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DISSECTING LEFTISM MIRROR
Leftists just KNOW what is good for us. Conservatives need evidence..
Why are Leftists always talking about hate? Because it fills their own hearts As President, Trump will be as transformative as Reagan; He has blown the political consensus out of the water |
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31 May, 2018
Proof of creation?
EXTENSIVE analysis of DNA barcodes across 100,000 species revealed a telltale sign showing that almost all animals on Earth emerged about the same time as humans.
WHO would have suspected that a handheld genetic test used to unmask sushi bars pawning off tilapia for tuna could deliver deep insights into evolution, including how new species emerge?
And who would have thought to trawl through five million of these gene snapshots — called “DNA barcodes” — collected from 100,000 animal species by hundreds of researchers around the world and deposited in the US government-run GenBank database?
That would be Mark Stoeckle from The Rockefeller University in New York and David Thaler at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who together published findings last week sure to jostle, if not overturn, more than one settled idea about how evolution unfolds.
It is textbook biology, for example, that species with large, far-flung populations — think ants, rats, humans — will become more genetically diverse over time.
But is that true?
“The answer is no,” said Stoeckle, lead author of the study, published in the journal Human Evolution.
For the planet’s 7.6 billion people, 500 million house sparrows, or 100,000 sandpipers, genetic diversity “is about the same,” he told AFP.
The study’s most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
“This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could,” Thaler said.
That reaction is understandable: How does one explain the fact that 90 per cent of animal life, genetically speaking, is roughly the same age?
Was there some catastrophic event 200,000 years ago that nearly wiped the slate clean?
To understand the answer, one has to understand DNA barcoding. Animals have two kinds of DNA.
The one we are most familiar with, nuclear DNA, is passed down in most animals by male and female parents and contains the genetic blueprint for each individual.
The genome — made up of DNA — is constructed with four types of molecules arranged in pairs. In humans, there are three billion of these pairs, grouped into about 20,000 genes.
But all animals also have DNA in their mitochondria, which are the tiny structures inside each cell that convert energy from food into a form that cells can use.
Mitochondria contain 37 genes, and one of them, known as COI, is used to do DNA barcoding.
Unlike the genes in nuclear DNA, which can differ greatly from species to species, all animals have the same set of mitochondrial DNA, providing a common basis for comparison.
Mitochondrial DNA is also a lot simpler, and cheaper, to isolate. Around 2002, Canadian molecular biologist Paul Hebert — who coined the term “DNA barcode” — figured out a way to identify species by analysing the COI gene.
“The mitochondrial sequence has proved perfect for this all-animal approach because it has just the right balance of two conflicting properties,” said Thaler.
On the one hand, the COI gene sequence is similar across all animals, making it easy to pick out and compare.
On the other hand, these mitochondrial snippets are different enough to be able to distinguish between each species.
“It coincides almost perfectly with species designations made by specialist experts in each animal domain,” Thaler said.
In analysing the barcodes across 100,000 species, the researchers found a telltale sign showing that almost all the animals emerged about the same time as humans.
What they saw was a lack of variation in so-called “neutral” mutations, which are the slight changes in DNA across generations that neither help nor hurt an individual’s chances of survival.
In other words, they were irrelevant in terms of the natural and sexual drivers of evolution.
How similar or not these “neutral” mutations are to each other is like tree rings — they reveal the approximate age of a species.
Which brings us back to our question: why did the overwhelming majority of species in existence today emerge at about the same time?
Environmental trauma is one possibility, explained Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University.
“Viruses, ice ages, successful new competitors, loss of prey — all these may cause periods when the population of an animal drops sharply,” he told AFP, commenting on the study.
“In these periods, it is easier for a genetic innovation to sweep the population and contribute to the emergence of a new species.” But the last true mass extinction event was 65.5 million years ago when a likely asteroid strike wiped out land-bound dinosaurs and half of all species on Earth. This means a population “bottleneck” is only a partial explanation at best.
“The simplest interpretation is that life is always evolving,” said Stoeckle. “It is more likely that — at all times in evolution — the animals alive at that point arose relatively recently.” In this view, a species only lasts a certain amount of time before it either evolves into something new or goes extinct.
And yet — another unexpected finding from the study — species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there’s nothing much in between.
“If individuals are stars, then species are galaxies,” said Thaler. “They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space.” The absence of “in-between” species is something that also perplexed Darwin, he said.
SOURCE
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How Trump Can Dismantle Obamacare Without Congress
After more than eight years of promising to end Obamacare, Republicans in Congress—despite having control of both the House and Senate—have failed to stop this disastrous health care law. But thanks to an important provision Republicans included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act when they passed the law in December 2017, the Trump administration may soon have an opportunity to end Obamacare without Congress, which might force Republican congressmen to finally get their act together and pass health care legislation that would empower states and local governments and free health care markets from costly federal government mandates.
As I have previously noted in several articles on the subject, including in a May 14 article for Townhall, a very strong argument can be made that Obamacare will soon no longer be constitutional. The short explanation is that in the 2012 decision upholding the legality of the Obamacare individual mandate, Chief Justice John Roberts cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate on the basis that the penalty imposed for not having “qualifying” health insurance is not a fine, penalty, or fee, but rather a tax. Since Congress has the power to tax, Roberts reasoned, it has the power to impose the individual mandate.
When Congress and the Trump administration passed their tax reform legislation in December, they lowered the Obamacare penalty to $0 (effective January 1, 2019), eliminating any possibility of the fine being considered a “tax.” They did not, however, eliminate the mandate to purchase health insurance (because they couldn’t under the congressional rules used to pass the tax reform law). Without the so-called “tax” tied to the mandate, the foundation of Roberts’ argument will completely disappear when the penalty is removed.
This argument, which was also made recently in a lawsuit filed in federal court by 20 states and several other plaintiffs, creates the opportunity for the Trump administration to end Obamacare without Congress having to pass a law. But how?
In other articles, I noted the Trump administration would need to officially declare that the law will no longer be constitutional when the tax is eliminated in January 2019, but as I’ve been instructed recently by former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, that’s only partially correct.
In addition to declaring that the Trump administration will not recognize the constitutionality of the law, it would need to settle the lawsuit with those plaintiffs alleging the individual mandate is no longer constitutional. By settling the lawsuit and effectively acknowledging the plaintiffs’ argument is correct, Obamacare could be dismantled without Congress’s approval. With a settlement, it would be legally difficult, if not impossible, for Obamacare to be eliminated because the Trump administration has a duty to enforce existing federal law.
Some of you might be wondering why the entire Obamacare law might be tossed out if only the individual mandate is determined to be unconstitutional. The answer is that in previous Supreme Court cases, the Court has determined that when a particularly important provision of a law is deemed unconstitutional, the entire law should be struck down. The primary reason for this is that the Court’s job is not to create or alter legislation; that power, at the federal level, belongs to Congress alone.
Former Justice Antonin Scalia explained in the dissent he authored in the 2012 case that there is a two-part guide for determining whether one or more provisions ruled to be unconstitutional ought to compel the Supreme Court to strike down an entire law. As Scalia noted in the second part of the guide, the one most relevant for the current situation, “even if the remaining provisions can operate as Congress designed them to operate, the Court must determine if Congress would have enacted them standing alone and without the unconstitutional portion. If Congress would not, those provisions, too, must be invalidated.”
It’s extremely unlikely Congress would have passed Obamacare in 2010 had the individual mandate been removed from the law, because, as Congress noted in the ACA itself, the individual mandate is an “essential” part of the Obamacare scheme and “the absence of the requirement would undercut Federal regulation of the health insurance market.”
Obamacare is not constitutional, and the Trump administration has the power to end Obamacare on its own. For the sake of the country’s failing health insurance market, let’s hope it acts by settling the lawsuit challenging Obamacare and declaring the law to be what it always was: an illegal act by the federal government to force people to buy a product millions of families can’t even afford to use.
SOURCE
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What the Left Gets Wrong About Stock Buybacks
If you look around, the economy is growing faster than most economists predicted just last year.
Layoffs are rare and employers are hiring. New claims for unemployment benefits are close to a 48-year low, and unemployment is at an 18-year low. If you haven’t noticed, “help wanted” signs seem to be going up all over the place.
Tax reform, which passed last year, has only contributed positively to these economic trends. Those who want to detract from the successes of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act look for stories like a recent Harley-Davidson plant closing and large stock buybacks.
Even a historically strong economy hasn’t been able to rescue the motorcycle company from four years of declining sales.
Despite all the good news, some keep hammering corporate stock buybacks as evidence that the tax cuts aren’t working. So, let’s look at the reality of stock buybacks.
When businesses don’t have suitable investment options for all their profits, they give part of them back to their investors so that those individuals can instead reinvest in other, more profitable endeavors.
Harley-Davidson is a prescient example of stock buybacks. By transferring just shy of $700 million back to shareholders, those investors are now able to redirect that money to other investments that have a more promising future.
Those new investments will also need workers to build, design, and manufacture whatever the future demands.
If instead, Harley-Davidson poured more money into a U.S. market that did not want to buy its bikes, the investment would still not sustain long-term jobs. Instead, it would just prolong the company’s decline and ultimately everyone—including the employees—would be worse off.
The former director of the Congressional Budget Office, Doug Holtz-Eakin, summed up the economics of stock buybacks. “Stock buybacks do not make shareholders richer,” he said. “A stock buyback is simply the exchange of valuable stock for the same value in cash.”
Business Investment Raises Wages
The 2017 tax reform lowered the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. The lower tax rate makes investing in the U.S. more attractive. The tax law also further lowers the cost of business investments through expensing.
In the first quarter of 2018, investment increased by more than 21 percent among companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index, compared with the same quarter in 2017.
Investment is often slow in the first quarter of the year, so most observers predict strong business investment will continue.
More business investment in new buildings and equipment means that Americans will be more productive, revenues will increase, and businesses will want to hire more workers and will pay higher wages to find good talent.
“In a dynamic, competitive economy, the relationship between companies and their employees is symbiotic, not antagonistic,” explains Kevin Hassett, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. That is exactly what we are seeing.
A Healthy Stock Market Benefits the Middle Class
The popular narrative that only the rich benefit when the stock market and businesses are doing well is based on a mistaken view of stock ownership that may have been true in the 19th century, but certainly isn’t true today.
When businesses increase in value or pay dividends, shareholders—the owners of those businesses—share in the benefits.
In the U.S., shareholders are ordinary people, with more than half of all families owning stock, directly or indirectly. You likely own pieces of businesses in your private retirement savings account, through your company’s pension fund, and your kids’ college savings accounts.
The rate of stock ownership is increasing, with some of the biggest gains coming from lower-income households. The value of asset holdings in investment accounts has also for low-income Americans, compared with those with higher incomes.
The notion that only the wealthy benefit when businesses return profits to their investors is simply wrong.
All in all, stock buybacks are a common market function and a signal of a healthy economy. They may be an easy target to vilify, but we should base our attitude toward them on sound economic thinking and appreciate the broader context of a healthy economy.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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30 May, 2018
Will America have a debt Jubilee?
So far it is mostly Left-leaning economists who have been calling for it but conservative financial prophet Porter Stansberry thinks it is going to happen soon. I will let him outline the matter and then I will follow up with an even more radical but fairer proposal
Stansberry is something of a panic merchant and tends to put dates on things where he would be better to avoid that. It has been clear to me for some years that America is effectively bankrupt but I have no idea when that will come to a head. As Keynes is alleged to have said: "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". And with Mr Trump in the equation, anything or nothing is possible. So Stansberry and I agree on all but the timing of the crisis.
We owe a trillion dollars on our credit cards—which often have interest rates as high as 28%! We've borrowed a trillion dollars to buy new cars—which plummet in value the minute you drive off the lot. And we've racked up about $1.5 trillion for college education with dubious worth.
The debt load for the working poor has nearly quadrupled in the past 20 years as a percentage of their income. And this debt can never, ever be repaid.
It's this system that dooms every average worker to poverty. And almost guarantees that the rich and the powerful will stay that way.
Simply working harder—or working smarter—isn't benefiting employees anymore. On the other hand, Americans who own assets and businesses have seen their wealth soar over the last 40 years.
And so we are left with the biggest income and wealth disparity in America in nearly 100 years.
For those who have taken on these incredible new debt loads, it's a very stressful way to live. So many Americans today are in a hole. They are extremely stressed out, and there is no way out.
And herein lies the problem. This group is growing, and this stress and anger is building... ultimately fueling many of today's biggest issues...
It's why you see people rioting in Charlottesville, Virginia...
It's why you see massive increases in violence and desperation in cities like Baltimore and Chicago...
It's why you see more and more radicalized politics—like resurgent neo-Nazi groups and the rise of Black Lives Matter...
It's why you see the tearing down of historic statues, and why according to a recent Harvard study, more than 50% of young people no longer believe in capitalism!
It's why we now have the highest-ever percentage of people on food stamps—double the historical rate.
It's why in some states, nearly 10% of working age adults receive disability payments!
Remember: These uprisings and protests may be nominally about race, or Donald Trump, police brutality, or immigration.
But what they're really all about is money, debt, and economics.
And that's why we will soon see a dramatic political and economic event, the likes of which we haven't seen in nearly 50 years...
Very soon, millions of Americans will be calling for the government to "do something."
Specifically, they'll be calling for a clean slate... to wipe out their debts and "reset" the financial system.
The crowds will cheer and march like never before. The violence will escalate. Our politicians will promise this reset of the financial system as a way to a "new and better prosperity."
And while it might sound like good news to those who have gotten in over their head—what will really happen is a national nightmare.
You see, this idea of erasing debts to reset the financial system is not new. In fact, in the Bible, it's referred to as a "Jubilee." If you're unfamiliar with the term, it comes from The Old Testament, the Book of Leviticus, Chapter 25.
A Jubilee in the Jewish tradition was said to occur roughly every 50 years. It was a time for total forgiveness of debt, the freeing of slaves, and the returning of lands. Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed the first Christian Jubilee in 1300.
Since then, it's been used dozens of times, when anger among a population hits extreme levels, typically because of an explosive divide between the wealthy and the working class.
And very soon, millions will be calling for a new Debt Jubilee here in America. Believe it or not, many are already doing so...
Folks like Carmen Reinhart of Harvard University and Stephen Roach of Yale have advocated for a Debt Jubilee in one form or another. So have financial pundits Barry Ritholtz and Chris Whalen.
In Congress, more than a half-dozen Jubilee-style laws have been proposed, by folks such as Rep. Kathy Castor and Senator Bill Nelson from Florida.
And many of the most powerful left-wing economic "experts" are calling for a Debt Jubilee by name...
London School of Economics Professor David Graeber says: "we are long overdue for some kind of Biblical-style Jubilee... it would relieve so much genuine human suffering."
The national affairs correspondent for The Nation says we should: "Think Jubilee, American Style... because it combines a sense of social justice with old-fashioned common sense."
Paul Kedrosky, a senior fellow at the Kaufman Foundation (a liberal think tank), says: "we need a fresh start, and we need it now... we need... a Jubilee."
A Jubilee—which wipes the slate clean for millions of the most indebted Americans and "resets" the financial system—is inevitable.
And mark my words: This trend will accelerate. The idea of a Debt Jubilee will become THE leading political issue in the months to come.
Today, for millions of Americans, there's no more powerful political promise than a Debt Jubilee. Politicians will soon be promising it all...
I will wipe out your debts.
I will allow you to start fresh.
I will reward all of your bad decisions.
I will solve America's massive income inequality.
Who will pay for it? You guessed it... You, me, and millions of Americans with pensions, retirement accounts, and other types of savings.
Just as in the past, the folks in Washington will disguise this Jubilee under a different name. They might call it a "National Restoration" or "Patriotic Solvency." They'll pass an "Act" like they did in 1841... or invoke an Executive Order as was done in 1933 (Executive Order #6102)... or simply issue a mandate to the Secretary of the Treasury (which they did in 1971).
But it all means the same thing. The Jubilee will redistribute trillions of dollars from those who have invested and saved... to those who can no longer pay their debts.
Excerpt from an article received via email. Stansberry has more in his recent book "The American Jubilee, A National Nightmare is Closer Than You Think"
What Stansberry predicts is obviously unjust but does seem inevitable. Debt "forgiveness" happens all the time in international affairs. Argentina and Greece live on it. But how would you feel if a bank's debts to you (your deposits) were suddenly "forgiven"? Your savings would vanish.
There is a better way: America can't pay its debts so it is effectively bankrupt. So America should declare bankruptcy. But how do you do that? To whom do you make your declaration? It can't be done in anything like the normal way. The only way it can be done is to void the currency. America needs to declare that the Greenback is no longer its currency and all debts denominated in it lose any authority.
America then needs to issue a new currency (Maybe called "Feds") and declare that only debts denominated in Feds will be honoured. All dollar debts would be wiped. The streets would be filled with cheering students celebrating the end of their student debt and householders suddenly finding that they own their house outright after their mortgage debt has disappeared. And that pesky credit card debt is gone too. And without debt a lot of businesses would become more viable too. A weight will have lifted off the backs of the whole nation, resulting almost certainly in a huge economic boom. And a free government grant of 1,000 Feds to every citizen would get things rolling.
But what about your savings? The bank now owes you nothing. Nobody owes anybody anything. That's where the government can use its money issuing power. Certain losing groups can be compensated by GIVING them Feds. All savings accounts with a balance up to 5 million could be reinstated showing the same amount in Feds that they once showed in dollars. And social security payments would be re-denominated in Feds and would continue as before
China and Wall St would not be compensated or else the whole thing would be a farce. And labor unions that have extorted huge retirement benefits for their members would also find that their extortions had been in vain. Benefits their members had been receiving would come to a grinding halt. Their retired and retiring members would have to go on to the same social security payments (in Feds) as everyone else
So average Americans, whether previously savers or debtors, would all be better off and only the parasites would lose. Abandoning the greenback would root out a whole world of corruption.
That is just a very brief outline of how a national bankruptcy could be managed and I am not hopeful that the idea will be adopted. But it shows that the coming Jubilee would not necessarily hurt the little guy. He could be compensated.
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Conservatives Need to Argue About Ideas, Not About Trump
“Let’s grow up, conservatives.”
That call to arms was delivered by Barry Goldwater at the 1960 Republican convention to implore members of the then-youthful conservative movement to hold their noses and rally around Richard Nixon’s candidacy.
Neal Freeman, a battle-scarred veteran of the conservative movement — he was a correspondent for National Review and the producer of William F. Buckley’s TV show, “Firing Line,” among other tours of duty — recently echoed Goldwater’s clarion call for a different cause. It is time for conservatives to get to work on updating or even reinventing what it means to be a conservative. The conservatism of the last 50 years, programmatically, politically and psychologically, is in dire need of rejuvenation.
One sign of the exhaustion, Freeman writes, “is that the largest and most urgent issues are left unaddressed by any of the entrenched interests. Incumbent politicians deal with old issues. Movements ride new issues.”
The most obvious such issue is the exploding debt, which both parties have decided is something they should only care about when trying to unseat their rivals, if at all.
But the challenge of the debt is a bipartisan or, more aptly, a nonpartisan one, simply because the math doesn’t care about your politics. The pressing question for conservatives is, simply, “What is a conservative?”
“Are we free traders or fair traders?” Freeman asks. “Do we want open borders or high barriers? Can we save public education or should we euthanize it?”
Part of the dilemma is that in the modern era, Republican presidents define for many Americans (particularly in the media) what conservatism is, just as Democratic presidents tend to define what liberalism is. That may not be true in the eggheadier or more ideologically pure corners of the Left and Right, but for lots of normal Americans, that’s just how it works. Conservatism, in journalistic shorthand, is largely whatever constitutes the “Trump agenda” at any given moment, just as liberalism was whatever Barack Obama wanted to do when he was president.
But this is a remarkably recent development, and the fact that we assume it should work this way is a symptom of the polarization of the moment, which recasts partisan loyalty as philosophical principle.
Lyndon Johnson did not define liberalism for legions of left-leaning activists and voters, nor did Richard Nixon define conservatism among the ranks of right-leaning ones (which is why Goldwater felt it necessary to plead with conservatives to support Nixon).
Indeed, despite the fact that modern American conservatism allies itself with an old, even ancient, political tradition, it’s largely forgotten that it is arguably the youngest of political movements in America — certainly younger than progressivism, socialism or libertarianism (in all of its strains from anarchism to classical liberalism).
I understand very well that conservatives often bristle at the idea they need to change with the times. As the famous line from (the far from famous) Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland, goes, “Where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”
But we forget that the conservative movement’s strength came from the fact that it was armed with new arguments from diverse intellectual sources. More importantly, its vigor stemmed from the fact that these various strains of conservatives were eager to argue amongst themselves. There are arguments aplenty on the Right these days, but the vast majority of them are arguments over a specific personality — Donald Trump — not a body of ideas. And to the extent that there are arguments about ideas, they tend to be subsumed into the larger imperative to attack or defend Trump.
As I’ve argued before, the best thing Trump did was to shatter the calcified and sclerotic policy agenda of Reaganism. To paraphrase “Ghostbusters,” he was not the form of destroyer I would have picked, but the destruction was necessary nonetheless.
Don’t misunderstand me: Reagan was the indispensable man for his time. But the challenge for conservatives — at least my brand of conservatives — is to find ways to apply Reaganite principles to our times.
It is possible, all too possible, that the Reaganites will fail to win the necessary arguments ahead. But that is not an argument against having those fights, for the Reaganites will surely lose them by default if they don’t engage. We need more arguments — but the right arguments.
SOURCE
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Rent Control Pits Current Tenants against Potential Renters
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti would like to expand rent control in California. Doubtless he has many supporters among current renters. Nevertheless, rent control is actually detrimental to the interests of most renters, as Independent Institute Research Fellow Gary M. Galles explains in an op-ed published in the Orange County Register, and Los Angeles Daily News, and other SoCal news outlets.
Most “renters,” it should be noted, are not current renters but potential renters. “As a result, it is truer to say rent control harms renters than to say it helps them,” Galles writes. Rent control cuts incentives for new construction, it undermines maintenance of the existing rental housing stock, and promotes evasive efforts such as the conversion of rental housing to non-housing uses. Rent control is famous for creating housing shortages. It also robs value from property owners.
“A decade ago, such loses were estimated at $120 million annually under Santa Monica’s strict rent control laws,” Galles writes. “Those tripped property values are given to current tenants, whose bonanzas are shown by the fact that those under such controls almost never leave.”
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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29 May, 2018
Is Jordan Peterson a conservative?
Jordan Peterson and I both spent decades fascinated with authoritarianism and doing research into it. I am 20 years older than him, however, so our research activities did not overlap. I think, however, that our common research interests may enable me to judge his views more insightfully.
The first thing I have to say is that both Peterson and I have studied, Nazism, Fascism, amtisemitism etc as something which horrifies us, not something we admire. Many people seem unable to allow that, however. You must secretly admire it in order to study it seems to be the claim. And some justification of that will always be devised by misquoting or misunderstanding some isolated fact or bit of text that in fact provides no such justification at all.
And in my case, my frequent promotion of libertarian ideas should show where I belong on the political spectrum. The fact that libertarianism is the exact opposite of Fascism should be convincing about what I believe but it is not, of course. In the twisted minds of the left, liberarianism and Fascism are often equated. Black can be white for them. Even my cast-iron support for the State of Israel can be ignored.
An interesting example of Peterson being accused of what he is not is the case of the now famous article in the historically Leftist NY "Jewish Forward" which implicitly accused Peterson of being antisemitic. The article was such a total denial of everything Peterson has said that it got angry rebuttals from several sources and the "Forward" itself quickly published a retraction. Peterson gives all the detail of that here
So: Don't believe anything about Peterson in the Left-leaning media. Just read what he himself writes. Media comments will be reliably distorted. A rather amusing example of such a distortion is the NYT claim that Peterson advocates "enforced monogamy". Does that mean he wants to abolish all divorce laws? No. As one of Peterson's defenders summarized the matter: "Peterson is using well-established anthropological language here: “enforced monogamy” does not mean government-enforced monogamy. “Enforced monogamy” means socially-promoted, culturally-inculcated monogamy", not legally required monogamy. In other words, faithful marriage should be encouraged by the society at large. See here
Peterson himself says he is a classical liberal, meaning that he believes in a broad spectrum of individual liberties. Conservatives do too but they tend to add in other beliefs about patriotism and such social issues as abortion and homosexuality. And yet Peterson has such conservative positions too so I think he is simply resisting "conservative" as an overinclusive label. He offers no guarantee that he will agree with all conservative positions.
He is right to be cautious. "Racist" is a label that is ceaselessly thrown around by the Left and all conservatives are racist in their view. I did rather a lot of survey research showing that not to be so but Leftists don't need evidence for their accusations. So any mention of race brings howls from the Left and conservatives do in fact mention race in some ways at times.
And that is where Peterson and I part company. I try to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth at all times. And as a psychometrician I am well aware of important black/white differences. And I talk about them, sometimes at length. Peterson wisely avoids the topic. Because I do talk about scientifically well-established black white differences I am someone who has to be avoided. The fact that the official position of the American Psychological Association is that blacks are on averge about 15 points lower on IQ does not excuse me. I am simply putting the majority conclusion of academics in my field but I am outside polite society to say so publicly. I see blacks as requiring assistance rather than persecution but that doesn't count either. And I am vociferous in mocking the false assistance of "affirmative action".
