or university campuses where they shout down dissenting voices and attempt to have the dissenters fired or otherwise punished. The SJW's activism seeks to impose a uniformity of far-left expression upon society and to force compliance from others. The act of argumentation – that is, an exchange of differing opinions – is rare. Instead, rage-filled invective is hurled at the dissenter so that every word is defined as hate speech. The tactic comes directly from Cultural Marxism, which is the forerunner of political correctness. According to Cultural Marxism the content of what is said – that is, the truth or falsehood of statements – means nothing compared to 'who' is making the statement. The class affiliation is everything. A SJWer checks a person's gender, skin color and sexual orientation in order to decide whether their words should be tolerated or whether they are speech-offenders.
In short, SJWs do not deal in truth or falsehood when engaging with others. Typically, SJWs will swarm or dogpile a website at which someone has posted an 'incorrect' sentiment; for example, a white man might make a joke about fat people that would have occasioned no notice if it had been made by a black woman. Using social media sites, like Tumblr or Twitter, a coordinated attack is launched on the individual. Or a speaker at a university is shouted down or suddenly uninvited. The SJW goal is to control the narrative, to own the ideas and words that can be spoken, the thoughts that can be presented. They rarely present evidence and often repeat 'facts' that have been debunked because all that is important is to drown out competing ideas. In essence, SJWs have no other choice because their ideas cannot be sustained in an open forum, a free market of ideas.
To the extent there is a solid SJW goal, it is probably "equality" or equal distribution of privilege. What the words mean, however, is mandated and special benefits to preferred groups. There is no defined end point, no sense of when equality is and can be attained because SJWs reach back to the dawn of time when assessing the social debt owed to the preferred groups. They are remedial historians who impose the cost of centuries of wrongdoing on individuals who are innocent. They will continue to do so because there is no downside for them.
The downside is imposed on those whose peaceful behavior and ideas do not comply, and the mechanism of enforcement is the state. Using the state is part and parcel of the SJW definition of justice itself. SJWs approach justice as an end state. A just society is one in which there is an equal distribution of wealth, opportunities and privilege, where there is no patriarchy or capitalism, in which only correct words and ideas are represented. In other words, justice is a specific arrangement, a specific society that embodies economic, political, legal and cultural arrangements. For example, SJW justice requires no one to utter certain syllables, everyone to share a consensus of attitudes.
By contrast, those who value individual freedom view justice as a means-oriented process, not as an ends-oriented state. That is, the concept of justice refers to the method by which society operates and not to a particular arrangement of society being produced. The methodology is "anything that is peaceful," "society by contract," "the non-initiation of force," voluntaryism. Any outcome to which all of the adults involved have consented is, by definition, a just arrangement. The only end-state attributable to people who wish to live in freedom is precisely that: freedom. Otherwise stated, those who value liberty require only the protection of person and property, the prevention of force and fraud within society. Past that point, how society operates, what people choose to peacefully believe or do with their own bodies and property is up to them.
Consider marriage as an example of justice being a process or means-oriented rather than being a defined arrangement or ends-oriented. In freedom, any 'marriage' that results from the consent of the adults involved is "just." It could be a traditional marriage with the woman as a housewife or a homosexual one with children adopted from around the world. Monogamy, polygamy, sexual abstention ... there is no end state that can be called a "just" marriage; a marriage in which one party willingly supports the other is no more or less just than one in which each party contributes 50%. All that is important is the ability of peaceful adults to choose and continue to choose for as long as the relationship lasts. The specific arrangement is not what makes the arrangement just; the method by which it is reached IS.
This doesn't mean that everything peaceful or voluntary is moral. For example, a voluntary society may contain racism. I married into an Hispanic family and I feel strongly about anyone slandering or demeaning my family. I have been known to yell and scream in the face of people who do so. And anyone who refuses to hire my niece or nephew because of their race can take my contract, my business dollar and tear it in two. I would use every peaceful means at my disposal to change the vicious behavior of whoever discriminates and I would make them pay as high a price as I could. With one exception.