So Peterson is something more than a classical liberal but he is not wholly a conservative. So what is he? I think it is reasonable to say that he is a traditionalist. His self-help writings lie well within that description. They do not rely heavily on laboratory research or surveys but also use clinical insights and traditional wisdom: Christian wisdom in particular.
He is certainly using pre-Spock childrearing advice. That Spock himself eventually recanted much of his permissive views and saw much wisdom in earler teachings would support Peterson in that. Anybody who has absorbed Bible teachings in his youth -- as I did -- would find Peterson's personal development teachings familiar. And Peterson makes no secret of that. He appears to be an atheist -- as I am -- but sees Christianity as a great source of wisdom -- as I do.
So his views are not entirely scientific. They are sourced widely rather than in surveys and experiments. But where available the academic literature does offer some cautious support for what he says. And it should be noted that use of insights from clinical work has always been a major source of psychological thinking -- starting from Sigmund Freud -- JR
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All public forums should be open and uncensored
A huge silver lining from a recent court ruling
Trump should embrace (and expand) court ruling that his Twitter account is free speech forum
President Trump may not block even rude or obnoxious criticism from his Twitter account, because it is a public forum that is protected by the First Amendment, US District Court Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald has ruled. The President’s use of his Twitter account to comment on important policy, personnel and personal announcements made it a public forum, akin to a park or town square, she concluded.
Blocking unwanted tweets is thus viewpoint discrimination, which public officials are not permitted to engage in. Indeed, his Twitter account is not just a public forum. It is also “government space,” and thus may not be closed off, Judge Buchwald continued – rejecting a Justice Department argument that, since Twitter is a public company, it is beyond the reach of First Amendment public forum rules.
Free speech proponents hailed the ruling as a groundbreaking decision, saying it expands constitutional protections deep within the realms of social media. The executive director of Georgetown Law School’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection called it “a critical victory in preserving free speech in the digital age.” Blocking people from responding critically to presidential tweets is unconstitutional, because it prevents them from participating personally and directly in that forum, others said.
The Justice Department said it disagreed with the decision and was considering its next steps. Here’s another option: Embrace and expand on the decision. Assess how these District Court principles and free speech guidelines can be applied in other vital free speech arenas. Take it as far as you can.
Some will then predictably want to construe the decision narrowly, saying it applies only to government officials, perhaps especially conservatives who support this president. Conservatives, the White House and the Trump Administration should not feel bound by such partisan, self-serving assertions.
As Supreme Court and numerous lower court decisions have interpreted the Civil Rights Act and other laws, no person may employ race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, disability status or other categories, to discriminate in admissions, hiring or anything else under any program or activity receiving any form of federal financial assistance, including loans or scholarships. Those that do discriminate will lose their Internal Revenue Service non-profit status and their government funding.
Should that list of categories not include one of the most vital and fundamental civil rights of all – the one addressed and protected by the very first amendment to the United States Constitution? The right of free speech and free assembly, especially regarding one’s beliefs, interests and political viewpoints, and one’s ability to participate in discourse and debate over important political and public policy matters?
Our colleges and universities were once society’s crucible for developing and thrashing out ideas. Sadly, as anyone with a milligram of brain matter realizes, they have become bastions of one-sided ideological propaganda and intolerance. Every conceivable element of “diversity” is permitted and encouraged – nay, demanded – except for our most fundamental civil right of personal views, free speech and robust debate.
That right now applies only to liberal-progressive-leftist views and ideologies. Anything that challenges or questions those teachings is vilified, denounced and silenced, often violently – as being hurtful, hateful, objectionable or intolerable to liberals. Faculty members are hired, protected, promoted or fired based on their social, scientific or political beliefs. Viewpoint discrimination, bullying and mobbing are rampant.
It’s time for pushback. Judicial and Executive Branch decisions and guidelines hold that even private universities that receive federal money for faculty research, student loans and scholarships, or campus facilities, are subject to Civil Rights Act rules. Presidents, administrators and faculty members of public universities are arguably public officials. Campuses and classrooms are clearly public forums.
If they tolerate or encourage viewpoint bullying, mobbing or violence, they are violating the civil rights of students, professors and speakers whose views have been deemed inappropriate, discomforting, hurtful or intolerable to the fragile sensitivities of climate alarmist, pro-abortion, atheist and other liberal factions.
Judge Buchwald’s ruling and the reactions of free speech advocates provide useful guidelines to buttress this approach. The Trump Administration, state attorneys general and free-speech/individual rights advocates should apply them to help restore intellectual rigor and open discourse to our campuses.
The ruling and reactions could also help expand constitutional protections even more deeply in the realms of digital age social media. As they suggest, today’s most popular social media sites have become our most vibrant and essential public forums: today’s parks, town squares and town halls. People, especially millennials, rely on them for news, information and opinions, often as substitutes for print, radio and television (and classrooms). But they now seem far better at censorship than at education or discussion.
Google algorithms increasingly and systematically send climate realism articles to intellectual Siberia. Unless you enter very specific search terms (author’s name, article title and unique wording), those sly algorithms make it difficult or impossible to find articles expressing non-alarmist viewpoints.
Google thus allies with the manmade climate cataclysm establishment – which has received billions of taxpayer dollars from multiple government agencies, but has blocked Climate Armageddon skeptics from getting articles published in scientific journals that often publish papers that involve hidden data, computer codes and other work. Even worse, it facilitates repeated threats that skeptics should be jailed (Bill Nye the Science Guy and RFK Jr.), prosecuted under RICO racketeering laws (Senators Warren and Whitehouse), or even executed (University of Graz, Austria Professor Richard Parncutt).
Google is a private entity, there are other search engines, and those seeking complete, honest research results should see if those alternatives are any better. But there is something repugnant about mankind’s vast storehouses of information being controlled by hyper-partisan techies, in league with equally partisan university, deep state, deep media, hard green and other über-liberal, intolerant elements of our society.
Meanwhile, Google YouTube continues to use its power and position to block posting of and access to equally important information, including over 40 well-crafted, informative, carefully researched Prager University videos – because they contain what YouTube reviewers (censors) decreed is “objectionable content” on current events, history, constitutional principles, environmental topics and public policies.
Scholar-educator Dennis Prager sued YouTube for closing down yet another vital public forum to views that question, contest or simply fail to pay homage to liberal ideologies and agendas.
District Court Judge Lucy Koh concluded that YouTube did indeed apply vague standards and the arbitrary judgments of a few employees, and did indeed discriminate against Prager U by denying it access to this popular social media platform and digital public forum. However, she ruled that Google YouTube is a private company, and thus is under no obligation to be fair, to apply its services equally, or to refrain from imposing penalties on viewpoints with which its partisan officers and employees disagree.
In other words, YouTube may operate as a public forum but it is a private business and thus may discriminate as it wishes – since it does not bake cakes or provide food or overnight accommodations … or deal with any civil rights that Judge Koh would include among protected constitutional rights.
These actions are the hallmarks of communist, fascist and other totalitarian regimes that seek to control all thought, speech, economic activity and other aspects of our lives. They drive policies that further limit our freedoms, kill countless jobs, and cost us billions or trillions of dollars in lost productivity.
The Left is clearly afraid of conservative ideas and principles. It refuses to participate in discussions or debates that it might lose, and instead resorts to mobbing, bullying and violence to silence our voices.
Up to now, lower courts have not always been supportive of the analysis and prescriptions presented in this article. But appellate courts and the Supreme Court have yet to weigh in on the Trump Twitter, Prager YouTube, Google search bias and similar cases. So we are still in uncharted territory.
Conservatives, climate chaos skeptics and true free speech advocates should build their own social media forums – while helping to create the legal precedents that will protect our hard-won rights and freedoms, and exposing, ridiculing, embarrassing and challenging the dominance of the Intolerant Left.
Via email from Paul Driessen, JD
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Ted Cruz Says Media Is Avoiding Santa Fe School Shooting Because Texas Students Don’t Want Gun Control
In an interview in his Senate office Tuesday with The Daily Signal, Cruz said support for the Second Amendment in Texas is why CNN and other media outlets aren’t giving these students the kind of wall-to-wall coverage that followed the school shooting in Parkland, Florida.
Cruz also talked about why the Senate should work full workweeks and potentially skip the August recess to get more done. From making tax reform for individuals and small businesses permanent to repealing Obamacare’s employer mandate, the Texas senator said plenty of legislative priorities could be passed with a simple majority and Republicans should take advantage of the relatively rare opportunity of being in charge in Washington.
Cruz also applauded President Donald Trump both for listening to many views and for standing up to much of official Washington and fulfilling his promises to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and get America out of the Iran nuclear deal.
SOURCE
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France signs contracts for €1bn direct investment to Russia
Aha! So it must have been Russia that gave Mr Macron his win in the recent French elections!
Russia and France have signed six contracts for direct investment into Russia worth about €1 billion as part of the ongoing business forum in St Petersburg and the coinciding visit of the French president.
The billion-euro ($1.17 billion) sum of the deal was reported on Tuesday by Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. The six contracts were signed at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), which is being held in the former Russian capital on Tuesday and Friday.
For comparison, the entire foreign direct investment into Russia in 2017 amounted to $27.9 billion.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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28 May, 2018
Trump Delivers What May Be the Best Line of His Presidency at Naval Graduation
There were plenty of epic moments Friday as President Donald Trump gave the commencement speech at the graduation ceremony for the United States Naval Academy.
For instance, he shook the hands of every one of the over 1,100 graduates. That was pretty epic.
Or there was Trump confirming “that we are committing even more to our defenses, and we are committing even more to our veterans. Because we know that the best way to prevent war is to be fully prepared for war. And hopefully, we never have to use all of this beautiful, new, powerful equipment. But you know, you are less likely to have to use it if you have it and know how to work it.”
But it wasn’t the most epic line of the commencement speech. Oh, no. In fact, there was a line that got plenty of us here at office thinking it may just be the best line of his presidency.
It came as the president was giving a paean to the class of 2018, telling them that they “are still not tired of winning.”
“You chase discovery, and you never flinch in the eye of a raging storm. America is in your heart. The ocean is in your soul,” Trump said. “The saltwater runs through your veins. You live your life according to the final law of the Navy. The word impossible does not exist, because Navy never quits.
“You don’t give up. You don’t give in. You don’t back down. And you never surrender. Wherever you go, wherever you serve, wherever your mission takes you, you only have one word in mind, and that’s victory.
“That is why you are here. Victory. A very important word. You are now leaders in the most powerful and righteous force on the face of the planet. The United States military. And we are respected again, I can tell you that. We are respected again.”
During his eight years in office, Obama almost seemed to apologize for our military power.
He did it through hasty withdrawals in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the Islamic State group and Taliban were allowed to grow and metastasize. When he did fight them, it was using limited engagement tactics that handcuffed our pilots.
SOURCE
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Comey Brings Up Trump’s Grandkids, So Trump Returns the Favor… and Scorches Him
As the Trump-Russia collusion narrative continues to unravel, allegations that the Obama administration’s FBI utilized “informants” or “spies” as part of their counterintelligence investigation into then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign have entered the national discussion.
President Trump and his supporters have keyed in on those allegations as proof of what has now been scandalously dubbed “Spygate,” even as many elected Democrats and liberal media figures — who once scoffed at the notion of Trump’s campaign being spied upon — now say it was for the campaign’s own good.
One who has made such a ludicrous claim that spying on Trump’s campaign was a good and acceptable thing is fired FBI Director James Comey, who took to Twitter on Wednesday in an apparent attempt to defend the likely illegal and unethical actions.
Comey tweeted, “Facts matter. The FBI’s use of Confidential Human Sources (the actual term) is tightly regulated and essential to protecting the country. Attacks on the FBI and lying about its work will do lasting damage to our country. How will Republicans explain this to their grandchildren?”
President Trump was asked for his reaction to that particular tweet during an interview with “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade, and his response absolutely scorched the fired former director.
“How is he going to explain to his grandchildren all of the lies, the deceit, all of the problems he’s caused for this country?” replied Trump.
“I think a thing that I’ve done for the country — the firing of James Comey — is going to go down as a very good thing,” he continued. “The FBI is great, I know so many people in the FBI, the FBI is a fantastic institution.”
“But some of the people at the top were rotten apples — James Comey was one of them — I’ve done a great service for this country by getting rid of him, by firing him,” Trump added.
Kilmeade followed up and asked if the president would have any problems explaining all of this to his grandchild, to which Trump replied with a chuckle, “None.”
“No, we’re doing a great job, our country is coming back, our country is respected again, and what we’re doing over there is just another side of it, just one of many things,” stated Trump.
Trump then shifted gears and spoke about the economic renewal the country was experiencing, especially in terms of historic and record low unemployment numbers among various segments of the population.
The “Fox & Friends” crew noted afterward how interesting it was that despite all of the other major issues facing his presidency — most especially the Russian collusion allegations — the president still managed to shift the focus toward the steadily improving economy.
It was further pointed out that doing so was an incredibly smart move on Trump’s part, as the economy, jobs and more money in people’s pockets is always the biggest issue for a vast majority of voters, far more so than anything else the president’s many detractors and haters would prefer to focus the public’s attention on.
As to his scorching rebuttal of Comey’s sanctimonious remark about what people will tell their grandchildren, well, that is just the latest example of Trump’s classically devastating counter-punching ability against those who take a shot at him, one that will likely sting for quite some time.
SOURCE
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Joe diGenova on 'Spygate': Obama Knew About All Of This
diGenova calls the conspirators "psychotic". He is right to detect serious mental problems but the correct word for what he is talking about is "psychopathic". Psychopaths have no conscience. Psychotics hear and see things that are not there
Former federal prosecutor Joe diGenova and FNC's Tucker Carlson discuss "SPYGATE," the president's allegation that the Obama administration infiltrated and spied on his 2016 campaign.
"So, how could the president of the United States, who oversaw the FBI at the time, Barack Obama, not have known about it?" host Tucker Carlson asked.
"He did know about it because you remember that memorandum that Susan Rice wrote on inauguration day, memorializing the meeting on January 5th," DiGenova responded.
"On January 5th, the president, Biden, Yates, Rice, they were discussing exactly what we're finding out now and they were trying to figure out a way to explain it because they knew since Hillary didn't win, now it was going to come out and they needed a story," he added.
DiGenova also called Comey, James Clapper, and John Brennan psychotics who "can't stop lying."
"What you are hearing from Clapper and Comey is gaslighting," he said. "This is Charles Boyer talking to Ingrid Bergman trying to make her think all the things that she sees in front of her are not real. They are lying in the most unbelievably brazen and insidious way."
"Comey and Clapper and Brennan are a group of psychotics who now - they can't stop lying," DiGenova said.
Transcript:
TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: Joe diGenova is a former US attorney for the District of Columbia. He joins us now.
So, the ironies in this, Jim Comey beginning a tweet with facts matter are self-evident. But to the specifics, this spying, this use of confidential human sources is tightly regulated. Did a judge sign off on this?
JOE DIGENOVA: No, a judge did not sign off on this, and a judge usually doesn't sign off on it. This was not the traditional use fo a source, this was a spy on the campaign of the opposing party of the incumbent president, who at the time was Barack Obama.
What you are hearing from Clapper and Comey is gaslighting. This is Charles Boyer talking to Ingrid Bergman trying to make her think all the things that she sees in front of her are not real.
This is, they are lying in a most unbelievable brazen and insidious way. If they were not spying on the Trump campaign, why didn't they just tell the Trump people the Russians are coming after you, be careful. Because that's not what they were doing. They were spying on the Trump campaign, trying to frame people, set them up. That is what the use of Mr. Stefan Halper was to plant evidence os it would blow back so they could use it in FISA warrants.
Comey and Clapper and Brennan are a group of psychotics who now can't stop lying.
CARLSON: What I'm interested, among many things, is in the response from the left, the self-appointed civil libertarians who have been telling us for generations about protecting the rights of the individual against the state.
I asked a member of this House Intel Committee Eric Swalwell of California the other night who signed off on this? And he suggested that a judge knew about and approved this spying on the campaign. You are saying that's not true?
DIGENOVA: No, the FISA surveillance was signed off by a judge, but not this intrusion into the campaign. This was done without judicial approval.
CARLSON: So why wouldn't we want to know more about how and why this happened? There's no precedent for this that we know of, why is this not a big deal in the eyes of liberals?
DIGENOVA: Because liberals are no longer liberals, they are progressive. They have given up on liberal ideas... where everybody is an enemy who isn't on your side. They hate Trump so much that they were willing to besmirch the Constitution to achieve a goal, which was his ultimate defeat at the ballot box, and if that didn't work to have him removed from office.
CARLSON: I feel like I'm going crazy here because I'm reading these stories day after day that are denying what they are reporting.
DIGENOVA: Right.
CARLSON: Here is one just pulled out of a hat. Some guy called Justin Miller at "Daily Beast" just put this piece up. He refers to it, and I'm quoting, "The false claim that the FBI spied on the Trump campaign."
DIGENOVA: An informant is a spy. A confidential informant who weasels into any organization for good or ill is a spy. That is the classic definition of a spy. Indeed, James Clapper, while fumbling through his television appearances has actually conceded that it was spying, but in his words, it was good spying.
TUCKER CARLSON: So how could Barack Obama, who was president of the U.S. at the time, not have known about it?
DIGENOVA: He did know about it, because you remember that memorandum that Susan Rice wrote on inauguration day immortalizing the meeting on January 5? On January 5 [2017], the president [Obama], [V.P.] Biden, [acting A.G. Sally] Yates, [national security advisor Susan] Rice, they were discussing exactly what we're finding out now and they were trying to figure out a way to explain it because they knew since Hillary didn't win, now it was going to come out and they needed a story.
Obama knew all about this and the notion that he didn't is ludicrous.
CARLSON: It's shocking to me that nobody sees this as a terrifying precedent going forward that one administration suspicious of its political opponents would use our most powerful law enforcement agency to gather information on them.
Do we really want that to be the precedent?
DIGENOVA: We do not. And what's tragic about it is, in the course of doing that, they have destroyed the FBI. It will take a generation for the FBI to return to the respect of the American people that it deserves.
James Comey, who says he loves the FBI, has actually slit its throat.
SOURCE
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Can the FBI be trusted?
The FBI is in serious trouble, not just the people in the bureau that lied to the Office of Inspector General, fixed the Clinton investigation, and spied on a political campaign. The American people are losing confidence in the bureau. FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich stated in January, “When I look through the prism of risk for our organization, I find the No. 1 risk for our organization is losing the faith and confidence of the American people.”
The FBI has reason to be fearful because public trust in the institution is headed in the wrong direction. A recent poll by Axios showed that less than half of America had confidence in the FBI, with only 38 percent of Republicans having faith in the bureau. This should be extremely worrying to any prosecutor using the FBI’s evidence or agents as a witness at a trial — and a dream for any defense attorney. Half the jury pool has an unfavorable opinion of the feds, and recent revelations about the once revered law enforcement agency are sure to increase the unfavourability.
The FBI’s treatment of Carter Page was reprehensible. The propaganda outlets never mention it, but Carter Page was a witness for the FBI. Page is an energy expert concentrating on Russia and central Asia, a region rich with oil and natural gas. Page has also never hid his work with or for Russian companies. In 2013, while Page was running a consulting business and lecturing at NYU Russian diplomats and scholars attempted to recruit him. The FBI informed him the people that approached him were, in fact, Russian intelligence, and Page agreed to work with the FBI.
Page passed binders of his work with listening devices to the Russians, which allowed the government to convict one of the three of espionage, the other two were diplomats and could not be charged. One would plead guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent and sentenced to 30 months in prison. Carter Page helped the FBI secure the conviction of a Russian spy, and all he got for it was huge lawyer fees and his privacy invaded by the very people he helped.
Who would want to work with the nation’s preeminent law enforcement agency if doing so would get you investigated yourself?
What happened to former National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn gives everyone a reason to not talk to the FBI. The conversation the FBI had with Flynn was under dubious pretenses, to say the least. Sara Carter reported, “McCabe had contacted Flynn by phone directly at the White House. White House officials had spent the “earlier part of the week with the FBI overseeing training and security measures associated with their new roles so it was no surprise to Flynn that McCabe had called…. some agents were heading over (to the White House) but Flynn thought it was part of the routine work the FBI had been doing and said they would be cleared at the gate.”
It was only after the agents were in his office talking to him, without his lawyer, did Flynn realize he was being questioned like a suspect. Despite the sneaky tactics by the FBI, the agents did not believe Flynn was lying to them, according to their boss, then Director of the FBI James Comey.
The House Intelligence Committee report details testimony from Comey stating, “They didn’t see any change in posture, in tone, in inflection, in eye contact. They saw nothing that indicated to them that he knew he was lying to them,” when speaking about the interviewing agents. Then FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe echoed Comey’s testimony referring to a “conundrum that we faced on their return from the interview is that although [the agents] didn’t detect deception in the statements that made in the interview.” This begs the question, if he didn’t lie, then why was he charged by Special Counsel Robert Mueller? What changed?
And the most recent example of a reason to not trust the FBI is Stefan Halper. Halper is now at the center of the storm swirling around the 2016 election. Halper is believed to have been a mole, spy, informant, or whatever Clapper wants to call him, against the Trump campaign for the Obama administration.
This hurts the FBI because when the going got tough on the issue of an informant in the Trump campaign, it was likely the FBI and/or DOJ that leaked the information about Halper. Halper believed he was helping the FBI and was expecting his identity to be kept confidential. Regardless if you agree with what he did, the FBI threw him to the curb when it suited them.
Why would anyone want to help the FBI if they know the feds will abandon them and even out them to save their skin?
And all this has happened before the expected release of the Inspector General’s report, which according to reports, paints the FBI is an extremely bad light.
In this disastrous chapter of FBI history, the bureau has given citizens a reason to never talk to them, never help them, and never work for them. If Wray cared about the FBI, as he says he does, he should immediately move to cooperate with House and Senate investigators fully. The bureau’s reputation is beyond tarnished at this point, and only full disclosure of all misconduct can begin the process of rebuilding the FBI brand. Christopher Wray must rip the band aid off, fighting the Congress, which is trying to help you, will only prolong the pain.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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27 May, 2018
'We are living through a crisis in our democracy': Hillary Clinton receives Harvard medal for 'impact on society' as she blasts 'authoritarian' trends
The truth is the reverse. America has just escaped from authoritarian trends. What could be more authoritarian than Obama wanting to "fundamentally transform" American society?
And the only "threat to the rule of law" came from Obama, who tried to do and end-run around Congress with his "pen and phone".
Obama signed little of the legislation sent to him by Congress. By contrast Trump has signed legislation put before him by Congress even when he disliked a lot in it. So who is disrespecting the rule of law, again?
And who is threatening the free press? All the censorship is coming from the Left, not conservatives
And who is trashing free elections? It wouldn't be the Leftist attempts to unseat the democratically-elected Trump would it? And the critics of the electoral college are conservatives, are they?
It the usual Leftist style Hildabeest is upending reality and projecting Leftist faults onto others
Hillary Clinton, again wearing a long coat and bulky scarf in hot weather, has lectured a crowd that there is 'a crisis in our democracy' as Harvard University awarded her a medal.
Clinton spoke on Friday in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she accepted Harvard's Radcliffe Medal for her leadership, human rights work and 'transformative impact on society'.
The former Democratic presidential candidate, secretary of state, US senator and first lady said that American democracy is in crisis because of threats to the rule of law, the free press and free elections that are 'undermining national unity.'
She did not mention President Donald Trump by name as she called on audience members to do their part by voting and calling out fake news when they see it.
SOURCE
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Kim backs down
Less than 24 hours after President Donald Trump announced that the United States will out of the upcoming summit with North Korea, the regime issued a major statement.
According to Axios, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan released a statement saying the regime is ready to meet “at any time, in any format.”
“Leader Kim Jong Un had focused every effort on his meeting with President Trump,” Gwan said, adding that North Korea is “willing to give the U.S. time and opportunities” to reconsider talks.
The summit was set to take place on June 12 in Singapore, but White House officials say North Korea refused to accept communications with the U.S. numerous times in recent weeks, leading the administration to believe the talks were off.
On Friday morning, the White House said they are “talking to” the regime and that they will see what happens next based on the regime’s behavior.
While the regime is apologizing and begging for the historic summit to take place, Trump made it clear in his statement on Thursday that dictator Kim Jong Un has displayed aggressive behavior in recent weeks, which resulted in the cancellation.
The president said Kim appeared very willing and open to achieving peace on the Korean Peninsula a few weeks ago, but said the dictator is now refusing to honor those initial commitments, saying the U.S. is not going to accept a bad deal.
After a speaking very diplomatically and saying he’s saddened that North Korea won’t respect the idea of peace for the Peninsula and the world, the president reminded Kim that he didn’t appreciate his recent threats about nuclear war.
Earlier this week, Kim boasted about the regime’s nuclear capabilities and said he could match the United States weaponry in a war.
Trump made it very clear in the letter that America has the strongest and most powerful nuclear arsenal in the world, and that threatening the U.S. would have major consequences.
SOURCE
LATEST: Trump says 'very productive' dialogue with North Korea is underway, hints Singapore meeting may still happen
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Trump Walks Away With a Win Over North Korea
Donald Trump's cancellation of the Singapore summit with Kim Jong-un is not a loss for the United States — far from it. Trump understands dealmaking. And, as it turns out, he may also know a bit about history.