There are many options available to influence individuals and social trends. Persuasion, peer pressure, bribery, protest, social shaming, shunning, boycott ... The only option that is not available to decent human beings is the use of force as a means to make peaceful human beings comply. And, yet, that is the single arrow that SJWs have in their quiver. Why? Because if people are free to disagree and not associate with them, then they have no funding, no power, no validity. If a person is free not to fund PC projects with tax dollars, not to hire an employee for any reason, including gender, if he or she has the right to say 'no,' then the SJW is impotent.
And, so the SJWer must use the state. Those who respect freedom and genuine human dignity do not have that option. You cannot use force to impose a voluntary society: it is a contradiction in terms. You cannot put a gun to a person's head and say, "You are now free to choose." Freedom involves removing force from the situation. And, in the final analysis, this is what SJWs are against: choice.
SOURCE
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Dimensions Of Dysfunction Suffered By Secular Leftists
When people say Leftists suffer from mental illness, it is true, but only part of the story
ALLAN ERICKSON
I confess. I’m a recovered Leftist. I drank the voodoo juice in college. For a time, I joined the ranks of deranged control freaks. Our professors drilled Marx, Freud, and Darwin into our skulls for four years, leaving us glassy-eyed, numb, and unfit for worthwhile employment.
College brainwashed us well. Many graduates drone on to this day, dutifully reciting the scripted narrative. This explains the daily insanity expressed on TV news programs. “We agree with the president. He believes ISIS has nothing to do with Islam, that a jobs program will solve everything. He believes most police departments are racist. He thinks capitalism is a failure. He believes the economy is recovering. He thinks the clerics will not launch a nuke from Iran because it is against their religion. He believes government can run health care better than doctors. We agree!”
Have you noticed the central government is overrun by control freaks — real freaks warring reality? College indoctrination centers were successful these last 45 years. For me and for increasing numbers, reality eventually penetrated denial. We were reborn into a world of individual responsibility, moral clarity, productive endeavor, common sense, and meaningful living. We climbed out of the rabbit hole to escape Wonderland.
When people say Leftists suffer from mental illness, it is true, but only part of the story. Typical Leftists are compulsive about minding everyone else’s business. They pry. They interfere. They make assumptions. They accuse and condemn. In short, they will do anything to justify using government power to force submission and compliance. It’s an addiction pursued with religious zeal.
Leftists assume they are morally and intellectually superior, without a shred of evidence (and frequently contradicting the best evidence). It is delusional, but necessary. After all, one must assume supremacy to justify tyranny. It’s comparable to the jihadist mentality: “We are doing this for your own good because we know better.”
Pushed to the extreme (an inevitable outcome in order to overcome resistance), it is easy to justify infringement of rights, legal action, sanction, incarceration, even violence. One simply cannot let deficient people override the wisdom of the enlightened elite. Why waste time trying to persuade the uneducated? Much more efficient to threaten, humiliate, ridicule, and brow-beat them into submission while you brainwash their children and grandchildren.
Which leads to another dimension of the illness: Leftists are convinced they possess special knowledge. Leftists simply “know” things, such as human activity is destroying the planet, doomsday is right around the corner, gun control reduces crime, white people are inherently racist, capitalism is the root of all evil, Republicans are the spawn of Satan, Muslims are cool, Baptists drool, Marxism rocks, love is free, as clinics should be. For a Leftist, this special PC knowledge requires no substantiation, because “it feels right.” Things should be the way Leftists perceive because they have the special knowledge, debate over. And if you disagree, well, you just aren’t “cool.”
A snapshot to exemplify: poverty bad, redistribution good, expand government power to steal from one to give to another, (liberty lost), problem solved, case closed. Trouble is, reality is found elsewhere, and problems proliferate. Think the 50-year war on poverty declared by Lyndon Johnson and waged by Democrats, wasting $5 trillion dollars in that time.
Leftists are prone to misdiagnose problems, given their arrogant presumption, an illusion spread across generations by drug and alcohol abuse. One sees cars and heat waves, then observes a melting iceberg, and shazzam!, human beings are destroying the planet! Al Gore says so! The real trouble comes when “solutions” are “proposed.” In this case, man-made global warming can only be halted by destroying the economies of the industrialized nations, giving all the remaining wealth to the third world to supply solar panels and bicycles. There is nothing quite like a radical, irrational solution to an unidentified problem. What could go wrong?!