Let's go back 32 years to the Reykjavik summit, during which Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev offered sweeping nuclear arms cuts to President Ronald Reagan — provided Reagan stop development of the United States' then-fledgling anti-ballistic-missile defense system known as Star Wars. Reagan refused and walked away. It was arguably the moment that our nation won the Cold War. And it happened because Reagan walked away from an opponent who, as we now know from Peter Schweizer's book Victory, was on the ropes.
North Korea has similarly been on the ropes. The collapse of its nuclear test site set back that rogue country's nuclear weapons program. Sure, Kim has his missiles, but intercontinental ballistic missiles aren't as effective without nuclear warheads. Since that collapse, the North Koreans released three hostages, and then decided to finish by demolition what the collapse had started in the run-up to the summit.
So far, that means the North Koreans have made the bulk of the concessions (the U.S. did cancel one exercise with South Korea, but that can always be rescheduled). As Ari Fleisher, George W. Bush's former press secretary, noted, "It's about maneuvering, lack of predictability and leverage. Considering how often NK has played us in the past, I welcome this development."
Let's be blunt: Our nation's previous efforts have been failures. All along, North Korea still pursued nuclear weapons and missiles (the latter having been fired over Japan, incidentally). Furthermore, there has never been a serious consequence for North Korea's threats until now. It wasn't just about what Trump called North Korea's "tremendous anger and open hostility" exhibited in part when a North Korean official called Mike Pence a "political dummy." North Korea also went so far as to threaten to nuke the United States.
Losing the Singapore summit places Kim in an even tighter spot. North Korea's a basket case of a country, an unequivocal humanitarian nightmare.
The bigger message, though, goes to three countries: China, Russia and Mexico. China has been in talks with the U.S. to prevent a trade war and now has to realize that Trump is willing to walk away from a bad deal. Mexico has to be thinking the same thing with NAFTA renegotiations. Russia also has to rethink whether Donald Trump can be bullied.
Right now, President Trump is in a no-lose situation. If the summit cancellation sticks, we've still secured the safe return of three American hostages from that country, and its primary nuclear testing site is out of commission for a long time. Indeed, his cancellation letter to Kim is masterful in applying a geopolitical carrot and stick for that eventuality.
If the summit is back on, though, even at a later date, the North Koreans will likely have to make more concessions to President Trump. Furthermore, they'll be facing the reality that if they want the summit to happen, their behavior will have to change. That counts as a win, too.
As of this morning, Trump says, "We'll see what happens. We are talking to them now. They very much want to do it. We'd like to do it. It could even be the 12th."
SOURCE
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Trump Notices Something To His Right, Then IMMEDIATELY Runs Over And Does Something Amazing
President Donald Trump attended a round table event on Wednesday in New York to discuss MS-13 and combating illegal immigration.
He spoke with and met families who have lost loved ones at the hands of the brutal gang, and spoke about the importance of law enforcement arresting and deporting the “animals” from the country.
When the event was over and Trump was walking back to board Marine One, he noticed a group of law enforcement officers to his right who wanted to meet him.
In a video clip posted on Twitter by Dan Scavino Jr., the Director of Social Media for the Trump administration, Trump can be seen breaking away from the group and literally running to greet the law enforcement officers.
Just let that soak in. The president of the United States stopped what he was doing and ran about 20 feet to shake the hands of every single police officer before he left.
When was the last time a president gave a spontaneous, genuine, and personal appreciation for the police? It has been many years.
I wish there was a button stronger than love on this thing. Classy move Mr. President. Obama wound have NEVER done this
It’s unclear what Trump said to the officers, but he was likely thanking them for their heroism, bravery, and everything they do to protect their communities.
The media will never report on or show the American people this amazing video, which shows how much our president loves our law enforcement officers.
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Trump Agrees To Stay for ‘Hours’ To Shake the Hands of Over 1,000 Naval Midshipmen
Trump clearly has a genuine appreciation of the armed forces
After delivering the commencement address at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland on Friday, President Donald Trump chose to stay and shake the hands of all the over 1,000 graduates of the prestigious school.
“I was given an option. I could make this commencement address, which is a great honor for me, and immediately leave and wave goodbye,” the commander-in-chief recounted. “Or I could stay and shake hands with just the top 100. Or I could stay for hours and shake hands with 1,100 and something. What should I do? What should I do?” he asked.
The midshipmen responded with shouts of “Stay.”
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GOOD GUY WITH A GUN: Armed Oklahoma Man TAKES OUT Mass Shooter Before Any Casualties Occur
According to the Daily Wire, A good guy with a gun took down a shooter at an Oklahoma City restaurant on Thursday.
Police reported that “A man walked into the Louie’s restaurant and opened fire with a gun. Two people were shot. A bystander with a pistol confronted the shooter outside the restaurant and fatally shot him.”
The shooter’s motivation for the attack is not yet known and his identity has been kept concealed at the time of this report.
Police Capt. Bo Mathews reported that an adult woman and a child were shot when the man walked into the restaurant and opened fire. Also, a man broke a bone on his way running out of the restaurant. A fourth victim reportedly suffered a minor injury.
Police officials say at two people were rushed to the hospital, and are expected to survive. All of the injured victims are expected to fully recover.
Oklahoma City Police tweeted the good news: “ALERT: The only confirmed fatality is the suspect. He was apparently shot-to-death by an armed citizen. Three citizens were injured, two of whom were shot. A large number of witnesses are detained. There is no indication of terrorism at this point.”
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Typical Democrat fraud
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Trump Slashes $6B in Red Tape
The president is cutting government regulations at double the rate he campaigned on
One of President Donald Trump’s campaign promises that he has been most successful in accomplishing is slashing onerous and unnecessary federal regulations. He promised to cut two regulations for every new one added. Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute recently calculated the ratio of regulations cut to those added and found that, from the fall of 2017 to spring of 2018, Trump’s rate of deregulation had not only met his 2-to-1 pledge but surpassed it by the rate of 4-to-1. He currently sits at an impressive 5-to-1.
This aggressive deregulation amounted to a regulatory cost cut of $6 billion in 2017, and this year it’s estimated that Trump’s effort will ease Americans’ regulatory burden by another $10 billion. While $10 billion is small savings compared to the recent $300 billion omnibus bill, it’s certainly a step in the right direction. As James Freeman of The Wall Street Journal notes, “How beautiful is Mr. Trump’s $6 billion cut in year one in the regulatory costs imposed by Washington on the U.S. economy? It depends on how you look at it. It is certainly a remarkable and welcome change from his predecessor, who in eight years increased the regulatory burden by some $600 billion.”
In spite of stiff resistance from the Washington swamp and the Leftmedia, Trump has been able to succeed where many previous politicians have failed. And he’s carrying out the agenda he campaigned on. Americans benefiting from a growing economy are thanking him for it.
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That's a big "crumb": United Tech to invest $15 billion, hire 35,000 in U.S. over next five years thanks to GOP tax cuts
United Technologies Corp said on Wednesday it would invest more than $15 billion for research and development and capacity expansion in the United States over the next five years, spurred by the recent tax cuts.
The company also plans to hire 35,000 people in this period and spend about $75 billion with U.S. suppliers to strengthen local economies.
The maker of Pratt & Whitney aircraft engines said about $9 billion of the investment is expected to go towards research and development, including on artificial intelligence and autonomy.
The remaining $6 billion will be used to increase capacity in existing manufacturing facilities and improve efficiency.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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25 May, 2018
California Dem. Claims Trump Sent Secret Messages to Russians by Telling Joke
This insistence on his story despite common sense and contrary evidence sounds remarkably like paranoid schizophrenia. It's unlikely that the Democrats blaming Russians for Trump's success really are all schiz but the similarity does show that their mental processes are problematical
For more than a year, elected Democrats and the liberal media have alleged that President Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government to “steal” the 2016 election away from the “rightful winner,” Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, a narrative that has been steadily unraveling over time.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson has grown impatient at the lack of actual evidence put forward to justify such claims or the investigations that have sprung from them, so Monday he invited one of Trump’s most vociferous critics on the topic of Russia — California Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat who sits on the House Intelligence Committee — to appear on his program.
Carlson asked Swalwell for any evidence he has seen after 18 months of investigation to back up the collusion case, according to BizPac Review.
Swalwell offered up nothing that hasn’t already been made known before about tenuous business connections and marginal meetings that went nowhere, and even seemed to point to an obvious joke by Trump on the campaign trail in July 2016 where he asked the Russians if they knew the whereabouts of Clinton’s 30,000 missing emails as “proof” of some sort of secret coded message to encourage Russian hacking and interference.
Carlson noted that those emails have never turned up, to which Swalwell replied, “let’s let the Mueller investigation continue,” insinuating Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation had perhaps obtained them.
He also said that the mere “attempt” by Trump to invite the Russians to hack and obtain Clinton’s emails was, in and of itself, a crime.
“I hate to inject common sense into this,” Carlson said. “If you’re trying to make secret contact with Russia, your handlers back in Moscow, wouldn’t you dial them up on the short wave in the basement? Would you really sent a coded message in the middle of a joke at a press conference?”
Swalwell replied, “I’m not saying he’s the smartest guy in the world, Tucker. Never accused him of that.”
Incredulously, Carlson asked, “So that’s — that’s the smoking gun right there?”
“No, it’s part of the evidence,” Swalwell said with all seriousness. “An invitation made by the candidate, telling them it’s OK … he’s not the smartest guy in the world.”
Carlson couldn’t help but point out the absurd duality of Swalwell’s assertion. “So he’s both a secret agent for Putin but he’s so dumb that he spills his secrets at a press conference on TV?” he asked.
Swalwell replied, “The latter,” making it clear that he is part of the camp that believes Trump is an incredibly unintelligent individual. “There’s no ‘who could be so stupid they admit the crime in public’ exception,” he added.
Carlson later pointed to several examples of how Trump has been tougher on Russia than former President Barack Obama — such as sending lethal arms to Ukraine, killing hundreds of Russian soldiers in Syria or hurting their economy with increased U.S. oil and gas production — all of which Swalwell simply dismissed as things Trump was forced to do because of public sentiment that he was too favorable to Russia.
Carlson could only laugh at the ludicrous replies from Swalwell, which was pretty much the reaction the entire interview received on social media.
Despite having ample time and countless opportunities, this Democrat representative — like the rest of his colleagues and cohorts in the media — was unable to produce any sort of compelling evidence that definitively linked Trump or his campaign with the Russian government during the election.
But that won’t stop them from continuing to insist that evidence of collusion will eventually be uncovered, just you wait and see.
SOURCE
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The NFL Just Made A HISTORIC Rule Change About The National Anthem
NFL owners unanimously approved a historic rule change on Wednesday that requires all players, coaches, and team officials to stand for the national anthem. The new rule states that if anyone associated with a team is on the field, they must remain standing for the anthem.
Players can remain in the locker room during the national anthem if they choose to do so, which will take away all of the media hype from players who are desperate for attention. Here’s what ESPN reports:
“The new policy subjects teams to a fine if a player or any other team personnel do not show appropriate respect for the anthem. That includes any attempt to sit or kneel, as dozens of players have done during the past two seasons. Those teams will also have the option to fine any team personnel, including players, for the infraction.”
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell admitted the massive uproar from the American people over players disrespecting the flag and anthem forced him to create the new policy. Here’s Goodell’s statement:
“This season, all league and team personnel shall stand and show respect for the flag and the Anthem. Personnel who choose not to stand for the Anthem may stay in the locker room until after the Anthem has been performed.
“We believe today’s decision will keep our focus on the game and the extraordinary athletes who play it — and on our fans who enjoy it.”
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Canadian healthcare
Like all single-payer systems, the constant problem is delays in getting attention. I contrast that with the system in Australia, which encourages private hospitals. A few years back I got a very painful attack of kidney stones. I was cat-scanned and on the operating table within 6 hours of arriving at my usual private hospital
This woman spent 47 hours waiting for surgery in the Sunnybrook ER, with shattered wrists, a broken elbow, cracked ribs and internal bleeding
The day?Kelly Yerxa had her accident was mostly uneventful. It was a Friday in January 2016. After finishing work in Cambridge, where she is the city’s director of legal services, she drove to Haliburton to join her 19-year-old son, a competitive snowboarder, who had spent the day training there. Yerxa is tall and lean and, like her son, athletic. She went to university on a swimming scholarship and now, in her 50s, competes as a triathlete. She was scheduled to officiate during the weekend’s snowboard events, and she met up with her son and about a dozen other parents and athletes at a cottage they had all rented. It was late when she arrived, and since everyone would be getting up early, she and the others headed off to bed. Just before midnight, Yerxa made a trip to the bathroom, and on her way back along the pitch-dark hallway, she veered slightly to her left and took a wrong step. She plunged down seven wooden stairs, hit the landing, punctured the drywall there, and then continued down four more stairs before coming to a stop in the living room.
An athlete sleeping on the couch rushed over. Bones were sticking out of Yerxa’s right elbow, and her wrists were in the shape of the letter S, her hands dangling limply. But she was in shock, and she felt no pain. She told the young man not to worry, that he should go back to sleep since he had to compete in the morning. Then she passed out.
When she came to, two of the other parents were hovering over her, and she was soon being rushed to Haliburton Hospital by ambulance, sirens blaring. Doctors there told her that in addition to the two shattered wrists and broken elbow, she had a couple of broken ribs and a lacerated kidney, and she would require complicated surgery, which was beyond their capability as a small hospital. The pain was by that point intense, and doctors gave her strong painkillers. The next day, a snowstorm hit that made an airlift impossible, so Yerxa was transported by ambulance to Sunnybrook, and her husband, Trevor Clough, drove in from Cambridge to meet her there. He sat in the ER for nearly three hours, waiting for her arrival, and he couldn’t believe the pandemonium he witnessed. “I’d never seen a hospital that busy,” he says. “I was amazed at how many people were coming in.” He remembers ambulances arriving every 15 or 20 minutes, disgorging patient after patient. There had been a major accident on the 401, which he thought explained the deluge, but the nurses told him it was always that way on a Saturday night.
In the hallway, there was no curtain, no call button, and Yerxa was next to the bedpan dumping station. Illustration by Jeffrey Smith
When he finally got to see his wife later that evening, Clough discovered that her bed was in what Sunnybrook staff call the “orange zone”—essentially a holding area for patients when no rooms are available. Her bed was pushed up against a wall, with the IV pole and other paraphernalia wedged in beside her. Clough had nowhere to sit, so he stood awkwardly next to her until a nurse kindly brought him a chair. There was a curtain, but no switch to turn off the lights at night. That location would be Yerxa’s home for the next 19 hours—and her predicament would get worse from there.
Hallway health care is epidemic in Toronto right now. Hospital administrators typically strive for an occupancy level of about 85 per cent, a rate that balances the need for efficiency with the ability to accommodate sudden surges in patient numbers. In other words, even on really busy days, a hospital should be able to find a bed when your father has a stroke or your partner contracts pneumonia. However, for most of the past year and a half, Toronto hospitals have had average monthly occupancies well above that target.
Occupancy at the University Health Network, which includes Toronto General and Toronto Western, didn’t dip below 97?per?cent between January and May last year, according to documents obtained by the NDP. The three Mississauga hospitals that make up the Trillium Health Partners went as high as 109?per?cent in January last year and didn’t fall below 103?per?cent all spring. Etobicoke General spiked to 122?per?cent last January and stayed above 106 over the next few months. The pattern has continued this year. Throughout the first half of January 2018, Toronto East General hovered between 104?and 119?per?cent occupancy, and Scarborough and Rouge Hospital’s Birchmount site reached 147?per?cent. Toronto’s hospitals are, in a word, bursting.
When a hospital finds itself with 147 patients and only 100 places to put them, administrators have to be creative. The first place patients are typically stowed, after being admitted through the ER, is in the emergency department itself—a terrible place for admitted patients. It’s frenetic, loud and bright, making it impossible to rest, and elderly patients, who make up the majority of admissions, often develop delirium as a result, which can take days to clear. In addition to serious privacy and dignity concerns, the cramped conditions make it hard to do the job right.
To relieve the congestion in ERs, hospital administrators have been forced to use what they euphemistically call “unconventional spaces.” In Yerxa’s case, it would end up being a spot in the hallway. In other instances, it is an office, a sunroom, a conference room, a TV room or even a bathroom, with the bed placed between the toilet and bathtub. There’s often no door, no curtain, no call button, no space for loved ones. If a wound needs inspecting or a private detail has to be discussed, it happens out in the open. If you need a bedpan, you just do your business right there.
This is no way to practise medicine, says Paul Pageau, an emergency doctor in Ottawa and president of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians. But he has noticed that patients seem to be slowly resigning themselves to the inevitability of long waits and a war zone atmosphere. “I find it remarkable that the patients we see seem to a great degree to accept this,” he says. “Which in itself I find unacceptable.” He thinks if the public demanded more, things might change faster. “I don’t mean to blame the public. But I don’t want us to become too complacent.”
Keeping track of patients who are stashed in hallways, bathrooms and alcoves sometimes requires doctors to get creative. Illustration by Jeffrey Smith
Her first evening at Sunnybrook, Yerxa was heavily sedated, so after she was settled into her bed, Clough drove home to Cambridge for the night. The next morning, a friend drove him to Haliburton, where he picked up his son and collected Yerxa’s car. First thing Monday morning, father and son drove to Sunnybrook to visit Yerxa.
Thirty-eight hours had elapsed since Yerxa had arrived, so Clough was surprised to find that she hadn’t been moved into a room but was instead in a hallway. She had a dressing on her right arm that stretched from her bicep down to her fingers, and another on her left arm that went from elbow to fingers. There she was, lying in the hallway of one of Canada’s premier hospitals, still waiting for surgery.
The hall was noisy, with machines constantly beeping and people talking. There was nowhere for her husband and son to sit where they weren’t in the way. “It was like parking in a fire route,” Yerxa says. Worst of all, they were next to a bedpan dumping station, which stank to high heaven. Yerxa couldn’t eat or drink by herself, let alone get out of bed or go to the washroom. She was entirely dependent on the nurses, who, despite being clearly overloaded, she says, took excellent care of her. Rather than venting or getting snippy, they just kept apologizing.
After lying in the emergency department for almost two days, Yerxa finally had surgery to install plates in her wrists and to repair her elbow. Then she was moved into a room, where she stayed until her discharge, five days later. In retrospect, she is glad she was so subdued by the pain. Had she been more lucid, she says, she would have been angry.
Since her time at Sunnybrook, the hospital-bed crisis has only escalated. Typically, there’s respite in the summer, after the flu season is over, but last summer that didn’t happen. “The surge from last winter hasn’t gone away,” Anthony Dale, CEO of the Ontario Hospital Association, told me in December. “All across the GTA, you’ve seen hospitals spike as high as 140?per?cent at any given moment.”
When numbers surge like this, hospitals have to care for the extra patients without extra resources. Nurses, cleaning staff, clerical staff, food workers—they are all being run off their feet, says Pam Parks, a registered practical nurse and CUPE union rep who has worked at Lakeridge Hospital in Oshawa for nearly 30 years. Whereas normally a nurse on day shift might have been assigned four patients, she says, now they’re routinely getting six; on night shift, they sometimes have more than 10. They forgo their breaks. People yell at them and even throw things. “We can’t do it anymore,” she says. “We’re tired, burnt out and getting sick.”
Administrators are also exhausted. Figuring out how to accommodate all the extra patients has become a major obsession. “I can’t put in words the amount of stress I’ve witnessed on the entire hospital,” says Ari Zaretsky, who between July and December last year stepped in as Sunnybrook’s interim chief medical executive. He described hospital officials regularly having to clear their schedules and “call a huddle”—code for an ad-hoc crisis meeting to come up with a plan for how to accommodate the excess of patients without cancelling key services. Overcrowding is especially serious for a hospital like Sunnybrook, which not only accepts regular patients through the emergency department but also, as a specialist trauma centre, takes in many of the province’s car accident, burn and gunshot victims.
Part of Zaretsky’s job was to oversee what’s known as “flow and occupancy,” and when I spoke to him in December, the winter’s flu season was just gearing up. Modern hospitals have teams of specialists who use computerized bed maps to track every patient—Zaretsky likens them to air traffic controllers. As new patients arrive, these specialists have to decide how to reconfigure them according to illness type, severity, infectious disease status and likely discharge date. If someone needs to be isolated because of infection, for instance, they might jump the queue. The same is true if their condition is life-threatening. In rare cases, an extremely sick person can even bump a less sick person, ideally someone for whom discharge is imminent, out of their room and into a hallway. “It’s very contentious,” says Zaretsky. “You can imagine. You’re still ill—you have to be in hospital—but you’re not ill enough, compared to the poor person who has just been admitted.”
By the standards of most developed countries, Canada doesn’t have a lot of acute care beds: just two for every 1,000 people, compared to 4.1 in France, 6.1 in Germany and 7.8 in Japan. In terms of total beds, Ontario is one of the most sparsely bedded provinces, with just 2.3 per 1,000. The average in the other provinces is 3.5. That said, some places have low bed numbers but aren’t in crisis. Denmark, for instance, has just 2.5 beds per 1,000. The difference is that Denmark also has an extensive and well-orchestrated system of alternative care for patients who need treatment but don’t necessarily need a hospital.
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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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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24 May, 2018
House votes to ease post-crisis bank rules in victory for Trump
The U.S. House of Representatives passed on Tuesday bipartisan legislation that would ease bank rules introduced in the wake of the 2007-2009 financial crisis, giving President Donald Trump a major legislative victory.
Tuesday's vote rolls back some of the 2010 Dodd-Frank rules that restricted operations by smaller banks and community lenders and keeps the Republican president's campaign promise to try to spur more economic growth by cutting regulation.
The bill, which was approved by the Senate in March, marks the first significant rewrite of U.S. financial rules introduced following the crisis, which saw Wall Street lenders bailed out to the tune of $700 billion.
Republican critics say Dodd-Frank went too far and curbs banks’ ability to lend, while many Democrats say it provides critical protections for consumers and taxpayers.
The bill, approved 258-159, raises the threshold at which banks are considered systemically risky and subject to stricter oversight to $250 billion from $50 billion. It also eases trading, lending and capital rules for banks with less than $10 billion in assets.
It does not, however, weaken the top U.S. consumer watchdog created by Dodd-Frank that has been consistently attacked by Republicans who say it oversteps its mandate.
But the bill does offer a handful of niche provisions that would help some larger banks, such as allowing custody banks like BNY Mellon and State Street Corp to exempt the customer deposits they place with central banks from a stringent capital calculation requirement.
It also offers more favorable treatment for municipal bonds, a measure that analysts say is likely to help Citigroup Inc's bond-trading business.
But backers of the bill stress that the core Dodd Frank provisions that aimed to shore up the financial system and make banks less risky, remain untouched by this legislation.
The bill also does not alter the so-called "Volcker Rule" banning Wall Street banks from making risky bets with their own money, or limit the ability of regulators to apply stricter rules to large institutions they deem critical to the financial system.
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Former Trump Advisor Says MULTIPLE Spies Embedded Into Campaign, They’ll “Be Wearing Orange Suits”
Former Trump Advisor Michael Caputo unleashed a tsunami on the Obama Administration and Deep State during Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox News last night.
After Ingraham aired a clip of Former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, justifying a spy on the Trump campaign. He even called the spying “a good thing.”
Caputo shreddded the United States government for being similar to a Russian spy agency. Hew then went on to say there were multiple spies and multiple agencies involved.
“Let me tell you something that I know for a fact, this informant, this person that planted, that they tried to plant into the campaign and even into the administration, if you believe Axios–he’s not the only person who came into the campaign!” Caputo stated. “And the FBI is not the only Obama agency who came into the campaign.”
Caputo dropped the biggest bomb of all on Clapper. “I know because they came at me. And I’m looking for clearance from my attorney to reveal this to the public. This is just the beginning and I’ll tell ya, when we finally find out the truth about this–Director Clapper and the rest of them are gonna be wearing some orange suits,” Michael Caputo added.
It certainly looks like this is just the beginning as more and more is revealed every single day. As we previously reported:
“New revelations from the 2016 campaign have exposed top-secret CIA and FBI source, Stefan Halper, a Cambridge University professor, for contacting and being in touch with Trump advisers Carter Page, George Papadopoulos and Sam Clovis.”
Now we’re finding out CNN was even in on it. This is an unbelievable abuse of power in an attempt to take down our President.
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Trump's Not Messing Around With MS-13 'Animals'
He issued a statement titled "What You Need To Know About The Violent Animals Of MS-13."
The Leftmedia went out of its way to peddle a BIG Lie about Donald Trump and immigration last week — that he called all illegal aliens “animals” instead of simply the violent thugs of the MS-13 gang. Never one to shy away from a fight, Trump issued a White House statement yesterday titled “What You Need To Know About The Violent Animals Of MS-13.”
Trump’s statement recounts numerous incidents of “unthinkable violence of MS-13’s animals.” And he’s right — their crimes include decapitation, dismemberment and savage beatings and stabbings. “President Trump’s entire Administration is working tirelessly to bring these violent animals to justice,” the statement concludes.
Politically, this accomplishes two things beyond sending a message of law and order to illegal alien thugs. It reassures Trump’s base that he’s serious about addressing the worst elements among immigrants. And it also fires a shot across the Leftmedia’s bow that Trump won’t be intimidated by lies meant to “prove” his supposed racism. “I referred to them as animals,” he said later, “and guess what? I always will.”
Dennis Prager gets to the bottom of the issue, “Biologically, of course, we are all human. But if ‘human’ is to mean anything moral — anything beyond the purely biological — then some people who have committed particularly heinous acts of evil against other human beings are not to be considered human. Otherwise ‘human’ has no moral being.”
Meanwhile, President Trump is requesting $500 million more for the border wall.
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China Makes Massive Cut to Car Tariffs After Truce With Trump
Bloomberg’s Tom Mackenzie discusses China’s decision to cut tariffs on imported cars to 15 percent from 25 percent.
China will cut the import duty on passenger cars to 15 percent, further opening up a market that’s been a chief target of the U.S. in its trade fight with the world’s second-largest economy.
The Finance Ministry said Tuesday the levy will be lowered effective July 1 from the current 25 percent that has been in place for more than a decade, boosting shares of automakers from India to Europe. Bloomberg News reported last month that China was weighing proposals to reduce the car import levy to 10 percent or 15 percent.
A reduction in the import duty follows a truce between President Donald Trump’s administration and Chinese officials as they seek to defuse tensions and avert an all-out trade war. While the levy reduction could be claimed in some quarters as a concession to Trump and will be a boon to U.S. carmakers such as Tesla Inc. and Ford Motor Co., the move will also end up benefiting European and Asian manufacturers from Daimler AG to Toyota Motor Corp.
“This is, without a doubt, positive news,” said Juergen Pieper, Frankfurt-based head of automobiles research at Bankhaus Metzler. “You can’t completely disregard the fact that there are certain imbalances in China’s favor. This could be a signal that if one side is making concessions, it could lead to the Americans easing some of their pressure as well.”
Shares of Jaguar Land Rover owner Tata Motors Ltd. and BMW AG posted their biggest intraday gains in more than a month on the news. The Finance Ministry in Beijing said later Tuesday that the step is intended to help reduce prices and aid competition.
The import duty on car parts will be reduced to 6 percent, China’s Finance Ministry said. The shift is significant more for its optics than its potential impact given imported cars made up only about 4.2 percent of the country’s 28.9 million in automobile sales last year.
The latest round of tariff easing is part of a flurry of policy announcements in recent months aimed at demonstrating China’s commitment to opening the economy -- partly in response to the accusations of protectionism leveled by the Trump administration. Beijing has also pledged to cut ownership limits in the auto sector as well as in banking, and last November reduced import tariffs on almost 200 categories of consumer products.
China announced May 18 that it would end its anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigation into imports of U.S. sorghum, citing the “public interest.” That move, coupled with recent steps including restarting a review of Qualcomm Inc.’s application to acquire NXP Semiconductors NV, signal a conciliatory stance from the Chinese side.
For his part, President Trump has retreated from imposing tariffs on billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods because of White House discord over trade strategy and concern about harming negotiations with North Korea, according to people briefed on the administration’s deliberations.
In further evidence of an easing in tensions, China and the U.S. agreed on the “broad outline” of a settlement to the ban on China’s ZTE Corp. buying American technology after alleged sanctions infringements, the Wall Street Journal reported.
At the Boao Forum in April, President Xi Jinping reiterated China’s commitment to reduce import tariffs on vehicles.
Of the $51 billion of vehicle imports in 2017, about $13.5 billion came from North America including sales of models made there by non-U.S. manufacturers like BMW. China imported 280,208 vehicles, or 10 percent of total imported automobiles, from the U.S. last year, according to China’s Passenger Car Association, an industry trade body.
A duty cut would typically benefit luxury carmakers or manufacturers, like Tesla, that don’t have a local production site. Most automakers produce mass-market models in China.
For Tesla, a tariff cut will provide a boon until the company manages to set up local production. The Palo Alto, California-based company has been working with Shanghai’s government since last year to explore assembling cars in China. China saying that it will allow foreign new-energy vehicle makers to fully own auto factories as early as this year removed a primary hurdle for founder and billionaire Elon Musk.
Luxury sales leader Audi, part of Volkswagen, has been making cars in China since 1990s. General Motors Co.’s Cadillac, which has relegated Lexus to fifth in the luxury-car rankings, opened a factory in Shanghai in 2016.
Foreign carmakers have long pleaded for freer access to China’s auto market, while its own manufacturers are expanding abroad. In April, China announced a timetable to permit foreign automakers to own more than 50 percent of local ventures.
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Seattle created its homelessness crisis; now it’s trying to make it worse
Seattle never learns. Seattle says it has a homelessness problem, which it does. The city says the problem is getting out of control and something needs to be done about it. Are the uber-liberal residents and politicians of the city stepping forward to house the unfortunate people? No. Seattle is failing to learn its lesson and is insisting on more bloated government to solve a problem bloated government created.
The housing crisis in Seattle is the fault of the Seattle government. The city has been on a nonstop rampage to declare itself the most progressive society in the world for the last few years. During its crusade to kill jobs and make life miserable in the city it has enacted rules and regulations that make it almost impossible to build housing there.
John Stossel, from Reason Magazine, reported the building code is 745 pages long, and the residential building code is another 685 pages. Jeff Pelletier, of Board and Vellum Architects, points to the permits as one of the main drivers in the rise of housing cost in Seattle stating, “while there is a lot of benefit to a thorough review of your project, we are seeing tremendous cost and schedule increases from local building departments.”
One way to help solve the housing problem would be to build mid and high-rise condominiums. On a plot of land that usually accommodates 3-4 single family homes, the city could allow developers to build projects that house 100+ people, getting much more bang for your buck in land use. But no, this is Seattle. Strict zoning laws have only given multi-family and commercial/mixed-use areas one-third the land use of residential land use, driving up the price of single-family homes.
The city’s recently enacted minimum wage law is also having an impact on the housing problem. On June 2, 2014, Seattle’s extremely progressive city council attempted to regulate prosperity by instituting a $15 minimum wage over time. Business owners warned about the economic impact the move would have, but not one person on the council listened, and all voted for the job-killing regulation, showing no one on the council has a basic understanding of economics.
In 2018, the full $15 per hour minimum wage went into effect, but the impact was felt much earlier. A University of Washington team completed a study of worker pay, hours, and benefits in Seattle in 2017, and found the law was a net loss for workers. The study concluded:
“Our preferred estimates suggest that the Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance caused hours worked by low-skilled workers (i.e., those earning under $19 per hour) to fall by 9.4% during the three quarters when the minimum wage was $13 per hour, resulting in a loss of 3.5 million hours worked per calendar quarter. Alternative estimates show the number of low-wage jobs declined by 6.8%, which represents a loss of more than 5,000 jobs. These estimates are robust to cutoffs other than $19.45 A 3.1% increase in wages in jobs that paid less than $19 coupled with a 9.4% loss in hours yields a labor demand elasticity of roughly -3.0, and this large elasticity estimate is robust to other cutoffs… The reduction in hours would cost the average employee $179 per month, while the wage increase would recoup only $54 of this loss, leaving a net loss of $125 per month (6.6%), which is sizable for a low-wage worker.”
Keep in mind this was before the full impact of the $15 per hour minimum wage could be felt, as the law only became fully implemented this year, the situation is going to get worse in Seattle.
So now that we know Seattle’s own laws created a shortage of housing in the city while at the same time reducing the amount of take-home pay for lower-income residents, what is the city council’s solution? More government.
In 2017, King County and Seattle spent over $195 million to combat homelessness, which included city, county, state, federal, and charity spending. Surely the massive amount of spending had an impact on the problem? No, homelessness actually increased last year.
But don’t worry, the city council has a plan. All other plans have failed, this one will work. The city council had the great idea to institute another tax, known as a “head tax.” The city is going to tax its largest business $500 for every employee. This money would then be used to build “affordable housing.” It is hard to see how that could be done with the current zoning laws, the laws that helped start the crisis in the first place, still in place.
After the city council voted 9-0 for the ordinance business leaders spoke out, and Amazon paused construction on a project, pitting hard-working construction workers against do nothing, full-time protesters. After some negotiating between the city council and Mayor Jenny Durkan the tax was reduced to $275. This may seem like a win, but like everything in Seattle, all is not as it seems. Along with the lower rate, so far the funds are non-binding. Meaning there is no plan to spend the money and it could easily be spent on non-homelessness issues.
What Seattle has done is so poorly planned, even some of the homeless are calling out the city for its excessive spending. Geno Minetti, currently living out of his car, stated, “They’re wasting the taxpayer’s money. If they get more; they’ll waste more.” It is a shame this man can see the problem and knows government spending is not the answer, but the people in charge only see taxation and spending as an answer to every problem.
Businesses in the Seattle must now ask themselves some important questions, is it worth expanding if the business will get taxed for succeeding? If Seattle doesn’t want a person’s business to grow and expand, why should he or she move or start it there?
The lunacy of Seattle never ceases to amaze. Only the left would watch its taxation, zoning, and employment laws create a crisis, then advocate for more of the same. Every city should pay close attention to what Seattle is doing, and do the opposite. If a city wants to increase its tax base, decrease poverty, and increase the quality of living, don’t be like Seattle.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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23 May, 2018
Farm Subsidies and the Farm Bill: Truth vs. Fiction
Farm reform will never get up without "adjustment" assistance. The government will have to offer something to help farmers adjust to new realities. If use of corn alcohol in motor fuel no longer becomes compulsory, for instance, something will have to be offered to make use of now surplus ethanol.
One idea that might not be too wild would be to go to amateur distillers worldwide in search of several new forms of corn spirits for human consumption -- several new types of corn whisky, for instance. Maybe even a corn liqueur. A liqueur called "Moonshine" should be attractive if only because of the name
The government could then sponsor a big advertising blast to get people to try the new product. Success would all depend on attractive products being devised but that should not be beyond the wit of man
Like immigration, health care and other seemingly endless legislative quarrels, agriculture is a highly contentious issue every time Congress grapples with it. So this week’s House farm bill is simply par for the course. The Heritage Foundation’s Daren Bakst has produced an excellent compilation of critical amendments that should graduate to the finalized bill. Unfortunately, these amendments — just like past reform proposals — will be in the crosshairs of subsidy-obsessed special interests.
As Bakst explains in a Daily Signal op-ed, “Agricultural special interests try to make it sound as though touching even one farm subsidy — regardless of how unreasonable the subsidy is — will be the end of agriculture as we know it. Using scare tactics, they will assert wild claims without any support, or they will cherry-pick data to provide a misleading picture.” Sound familiar? That’s because global warming scaremongers apply the same tactic.
The truth is less menacing. For example, while special interest groups assert that farmers are financially strapped and therefore require subsidies, Bakst points to the opposite: “Farm households have far greater median income and wealth than non-farm households.” This means that, as of 2016, 70% of farm households reported higher earnings, and farmer wages averaged about 29% higher. In terms of aggregate wealth, farmers’ average of $897,000 dwarfs that of other households, which stands at a relatively paltry $97,300.
Another farce revolves around the supposedly deteriorating economy. While the agriculture economy is admittedly off its peak, Bakst notes that “key financial indicators such as debt-to-asset ratios are near historic lows.” Besides, he reminds us: “What other sector of the economy expects regular taxpayer handouts when things aren’t going well? The very assumption that taxpayers should protect farmers from competing in the market like every other business shows the egregious nature of the current subsidy system.”
A few additional pointers: The rural economy’s troubles have little to do with farming — “only about 6 percent of rural jobs are in farming,” says Bakst — and subsidies are disproportionately divided among small family and commercial farms (guess which one profits the most?). This contradicts the narrative that subsidies are primarily needed to propel small family farms. The number of family farms, by the way, is not in a tailspin, as special interests claim.
Believe it or not, there’s even a national security angle when it comes to subsidies. But as Bakst points out, “There are no national security problems for almost all commodities that receive little to no subsidies,” which happens to be most agricultural commodities.
Let’s also not belittle the most important fact — taxpayers are on the hook for every subsidiary element. Even with crop insurance, taxpayers foot 62% of the premium bill. And when it comes to sugar, the economy takes a $3.7 billion hit annually despite the special interest groups’ laughable claim that it’s a financially neutral program. The reality is that the poor are hardest hit. The farm bill is currently constructed in a way that ignores these realities. It can, however, be amended. We’ll soon see how Congress considers a priority — special interest groups, or taxpayers.
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Trump turns up heat on Obama, Brennan amid 'informant' questions: demands DOJ probe
Fox News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano on President Trump calling on the Department of Justice to investigate allegations the FBI spied on his 2016 presidential campaign.
President Trump sought to turn the tables on the Obama administration Monday after demanding a probe into whether his predecessor’s FBI “infiltrated” his 2016 campaign, pointedly asking what then-President Barack Obama knew about the operation – while clashing with former CIA boss John Brennan.
Following reports detailing how an FBI “informant” had multiple contacts with members of Trump’s campaign, the president said Sunday he’d formally seek a DOJ probe of whether agents surveilled the campaign for political purposes, and whether any such demands came from the Obama administration.
While the DOJ swiftly asked the department’s inspector general to handle that review, the president turned the spotlight Monday to Obama.
“The Wall Street Journal asks, ‘WHERE IN THE WORLD WAS BARACK OBAMA?’ A very good question!” Trump tweeted.
He was referring to an op-ed calling on Obama to explain “his administration’s surveillance of affiliates of a presidential campaign.” The column from James Freeman posited that Obama was likely “fairly well-informed” about his law enforcement agencies, but said if he was unaware of the Russia probe’s full history, “then it would seem a public explanation is also in order—about his management, and about just how far the ‘deep state’ went without specific presidential approval.”
Former Secret Service agent says Brennan is responsible for Americans' loss of faith in the intelligence community.
Meanwhile, another dust-up between the president and Brennan took shape as the former CIA director, and now MSNBC/NBC contributor, warned Republican leaders in Congress not to “enable” Trump, in response to his call for an investigation.
“Senator McConnell & Speaker Ryan: If Mr. Trump continues along this disastrous path, you will bear major responsibility for the harm done to our democracy. You do a great disservice to our Nation & the Republican Party if you continue to enable Mr. Trump’s self-serving actions,” Brennan tweeted, while also quoting Roman philosopher Cicero: “Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error.”
Trump fired back by quoting, at length, former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino on “Fox & Friends,” as Bongino accused Brennan of sparking the entire Russia probe and taking part in a politically motivated investigation.
Brennan has been a vocal critic of Trump ever since he took office.
The precise origins of the Russia probe remain unclear. Officials have previously pointed to comments Trump adviser George Papadopoulos allegedly made about Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton as touching off the investigation in July 2016. A House GOP memo released earlier this year affirmed this timeline.
But reporting over the weekend in The New York Times and Washington Post said an informant was also talking to Papadopoulos and other Trump figures in 2016. The details have raised questions about what prompted those contacts.
The revelations come amid a tense dispute between the Justice Department and House Republicans who have been seeking details about the informant’s role. Trump referenced that standoff on Saturday, tweeting: “Only the release or review of documents that the House Intelligence Committee (also, Senate Judiciary) is asking for can give the conclusive answers. Drain the Swamp!”
The FBI’s probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible collusion with Trump figures would eventually be taken over by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team. The intelligence community, and Senate Intelligence Committee, have since declared that Russia did seek to interfere in the election, largely to boost Trump over Clinton.
But in looking to turn up new information on how the probe began – and suggesting political motivations were at play – Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill could undermine the Mueller’s probe just as Trump and his legal team are weighing the possibility of a Trump interview with the special counsel.
Meanwhile, Obama has said little about the probe’s beginnings, and it’s unclear if he plans to enter this highly charged debate.
One of the few references to his involvement came in texts released earlier this year from anti-Trump FBI officials Lisa Page and Peter Strzok. In one of them, the two discussed preparing talking points for then-FBI boss James Comey to give Obama, who wanted to “know everything we’re doing.”
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Trade War Ceasefire?
From the beginning, we argued that President Donald Trump's planned tariffs were a negotiating chip with China. That became even more clear over the weekend, as China announced that it would buy "significantly" more U.S. goods and services. According to a White House statement, that will include "meaningful increases in United States agriculture and energy exports" with the goal being to "substantially reduce the United States trade deficit in goods with China." Let's hope it also brings back some American jobs.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin declared that the U.S. was "putting the trade war on hold" as negotiations continue, but U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer insisted tariffs remain on the table if needed to "protect our technology." Good cop, bad cop.
Keep in mind that trade is tied together with negotiations over the nuclear weapons program of China's puppet, North Korea. The upcoming June 12 summit between Trump and Kim Jong-un is crucial, and sorting things out on the trade front with China is key. Hence other chess moves like canceling a planned training exercise with South Korea.
In short, this isn't nearly as simple as the mainstream media sometimes portrays. Trump's negotiations are all part of a long game.
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‘It’s Not a Gun-Law Issue’: 18-Year-Old Tells Texas Gov ‘Shooting Is About More Than Firearms’
While David Hogg and crew are running around the country screaming ‘Gun-Control.’ this 18-year old ‘survivor’ understands that there is so much more going on.
Of course that’s obvious to anyone who isn’t zoned in to the anti-gun rhetoric spewing forth from every channel on TV, but it’s nice to hear the truth coming from a young person who just experienced one of life’s most horrifying moments.
According to ijr.com:
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Monica Bracknell, an 18-year-old ‘survivor’ who knew one of the teachers killed during the shooting at Santa Fe High School, told Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas) that the shooting is about school security, not gun laws.
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On Sunday, Abbott addressed members of Arcadia First Baptist Church before services began. According to the Wall Street Journal, he explained that he was there to “comfort my fellow Texans.” He also said he was open to speeding background checks and preventing people who pose a threat to others from getting firearms.
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The Associated Press (AP) reported Bracknell, who survived the shooting, seized the opportunity to meet the governor and share her views on the issue of gun control.
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“People are making this into a political issue,” she shared with the AP she told him. “It’s not a political issue. It’s not a gun-law issue.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, she added that the recent high school shooting shows that there’s a major problem with school safety, “It’s a, this-kid-was-able-to-get-into-the-school-very-easily, issue,” she said.
Jerl Watkins, the interim senior pastor at the church, explained that there are “no words” that can take away the pain the 10 families of the victims are feeling and called for more than just prayers.
“Do we need to do more than just pray?” he asked. “Yes, we most certainly do.”
The recent shooting reignited an already fierce debate about gun control in the country, but the Los Angeles Times reported that in the wake of the shooting, the Santa Fe students, unlike Parkland, Florida, students, haven’t vocalized a strong cry for increased gun control.
At a vigil on Friday evening, the Los Angeles Times reported the issue of guns didn’t come up, and on Saturday there were no protests, and there weren’t an expected for Sunday.
“We have created a culture that does not value life, that does not honor God, that does not respect authority,” Rev. Brad Drake, who lost a member of his congregation in the shooting.
He added that now, we’re “reaping the consequences of those actions,” and no security guard or metal detector can reverse what’s been created.
Eight students and two teachers were killed during the shooting on Friday. Accused shooter Dimitrios Pagourtzis, was arrested and faces charges of capital murder and aggravated assault of a public servant.”
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CCRKBA to Antis: ‘When Will You Blame the Murderers?’
Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, has issued a challenge to the gun prohibition lobby. Following last week’s attack at Santa Fe High School in Texas that left ten dead and another ten wounded, Gottlieb wants to know why anti-gun groups never seem to blame the perpetrators of such horrendous crimes.
“Time after time,” he said in a Monday news release, “with endless fund raising appeals and inflammatory rhetoric, we’ve seen these anti-rights lobbying groups immediately try to shift blame to the NRA, or the Second Amendment, or the firearms industry, or some mythical loophole in the law. But they never seem to point their fingers at the culprit, and we think it’s time for the American public to ask why?”
Why, indeed? Gottlieb suspects that the mission of these gun grabbers is not to keep “dangerous or deranged criminals off the street,” but to infringe on the Second Amendment rights of honest citizens.
By diverting public attention away from killers and toward law-abiding citizens who had nothing to do with the crime, Gottlieb suggested in his statement, “these lobbying groups have created a very strong impression that they’re not really interested in punishing criminals, but only in penalizing honest firearms owners for crimes they didn’t commit.”
“Over the weekend, Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety was quick to push its gun control agenda, and the Alliance for Gun Responsibility was asking for donations to ‘take a stand…against the gun lobby.’ When was the last time either of these groups demanded swift justice and certainty of punishment for the actual perpetrators?”—CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb
“Time and again,” he stated, “we’ve heard these groups demand a national dialogue on guns. But how do you have a rational discussion with people or groups that repeatedly demonstrate that they cannot tell the difference between the bad guys and the good guys?
“If all they can do is blame innocent citizens while diverting attention from murderous monsters, then it is time to ask these people just whose side they are on,” Gottlieb concluded.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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22 May, 2018
The UN Human Rights Council slams Israel for the umpteenth times
Below is the sort of propaganda Leftists love. It is of course totally one-sided with no reference to how Israel sees it. The very first deception is referring to the Arabs as "protesters". They are not. They are violent attackers doing their best to breach and destroy the Israeli border. If they were peaceful they would not be shot.
And nobody is giving the true reason why the Arabs are throwing themselves onto the Israeli guns. You are supposed to get the idea that people are throwing away their lives because of the desperation of their situation.
The real reason is jihad. They are deliberately throwing away their lives in the belief that when they die fighting the infidel they will go straight to Paradise and be given 72 virgins to serve them.
That promise matters to the young men concerned. Under polygamy, rich old men get most of the women -- leaving none for many of the young men. So Paradise is the only chance they have of getting a woman. Unquiet penises are behind it all. Sick.
The UN has voted to send an international war crimes probe to
Gaza after the body’s leading human rights official slammed Israel’s reaction to protests along the border as “wholly disproportionate”.
Israeli firing into Hamas-ruled Gaza killed nearly 60 Palestinians at mass border protests on Monday.
“There is little evidence of any attempt to minimise casualties on Monday,” Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein told a special session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
The council voted through the resolution with 29 in favour and two opposed, while 14 states abstained.
The resolution also condemned “the disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force by the Israeli occupying forces against Palestinian civilians”.
Israel condemned the resolution, which was put forward by a group of countries including Pakistan. The United States decried it as an example of a biased focus on Israel by the council.
Both lamented that it didn’t mention Gaza’s Hamas rulers, whom Israel blames for the violence.
The “independent, international commission of inquiry” mandated by the council will be asked to produce a final report next March.
In a vigorous speech, Mr Zeid slammed the “appalling” recent events in Gaza and called for the occupation of Palestine by Israel to end.
He said the 1.9 million people living in Gaza had been denied human rights by Israeli authorities and described those living in the Palestinian enclave as “caged in a toxic slum from birth to death”.
“They are, in essence, caged in a toxic slum from birth to death; deprived of dignity; dehumanised by the Israeli authorities to such a point it appears officials do not even consider that these men and women have a right, as well as every reason, to protest,” he said.
The vote for an investigation came days after Israeli forces shot and killed 59 Palestinians and injured more than 2,700 during mass protests along the Gaza border on the day the US officially opened its embassy in Jerusalem.
Mr Zeid said that under international law, Israel was obligated to protect the population of Gaza and ensure their welfare, “but there is little evidence of any attempt to minimise casualties,” he added.
The human rights chief said 118 Palestinians, including 15 children, were killed since protests began on 30 March. He said the number continues to climb as some of the injured die from their wounds.
He compared the Palestinians’ use of Molotov cocktails, slingshots and burning kites against the “horrifying and criminal violence” with which they were met.
“The stark contrast in casualties on both sides is ... suggestive of a wholly disproportionate response. Killings resulting from the unlawful use of force by an occupying power may also constitute ‘wilful killings’ – a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention,” he told the UN council.
“Nobody has been made safer by the horrific events of the past week,” he concluded.
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Trump Campaign Spy’s Past Exposed: Veteran operative
The political scandal of the decade is brewing in Washington, D.C., and it may leave President Donald Trump in a very different position than his enemies wish: Not destroyed, but largely vindicated.
Details have finally started to emerge about an establishment-led effort to plant a “mole” within the Trump campaign, and evidence is beginning to mount that its goal was to undermine and derail his run for office.
The facts are suggesting something chillingly sinister: A government operative directed by the Obama-run FBI purposely infiltrated the campaign of a candidate with the training and background needed to destabilize elections.
In a detailed piece published by The Intercept, investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald summarized the scandal and gave a blow-by-blow account of how its beginning to unravel.
“Over the past several weeks, House Republicans have been claiming that the FBI, during the 2016 election, used an operative to spy on the Trump campaign, and they triggered outrage within the FBI by trying to learn his identity,” he explained.
“The controversy escalated when President Trump joined the fray on Friday morning. ‘Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president,’ Trump tweeted.'”
Amazingly, FBI and Department of Justice sources did not deny this claim. It’s worth remembering that while the media and DOJ insiders were laughing and dismissing Trump’s accusations a year ago — especially regarding wiretapping and the Steele dossier — he has been proven right on almost every point.
Nobody is laughing now. Instead, they’re scrambling to cover their tracks.
“On May 8, the Washington Post described the informant as ‘a top-secret intelligence source’ and cited DOJ officials as arguing that disclosure of his name ‘could risk lives by potentially exposing the source, a U.S. citizen who has provided intelligence to the CIA and FBI,'” Greenwald reported.
That was almost certainly a last-ditch effort to protect the mole and save face. Then came the threats.