You will notice, as well, that Leftists tend to stifle debate by insisting that issues are settled and catastrophe is at hand: We have to act right now, or we all die! Intolerance generally accompanies the hysteria and the rush to judgment and action, however ill-advised. When serial failures ensue, the only way they can salvage some form of sanity is to project those failures on others. “Well,” they say, “we only failed because of obstructionist Republicans. We didn’t fail actually. They prevented success. We were underfunded. The media was complicit. The Chinese undercut our margins. It just isn’t fair.” Unfairness is a very convenient accusation when projecting failure on others. Think Solyndra.
Always angry, irritable, and demanding, like menopausal women trying to stop smoking, Leftists never sleep. They never miss an opportunity to attack, slander, and engage character assassination. There is no satisfying these people. If you support traditional marriage but have no interest in persecuting homosexuals, you are a homophobic hate monger. If you don’t think affirmative action is such a great idea, but have no interest in discriminating for any reason, you are a racist moron. If you think unborn human beings have a right to life, without being insensitive to the needs of women in crisis pregnancy situations, you are a sexist pig. If you support equal rights for all without seeing the destruction of males as required, you are a chauvinist waging a war on women. And if you think history teaches that liberty can only be sustained by a decentralized federal government, the separation of powers, the consent of the governed, and the right to private property, you are a Nazi.
If you’re Republican, you deserve a firing squad.
Finally, Leftists tend to be very self-absorbed and paranoid, immune to all factual information contradicting the narrative. If not experiencing immediate gratification, they go all Veruca, then spin another conspiracy theory. It often gets very emotional.
In short, hell hath no fury like a Leftist scorned. Go ahead. Scorn one. See what happens. Or you can tune into MSNBC and watch them go berserk. Great fun, until you realize the psychos really are in control, and thus, the world has become one enormous asylum.
Perhaps we should cling to our guns and our Bibles.
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog
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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1 March, 2015
Muslim "lone wolves"
I don't entirely agree with the above graphic. It is true that there has been something of an epidemic of terrorist attacks from Muslims acting alone or nearly alone recently -- in the USA (e.g. Boston), Denmark, France, England, Canada and Australia. But they hardly add up to an army. There are many Muslim armies but their great enthusiasm is for attacking one-another, which is rather neat.
What is clear is that all the attacks have been carried out by losers -- men on the margins of society. The only organized Muslim terrorist body was Al Qaeda and they were on the wane even before Osama bin Laden was eliminated. Osama was certainly not living the high life when he was tracked down. It's possible that the Islamic State might take up where Al Qaeda left off but it hasn't happened yet. And a big one dropped on Raqqa would shut them up for a long time.
Meanwhile. ISIS seems to have its uses. Lots of Jihad-inclined young males from Muslim families in the West go there to join up and fight other Muslims, which is a big improvement on them attacking us. It seems to be a sort of fly-paper for attracting and trapping young Muslim misfits.
So it seems that all the recent attacks have been motivated by Jihad preaching but that Jihad preaching is overall a huge failure. Jihad motivation was only strong enough to move people to attack us who already had little to lose. But one man with a firearm can do a lot of harm for a short while. So it seems to me that we have strong reasons to stop such attacks even if they not systemically threatening. Life will go on much as it otherwise would for 99% of the population despite the misdirected anger of a few misfits.
And although it is desperately "incorrect" to mention it, the killings by Muslims pale into insignificance compared with the plague of killings by blacks. If we want to stop killings, it is blacks who should have our priority attention. But it's not going to happen, of course. Jim Crow is dead and not likely to be resurrected in the near future.
So there is some point in the Leftist contention that Muslim attacks should be dealt with solely as a police matter. Police deal with shootings all the time and the race or religion of the shooter doesn't matter much.