“The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner … actually threatened his own colleagues in Congress with criminal prosecution if they tried to obtain the identity of the informant,” Greenwald reported.
Journalists, including Greenwald and veteran gumshoes at several major media outlets, didn’t stop. After a few rounds of newspaper one-upmanship, the mole’s name has been revealed.
“As a result of some very odd choices by the nation’s largest media outlets, everyone knows the name of the FBI’s informant: Stefan Halper,” Greenwald wrote.
Here’s the truly important and shocking part: Halper is no run-of-the-mill FBI operative. He has a history of being involved in shady CIA operations to infiltrate and derail U.S. elections.
“To begin with, it’s obviously notable that the person the FBI used to monitor the Trump campaign is the same person who worked as a CIA operative running that 1980 Presidential election spying campaign,” Greenwald wrote.
Yes, it was Halper, a former Nixon insider and the same man at the center of the anti-Trump scandal today.
Nearly 40 years ago, a largely buried scandal was playing out in Washington. In involved some famous Republicans, including old names that even today are firmly in the “Never Trump” camp.
“Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal involving the 1980 election, in which the Reagan campaign — using CIA officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush — got caught running a spying operation from inside the Carter administration,” the Intercept explained.
In other words, there may be a structure within the foreign policy and intelligence communities that goes back to at least the time when George H.W. Bush ran the CIA.
That behind-the-scenes power structure — “Deep State,” to borrow the term — was on the side of Hillary Clinton and believed that Trump needed to be stopped at any cost.
One look at the now-public text messages from FBI officials in the weeks and months leading up to the 2016 election definitely seems to support this. And it’s worth pointing out that the now 93-year-old George H.W. Bush admitted to supporting Hillary Clinton.
By any measure, the Bush dynasty has not been friendly to Trump.
“Whatever else is true, the CIA operative and FBI informant used to gather information on the Trump campaign in the 2016 campaign has, for weeks, been falsely depicted as a sensitive intelligence asset rather than what he actually is: a long-time CIA operative with extensive links to the Bush family who was responsible for a dirty and likely illegal spying operation in the 1980 presidential election,” explained Greenwald.
“For that reason, it’s easy to understand why many people in Washington were so desperate to conceal his identity, but that desperation had nothing to do with the lofty and noble concerns for national security they claimed were motivating them,” he added.
Deep operatives. Election interference. Moles and spies deployed against a candidate by our own government agencies.
It’s a chilling picture, but one that all of the evidence so far supports. There’s a power struggle of shadows within the swamp in Washington, and it is at odds with the American people and their sovereign voice.
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Net Neutrality is a Fancy Term for Internet Socialism
Don’t be fooled by the terminology. Net neutrality isn’t a tech term that will be hard for you to comprehend. You will get it in an instant, I promise. It’s the same old socialism, just rebranded to make it tech-trendy.
There’s nothing neutral about net neutrality. It simply means everyone pays more, for things they need and don’t need, all indiscriminately, like taxes. Net neutrality is just internet socialism.
People who originally fought for net neutrality were afraid of “unregulated capitalism.” Red flags all over the place.
Why else did you think Democrats wanted it so badly?
Senate Democrats just voted to keep their collectivist legacy. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren; all 49 of them voted in favor of keeping net neutrality regulations. Because providers can otherwise dangerously “discriminate” if people pay more or less. “Discriminate” means apportion services based on how much providers are paid. Pay more, get more is terrible discrimination, according to the Democrats.
Democrat thought process: How dare you ask for the right to pay for better service! How dare you ask to pay less to save some money and not subsidize your neighbor’s internet! Everyone pays the same and gets the same. Government tells you what you need and what you pay.
Democrats argued Wednesday that if we repeal the regulations, the internet as we know it will come to end. Net neutrality didn’t even exist until three years ago when the Democrats passed the rules through the Democrat-controlled FCC. Was anyone feeling that their internet opportunities were hindered before 2015? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Maybe if you couldn’t afford the internet. But you’re not entitled to internet. Just as with everything else, you need to earn your money and pay for it if it’s worth anything to you. Same as any other service.
Democrats disagree with me, they believe everyone is entitled to internet. They used key socialist terminology Wednesday when describing net neutrality: “public good.” That’s the socialist term for entitled.
The internet is not a commune. The internet is a marketplace. I like to keep my markets free, competitive, innovative and profitable. Socialism inhibits all of that.
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Sugar Subsidies Should Go—Consumers And Candy Manufacturers Would Benefit
U.S agriculture policy, especially the farm bill fiasco that comes up for renewal every five years, is loaded with pork-barrel spending and reminds us of the old Soviet-era “five-year plan.” From billions in subsidies and insurance premium payments for multimillionaire corporate farmers to providing food stamps to the able-bodied—even when they refuse to seek employment—the farm bill is a boondoggle only special interests and the politicians who benefit from their campaign donations could love.
No farm group spends more on lobbying to keep its sweet tooth satisfied than the sugar lobby. A relatively small group of sugar cane and sugar beet farmers and processors haul in an inordinate amount of support in nearly every farm bill, which guarantees them a price floor for their product, cheap loans, and tariffs that help keep competitors out of their market.
U.S. consumers and candy makers suffer because of this largesse. Justin Sykes of Americans for Tax Reform found the average wholesale price of domestically produced sugar in the United States is more than double the average price of sugar elsewhere in the world.
According to agriculture Census data, the hundreds of millions of dollars in support reaped by the sugar lobby support only about 4,500 sugar beet or cane farm jobs, plus an additional 18,000 jobs in the sugar processing industry. By comparison, there are 600,000 jobs in the food and baking sector, which are harmed by ill-conceived federal sugar policies. It is not surprising then Sykes found the U.S. Sugar Program led to a loss in U.S. manufacturing jobs.
According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, for every sugar-growing job saved by America’s artificially high sugar prices, approximately three in the confectionery industry are lost. Analyzing U.S. Census Bureau data, Alexandra Wexler wrote in 2013 in a Wall Street Journal article that “total U.S. confectionery manufacturing employment declined by 22 percent from 1998 through 2011,” in no small part due to high sugar prices. Chocolate and candy manufacturers moved their operations to Canada, Mexico, and elsewhere overseas in pursuit of cheaper sugar—a critical, if not primary, ingredient in their products.
A coalition of environmentalists, bakers, candy and food manufacturers, and free-market research centers formed The Alliance for Fair Sugar Policy to fight for an end to Big Sugar’s stranglehold on food policy. The Heartland Institute, where I work as a research fellow, is a proud member of the Alliance.
The Alliance notes the “sugar shakedown is baked into nearly every food, snack and treat, which results in zero benefit for the American consumer. The U.S. sugar program forces manufacturers to pay twice as much for sugar as the rest of the world, putting American small businesses at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to creating jobs. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the sugar program killed 123,000 jobs between 1997 and 2015. The American Enterprise Institute estimates that the program costs small businesses and consumers $2.4 – $4 billion a year.”
The U.S. Sugar Program represents crony capitalism at its worst. The program delivers unearned billions to a well-funded, politically connected industry, in the process punishing consumers, American manufacturers, and workers by imposing higher prices on consumers, diminishing competition in in the marketplace, and closing factories in the United States. It’s time to end sweetheart deals for domestic sugar farmers and processors and foreign candy manufacturers.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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21 May, 2018
'Animals': The Leftmedia's Latest BIG Lie
The mainstream media is exposed for spinning a narrative to paint Trump as a racist
This week we have yet another case study in the mainstream Leftmedia’s practice of dezinformatsiya in the era of #Resistance to Donald Trump. This was an irrefutable example of how intentionally quoting out of context can create an alternative narrative that is then presented as fact. In this case, the Demo/MSM propaganda machine went out of its way to bolster its narrative that Trump’s motivation for enforcing America’s immigration laws is his own racism.
The context the Leftmedia intentionally ignored: Trump was involved Wednesday in a roundtable discussion with law enforcement from across the country seeking to address the problems sanctuary cities pose for immigration enforcement. At one point, Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims thanked the president for recognizing and seeking to address the problem. But she also complained about the law: “There could be an MS-13 member I know about [but] if they don’t reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about it.”
Trump responded:
We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before. And because of the weak laws, they come in fast, we get them, we release them, we get them again, we bring them out. It’s crazy. The dumbest laws — as I said before, [we have] the dumbest laws on immigration in the world. So we’re going to take care of it, Margaret. We’ll get it done.
Cue the Leftmedia’s spin. Here are a few of the headlines:
The Washington Post: “Trump compares illegal immigrants to ‘animals’”
The New York Times: “Trump calls some unauthorized immigrants ‘animals’ in rant”
Huffington Post: “Trump refers to immigrants as ‘animals.’ Again.”
USA Today: “Trump ramps up rhetoric on undocumented immigrants: ‘These aren’t people. These are animals.’”
Vox: “Trump on deported immigrants: ‘They’re not people. They’re animals.’”
NPR: “During roundtable, Trump calls some unauthorized immigrants ‘animals’”
These constitute contemptible lies. Trump responded to the propaganda in his usual fashion, stating, “Fake News Media had me calling Immigrants, or Illegal Immigrants, ‘Animals.’ Wrong! … I referred to MS 13 Gang Members as ‘Animals,’ a big difference — and so true. Fake News got it purposely wrong, as usual!”
Not to be outdone by the Leftmedia, outlining the Senate memo to perpetuate the lie, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) declared, “When all of our great-great-grandparents came to America they weren’t ‘animals,’ and these people aren’t either.”
Over in the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), effectively equating all immigrants with MS-13 gang members, doubled down, saying, “When the president of the United States says about undocumented immigrants, ‘These aren’t people, these are animals,’ you have to wonder: Does he not believe in the spark of divinity, the dignity and worth of every person?”
Pelosi added, “We are all God’s children. There is a spark of divinity among every person on earth, and we all have to recognize that as we respect the dignity and worth of every person.”
She was not talking about the “spark of divinity, dignity and worth” of children in their mother’s womb, but of MS13 gang members Trump was, in context, referencing.
SOURCE
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Trump Uses Reagan Rule to Block Abortion Funding
Contrary to the Leftmedia narrative, this does not amount to "sweeping new abortion restrictions."
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan used Title X regulations to prevent organizations that receive federal dollars from promoting or referring for abortions, or from sharing physical space with abortion providers. After all, the 1970 law establishing Title X states: “None of the funds appropriated under this title shall be used in programs where abortion is a method of family planning.” Nevertheless, abortion proponents sued. Though the Supreme Court ruled in Reagan’s favor, the policy never actually went into effect because neither President Bush followed his lead, and, naturally, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama opposed it. President Donald Trump, however, plans to resurrect that rule in an announcement today. Stand by for Planned Parenthood to sue in three, two, one…
Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion mill, kills more than 300,000 unborn babies every year, and it receives $500 million in taxpayer funding to do so. Of course, the organization insists that it’s complying with federal law preventing taxpayer dollars from being used directly for abortions. As Yuval Levin explained in 2015, “Planned Parenthood gets around the legal prohibition by formally separating its abortion clinics and its other family planning services, even when those are located in the same facility and essentially funded jointly.”
But let’s be honest — abortions are what Planned Parenthood does. Other health services are a mere fig leaf designed to obscure that fact. Pouring water in the shallow end of the pool is the same as pouring it in the deep end.
Given that Republicans in unified control of Washington have failed to defund Planned Parenthood as promised, Trump’s move is a welcome one. But does it go far enough?
Well, the rule only affects $260 million in federal funding for contraception and other “family planning” services, of which Planned Parenthood receives part. The bulk of Planned Parenthood’s federal funding comes from Medicaid, and only legislation can stop it.
Furthermore, “This proposal does not necessarily defund Planned Parenthood, as long as they’re willing to disentangle taxpayer funds from abortion as a method of family planning, which is required by the Title X law,” said an administration official. “Any grantees that perform, support, or refer for abortion have a choice — disentangle themselves from abortion or fund their activities with privately raised funds.” Planned Parenthood has no shortage of private funds, either.
In other words, it seems that semantics and accounting gimmicks may still suffice, and, contrary to the Leftmedia narrative, this does not amount to “sweeping new abortion restrictions.” Even so, Trump has yet again acted where congressional Republicans (and two previous GOP presidents) failed. Let’s hope it leads to further action to stop funding mass slaughter.
By the way, on Wednesday, former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards was presented with the Hubert H. Humphrey Civil and Human Rights Award by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Just a reminder that she oversaw the demise of 3.5 million babies in her 12-year tenure.
SOURCE
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Israel Deploys ‘Shoko Drones’ to Drop Skunk Water on Gaza Rioters
In response to criticism of its use of deadly weapon fire against Gaza rioters, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will begin dropping skunk water on violent protesters, Israel’s Defense Ministry announced Wednesday.
Newly-developed Shoko drones will drop bags (“shoko”) of skunk water onto the rioting crowds to disperse them by non-violent means, The Jerusalem Post reports:
“Israel has developed a new tool to assist in non-violent riot dispersal: The Shoko Drone, which will drop skunk water onto crowds, according to a Defense Ministry statement on Wednesday.” ...
“The IDF has been criticized by the international community for its use of live fire against protestors who approached or attempted to breach or damage the security fence. As such, Israel has upped its efforts to develop non-violent crowd control and dispersal techniques.”
More than one hundred rioters had been either been killed or injured on the Israel-Gaza border during the previous six weeks.
SOURCE
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China agrees to import more from US, no sign of $200b figure
China has agreed to significantly increase its purchases of US goods and services, the two countries said on Saturday, but made no mention of a US$200 billion ($266 billion) target the White House had touted earlier.
Beijing and Washington agreed they would keep talking about measures under which China would import more energy and agricultural commodities from the United States to close the $473 billion annual US goods and services trade deficit with China.
A joint statement issued at the conclusion of intensive trade talks in Washington did not indicate whether the two countries would delay or drop their tariff threats on billions of dollars worth of each country's goods, which has sparked fears of a wider trade war and roiled financial markets.
US stocks fluctuated, the dollar rose and Treasury yields retreated as investors assessed conflicting signals on trade talks between the world’s two largest economies.
US stocks fluctuated, the dollar rose and Treasury yields retreated as investors assessed conflicting signals on trade talks between the world’s two largest economies.
"To meet the growing consumption needs of the Chinese people and the need for high-quality economic development, China will significantly increase purchases of United States goods and services."
US President Donald Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on up to $200 billion on Chinese goods to combat what his administration says is Beijing's misappropriation of US intellectual property through joint venture requirements and other policies that force technology transfers.
Beijing denies such coercion and has threatened equal retaliation, including tariffs on some of its largest US imports - among them aircraft, soybeans and autos.
A report by China's state-run Xinhua news agency described the statement from the two governments as "vowing not to launch a trade war against each other".
While the statement said the two sides would engage at high levels and "seek to resolve their economic and trade concerns in a proactive manner," it made no mention of tariffs. It said there was consensus between Washington and Beijing on the need to create "favourable conditions to increase trade" in manufactured goods and services. This could be a reference to China's previous pledges to open up more economic sectors to services.
The United States will also send a team to China to work out the details of increased agricultural and energy exports, the countries said, without specifying timing.
A senior US official said that during discussions with a member of President Xi Jinping's office, China was considering a package that relied on major purchases of US liquefied natural gas, including a contract for a US firm to build LNG receiving and processing facilities in China.
The package, which also would include new commitments on intellectual property protections, could be agreed by a potential mid-year visit to Washington by China's Vice-President Wang Qishan, the official said.
Trump made cutting the US trade deficit with China a promise in his presidential campaign.
SOURCE
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Media Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian Clash Is Built on a Myth
No matter how often Hamas tells us that rioters on the Israel-Gaza border are armed, the media keeps referring to them as “protesters” and “demonstrators.” No matter how often Hamas concedes that those rioters are part of a broader “war,” the media simply won’t report it as such. And even though rioters assure reporters they have a desire to kill and burn Jews, left-wing journalists and pundits continue to frame Israel as the aggressor.
This week, a senior Hamas official bragged that 50 of the nearly 60 people killed by the Israeli Defense Forces at the Israel-Gaza border were members of Hamas. Israel has identified around 24 of those killed during the riots as Hamas members — 10 of them reportedly members of the internal security apparatus. All of this is an amazing coincidence considering how the clashes have been portraying as a massacre of innocent civilians and children.
Hamas, of course, has no problem boasting about these deaths, but it’s the goal. If you’re going to embed armed terrorists in a ginned-up mob that has been propagandized, paid, coerced and then sent toward military installations and civilian centers across the border, you are counting on causalities. Because martyrdom is the point.
Instead of taking them at their word, Hamas apologists continue arguing that Gaza is an open-air prison. This is only true if you consider people who lock themselves up as prisoners. The controlling government, which took power through a violent coup against “moderates” after the Israelis gave Gaza autonomy, won’t accept any international laws or any set of rules that would allow peaceful interaction with its neighbors. Hamas runs a proto-terror state. And Iran, a fully formed terror state, has continued to send arms to the military wing of Hamas.
Now, it’s true that this entity isn’t nearly as powerful or as advanced as its neighbors, economically or morally. But al-Qaida and ISIS and the Taliban are not as sophisticated as the United States. No one would frame those groups as victims. The idea that Israel, and Israel alone, should afford its enemies free reign over an adjacent territory does not comport with the practices or ideals of any other free nation in the world.
And although it’s rarely mentioned, Egypt has also had the border it shares with the Palestinians closed for the better part of a decade, not only because Hamas is funded by its enemy Iran but also because Hamas is aligned with numerous other groups that embrace violent theocratic methods to further its cause.
And despite what you may have heard, the United States embassy being moved to the western part of Jerusalem is not the cause of the unrest. Hamas itself didn’t recognize the American embassy in Tel Aviv, or anywhere else. It doesn’t recognize Israeli sovereignty over any territory. It is not alone. The precursor to Fatah, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, was formed before the 1967 unification of the Jewish capital. Since then there has not been a single Palestinian leader who has conceded that Israel should have sovereignty over any part of Jerusalem.
Then again, Palestinians have never defaulted to moderation on the status of Jerusalem or anything else. Their far-flung fantasies regarding the right to return (hitched to the historical myth of Nakba) consume them. This is what stands in the way of an agreement. Fatah, the moderate Holocaust-denying wing of Palestinian governance, still runs a martyr fund that pays cash stipends to the families of those killed or imprisoned for carrying out terrorist attacks against Jews. Thanks to the help of international aid, it has been able to make those payments increasingly generous.
Now imagine what the extremist wing of that movement looks like. These riots are not driven by economic destitution but rather the frustration of Hamas, whose attempts at suicide bombing have been thwarted and whose attempts to fire missiles into Israel have been stymied by the Iron Dome defense system. If this were about food and shelter, the Palestinian rioters would be headed to the government building in Gaza City rather than turning away Israeli trucks bringing them humanitarian aid. At this point, everyone knows that Israel has repeatedly shown a willingness to make peace with anyone who desires it.
The fact that those of Hamas are willing to sacrifice their lives (and the lives of their citizens) doesn’t suggest they aren’t the instigators or the guilty party. There’s an obsession in the media with the disproportionate number of Palestinians who die in these conflicts. Some can’t escape the hackneyed oppressor-oppressed news template. Others allow their obsession with Donald Trump to cloud their view of the situation — not to mention their morality. The fact is that if Hamas were to drop its claim on Israel proper and stop using every opening provided to instigate violence, not a single Palestinian would ever have to die in this war.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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20 May, 2018
Putin has the last laugh
Vladimir Putin has taunted Britain after Sergei Skripal's release from hospital - suggesting the Russian spy would have 'died on the spot' if he had been attacked with a military-grade toxin.
Mr Skripal is being protected by 24-hour armed guard at an MI5 safe house after leaving hospital earlier this week, sources have revealed.
The 66-year-old, and his daughter Yulia, 33, were admitted to Salisbury District Hospital along with Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey after being exposed to the nerve agent in March.
Britain has accused Russia of being behind the poisoning, saying it was caused by a type of nerve agent known as Novichok which was developed in the Soviet Union.
Putin wished Skripal 'good health' during a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel today. But he added: 'God grant him good health... If a military-grade poison had been used, the man would have died on the spot. Thank God he recovered and that he left (hospital).'
Putin then accused Britain of failing to respond to the Kremlin's offer of help with the investigation. 'We have several times offered our British partners any necessary assistance in the investigation (of the poisoning). So far we have received no response. Our offer remains open,' he said.
Mr Skripal, who nearly died after being exposed to the deadly nerve agent novichok, was discharged earlier this week and was whisked to an undisclosed location.
His daughter Yulia, who was also poisoned and left gravely ill, left hospital last month.
Today, Russia's ambassador to the UK stepped up demands to be allowed to see the pair, suggesting they may be being detained by the British state.
Alexander Yakovenko said the pair were 'isolated', adding: 'You can call it kidnap.'
He welcomed the announcement that former spy Mr Skripal had been discharged from hospital. But Mr Yakovenko has claimed the UK is violating international law by not granting access to the Skripals.
The 1963 Vienna Convention gives consular officials access rights if one of their nationals is in prison, custody or detention.
SOURCE
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School Shooter Found Carrying Communist Symbol
Details about the alleged perpetrator of Friday’s school shooting are beginning to emerge, and they seem to dismantle leftist narratives about gun violence.
At least nine people were killed during an attack at Santa Fe High School in Texas. Authorities have confirmed that part of the criminal’s plot involved makeshift bombs most likely constructed from pressure cookers, and at least one armed police officer engaged the shooter at the school.
That suspected criminal has now been taken into custody and revealed as a 17-year-old student. As journalists poured over the alleged shooter’s social media accounts, they found something chilling.
It appears that the shooter proudly wore a piece of pro-Communist propaganda on his clothing as he carried out the attack.
Photos and descriptions from the accused criminal’s Facebook page show an unmistakable Soviet “hammer and sickle” pin placed prominently on the lapel of his jacket — the same jacket that witnesses said he wore during the rampage.
The “hammer and sickle” is the exact same symbol used by many far-left anti-Trump activists, including “Antifa.”
Metro UK newspaper published screenshots of the suspect’s account and showed a red Socialist star with the hammer and sickle. The student’s own description confirmed what the pin meant. “Duster Hammer and Sickle = Rebellion,” he wrote.
The star pin appeared to be identical or similar to items available from MarxistBooks.com and other pro-socialist propaganda outlets.
More recently, the symbol has become the de facto icon of radical anti-Trump protesters. There are numerous examples of liberal protesters waving the hammer and sickle flag or using the iconography on banners protesting the president and conservatism.
It appears that wearing the trench coat with its pro-socialist propaganda was common for the alleged shooter.
“Dustin Severin, a 17-year-old student, told local NBC affiliate KPRC that he saw (the shooter) in the hallway shortly before the bullets started flying — and that he was wearing his usual outfit,” reported NBC.
“He wears a trench coat every day, and it’s like 90 degrees out here,” the witness said.
The jacket also had other pins, including a rising sun that symbolizes “kamikaze tactics,” and Baphomet, an idol of the Occult that is associated with evil.
More details about the shooter and this horrible crime will emerge over the coming days. What is already clear, however, is that this was a disturbed person bent on carrying out harm … and the liberal media’s narratives about conservatives being to blame for these crimes just does not hold water.
SOURCE
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My Country or My Tribe?
The real divide in America? The Right believes the Left is wrong. The Left believes the Right is evil.
“Tribalism, it’s always worth remembering, is not one aspect of human experience. It’s the default human experience.” —columnist Andrew Sullivan in 2017
If one were to believe much of the Leftmedia’s take, America was a reasonable nation until Donald Trump was elected. Yet the tribalism we now call identity politics has been nurtured for decades, engendered by the change from one simple idea to another: a nation once urged to embrace assimilation in all its “melting pot” permutations became one where “celebrating our differences” was deemed the more enlightened approach.
It was a total fraud.
One that is reaching epic proportions. Did we really have a presidential candidate willing to completely dismiss millions of Americans as “deplorables” simply because they disagreed with her political philosophy, and/or disliked her personally? How do Hillary Clinton, her media allies and her legions of supporters account for the fact that many of those same deplorables voted for Barack Obama?
“Trump ran and won as, among other things, a white racial demagogue who mocked and insulted minorities on his way to the White House; while the left, as it has grown more diverse, has become accustomed to periodic spasms of hostility and mutual recrimination among its various minority groups and their white allies,” asserts columnist Paul MacDougald.
Really? A majority of Trump voters embrace racial demagoguery? And the Left’s understanding of diversity consists of sub-tribes jockeying for primacy, largely based on which one can elicit the most guilt from all the others?
Such clichéd cynicism, and the unending torrent of political correctness needed to sustain it, was as much a driver of Trump’s victory as anything else. And adding to leftist despair is the reality that Trump’s coarseness — seen as the antidote to political correctness — was not a bug but a feature of his success.
The real divide in America? The Right believes the Left is wrong. The Left believes the Right is evil.
Thus, leftists believe it is their sacred duty to impose their beliefs on the nation whether it wants them or not. And because of that sacredness, executive orders, court decisions, bureaucratic fiats and everything else that can be used to thwart the constitutional order is perfectly acceptable — when leftists do it.
Thus, a Supreme Court that usurps states’ rights and changes the 5,000-year-old definition of marriage is to be applauded. The same Court upholding an individual’s right to keep and bear arms? A travesty of justice. Barack Obama implementing DACA by executive order? Enlightened. Donald Trump demanding Congress decide the issue? Anti-immigrant bigotry.