But I think we can do better than that. I think we should criminalize Jihad preaching. Not all speech is free speech and there is already a precedent saying that incitement to violence is not covered by free speech protections. So I think all we need to do is to formally classify Jihad preaching as incitement to violence -- which it largely is anyhow -- and put a few mullahs in prison. Without the incitement, the attacks should at least diminish in frequency. Without the incitement, the losers would probably just continue to bomb themselves out with drugs, which is mostly what they do already
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Bozell to CPAC: ‘Cultural Fascism Has Arrived in America'
“Cultural fascism has arrived in America,” Media Research Center President Brent Bozell said Friday in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Tyranny is knocking at our door,” Bozell said.
“Webster defines fascism as ‘a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control,’" he said. "Cultural fascism has arrived in America."
"Let us understand this soberly and unequivocally,” Bozell told hundreds of conservative activists. "Ladies and gentlemen, we know this to be true. So it begs the question: What is our response?"
“Something terrible is happening to our country,” Bozell noted, listing numerous instances in which Americans in politics, the media, and academia have been persecuted for their political and religious beliefs, including the targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which he called “the most feared arm of the federal government”.
Bozell reminded the CPAC audience that “the radical Left now controls most levers of political and cultural power, and is using both in a relentless campaign to destroy the last vestiges of freedom in America.”
“The radicals now control the Federal Communications Commission and the FCC is out of control in its zeal to control free speech,” he pointed out. “The North Koreans would approve of this. Last summer it was making quiet preparations to put a federal monitor in every newsroom to assess stations’ ‘news philosophy,’ and ‘the process by which stories are selected.’ This shocking abuse of governmental authority was exposed and stopped -- but by no means have the radicals stopped,” Bozell said.
“The radicals have shown their fangs,” he added. “They will do anything, using any means at their disposal, legal or otherwise, to control our very freedom of speech."
“Ponder this carefully: when the state uses its power to destroy any political opposition, spying on and silencing through threats and criminal prosecution, is it all that different than the East German Stasi?”
Bozell bluntly told the crowd that conservatives “have been retreating for decades” and urged them to go on the offense against those who threaten their freedoms.
“I do not ask you to defend yourself well in retreat,” Bozell told the gathering. “I ask you to stop the retreat. I ask you to ride to the sound of the guns.”
“Do you accept the new reality of a transformed society where freedom is but an evermore distant memory?” Bozell challenged the CPAC audience. “Is that your gift to your progeny, after so many millions of men and women gave their blood, and their very lives, to give you the gift of the freest society in the history of man?
“No, by God, tell me it’s not,” he said.
Instead of surrendering, “perhaps only gradually, certainly grudgingly, but ultimately surrender[ing] nonetheless,” he urged them to fight back against the “fascists in academia…the censors in the news or entertainment media” and radicals who attack conservative leaders.
“Look for every opportunity to be politically incorrect,” Bozell exhorted the crowd. “Drive these radicals crazy. Make a vow that this December everywhere you go, with everyone you see, it’s not ‘Happy Holiday.’ It’s ‘Merry Christmas!’”
“We have weapons,” he said. “We can communicate with millions of Americans every day through the wonders of technology. Use them. Tell your story. Tell our story. Tell them what America was, should be, and will be again: a free and virtuous nation.
“Our Founders will be vindicated. Your progeny will be grateful. And the Almighty will be well pleased,” he concluded.
SOURCE
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The End of Freedom in America
The America that has existed from the days of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, when its sovereignty was acknowledged by a treaty with England 1783, and its founding in 1788 with the ratification of the Constitution is no more. The America for which thousands fought and gave their lives is no more.
That America ends on February 26 when the Federal Communications Commission, under intense pressure from the Obama White House and with the votes of its Democratic Party commissioners asserts government control over the Internet with a 332-page set of regulations, dubbed "Net Neutrality."
Writing in the Feb 22nd Wall Street Journal, columnist L. Gordon Crovitz summed up what will occur saying "Obamanet promises to fix an Internet that isn't broken...The permissionless Internet which allows anyone to introduce a website, app, or device without government review, ends this week."
"The big politicization came when President Obama in November demanded that the supposedly independent FCC apply agency's most extreme regulation to the Internet." Of course Obama wants the Internet regulated and of course the Democratic Party will support this move to control who gets to put up a website or blog and, more importantly, who gets to say anything critical of the President.
The Democratic Party has been in everything but name the Communist Party in the United States for several decades. Obama was raised and mentored to be a Marxist. What we are witnessing is nothing less than tyranny replacing democracy.
Crovitz warned that "This week Mr. Obama's bureaucrats will give him the regulated Internet he demands. Unless Congress or the courts block Obamanet, it will be the end of the Internet as we know it."
Earlier this week, as reported by Giuseppe Macri in The Daily Caller the FCC's two Republican commissioners, Ajit Pai and Michael O'Rielly, asked Chairman Tom Wheeler "to delay the vote and release his proposal to the public. ‘We respectfully request that FCC leadership immediately release the 332-page Internet regulation plan publicly and allow the American people a reasonable period of not less than 30 days to carefully study it.'"
There is some evil at work here because, as the Republican commissioners point out, "the plan in front of us right now is so drastically different than the proposal the FCC adopted and put out for public comment last May."
Shades of ObamaCare! Even the Democrats who voted that monstrosity into law had not read it. Now neither Congress, nor the rest of America is being permitted to see regulations that will determine what can and cannot be posted to the Internet, the greatest instrument of free speech ever invented since the printing press.
Commissioner Pai says that the FCC is "adopting a solution that won't work to a problem that doesn't exist using legal authority we don't have." He estimates that the regulations will add up to $11 billion in new taxes on Internet access.
In a commentary, "Neutralize Obama's Hijacking of the Internet", Judi McLeod, the editor of CanadaFreePress.com, said "Forget NSA, the FBI, the CIA, and all warnings sent by Edward Snowden. They've got nothing on how Net Neutrality will silence you."
"Someday in the near future when you type in the words "Islamic terrorists" in an Internet post, you will be knocked off the Net and find it all but impossible to climb back on again."
Do I think the Congress will exercise its oversight responsibilities and stop this tyrannical power grab? No. Do I think our court system will do anything other than bow to precedent set by earlier FCC regulations? Yes.
As a nation founded on and devoted to freedom of speech, I think February 26, 2015 will go down in the history books as the day when that freedom came to an end in America.
Thanks to a National Security Agency we no longer have any privacy regarding anything we say using telephones, the Internet or any other form of communication.
If the Democrat-controlled FCC has its way, the Internet will slow your access and could eliminate access countless sites that provide news and express opinions the federal government finds offensive. That's what tyrannies do.
SOURCE
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More Leftist lies -- still ignoring all the facts and stirring up hatred over the Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin encounter
And they are still using the wholesome picture of Martin aged about 12, when much more recent and relevant pictures are available
Apropos of James Kirkpatrick’s post about the Justice Department’s dropping its campaign against George Zimmerman, The Washington Post‘s story contains a flat-out lie to open its meditation on the matter, which very much of a piece with what Mr. Kirkpatrick noted.
Reported the Post, “Zimmerman fatally shot Martin while the unarmed African American 17-year-old was walking in Sanford, Fla."
No, Zimmerman didn’t do that. He shot Martin because Martin was bashing his head into the ground, trying to kill him.
The Post also noted that Zimmerman “identifies as Hispanic” and told police he was fighting for his life and fired at Martin in self-defense.”
One can’t imagine the Post reporting that Barack Obama “identifies as black,” and we know why the Post wrote it that way. It’s casting doubt on Zimmerman’s Hispanic background so it won’t have to finger an Hispanic in its recreated narrative. Much better to leave Zimmerman’s background fuzzy and have readers think he’s white. We all recall The New York Times hilariously calling Zimmerman a “white Hispanic.”
The second line ignores the evidence Zimmerman produced when he had to go to trial–evidence of Trayvon’s bloody knuckles, and Zimmerman’s injured head.
The evidence that made a jury acquit him, basically finding exactly that: Zimmerman “was fighting for his life and fired at Martin in self-defense.”
The phrase “fired at Martin” makes it sound as if Zimmerman shot Martin from 15 feet away, which comports with the lie that he “shot Martin while the unarmed African-American 17-year-old was walking.”