Nor is the divide simply about differing worldviews. Many progressives themselves once had traditional beliefs regarding subjects like marriage and gender. But since they’ve “evolved,” every American must follow suit — within a progressive-defined timeline. Those who don’t? As contemptible as those who resist completely.
Imposing arbitrary timelines on societal change, no matter how worthy, virtually guarantees a tribalist response. Nonetheless, the Left remains obsessed with pushing the envelope. “Is Your Script Gender-Balanced? Try This Test” states a New York Times headline. It speaks to Hollywood screenwriter Christina Hodson’s development of gender analysis software that keeps track of how many characters are male and female, how many lines are spoken by each character, and eventually, “other issues of representation, like race and ethnicity,” as the Times puts it. “It’s a tool for people to self-police and look at unconscious bias in their own work,” Hodson insists.
More like a tool to make story-telling indistinguishable from progressive virtue-signaling.
If such tribalist-inspired nonsense were limited to Hollywood scriptwriting, it would be amusing. Yet as columnist Heather MacDonald reveals, the identity politics imposed on social science and humanities courses at America’s colleges is bleeding over into the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), now seen as insufficiently “diverse.”
How does one engender sufficient levels of diversity? By eliminating meritocracy. “Medical school administrators urge admissions committees to overlook the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scores of black and Hispanic student applicants and employ ‘holistic review’ in order to engineer a diverse class,” MacDonald explains.
Will Americans countenance a nation where ideological imperatives for a movie script become indistinguishable from those for an operating room?
“When civil rights shifted from punishing mandatory segregation to punishing the lack of integration, it ceased to be a movement pursuing freedom and instead became a totalitarian movement,” asserts columnist Daniel Greenfield.
That totalitarian movement has pushed millions of well-meaning Americans into tribalist enclaves, where safety becomes more important than freedom of expression. And that retreat is often justified by what many Americans perceive is a double-standard with regard to accountability. Did the Trump campaign collude with the Russians, or is a Ruling Class long used to getting its way seeking to nullify the 2016 election? Are we an exceptional nation built on an unprecedented understanding of human rights and the limits of government power, or one built on the “genocide of native people and slavery,” where the “cradle of democracy is "bulls—t,” as filmmaker Spike Lee asserts? In America today, one’s answers to such questions are more often than not determined by one’s tribal allegiance.
As Sullivan reminds us, tribalism is not necessarily a bad thing. There is nothing wrong with “unconditional pride, in our neighborhood and community; in our ethnic and social identities and their rituals; among our fellow enthusiasts,” he writes. By contrast, he warns, when it calcifies and “rivals our attachment to the nation as a whole” and “turns rival tribes into enemies” it ultimately destabilizes the nation.
Of course, Sullivan blames both sides for the divisiveness but holds the Right more accountable — or so he thinks. “One of the great attractions of tribalism is that you don’t actually have to think very much,” he asserts.
The American Right can be blamed for a great many things with regard to tribalism. But dumbing-down public schools and colleges that routinely turn out legions of weak-thinking but well-indoctrinated social justice warriors isn’t one of them.
Is there a truce to be had? Oddly enough, the most recent Supreme Court decision striking down a federal law prohibiting sports betting epitomizes the “live and let live” federalism the Founding Fathers were prescient enough to make an integral part of governing documents. Yet federalism is only part of the equation. “Nurturing your difference or dissent from your own group is difficult; appreciating the individuality of those in other tribes is even harder,” Sullivan explains.
Individual thinking would undoubtedly be fatal for tribalism. But if the Left’s reaction to Kanye West is any indication, tribalism in America will last as long as leftists view a heckler’s veto as a reasonable substitute for debate.
It’s not. Not by a long shot.
SOURCE
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Wasserman Schultz Calls Five Million Americans 'Terrorists'
"The NRA is kind of just shy of a terrorist organization," declared Debbie Wasserman Schultz. "They have done everything they can to perpetuate the culture of violence that we have in our country with the spread of assault weapons across the nation." She was responding to Oliver North, the NRA's new president, who said recently of gun-controllers, "They call them activists. That's what they're calling themselves. They're not activists — this is civil terrorism." He accused them of "intimidation and harassment and lawbreaking."
North has a point, especially in light of the recent hate-filled boycott campaign against the NRA and the ignorant political pawns marching against our constitutional rights.
But we want to rebut Wasserman Schultz's gross slander more specifically. The nearly 150-year-old NRA is made up of roughly five million Americans who love our Constitution and stand in particular for the Second Amendment — the right that secures all the others. Those Americans commit crimes at a far lower rate than the general population. In fact, as a subset, concealed-carry permit holders are more law-abiding than the police. No NRA member has ever perpetrated a mass murder, though an NRA instructor did stop the one in Texas last year. When the annual NRA convention comes to any city, that city's crime rate drops. The NRA spends millions instructing Americans of all ages how to responsibly handle firearms, both for recreational purpose and self-defense. That reduces crime.
By contrast, most crime in America — and particularly gun crime — is committed on urban poverty plantations that Democrats have run for decades. That crime is not committed with what Democrats have misnamed "assault weapons," either, but by illegally owned handguns often wielded by drug dealers and gangs. Democrats perpetuate the culture of death through their rabid support of abortion. When political violence is committed, it's usually against Republicans. And as for actual terrorists, well, Democrat Barack Obama funded it with billions of dollars.
"It's kind of like a spoiled child stamping their feet on the ground, insisting that something right in front of their face isn't true," Wasserman Schultz said. Yes. Yes it is. But it's worse than that. Her hateful slander of law-abiding Americans is utterly contemptible.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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18 May, 2018
European Officials Bribed Into Accepting Iran Nuke Deal?
After President Donald Trump's decision last Tuesday to pull out of Barack Obama's dubious Iran nuclear deal, which was followed by threats to reimpose economic sanctions against the number-one state sponsor of terrorism, Iran's foreign affairs minister issued his own threat via a bombshell revelation. H.J. Ansari Zarif stated, "If Europeans stop trading with Iran and don't put pressure on the U.S. then we will reveal which western politicians and how much money they had received during nuclear negotiations to make #IranDeal happen."
Now, the Iranians aren't exactly the most trustworthy bunch. That's a huge part of the problem with the deal. But Zarif's charge that several European leaders were essentially bribed into accepting the Iran deal is entirely plausible.
Recall that after Obama completed the Iran deal back in 2015, Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer wondered, "The most astonishing thing [about the deal] is that in return, they [the Iranians] are not closing a single nuclear facility. Their entire nuclear infrastructure is intact. They are going to have the entire infrastructure in place either for a breakout after the agreement expires or when they have enough sanctions relief and they want to cheat and to break out on their own."
Krauthammer's observation was accurate. So what exactly did the rest of the world get from the Iran deal? Why did so many of Europe's leaders sign on to such a bad deal? The answer is twofold: As far as reining in a rogue regime's efforts to gain nuclear weapons, the West got nothing; as for opportunities for lucrative business deals, that was most definitely in the cards, as Zarif may have just alluded to. And this revelation might also explain why European leaders are scrambling to salvage the deal. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire argued, "Do we want to be vassals who obey decisions taken by the United States while clinging to the hem of their trousers? Or do we want to say we have our economic interests, [and that] we will continue to do trade with Iran?"
Memo to Le Maire: U.S. GDP ranks first in the world and accounts for 23% of the world's GDP. Iran is 29th, accounting for less than 0.5%. What was that about economic interests again?
SOURCE
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What Trump is quietly (and effectively) doing to fix our broken health care system
Since ObamaCare’s passage and failed implementation, patient premiums and out of pocket expenses have gone way up, not down as promised. Consumers now have less options in terms of policies and benefits to choose from, not more as they were told. Countless patients can no longer see their doctors or be treated at local facilities of their choice.
On the campaign trail, candidate Donald Trump said he would work with a Republican Congress to repeal ObamaCare so that patients and doctors, rather than bureaucrats and unelected boards, would have more control over individuals’ health care decisions. He also vowed to roll back government obstacles to bring new medicines to market faster, speed generic drug approvals, and address the high costs of insurance premiums and prescription drugs, all to reduce unsustainable health care costs.
Detractors of President Trump like to highlight that ObamaCare is still in existence, despite Republicans controlling both houses of congress. But President Trump has quietly gained the upper hand on several crucial health care reforms including the repeal of Obama cares individual mandate, the laws core, in last years tax bill. Another victory is the repeal of ObamaCare's independent payment advisory board, aka the ObamaCare death panel. Naturally the media gives him no credit for these achievements.
The changes that are already underway spurring greater competition which will help further drive down costs without sacrificing new medical innovations, or bringing new treatments to market. Several of the most significant reforms have come from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the agencies housed within it, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
HHS Secretary Alex Azar is a seasoned veteran who brings experience as a health care reformer in the federal government and as an innovating private sector executive. Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, an FDA alum, is reforming the regulatory system to expedite reviews and ignite greater competition. Over the past decade, competition from generic drugs has saved the U.S. health care system $1.67 trillion. Expect much more. Gottlieb is working to eliminate regulatory barriers that stand in the way of bringing more of these drugs to market.
He’s prioritized FDA reviews for the first three generic alternatives to any original brand name drug, and these efforts are having an impact. In fact, the FDA approved more than 100 generic drugs in the month of October 2017 – more than ever before. And in July, the FDA will host a pioneering program focused on “Patient Focused Drug Development” that elevates patient perspectives and priorities in both the development of new treatments and their evaluation by regulators.
Much attention of late has been made about patients who have picked up prescriptions at the pharmacy counter only to find the costs under their insurance plan are sky high -and rising even higher. That’s because Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) – middlemen that negotiate discounts and rebates from drug manufacturers – and health plans don’t always pass along those savings, sometimes up to 50 percent, to patients. This unfairly inflates drug costs, including those of senior Medicare beneficiaries. CMS Administrator Seema Verma is working to address this through a new proposed Medicare rule, which will ensure patients benefit directly from these substantial discounts. And it’s a change that could yield more than $10 billion in savings for seniors.
Similarly, Verma has proposed reforms to Medicare’s 340B Program that would save patients hundreds of millions of dollars on drug copayments in 2018 alone. The 340B program was originally intended to help low income patients pay for medicines through large discounts provided by drug manufacturers to 340B designated hospitals. The program was expanded significantly as part of ObamaCare. Alas, the 340B program has subsequently been widely abused by hospitals who have turned the discounts into profit centers instead of passing savings on to patients. For context, a recent House Energy and Commerce Committee report calculated that the number of hospitals participating in the 340B program has more than quadrupled from 591 in 2005 to 2,479 in 2017. Furthermore, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the financial gains for hospitals from the 340B program didn’t lead to expanded care or lower mortality for low- income patients.
Despite representing less than 14 percent of total health care spending, drug costs now have more visible public price tags in the wake of ObamaCare. This largely is because health insurers, even after dramatically spiking premiums, have also vastly increased deductibles, co-pays and other out -of -pocket expenses. Add to this, the misguided practice of insurers and PBMs not passing along negotiated savings from manufacturers to patients, and it is evident that the “system” created under ObamaCare has effectively shifted much of the cost burden directly on to patients in visible, invisible and painful ways. That said, as President Trump noted in his State of the Union address, the cost of drugs remains too high.
Reforms that help to lower drug costs without stifling medical innovation and investment is a critical goal, but one that can only be achieved through an approach that examines the entire “system.” This includes biopharmaceutical manufacturers, health insurers, PBMs, trial lawyers and patent trolls, regulators and our foreign trading partners. Price controls such as those that are routine in Europe would suffocate the development of life-saving, life- improving medicines and medical devices. This is what has happened overseas.
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Is it rational to trust your gut feelings? A neuroscientist explains
My survey of the academic literature relevant to stereotyping (See here and here) reached a similar conclusion. The brain is continually monitoring and integrating new information and changing its responses accordingly -- not necessarily at the conscious level
Imagine the director of a big company announcing an important decision and justifying it with it being based on a gut feeling. This would be met with disbelief – surely important decisions have to be thought over carefully, deliberately and rationally?
Indeed, relying on your intuition generally has a bad reputation, especially in the Western part of the world where analytic thinking has been steadily promoted over the past decades. Gradually, many have come to think that humans have progressed from relying on primitive, magical and religious thinking to analytic and scientific thinking. As a result, they view emotions and intuition as fallible, even whimsical, tools.
However, this attitude is based on a myth of cognitive progress. Emotions are actually not dumb responses that always need to be ignored or even corrected by rational faculties. They are appraisals of what you have just experienced or thought of – in this sense, they are also a form of information processing.
Intuition or gut feelings are also the result of a lot of processing that happens in the brain. Research suggests that the brain is a large predictive machine, constantly comparing incoming sensory information and current experiences against stored knowledge and memories of previous experiences, and predicting what will come next. This is described in what scientists call the “predictive processing framework”.
This ensures that the brain is always as prepared to deal with the current situation as optimally as possible. When a mismatch occurs (something that wasn’t predicted), your brain updates its cognitive models.
This matching between prior models (based on past experience) and current experience happens automatically and subconsciously. Intuitions occur when your brain has made a significant match or mismatch (between the cognitive model and current experience), but this has not yet reached your conscious awareness.
For example, you may be driving on a country road in the dark listening to some music, when suddenly you have an intuition to drive more to one side of the lane. As you continue driving, you notice that you have only just missed a massive pothole that could have significantly damaged your car. You are glad you relied on your gut feeling even if you don’t know where it came from. In reality, the car in the far distance in front of you made a similar small swerve (since they are locals and know the road), and you picked up on this without consciously registering it.
When you have a lot of experience in a certain area, the brain has more information to match the current experience against. This makes your intuitions more reliable. This means that, as with creativity, your intuition can actually improve with experience.
Biased understanding
In the psychological literature, intuition is often explained as one of two general modes of thinking, along with analytic reasoning. Intuitive thinking is described as automatic, fast, and subconscious. Analytic thinking, on the other hand, is slow, logical, conscious and deliberate.
Many take the division between analytic and intuitive thinking to mean that the two types of processing (or “thinking styles”) are opposites, working in a see-saw manner. However, a recent meta-analysis – an investigation where the impact of a group of studies is measured – has shown that analytic and intuitive thinking are typically not correlated and could happen at the same time.
So while it is true that one style of thinking likely feels dominant over the other in any situation – in particular analytic thinking – the subconscious nature of intuitive thinking makes it hard to determine exactly when it occurs, since so much happens under the bonnet of our awareness.
Indeed, the two thinking styles are in fact complementary and can work in concert – we regularly employ them together. Even groundbreaking scientific research may start with intuitive knowledge that enables scientists to formulate innovative ideas and hypotheses, which later can be validated through rigorous testing and analysis.
What’s more, while intuition is seen as sloppy and inaccurate, analytic thinking can be detrimental as well. Studies have shown that overthinking can seriously hinder our decision-making process.
In other cases, analytic thinking may simply consist of post-hoc justifications or rationalisations of decisions based on intuitive thinking. This occurs for example when we have to explain our decisions in moral dilemmas. This effect has let some people refer to analytic thinking as the “press secretary” or “inner lawyer” of intuition. Oftentimes we don’t know why we make decisions, but we still want to have reasons for our decisions.
Trusting instincts
So should we just rely on our intuition, given that it aids our decision-making? It’s complicated. Because intuition relies on evolutionarily older, automatic and fast processing, it also falls prey to misguidances, such as cognitive biases. These are systematic errors in thinking, that can automatically occur. Despite this, familiarising yourself with common cognitive biases can help you spot them in future occasions: there are good tips about how to do that here and here.
Similarly, since fast processing is ancient, it can sometimes be a little out of date. Consider for example a plate of donuts. While you may be attracted to eat them all, it is unlikely that you need this large an amount of sugars and fats. However, in the hunter-gatherers’ time, stocking up on energy would have been a wise instinct.
Thus, for every situation that involves a decision based on your assessment, consider whether your intuition has correctly assessed the situation. Is it an evolutionary old or new situation? Does it involve cognitive biases? Do you have experience or expertise in this type of situation? If it is evolutionary old, involves a cognitive bias, and you don’t have expertise in it, then rely on analytic thinking. If not, feel free to trust your intuitive thinking.
It is time to stop the witch hunt on intuition, and see it for what it is: a fast, automatic, subconscious processing style that can provide us with very useful information that deliberate analysing can’t. We need to accept that intuitive and analytic thinking should occur together, and be weighed up against each other in difficult decision-making situations.
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Jobless in Seattle
Here's irony for you: Seattle is penalizing the companies most responsible for employing people while rewarding the city officials most responsible for creating a crisis of homelessness. What do we mean? We're referring to Seattle's new "head tax" of $275 per full-time employee for companies earning at least $20 million in annual revenue. Nearly 600 employers will be hit by the tax, which was dialed back from the initially proposed $500 per job. It was unanimously passed by the Democrat-run city council this week with the ostensible aim of raising nearly $50 million per year to pay for affordable housing and other "homeless services" — services needed because Democrat policies cause poverty. Seattle and King County, "home" to the third-highest number of homeless people in America, already spent $200 million on the problem last year.
The resurrected and greatly expanded tax is significant for two reasons: First, and most important, it serves as a Democrat model for other cities. Democrats always aim to punish the successful so they can redistribute to their favored constituency groups in return for votes and, thus, power.
Second, Seattle is home to both Starbucks and Amazon, two of the nation's largest employers, both of which oppose the tax. Now, don't get us wrong, we have little sympathy for either company. Starbucks has been at the forefront of leftist social justice battles, albeit recently getting a taste of its own medicine. And Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is the world's richest man and a stalwart financier of leftist causes, not least of which is owning The Washington Post. Amazon recently justified some anti-conservative discrimination based on the work of the radical leftist hate group known as the Southern Poverty Law Center.
But Amazon Vice President Drew Herdener sounded downright conservative in denouncing this "tax on jobs." He hammered the city, saying, "City of Seattle revenues have grown dramatically from $2.8 billion in 2010 to $4.2 billion in 2017, and they will be even higher in 2018. This revenue increase far outpaces the Seattle population increase over the same time period. The city does not have a revenue problem — it has a spending efficiency problem. We are highly uncertain whether the city council's anti-business positions or its spending inefficiency will change for the better." Indeed, Amazon is looking to expand elsewhere.
A letter signed by more than 100 Seattle business leaders likewise nailed it: "We oppose this approach, because of the message it sends to every business: if you are investing in growth, if you create too many jobs in Seattle, you will be punished." Companies won't hire more workers, and they've stop shy of earning $20 million.
As Fox News dryly notes, "Seattle once had a $25-a-year per head tax, but killed it in 2009 because leaders said it sent the wrong message to businesses during the recession."
Back to homelessness, again, Seattle's city council helped create the problem. Investor's Business Daily reports, "From 2010 to 2013, the city saw an explosion in the construction of 'congregate housing units' — basically, affordable, dorm-room size apartments with shared kitchen and living areas. Within those three years, private developers constructed 1,800 units. But by 2015, not one was built. Why? In 2014, the city stepped in and smothered this option with regulations that required the apartments to be bigger, banned them from more desirable areas, and forced builders to jump through costly design reviews." Voila, housing shortage.
And that's on top of Seattle's job- and pay-crushing $15/hour minimum wage, its income-redistributing tax on high-earners (that was struck down as illegal), its tax on property owners to pay for political speech, its soda tax and its gun tax, just to name a few.
It sure seems Seattle's Democrat overlords are doing everything possible to follow in the footsteps of the socialists killing Venezuela.
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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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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17 May, 2018
Who are the Mass. voters supporting Scott Lively?
The 2018 Massachusetts gubernatorial election will take place on November 6, 2018. The primary is scheduled for September 4, 2018. Incumbent RINO Governor Charlie Baker is running for re-election to a second term in office. He is very popular in Mass. so will win the Republican primary and subsequently the governorship. He has a real Republican challenger in the primary, Scott Lively, who has no hope of winning so some people are wondering why he is standing. A report from the Leftist Boston Globe below
The Globe treats as ludicrous Lively's claims about the homosexual element in Nazism but it is well documented here
In addition to such well-known homosexuals as Roehm and Schirach at the top of the Nazi hierarchy there were others such as Heines -- whom Shirer ("The Rise and fall of the Third Reich") describes thus: "Edmund Heines, the Obergruppenfuehrer of Silesia... a notorious homosexual" (p. 307). Silesia is of course a major industrial area of great historic significance so command of the Nazis there was no mean post. Could a "notorious homosexual" get a prominent party job anywhere else in the world at that time? I think not. So Nazism did in its times embody an exceptional degree of "gay lib". Arguably it was in fact the first flowering of "gay-lib"
Roehm (L) and Heines (R)
DEMOCRATS WANT BIG WINS in the November midterm elections. But in primaries last week in Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina, and West Virginia, not a single Republican critic of President Trump survived. In Massachusetts, nearly 28 percent of delegates to the state GOP convention last month voted for Scott Lively over Charlie Baker, the most popular governor in the country.
Lively has claimed that gays controlled the Third Reich. He also calls himself “100 percent pro-life,” “100 percent Second Amendment,” and “100 percent pro-Trump.”
Who are these Lively voters? Activists who want to send Baker a message to move to the right? Anti-gay bigots? Or mega-fans of Donald Trump, whose own extremes freed them up to support the ultra-extreme Lively?
It’s Trump, says Todd Domke, a long-time Republican analyst who resigned from the GOP after Trump’s election. The GOP base here is more conservative and populist than most realize, he says, and a president’s appeal is huge. Domke sites Ray Shamie’s stunning win over Watergate star and former Attorney General Elliot Richardson in the state’s GOP primary in 1984. Shamie wrapped himself around the swaggering Ronald Reagan. Richardson? Not so much.
The convention vote to put anti-gay crusader Scott Lively on the primary ballot is a self-inflicted black eye for the state’s Republicans.
Now we’re talking supper-swaggering Trump, a TV star billionaire with a cult-like appeal who drives liberal elites bananas. At a Belchertown Flag Day celebration last year, Lively supporter Chris Pinto of Massachusetts Gun Rights gave a speech detailing most every nasty remark made by such elites about Trump. Among them: Madonna, Robert DeNiro, Mickey Rourke, Stephen Colbert, Kathy Griffin, Snoop Dogg, YG, and Everlast.
Richard Howell, another Lively supporter, says that zeal for Trump turned into zeal for Lively, who’s wrapped himself around Trump completely. [Mass. governor] Baker, meanwhile, has kept his distance. He even blanked the 2016 presidential ballot, voting for neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton.
But it’s not just where Trump “stands on the issues,” says Howell. “It’s performance. Trump is not going to be threatened or intimidated.” And neither, he says, is Lively.
What about those Trump issues? The Iran deal? The Mueller investigation? Michael Cohen and his links to the Russian mob? All those women who’ve accused Trump of sexual assault or harassment?
Howell says he loves what the president is doing “with the mullahs in Iran.” He calls the Mueller investigation a “deep state operation” and wonders why nobody ever prosecuted Clinton for her e-mails. “If there were any truth to (the women’s claims) it would’ve come out sooner,” he says.
The zeal for President Trump turned into zeal for Lively.
You talk to deep-red Massachusetts Lively conservatives, and you realize: Although their numbers are tiny, their ideas echo talking points you heard in reports from Indiana and Ohio and daily on “Fox News.” Though no one I talked to embraced Lively’s crusade against homosexuality, they do oppose gay marriage and transgender rights. But mostly, they love Trump on guns, the wall, and anti-abortion judges.
Massachusetts’ progressives, meanwhile, may as well live in a different galaxy. They’re horrified by Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ plan to separate children from mothers at border crossings. They love talk of Cohen’s “slush fund” for porn stars and CNN debates between Alan Dershowitz and Jeffrey Toobin over Trump’s taking “the Fifth.”
GOP activist Steve Aylward of Watertown says he couldn’t vote for Charlie Baker, “who’s supported every kooky liberal program there is, from the bathroom bill (his term for transgender legislation) to bilingual education to this most recent crime bill, which may as well be called the let-people-out-of-jail bill.” Aylward, famed in state conservative circles for successfully leading the defeat of the 2014 gas hike ballot proposal, insists Lively support “has very little to do with gay rights. This is the anti-Baker Trump vote, if it was Scott Lively or Joe the Plumber.”
None of this is to argue that Charlie Baker needs to worry about Scott Lively on Election Day. But Trump fever clearly still thrives here in blue Massachusetts. And if it thrives here, Democrats may yet face a long, tough slog across America this fall.
SOURCE
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Face it: Trump has been right about Iran and North Korea
By Niall Ferguson
THE GREATEST GUNFIGHT in the history of cowboy films is in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” It’s a three-cornered shoot-out between Clint Eastwood (Blondie), Tuco (Eli Wallach), and Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef). The crucial point is that before the shooting starts, Blondie has emptied Tuco’s revolver of bullets.
To members of Washington’s foreign policy establishment, regardless of party affiliation, President Trump’s decision to exit one nuclear deal (with Iran) only to enter another nuclear deal (with North Korea) is beyond baffling. They clearly never saw “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Like Eastwood’s Blondie, Trump understands that only one of his antagonists has a loaded gun.
I wish I had a fistful of dollars for every article I have read in the past year about the foolishness or recklessness of Trump’s foreign policy. The funny thing is how few of the people writing such pieces ever pointed out the much greater foolishness and recklessness of his predecessor’s foreign policy.
The goal of Barack Obama’s Iran deal was not just to postpone the Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons by 10 years. For it to be more than a mere deferral, it also had to improve the relative strategic position of the United States and its allies so that by 2025 they would be in a stronger position to stop Iran entering the club of nuclear-armed powers.
As Obama himself put it then, his hope was that by “building on this deal, we can continue to have conversations with Iran that incentivize them to behave differently in the region, to be less aggressive, less hostile, more cooperative. . . . [We will] seek to gain more cooperation from them in resolving issues like Syria or what’s happening in Iraq, to stop encouraging Houthis in Yemen.”
In return for merely slowing down its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, Iran was handed $150 billion in previously frozen assets, as well as a trade bonanza as sanctions were lifted. Under the deal, remember, there was no threat to “snap back” sanctions if Tehran opted to use its new resources to increase its military support for Hezbollah and Hamas, Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, and the Shi’ite Houthi rebellion in Yemen. And so it did just that.
What about Obama’s North Korea policy? In essence, his administration applied ineffectual sanctions that did nothing whatsoever to slow down Kim Jong Un’s nuclear arms program. As Obama left the White House, we were assured that North Korea was still roughly five years away from having intercontinental ballistic missiles and a nuclear warhead small enough to fit on them. Not long after Trump’s inauguration, it became clear that North Korea had in fact been just five months away from possessing those assets.
Trump’s approach is almost exactly the opposite of Obama’s. Trump began by explicitly threatening Pyongyang with “fire and fury.” For a time Kim acted defiant, but the fact that both South Korea and China feared Trump was in earnest had its effect. The South Koreans offered olive branches. The Chinese squeezed North Korea’s economic windpipe. Trump then made a key concession: He agreed to a summit meeting with Kim. Next month in Singapore we shall see what comes of it. My guess is that the deal will make Trump’s knee-jerk critics themselves look foolish. He won’t get complete denuclearization, but he will get some. Meanwhile, large-scale South Korean and Chinese investment in North Korea will start the process of prising open the hermit kingdom.
Now for Iran. Trump’s strategy in year one was to reassure his country’s traditional allies in the region — not only the Saudis and Israelis, but also the other Arab states — that he was on their side against Iranian expansionism. In year two he is not only reapplying the US sanctions on Iran — and remember that they affect not only US companies but European ones too — but also applying pressure on the ground in all those different countries where the Iranians have intervened. Step forward the new national security team, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton — names calculated to make the mullahs quake.
“You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend,” Blondie tells Tuco after that memorable gunfight. “Those with loaded guns and those who dig.” Thanks to the Obama administration’s ineffectual tactics, the North Koreans got themselves into the former category: it became a nuclear state. But Iran — its Obama-era boom over — now has to dig.
Economically weak enough to suffer a wave of urban riots in December and January, the Iranians will not find it easy to withstand the snap-back of sanctions and the roll-back of its forces abroad. And if you think the Russians will help them, then you must have missed Benjamin Netanyahu shaking Vladimir Putin’s hand in the Kremlin last week.
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US threatens sanctions against European Union after trade body rules Boeing harmed by Airbus aid
The US has threatened to impose billions of dollars worth of retaliatory sanctions against the European Union, after the World Trade Organisation ruled the trading bloc had been providing illegal aid to Airbus.
The WTO dismissed an appeal by the European Union over an earlier ruling, saying it had failed to remove unfair funding for two of Airbus's models.
Boeing had been arguing that European plane maker Airbus received $22bn (£16.2bn) in market distorting preferential government loans to help launch the A380 superjumbo and A350 jet.
Boeing chief executive Dennis Muilenburg said: “Today’s final ruling sends a clear message: disregard for the rules and illegal subsidies are not tolerated.
"The commercial success of products and services should be driven by their merits and not by market-distorting actions."
The ruling marks a significant victory for Washington, bringing to a close a case dating back to 2004, and is the first of two key decisions to be made by the WTO regarding the ongoing dispute between Airbus and Boeing.
The second ruling, expected later this year, relates to a separate case, in which the EU is challenging US aid to Boeing. This could lead to the EU later imposing its own punitive tariffs against the US.
Airbus chief executive Tom Enders said the report was "really only half the story… The other half coming out later this year will rule strongly on Boeing’s subsidies and we’ll see then where the balance lies.”
The WTO's findings mark a stepping up of trade tensions between the US and European Union, which are already wrangling over whether US tariffs on aluminium and steel will apply to European products.
Speaking after the ruling, US trade representative Robert Lighthizer said: "It is long past time for the EU to end these subsidies.
"Unless the EU finally takes action to stop breaking the rules and harming US interests, the United States will have to move forward with countermeasures on EU products."
The EU's trade commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said the WTO had agreed that the EU had "largely complied" with its original findings, but that the EU would also "now take swift action to ensure it is fully in line with the WTO's final decision in this case".
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Kanye and Democrats
By Walter E. Williams
In the aftermath of the Kanye West dust-up, my heart goes out to the white people who control the Democratic Party. My pity stems from the hip-hop megastar's November announcement to his packed concert audience that he did not vote in the presidential election but if he had, he would have voted for Donald Trump. Then, on April 21, West took to his Twitter account, which has 28 million followers, to announce, "I love the way Candace Owens thinks." Owens is Turning Point USA's director of urban engagement and has said that former President Barack Obama caused "damage" to race relations in the United States during his two terms in office.
West's support for Trump, along with his criticism of the "plantation" mentality of the Democratic Party, has been met with vicious backlash from the left. In one song, West raps, "See, that's the problem with this damn nation. All blacks gotta be Democrats. Man, we ain't made it off the plantation." Rep. Maxine Waters said West "talks out of turn" and advised, "He should think twice about politics — and maybe not have so much to say." The bottom-line sin that West has committed is questioning the hegemony of the Democratic Party among black Americans. The backlash has been so bad that West had to hire personal security to protect him against threats made against his life. Fortunately, the police are investigating those threats.
Kanye West is not saying anything different from what Dr. Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, Jason Riley, I and other black libertarians/conservatives have been saying for decades. In fact, West has tweeted quotations from Sowell, such as "Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it" and "The most basic question is not what is best but who shall decide what is best." Tweeting those Sowell quotations represents the highest order of blasphemy in the eyes of leftists.
The big difference between black libertarians/conservatives and West is that he has 28 million Twitter followers and a huge audience of listeners whereas few blacks have even heard of libertarian/conservative blacks outside of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. (I might add in passing that Dr. Thomas Sowell is one of the nation's most distinguished and accomplished scholars alive today.)
The Kanye problem for the Democratic Party is that if the party doesn't keep blacks in line and it loses even 20 to 25 percent of the black vote, it can kiss any hope of winning any presidential and many congressional elections goodbye. Democrats may have already seen that threat. That's why they support illegal immigration and voting rights for noncitizens. Immigrants from south of the border who are here illegally may be seen as either a replacement for or a guarantee against the disaster of losing the black vote.
Keeping blacks blind to the folly of unquestioned support for the Democratic Party by keeping blacks fearful, angry and resentful and painting the Republican Party as racist is vital. Democrats never want blacks to seriously ask questions about what the party has done for them. Here are some facts. The nation's most troublesome and dangerous cities — Indianapolis, Stockton, Oakland, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Kansas City, Baltimore, Memphis, St. Louis and Detroit — have been run by Democrats, often black Democrats, for nearly a half-century. These and other Democratic-run cities are where blacks suffer the highest murder rates and their youngsters attend the poorest-performing and most unsafe schools.
Democrats could never afford for a large number of black people to observe, "We've been putting you in charge of our cities for decades. We even put a black Democrat in the White House. And what has it meant for us? Plus, the president you told us to hate has our unemployment rate near a record low." It turns out that it's black votes that count more to black and white politicians than black well-being, black academic excellence and black lives. As for black politicians and civil rights leaders, if they're going to sell their people down the river to keep Democrats in power, they ought to demand a higher price.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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16 May, 2018
A joyous occasion in Israel as the U.S. embassy opens in Jerusalem
Only one song seems right to celebrate the occasion
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The appalling seductiveness of Karl Marx
Martin Hutchinson
The 200th birthday of Karl Marx on May 5 passed with several indications, in both Europe and China that his appeal is not dead, and indeed showing considerable signs of revival. China has significantly reversed its move away from Marxism, whereas elements in the EU High Command seem to be recognizing that a centralized Marxist dictatorship is what they are aiming for. “Big Data” possibilities bring the frightening possibility that Marxism may work – better than it did, at any rate. How can a freedom-lover fight this apparently inexorable trend?
Probably the worst prophesy ever made was Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 “The End of History.” Far from becoming universal, the liberal democracy that appeared to have triumphed with the fall of communism rapidly became “liberal” in the American sense, acquiring a thick gooey patina of political correctness, wasteful social spending, non-market interest rates and endless yawning budget deficits. Whatever was supposed to have won in 1991, it wasn’t this. As a result, old falsehoods, which were never really killed, only scotched, made a rapid comeback in the West’s education institutions and now appear to be making a significant comeback in the West as a whole.
In this respect European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s speech in Trier, Marx’s birthplace, was typical. Saying that Marx had been misunderstood, Juncker claimed that people learned “freedom, emancipation and independence” from his works. That’s not just rehabilitation, it’s hagiography, and goes along with the 18-foot statue of Marx, donated by China, that now disfigures the pretty former capital, whose Archbishop was for over 500 years one of seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire.
The European Union, with its dirigiste assumptions that the big decisions must always be taken by a centralized government, is moving increasingly towards Marxism, while on the other side of the world China never really left it. President Xi Jinping is now promoting Marx as a rallying symbol for the nation while economically, the move towards private enterprise seen since Deng Xiaoping took over in 1978 has reversed in recent years, with state owned enterprises taking the great majority of loans and investments, funded by a banking system that remains almost entirely state-controlled.
There are three main reasons why Marxism remains attractive: the desire of governments to exert control, the insidious philosophical influence of leftist professors in universities and the advent of Big Data, which has for the first time awakened the horrid dream that its practitioners might actually be able to achieve the universal control they seek.
It is no coincidence that the two economists most favored by the big governments of today’s world are Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. Both thought in terms, not of an economy of small producers and consumers competing for resources, but of governments allocating them. In Marx’s case, the individual consumer or producer was subsumed in a “class,” with private ownership eliminated and resources allocated by the state after negotiations between the classes.
In Keynes’ case, while the price mechanism had some relevance in ordinary commerce, interest rates had no place in allocating capital, and the overall level of the economy, as well as much capital investment, would be determined by benign government bureaucrats. Both systems, therefore, are instinctively appealing to those who choose to work for government and fear the uncertainties of commerce. Keynes was himself highly sympathetic to Marxism/Communism, especially during the 1930s when he was locked out of influence in Britain by the capable free-market Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain.
There is no avoiding the natural proclivities of those working in government, except setting clear constitutional rules preventing them from messing up the economic system. In that context, it is a great pity that Thomas Jefferson, when drafting the Declaration of Independence, allowed his fascination with dodgy French philosophers to replace John Locke’s “life, liberty and property” with “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Without Locke’s firm property right, there is no protection against government allocating private resources to itself (a fact reinforced by the infamous 2005 “Kelo vs New London” Supreme Court decision) and therefore no protection against the horrors of Marxist economics. “The pursuit of happiness” as an aspiration tends to negate property rights and provides no real protection against anything.
The cultural drift towards Marxism needs little explanation. Professors, being unconcerned with the market system and, once established, secure in their jobs feel free to advocate economically destructive nostrums. Most college systems are set up with no effective control on this, because college alumni, many of whom are committed to market mechanisms, are deliberately given very little voice. The institution’s funding is either by government or through a charitable trust that benefits from unfair tax breaks and is thereby insulated from market forces. In such circumstances, there is no check on leftist fantasy, and the idiocies which the older members of the professoriat picked up during the “Summer of Love” are perpetuated among their juniors.
The pull towards Marxism exerted by modern technology is a more interesting question. I speak now not of the likes of “Facebook” which with its PC content-censors is merely another arm of the leftist academic-charitable complex. However, the abilities of Big Data are more sinister. Suddenly the problem that wrecked Gosplan, the lack of knowledge of the myriad factors affecting production, demand and value, may in principle be soluble. To the likes of Juncker and Xi, a dream beckons: If data can only be made BIG enough, it may finally be able to reflect the efficiencies of the market mechanism, while being controlled entirely by Big Brother standing at the Off switch.
If you combine Big Data with the censorship possibilities of social media, an even more enticing vision opens to authoritarians in government. Using Big Data, they can control the economy more efficiently than Gosplan (they think) and ensure that all the little regulations they can think of for enforcing economic conformity are in fact being followed. Then using social media they can suppress any data points that suggest something might be going wrong, and ensure that any economic actors whose lives are wrecked by their Big Data economic control are never heard from.
There are fortunately flaws in the Marxists’ dream of a super-Gosplan. Sure, you can imagine Big Data recording the production side of the economy so accurately that Big Brother has an idea of widget output to the last widget. You can even imagine Big Data recording via point-of-sale terminals every time a widget is sold, so that Big Brother knows the exact sales of widgets, second by second, together with data on where they are sold and who bought them. But there is very little he can do with this data. He can match production to sales, increasing production of fast-selling items – but any filthy capitalist can do this, and with Big Data will have as much information as Big Brother has to do it.
What Big Brother cannot do, even with Big Data, is get an accurate estimate of what consumer demand for any new product variant might be (because opinion polling is unamenable to Big Data accuracy). Further, Big Brother cannot in any way change the products the consumer wants to buy, or alter the products sold in any way that optimizes the economy beyond what is done by the market. Any attempt to produce excessive amounts of steel, because you have just decided to call yourself Stalin, will result in miserable failure, as consumers will not buy any more steel products than they would in a free market, so the excess steel will be wasted.
The instrument of control that Marx never thought of is interest rates. By pushing economies onto fiat money, and then setting interest rates at bureaucrat-determined ultra-low levels, Big Brother has over the last decade produced a gigantic mass of misguided investment, and urban housing markets that completely fail to serve ordinary people. This will doubtless eventually produce another enormous housing crash, which Big Brother will address by inventing more controls (such as abolishing cash) and distorting the economy further. Still, to be fair it is Keynes, not Marx, whom we must blame for this particular gigantic economic disaster.
Social media may offer Big Brother better opportunities for Marxist control than Big Data. If as several countries of the EU have recently done, you have through legislation acquired control of social media’s output, so that you control the political and social messages seen by the vast majority of the electorate, who do not take the trouble to make themselves properly informed, then you have gone a long way to ensuring that the electorate will vote as you want it to vote.
The EU is happy to sneer at Vladimir Putin’s version of “democracy” which draws heavily on techniques developed in the previous Marxist-Leninist state, but one can easily imagine the EU itself and its puppet European Parliament becoming a very similar one-party bureaucracy, with opposition limited to a few gadflies from unimportant countries, who can easily be quelled and overruled. As Putin has discovered, you don’t need to control 99% of the votes in an assembly to do exactly what you want; 70% will do just fine.
Fortunately, it appears Big Data won’t bail out Big Brother, although social media may well make his task of domination easier. If a free market can be kept going, the lives of ordinary people will improve even in a non-free state, as Russians have proved over the significantly populace-enriching period of Vladimir Putin’s rule. The trick, therefore will be to preserve as much of capitalism as possible against the bureaucrats – and do something about the universities, so Marx’s pernicious doctrines are gradually relegated to the dustbin of history, where they belong.
SOURCE
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Top Four Obama Policies Trump Has Reversed
Fulfilling a campaign promise, earlier this week Donald Trump officially withdrew the United States from the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran, calling it “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.” For critics of the deal who recognized its flaws and did not turn a blind eye to evidence Iran was violating the terms of the agreement, this was welcome news a long time coming. Trump fulfilled his promise, and the days of kowtowing to terror-sponsoring regimes are behind us.
Naturally, Obama administration alums are throwing hissy fits. Obama himself released a statement calling the decision “a serious mistake.” Apparently, the man who gave billions of dollars and a pathway to creating nuclear weapons to the world’s number one state sponsor of terrorism thinks he has any credibility on the issue. Of course, Obama, the self-proclaimed former constitutional law professor, should have known that Senate ratification is required for his deal to be legally binding. For all intents and purposes, Obama’s Iran deal was written in pencil, and Trump took his eraser to it.
Just like that, Obama’s "major" foreign policy achievement became yet another example of just how foolish Obama’s “I have a pen and a phone” approach to governing was for someone who wanted to establish a long-term legacy.
Below are the top four unilaterally implemented Obama policies Trump has successfully reversed:
1. The Trans-Pacific Partnership
It may have been Obama’s signature trade deal, but Trump was not “down with TPP” and he often referred to it as a bad deal while on the campaign trail. Trump made good on his promise to end it just days after taking office. The move was no surprise, and the fact that Obama didn’t go to Congress to approve the deal made it an obvious choice for President Trump’s chopping block.
2. Planned Parenthood Protections
In January, the Department of Health and Human Services rescinded Obama-era “legal guidance” that would have punished states for defunding Planned Parenthood, the nation’s number one abortion provider and big money donor to Democrats. The regulations “warned states that ending Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood or other health-care providers that offer abortions could be against federal law.” Of course, for many pro-life conservatives, while this was a welcome reversion of an Obama regulation, the subsequent omnibus bill that fully funded Planned Parenthood was not so welcome.
3. DACA
Perhaps one of Trump’s more brilliant moves in undoing Obama’s legacy was how he handled Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Aside from being pseudo-amnesty, one of the primary objections to DACA was that Congress, not the president unilaterally, is supposed to make decisions regarding issues of immigration. In place for five years at the time Trump ended it, nearly 800,000 people were protected from being deported under DACA, and reversing it was no simple issue. So Trump put the onus on Congress to work out a permanent solution. Trump said of his decision: "We will resolve the DACA issue with heart and compassion -- but through the lawful Democratic process -- while at the same time ensuring that any immigration reform we adopt provides enduring benefits for the American citizens we were elected to serve.”
Obama may not have understood how our constitutional republic works, but Trump clearly does. Currently, Republicans are trying to force a vote on DACA in Congress.
4. The Paris Climate Accord
Once again, this was another multinational treaty that Obama knew he couldn’t sell to Congress, so he didn’t even try. It has been just under a year since President Trump withdrew the United States from the 2015 Paris climate accord. So far, no climate apocalypse has occurred. Sea levels haven’t eaten up our coastlines and the air is still breathable. We’ve survived.
It is true that Trump has signaled that rejoining the treaty is still a possibility, but if he punts that to the Senate (where it should be), it will never happen.
Keep in mind, this list is by no means complete. Trump has reversed or weakened many Obama-era policies that were enacted without the consent of Congress. Earlier this year, Obama’s Vice President Joe Biden lamented: “All he seems to be trying to do is undo everything that President Obama has done.”
Yeah, that is why he won. But Obama was the one who chose to take an unconstitutional unilateral approach to governing. Obama took office with comfortable majorities in the House and Senate. Bipartisan compromise was unnecessary, and was never sought. When Democrats lost their majorities, Obama never felt the need to meet Republicans in the middle to achieve consensus the way his predecessors had. Obama was counting on Hillary Clinton to win the presidency and keep his unconstitutionally enacted agenda in place.
SOURCE
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Bolton: Iran's Economy 'Quite Shaky,' So Effect of Sanctions 'Could Be Dramatic'
Regime change in Iran is "not the policy of the administration," National Security Adviser John Bolton told ABC's "This Week" on Sunday. "The policy of the administration is to make sure that Iran never gets close to deliverable nuclear weapons," he said.
But on CNN's "State of the Union," Bolton noted that getting out of the Iran nuclear deal will result in the reimposition of American sanctions on Iran: "And I think what we've seen is that Iran's economic condition is really quite shaky, so that the effect here could be dramatic," Bolton told CNN's Jake Tapper.
Tapper noted that Bolton repeatedly pushed for regime change in Iran before he became national security adviser. "I know that is not the current position of the United States government. But are you behind the scenes pushing for it to become the position of the United States government, regime change?" Tapper asked Bolton.
Bolton replied that he has "written and said a lot of things over the years when I was a complete free agent. I certainly stand by what I said at the time. But -- but those were my opinions then.
"The circumstance I'm in now is that I'm the national security adviser to the president. I'm not the national security decision-maker. He makes the decisions, and the advice I give him is between us."
Meanwhile, CBS's "Face the Nation" started on Sunday with a report from foreign correspondent Elizabeth Palmer in Tehran. Host Margaret Brennan asked Palmer how Iranian citizens are reacting to the U.S. pulling out of the nuclear deal:
"Well, the hard-liners hit the streets after President Trump's decision, with the old cries of 'Death to America,'" Palmer responded. "But they and everybody else are actually much more angry with their own government. They're fed up, because they haven't had salary increases. There are no jobs. There's corruption. And, most of all, they say the Iranian government can offer nothing but a bleak future.
"I have never heard people so angry here. At the moment, the government is keeping a lid on little protests that have been springing up everywhere, but it's anyone's guess how long they can maintain stability," Palmer concluded.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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15 May, 2018
Donald Trump’s Mommy Issues
The report below is very light on evidence. It is by an amateur psychologist, PETER LOVENHEIM, who has devoted himself to "Attachment Theory" -- the claim that you need to have a lot of nurturance from your mother in the first 4 years of you life to grow up psychologically healthy.
It is a theory from John Bowlby, an early British psychoanalyst who was disowned by other psychoanaysts, who think the father is the key. Bowlby himself lost his mother when he was about 4 so that seems to be the genesis of the theory. Psychologists today -- such as Rutter -- generally think there is something in the Bowlby theory but see it as only one of several influences
But when you have got a hammer everything looks like a nail and Lovenheim sees attachment theory as an explanation of Trump's behaviour. As Trump always talks warmly of his mother, that would seem to disprove the Lovenheim theory but Lovenheim thinks he knows better what Trump feels. It's all just speculation.
For what it's worth, I just think Trump was rather spoilt in his upbringing but it has not hurt his ability to empathize with normal people
Donald Trump is easily the most psychoanalyzed president of modern times. His decision-making style and behavior have been hotly debated by journalists, voters, politicians, world leaders and pundits who have bestowed upon him any number of fanciful, grave-sounding mental conditions, calling him, among other things, a narcissist, a sociopath, a psychopath and a paranoiac. Trump has said he distrusts mental health professionals, so we don’t have access to a formal assessment of his psychology. But colloquially speaking, perhaps the best explanation for the president’s behavior dates back to his earliest interactions with his mother.
Although I’m not a psychologist, I have spent years researching a major field of psychology known as attachment theory for a book. According to the science of attachment—developed in the second half of the 20th century by British psychotherapist John Bowlby—we’re hardwired at birth to attach to a competent and reliable caregiver for protection because we are born helpless. The success or failure of this attachment affects all our relationships throughout life—in the workplace, on the athletic field, with loved ones—and yes, even in politics. Children who bond successfully with a primary caregiver—usually this is the mom but it could also be the dad, grandparent, nanny or other adult—grow up with what is termed a “secure” attachment. As adults, they tend to be confident, trusting of others, resilient in the face of setbacks, and able to enjoy long, stable relationships. Children who fail to achieve a successful attachment, on the other hand, may as adults have a lack of comfort with intimacy, difficulty trusting others, a constant need for reassurance from relationship partners, and a lack of resilience when faced with illness, injury or loss.
The biographical record is fairly strong on Trump’s failure to develop a healthy emotional attachment to either of his parents. It may have contributed to his tumultuous personal life, but it also endowed him with some traits that made him well-suited to his late-career entry in politics.
Donald Trump is the fourth of five children of Fred and Mary Trump. Because his father was busy building a real estate business, and it was the mid-20th century when dads didn’t typically do a lot of early child care, his mother cared for the children (with the help of a live-in maid) and was their primary “attachment figure.” What factors may have affected the quality of young Donald’s early care—his own temperament as an infant; the role, if any, of the family’s maid in child care; the demands on his mother’s time and energy of three older children and a subsequent pregnancy—we don’t know. The president’s own writings are largely silent about his early childhood; journalists and biographers fill in only some of the blanks.
But we do know that Mary Trump became seriously ill from complications during labor with her last child. An emergency hysterectomy and subsequent infections and surgeries followed—four in two weeks, one of her oldest daughters once said. As a result, at just two years and two months of age, Trump endured the trauma of the prolonged absence and life-threatening illness of his mother. It’s not clear how long she was incapacitated. Indeed, we don’t know that she ever really re-engaged with her son. According to a Politico Magazine story on Mary Trump, there’s evidence that Mary and her son didn’t interact much during his childhood (more on this later).
Infants who fail to receive that kind of care usually fall into one of two categories as adults. Either they have what’s called attachment anxiety—leading them as adults to crave intimacy but have difficulty trusting others and constantly seeking reassurance—or they have attachment avoidance, where as adults they generally distrust others and convince themselves they don’t need close relationships. The relationships they do have are often unstable. They also tend to be excessively self-reliant and desire a high level of independence. These last two traits—self-reliance and independence—are not necessarily disadvantageous, of course. They might be just the right recipe, for example, for an entrepreneur.