SOURCE
The full facts are given here. Backups here and here
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog
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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IN BRIEF
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.
A favorite Leftist saying sums up the whole of Leftism: "To make an omelette, you've got to break eggs". They want to change some state of affairs and don't care who or what they destroy or damage in the process. They think their good intentions are sufficient to absolve them from all blame for even the most evil deeds
Leftists are the "we know best" people, meaning that they are intrinsically arrogant. Matthew chapter 6 would not be for them. And arrogance leads directly into authoritarianism
Leftism is fundamentally authoritarian. Whether by revolution or by legislation, Leftists aim to change what people can and must do. When in 2008 Obama said that he wanted to "fundamentally transform" America, he was not talking about America's geography or topography but rather about American people. He wanted them to stop doing things that they wanted to do and make them do things that they did not want to do. Can you get a better definition of authoritarianism than that?
And note that an American President is elected to administer the law, not make it. That seems to have escaped Mr Obama
That Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian is not a new insight. It was well understood by none other than Friedrich Engels (Yes. THAT Engels). His excellent short essay On authority was written as a reproof to the dreamy Anarchist Left of his day. It concludes: "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means"
Psychological defence mechanisms such as projection play a large part in Leftist thinking and discourse. So their frantic search for evil in the words and deeds of others is easily understandable. The evil is in themselves.
Leftists who think that they can conjure up paradise out of their own limited brains are simply fools -- arrogant and dangerous fools. They essentially know nothing. Conservatives learn from the thousands of years of human brains that have preceded us -- including the Bible, the ancient Greeks and much else. The death of Socrates is, for instance, an amazing prefiguration of the intolerant 21st century. Ask any conservative stranded in academe about his freedom of speech
Conservatives adapt to the world they live in. Leftists want to change the world to suit themselves
Given their dislike of the world they live in, it would be a surprise if Leftists were patriotic and loved their own people. Prominent English Leftist politician Jack Straw probably said it best: "The English as a race are not worth saving"
Why do conservatives respect tradition and rely on the past in many ways? Because they want to know what works and the past is the chief source of evidence on that. Leftists are more faith-based. They cling to their theories (e.g. global warming) with religious fervour, even though theories are often wrong
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley"[go oft astray] is a well known line from a famous poem by the great Scottish poet, Robert Burns. But the next line is even wiser: "And leave us nought but grief and pain for promised joy". Burns was a Leftist of sorts so he knew how often theories fail badly.
Thinking that you "know best" is an intrinsically precarious and foolish stance -- because nobody does. Reality is so complex and unpredictable that it can rarely be predicted far ahead. Conservatives can see that and that is why conservatives always want change to be done gradually, in a step by step way. So the Leftist often finds the things he "knows" to be out of step with reality, which challenges him and his ego. Sadly, rather than abandoning the things he "knows", he usually resorts to psychological defence mechanisms such as denial and projection. He is largely impervious to argument because he has to be. He can't afford to let reality in.
A prize example of the Leftist tendency to projection (seeing your own faults in others) is the absurd Robert "Bob" Altemeyer, an acclaimed psychologist and father of a prominent Canadian Leftist politician. Altemeyer claims that there is no such thing as Leftist authoritarianism and that it is conservatives who are "Enemies of Freedom". That Leftists (e.g. Mrs Obama) are such enemies of freedom that they even want to dictate what people eat has apparently passed Altemeyer by. Even Stalin did not go that far. And there is the little fact that all the great authoritarian regimes of the 20th century (Stalin, Hitler and Mao) were socialist. Freud saw reliance on defence mechanisms such as projection as being maladjusted. It is difficult to dispute that. Altemeyer is too illiterate to realize it but he is actually a good Hegelian. Hegel thought that "true" freedom was marching in step with a Left-led herd.
What libertarian said this? “The bureaucracy is a parasite on the body of society, a parasite which ‘chokes’ all its vital pores…The state is a parasitic organism”. It was VI Lenin, in August 1917, before he set up his own vastly bureaucratic state. He could see the problem but had no clue about how to solve it.
Leftist stupidity is a special class of stupidity. The people concerned are mostly not stupid in general but they have a character defect (mostly arrogance) that makes them impatient with complexity and unwilling to study it. So in their policies they repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot; They fail to attain their objectives. The world IS complex so a simplistic approach to it CANNOT work.
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.)
Most people find the viciousness of the Nazis to be incomprehensible -- for instance what they did in their concentration camps. But you just have to read a little of the vileness that pours out from modern-day "liberals" in their Twitter and blog comments to understand it all very well. Leftists haven't changed. They are still boiling with hate
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.
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.
It would be very easy for me to say that I am too much of an individual for the army but I did in fact join the army and enjoy it greatly, as most men do. In my observation, ALL army men are individuals. It is just that they accept discipline in order to be militarily efficient -- which is the whole point of the exercise. But that's too complex for simplistic Leftist thinking, of course
R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. Allende had just burnt the electoral rolls so it wasn't hard to see what was coming. Pinochet 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.
Judged by his deeds, Abraham Lincoln was one of the bloodiest villains ever to walk the Earth. See here. 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?
Conrad Black on the Declaration of Independence
Malcolm Gladwell: "There is more of reality and wisdom in a Chinese fortune cookie than can be found anywhere in Gladwell’s pages"
IN BRIEF:
The 10 "cannots" (By William J. H. Boetcker) that Leftist politicians ignore:
*You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
* You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
* You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.
* You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
* You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
* You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
* You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
* You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
* You cannot build character and courage by destroying men's initiative and independence.
* And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.
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
"England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution" -- George Orwell
Was 16th century science pioneer Paracelsus a libertarian? His motto was "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself."
"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
To me, hostility to the Jews is a terrible tragedy. I weep for them at times. And I do literally put my money where my mouth is. I do at times send money to Israeli charities
My (Gentile) opinion of antisemitism: The Jews are the best we've got so killing them is killing us.
"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
"O pray for the peace of Jerusalem: They shall prosper that love thee" Psalm 122:6.
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)
Israel, like the Jews throughout history, is hated not for her vices but her virtues. Israel is hated, as the United States is hated, because Israel is successful, because Israel is free, and because Israel is good. As Maxim Gorky put it: “Whatever nonsense the anti-Semites may talk, they dislike the Jew only because he is obviously better, more adroit, and more willing and capable of work than they are.” Whether driven by culture or genes—or like most behavior, an inextricable mix—the fact of Jewish genius is demonstrable." -- George Gilder
To Leftist haters, all the basic rules of liberal society — rejection of hate speech, commitment to academic freedom, rooting out racism, the absolute commitment to human dignity — go out the window when the subject is Israel.
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.
Is the Israel Defence Force the most effective military force per capita since Genghis Khan? They probably are but they are also the most ethically advanced military force that the world has ever seen
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
Amid their many virtues, one virtue is often lacking among Jews in general and Israelis in particular: Humility. And that's an antisemitic comment only if Hashem is antisemitic. From Moses on, the Hebrew prophets repeatedy accused the Israelites of being "stiff-necked" and urged them to repent. So it's no wonder that the greatest Jewish prophet of all -- Jesus -- not only urged humility but exemplified it in his life and death
"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.
Karl Marx hated just about everyone. Even his father, the kindly Heinrich Marx, thought Karl was not much of a human being
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" -- and that preference has NOTHING to do with an American soap opera that featured a character who was referred to in that way
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"
Western Heart
BLOGS OCCASIONALLY UPDATED:
"Marx & Engels in their own words"
"A scripture blog"
"Recipes"
"Some memoirs"
To be continued ....
Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).
Queensland Police -- A barrel with lots of bad apples
Australian Police News
Paralipomena (3)
Of Interest
BLOGS NO LONGER BEING UPDATED
"Food & Health Skeptic"
"Eye on Britain"
"Immigration Watch International".
"Leftists as Elitists"
Socialized Medicine
OF INTEREST (2)
QANTAS -- A dying octopus
BRIAN LEITER (Ladderman)
Obama Watch
Obama Watch (2)
Dissecting Leftism -- Large font site
Michael Darby
Paralipomena (2)
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
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/