The only way to be certain of President Trump’s attachment style would be for him to take the Adult Attachment Interview, an hour-long, structured interview that is considered the gold standard for assessing attachment in adults. Since that isn’t likely to happen, we’ll have to make an educated guess. While mental health professionals are constrained by ethical standards to avoid diagnosing public figures they haven’t personally examined, I am not bound by those rules. Based on my seven years of research, reading countless academic studies and interviewing leading attachment researchers worldwide, I’m willing to say what they can’t. I would peg President Trump’s attachment style as avoidant. Here are my three reasons:
First, Mary Trump’s major health crisis appears to have compromised her efforts—no matter how well-intentioned—to care reliably for young Donald.
Second, as previously reported in Politico Magazine, Trump has over the years said many flattering things about his mother, calling her “fantastic” and “tremendous.” He’s also described her as “very warm” and “very loving.” And yet, I find no stories or other anecdotes of early childhood that support these sentiments. In fact, friends of the Trump family who knew the Trump kids when they were young have reported they “rarely saw Mrs. Trump” and that Donald, while “in awe” of his father, was “very detached from his mother.” A characteristic of adults with avoidant attachment is the tendency to idolize one’s parents without supporting evidence.
Finally, much of the president’s behavior, both before and since he took office, is clearly consistent with attachment avoidance: His powerful sense of self-reliance and near-inability to acknowledge self-doubt; his bragging about his sexual relations; his almost complete lack of close friends; his multiple marriages; and his unstable relationships with White House staff, Cabinet members and congressional leaders of both parties.
Trump’s almost compulsive need to be in the spotlight might be evidence of attachment anxiety if it were aimed primarily at needing approval. But in the president’s case, it appears to be more about needing admiration. Overt narcissism or grandiose self-regard, the leading attachment researchers Mario Mikulincer and Philip R. Shaver report, is associated with attachment avoidance.
By any number of measures, President Trump may be seen as an anomaly among politicians—after all, how many people have run for precisely one political office and landed directly in the White House?—but if my hunch is correct, in this one trait—attachment avoidance—Trump may, in fact, be rather typical.
Attachment avoidance accounts for about 25 percent of the general population, with about 55 percent of people being secure, 15 percent anxious and 5 percent disorganized (often those who were neglected or maltreated in childhood). But in the course of my research, I asked questions from the Adult Attachment Interview to diverse officials: a former presidential nominee, current and former members of Congress and a mayor. With only one exception, their results indicated attachment avoidance.
Some of this may be because avoidance—though generally not the ideal for anyone—does confer some advantages for the political lifestyle. Avoidant athletes, for example, do well when they compete individually—as politicians do in elections. Avoidant people travel well—think never-ending campaign trail—feeling little need to be near loved ones. And the avoidant person’s general reluctance to trust others can act like protective radar in a field like politics that is rife with betrayal and double-dealing.
Avoidant politicians have one more quality that under the right circumstances can lead to success in office: They are quick to respond to threats and to take action. In a clever study in 2011 where test subjects were exposed to what appeared to be a threatening situation (a room gradually filling with smoke because of a supposedly malfunctioning computer), people high in attachment avoidance—who prize independence and self-reliance—were the first to find a way out to safety for themselves and others.
So is having a president with an avoidant attachment style good or bad? According to attachment theory, human relationships would generally be healthier and more stable if more people had a sensitive and consistent caregiver during infancy—and grew up to have a secure attachment style. So it is likely that leaders with secure attachment—as, for example, Franklin Roosevelt had, according to researchers—can become truly transformational by encouraging and uplifting the population in times of crisis. And while it’s true that people with attachment avoidance can often be personally successful—in business and other individually focused activities—there are requirements for public office, such as the ability to connect emotionally with constituents or at times to act selflessly—that may be difficult for those with attachment avoidance to muster. While it is too early for history to judge this presidency, understanding President Trump’s likely attachment style—and the attachment styles of all our political leaders—can give us important insights into their behavior and actions in office.
We should keep in mind that as voters, we have attachment styles, too. According to research, these may affect our political leanings and the relationships we have with elected leaders.
Secure voters, for example, tend to be tolerant of ambiguity, flexible in their political views, and thus disinclined to embrace any rigid dogmatism, As such, secure voters are most often found in the political center. Insecure voters, on the other hand, may be attracted to the perceived safety of dogmatism and are more likely to be found on the far-left or far-right. For example, anxious voters—seeking security in a world that feels threatening—may find comfort in a liberal orthodoxy that advocates redistribution of wealth and political power, and aggressively demands “inclusion” and protection in the form of a care-giving government. Avoidant voters, on the other hand, often distrusting others and prizing self-reliance, may embrace a strident conservatism, both economic (the world is a “competitive jungle”) and military (“we can only depend on our own strength”).
So as we think about President Trump, we might consider that his presidency—and our personal reactions to it—may be influenced not only be his attachment style, but also our own.
SOURCE
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Exhaustive Study: Murder Rates Rise Every Place that Bans Guns
So, think banning guns is going to solve America’s murder problem? The data should tell you to think again.
Yes, in spite of the fact that we’ve been told that Mr. and Mrs. America turning all their guns in is the best way to fix violence, that’s actually a complete lie. And the Crime Prevention Resource Center has the numbers to prove it.
The 2013 study looked at murder rates from places that had banned guns around the world, from Washington, D.C. and Chicago to England, Wales, Jamaica and even the Solomon Islands, an archipelago in the South Pacific which only had mass shootings after they decided to ban guns.
The most striking example might be that of England and Wales, both of which banned firearms back in 1997. Homicides rose from 676 to 734 the first year of the ban. And things only got worse from there.
“After the ban, clearly homicide rates bounce around over time, but there is only one year (2010) where the homicide rate is lower than it was in 1996,” the CPRC noted. “The immediate effect was about a 50 percent increase in homicide rates. Firearm homicide rate had almost doubled between 1996 and 2002 … The homicide and firearm homicide rates only began falling when there was a large increase in the number of police officers during 2003 and 2004. Despite the huge increase in the number of police, the murder rate still remained slightly higher than the immediate pre-ban rate.”
The highest recorded murder rate was in 2002/03, which saw 1,041 murders. That number included 172 murders by Dr. Harold Shipman, a notorious physician and serial killer who murdered his patients via lethal doses of morphine. That said, the general trend was still toward more killings after the gun ban was put into place.
Meanwhile, Jamaica’s murder rate was at roughly 10 killings per 100,000 people in 1974, when guns were banned. By 1980, that number spiked to over 40 per 100,000, and 58 per 100,000 in 2005. While the numbers have again bounced around, Jamaica didn’t see under 20 murders per 100,000 people between 1990 and 2007. According to the Jamaica Gleaner, 38 people were murdered in the first six days of this year alone.
Ireland also saw a spike when it banned guns, the CPRC reports, from under 0.4 murders per 100,000 in 1972 to over 1.6 per 100,000 in just a few years, an increase of well over 400 percent. While that was the peak of the murder rate, it never fell below what it was the year before the gun ban.
Chicago also banned guns in 1982. How did that work? Well, the Windy City has always had a high homicide rate, but as you can see, it rose dramatically in the years following the ban. While there was a reduction in the 2000s, it rebounded again in the 2010s to become the gunshot capital of America.
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Escape from Obamacare: Coming soon to a health insurance plan near you
Millions of Americans could soon enjoy lower health insurance premiums, thanks to a new Trump administration rule.
The rule, which was proposed in January and will likely be finalized by early summer, would make it easier for self-employed individuals and small businesses to band together and purchase coverage through association health plans.
AHPs offer small businesses and sole proprietors an alternative to overpriced plans sold through the Obamacare exchanges. In 2018, average individual premiums on the healthcare.gov exchanges were nearly twice as high ($444 per month) as average individual-market premiums in 2013, the year before most of Obamacare took effect.
Premiums for small-group plans have also skyrocketed. This year, the price of plans in Connecticut jumped an average of 25 percent compared to 2017. Small businesses in Minnesota experienced increases of up to 23 percent.
These hikes explain why many small businesses don't extend health benefits to employees. Less than one in three employers with 50 or fewer workers currently offers coverage.
President Trump's AHP proposal could make it less expensive for small-business owners and self-employed Americans to obtain health insurance. In effect, the rule gives these people access to the coverage enjoyed by large businesses.
Historically, premiums for large employer plans have increased at a far slower rate than individual and small-group market premiums. Among companies with at least 1,000 workers, average premiums for an individual plan rose by less than 6 percent between 2014 and 2016.
The reason? Larger companies have more bargaining power to negotiate lower rates with insurers and providers. These companies also aren't subject to some of Obamacare's most expensive 10 essential health benefit mandates.
AHPs would level the playing field. Right now, a 20-person construction company has little to no leverage to negotiate favorable rates. But if a dozen small construction firms formed an AHP, they could negotiate better deals and keep costs low.
AHPs give small-businesses and self-employed Americans an affordable alternative to Obamacare-compliant coverage. The reform can't come soon enough.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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14 May, 2018
Would-be Hitler says Trump Must Be Impeached before He Becomes another Hitler
Leftist projection again. Steyer and his Greenie companions want to control just about everything that people do. They are the real heirs of the Nazis
Billionaire liberal Tom Steyer told the crowd at an Iowa town hall Thursday that President Trump communicates effectively like Hitler and must be impeached before he leads the country down a similarly dark path.
A lady from the crowd remarked to Steyer that Trump reminds her of Hitler, saying the president separates immigrant families just as the leader of Nazi Germany separated Jewish families and others.
“[Trump] really is an incredibly skillful and talented communicator. He really is, which Hitler was, too,” Steyer agreed. He added, though, that there is still a “very big difference” between the two men:
I think the reason people push back against the Hitler comparison, regardless of any similarities, is Hitler ended up killing millions and millions of people, and Mr. Trump has shown a disregard for our law, he breaks the law…and in many ways he has done things that we find, or I find abhorrent. But he hasn’t killed millions of people.
The crowd rumbled with raised voices, causing Steyer to entertain the comparison some more.
“I agree! Look, that’s why we want to impeach him!” Steyer said. “We’d like to end it here while it’s still OK….We haven’t gotten to that point. God bless us, let’s hope we never get anywhere near that point.”
Steyer, the heavyweight anti-Trump activist, has invested tens of millions of dollars trying to convince Democrats to impeach the president, to the chagrin of many party luminaries including House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, who has argued that the best way to oppose Trump is to gain control of Congress.
As part of his campaign against Trump and the GOP, Steyer’s political action committee, NextGen America, released an ad this week comparing Republicans to white nationalists.
“We’re just telling the truth to the American people, and it’s an important truth,” he said of impeaching the president. “And if you don’t think it’s politically convenient for you, that’s too bad.”
SOURCE
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The Republican Advantage That’s Easy to See but Nobody Notices
In close elections, any slight advantage might be responsible for determining the outcome, and it might be that the red party has a slight advantage over the blue party... because it’s the red party.
An article reporting on studies by two psychologists suggests that color influences behavior and that red is a winning color. In one study from the 2004 Olympics, where competitors in combat sports like boxing and taekwondo were randomly assigned either red or blue kits, they found that those assigned the red kits were more likely to win than those assigned the blue.
One of the researchers said, “Simply wearing red doesn’t turn you into an excellent competitor, but it helps tip the balance between winning and losing when people are fairly evenly matched.” Might referring to one party as the red party and the other as the blue have the same effect in politics?
The article gives many other examples of the color red being associated with dominance. People feel more dominant when they wear red. Gamblers feel more confident and gamble more when they use red poker chips. Waitresses get higher tips when they wear red. Men and women are both rated as being more attractive when they are wearing red rather than other colors.
This suggests that the party associated with red will have an advantage over the party associated with blue.
Today, we are accustomed to thinking of the Republican Party as the red party and the Democratic Party as blue, but this color assignment was solidified only in the past few decades. This article explains that color-coding the parties as red and blue became popular with the advent of political reporting on color television, but initially, the colors were not consistently assigned. The election of 2000 was the point at which the current color identification was solidified, and the Republican Party became the red party.
If there really is an advantage to being the red party, how did the Republicans manage to get it? One conjecture is that the mainstream news media (which may slant toward the left) rightly associated red with communism, and didn’t want the Democrats being the red party. During the Cold War, being a red meant being a communist. So, the media assigned red to the Republican Party to avoid associating the Democratic Party with socialism.
If so, this may have been a lucky break for the Republicans. They managed to grab the color that dominates all others by default, giving them a slight advantage in elections. Surely, in politics more than in many aspects of life, symbolism exerts powerful effects.
This is a red party advantage that everyone can see, but nobody notices.
SOURCE
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Free Traders Should Be More Careful When Defending Trade Deficits
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Harvard economist Robert Barro understandably took aim at President Trump’s faulty mercantilist criticism of free international trade. In contrast to Trump’s view, Barro argued that imports are “things we want” whereas exports are “the price we have to pay” to obtain them. Although Barro’s statements are a useful way to get novices to think about trade, they can be misleading, and in this case actually did lead a WSJ editor to write something incorrect. All too often, in their zeal to defuse hysteria over America’s trade deficit, free-trade economists prove too much, using arguments that suggest countries with trade surpluses are somehow getting ripped off. In this post, I’ll spell out the WSJ mistake, and offer a clearer way to think about international trade.
To set the scene and to be fair to Barro, here is his argument in context:
The Trump theory of international trade seems straightforward: Selling stuff to foreigners is good, and buying stuff from foreigners is bad. It’s a form of mercantilism. Exports are attractive because they represent domestic production and American jobs. Imports are undesirable because that production and employment otherwise could have happened at home.
Simple economic reasoning, however, suggests that this logic is backward. Imports are things we want, whether consumer goods, raw materials or intermediate goods. Exports are the price we have to pay to get the imports. It would be great, in fact, if we could get more imports without having to pay for them through added exports. [Barro, bold added.]
To reiterate, there’s nothing explicitly false in the above excerpt; this is a standard approach to getting students to think about international trade. However, there’s actually a problem with this typical line of free-trade reasoning that I’ve noticed for some time now. And to prove I’m not just handwringing, look at the title and subtitle that a WSJ editor (presumably) gave to Barro’s piece:
Trump and China Share a Bad Idea on Trade
Imports are things we want, and we pay for them with exports. Isn’t getting more for less a good thing?
Contrary to this claim, the U.S. trade deficit does not mean that Americans are “getting more for less.” If it did mean that, then the flip side would hold as well: Countries running a trade surplus must be getting less for more, and so presumably a populist candidate could run for office in those countries and offer trade barriers as a way to stop the bleeding. Yet, of course, that’s not right either: so long as people around the world are engaging in voluntary transactions, the trades are all win-win and a “trade deficit” or “trade surplus” is a bit of statistical trivia.
The problem with the WSJ subtitle stems from the equivocation in the claim that “we pay for them [imports] with exports.” Although this statement is a useful first step in getting novices to think about trade, strictly speaking, it is not literally correct in any finite time frame. After all, if a country literally paid for its imports with its exports in any particular time period—say, during each calendar year—then every country’s measured trade deficit/surplus would always be $0.
It’s easy to unpack the confusion by considering an analogy with an individual. We can imagine an economics professor telling her students: “Contrary to popular belief, ‘consumption’ is the things you want, while ‘work’ is the price you have to pay to get them. Indeed, if you could get more consumption without having to work more, that would be great.”
There’s a certain sense in which this statement is correct, and it might help some students get their thinking straight when sorting out benefits vs. costs in the context of employment. However, suppose a particular student replied, “Ah, then I’m doing great! Last year I spent $52,400 on consumption, while I worked only enough to earn $18,700 in wages. I plan on keeping my consumption the same this year, while maybe working even less. I love getting more goods for fewer labor hours!”
It would be clear that such a student utterly misunderstood the professor’s statement. The student isn’t bartering labor-hours directly for consumption goods. Rather, the student is spending a full $52,400 on the “$52,400 worth” of consumption goods; that’s what it means to measure consumption in dollars. The difference between the consumption ($52,400) and wages ($18,700) is made up by the fact that the student is selling assets worth $33,700 in order to finance his “trade deficit,” by selling off pieces of property (such as an old car) and/or by issuing claims against his future income by (say) borrowing money from credit card companies.
There is similar confusion in the WSJ’s treatment of U.S. trade with China. According to Barro, “In 2017, the Chinese sold the U.S. $524 billion of goods and services and bought only $187 billion, for a bilateral trade deficit of $337 billion.” Even though it’s true that imports are things we want and exports are the price we pay to get them, it is not the case that Americans are somehow snookering the Chinese. No, we paid a full $524 billion for our $524 billion of imports; that’s what it means to measure imports in dollars. The fact that we only sold them $187 billion of goods and services means that we made up the difference by issuing a net $337 billion in asset sales, such as U.S. real estate, corporate stock, and Treasury debt.
There’s a sense in which a worker must pay for consumption by selling labor hours, but that is only a long-run condition; the timing of consumption and wage payments can be different, with the gaps accommodated through asset sales (including the credit markets). Furthermore, if we observe a worker who consumes more than his wages in a certain year, this isn’t evidence of shrewdness; it simply means the worker is selling assets and/or taking on future claims against himself. Maybe that’s a sign of wise investment (in the case of a student taking out loans to attend medical school) or maybe it’s a sign of profligacy (in the case of someone running up credit cards for gambling vacations), but either way we shouldn’t congratulate such a worker for “getting more for less.”
What is crystal clear in the case of an individual is, unfortunately, obscured in the case of a country, as even a WSJ editor got tripped up. The editor took Robert Barro’s correct claim that a nation pays for its imports with its exports, and then erroneously misconstrued trade deficits as evidence of a bargain. But it’s more accurate to say the United States in any given time period “pays for” its imports with exports and by selling claims on future U.S. dollars. Maybe that’s a sign of wise investment (in the case of foreigners investing in U.S. factories) or maybe it’s a sign of profligacy (in the case of foreigners lending money to Uncle Sam to fuel boondoggle programs), but either way we shouldn’t view our trade deficit as “getting more for less.”
SOURCE
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Curing Diseases Is Sustainable, Government in Healthcare Is Not
Goldman Sachs analysts recently asked the question, “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”, in a report entitled The Genome Revolution. The report outlined profit strategies for biotechnology companies engaged in gene therapy, which attempts to replace defective genes to correct genetic disorders. CNBC has since obtained the report and released the answer:
The potential to deliver ‘one shot cures’ is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies... While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.
Some have taken the report to be an “outright acknowledgment from the financial services industry that curing diseases with a single treatment is not profitable.” Others allege the report demonstrates “curing patients is bad for business” more broadly.
While Americans have every reason to be concerned about their healthcare, the belief that private medical companies will not develop and produce products that cure various conditions is unwarranted.
Recent medical history provides ample evidence that the medical industry has tremendous incentives to cure patients. For example, chicken pox, smallpox, rabies, SARS, measles, polio, and shingles, among many other diseases, were all cured and eradicated in our lifetime. Insulin, although not a cure for diabetes, has saved countless diabetics from certain death. Similarly, HIV and AIDS are now manageable when they were once fatal.
Further, most medical discoveries do not earn profits. This is especially true of pharmaceuticals where, according to a white paper published by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, only 20 percent of the drugs that make it to market obtain enough revenue to cover their R&D and FDA drug approval costs. Although not all these drugs provide a cure, profits are clearly not the only motives for these companies.
However, there is a more fundamental misunderstanding about these claims. Are profits derived from curing diseases sustainable? No. However, in a market economy, no profits are sustainable! Entrepreneurs work tirelessly to improve their products and lower their prices to please their customers and to compete for the profits earned by others. When profits dwindle, entrepreneurs search for other opportunities to serve customers. In some cases, this means finding innovative ways to cut costs. In others, it can mean improving the product. Offering a cure for a condition, although difficult, is a clear way to beat out other treatment methods.
Consider the case of the biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, whose entrepreneurial insight to purchase and develop an unproven compound became Sovaldi, the only cure for hepatitis C. In 2014, Solvaldi earned over $10 billion in sales. However, two years after making the cure, Solvadi sales fell over 50 percent. Far from suffering from its “unsustainable business model,” the company recently released data on a drug it is developing to help HIV infection.
While the evidence companies do not find curing diseases profitable is weak, concerns that the healthcare sector might act in ways against the patient’s interest are very real. But these concerns stem from the relationship between the state and the market, not from the market itself.
For example, the burdensome costs and time-intensive FDA drug approval process, which is supported by large pharmaceutical companies, prevents many smaller companies with less financial capital from getting their products approved. When the medical industry spends lobbying for government favors, and it spent $57 million last year, it uses resources to thwart competition to the detriment of consumers. Efforts like these are how the firms in the healthcare sector can earn sustainable profits without benefiting consumers.
Fundamentally, the alarm created by Goldman Sach’s report stems from a fear that the companies in the healthcare sector will not act in the patient’s interest and little can be done about it. I can think of no better way for these fears to become a reality than to have government involved in healthcare. Once we understand this diagnosis, we can work toward a cure.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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13 May, 2018
The ultimate feat of projection: Leftist academics describe conservatives as being like Leftist academics
That's a bit hard to get your head around, isn't it? After years of reading and researching in political psychology, I have only just realized it fully myself. Projection consists of seeing your own faults in others and Leftists do it all the time. So it is interesting that the major academic Leftist account of what a bad lot conservatives are should list characteristics that are actually very prominent in Leftists themselves. And as Leftists the academics partake of those characteristics too.
It all started with a 1950 book under the lead-authorship of noted Marxist theoretician Theodor Adorno (born Theodor Wiesengrund), a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany. The book was called "The authoritarian personality" and had a theme only a Marxist could love: The claim that it was conservatives, not Leftists who were authoritarian.
And that claim was made just after the socialist Hitler had been defeated and the vast Soviet tyranny was straddling the Northern half of Eurasia -- a Communist empire that stretched from Leningrad on the Baltic to Vladivostok on the Pacific. That was a big blob of authoritarianism to overlook.
But in typical Leftist style, Adorno and his merry men (and one woman) were not concerned with actual on the ground reality. They were concerned with POTENTIAL or theoretical authoritarianism. And where would one look for that? To conservatives of course. To people who are skeptical of authority and who believe in democracy and the rule of law. Apparently that makes sense in some weird Freudian sort of way. And Adorno loved Freud nearly as much as he loved that great hater, Karl Marx.
When Adorno arrived in the USA he saw much that he thought was reminiscent of Hitler's Germany. There were a lot of rather tough-minded social attitudes about. He was right about that. America at the time was at the tail end of a long dominance by "Progressives", with eugenics being widely accepted and practiced and Jews being kept at arm's length and away from much that was desirable in America -- such as enrollment at Harvard. The Progressives and Hitler differed not so much in attitudes but in the fact that Hitler applied those attitudes with German thoroughness.
The idea of war as a purification of the human spirit and territorial conquest being a source of national glory had rather gone off the boil in America by that time but Hitler learnt those ideas off an American President who had been world-famous in Hitler's youth: Theodore Roosevelt, the man who was instrumental in the American conquest of Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico. TR himself rather went off those ideas when one of his sons died in WWI but those ideas were still widely respected in America. TR was a great Progressive. He even founded a short-lived Progressive party and he personally remained widely respected and admired in America.
So you could see why Adorno feared a Nazi uprising in America. The ideology was there. But Adorno was a European. He didn't understand the Anglo-Saxon temperament, traditions or ideas about government. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had already gone as far as he could in enacting Progressivism in America and there was no chance that Americans would accept a Hitler-like regime. Shortly after the Adorno book was published, Americans elected the conservative "Ike" (Eisenhower) to the Presidency, with Richard Milhous Nixon as Vice president. Ike of course had made his name by playing a major role in the destruction of Nazism.
So how did Adorno & Co. put flesh on their naive fears about Americans? They resorted to their old friend Sigmund Freud. Freud had told a merry tale about how a stern father could psychologically ruin a son for life (In Freud's era a stern father was thought to be rather a good thing) and Adorno had the brilliant idea that a son's relationship with his father was a relationship with an authority figure. Therefore Freud's ideas told us all about our attitude to authoritarian governments. Despite much contrary evidence, that idea lives on to this day in the world of a-historical Leftist psychologists such as George Lakoff and Karen Stenner. See here for some of the research evidence that contradicts that neo-Freudian theorizing.
Anyway, from their Freudian ideas Adorno & Co deduced a whole series of personal characteristics that would be found in a pro-authority person. He would show conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intellectualism, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, an admiration of power and "toughness", destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over sex. Later authors would amplify that to say that the authoritarian would be rigid, closed minded and dogmatic in his beliefs, intolerant of ambiguity, not open to experience or novelty.
So there you have the typical conservative, a thoroughly bad egg! But is that true? No. Every one of those characterizations has been found unsupported in subsequent research. The first half of Altemeyer's 1981 book "Right-Wing Authoritarianism" gives a pretty thorough coverage of the contrary research. I see that a copy of that book is going for $499 on Amazon. I should sell my copy. Altemeyer's publisher, the University of Manitoba Press, sent me my copy for free.
Many of my academic publications also test and find wanting the Adorno theories.
So are there any real persons who fit the Adorno picture of villainy? Was Adorno's picture of the authoritarian based on any real group of people? I think it was. It was actually a picture of what leftist academics are like. Adorno and his merry men (and one woman) were making the classic mistake of judging other people by themselves. They thought others thought like they thought. Let me illustrate that by some contemporary examples.
Rigidity: Academics are amazingly rigid in their adherence to Leftist ideas. Particularly in the social sciences, a conservative is as rare as hen's teeth. You just don't get anywhere in academe unless you are a Leftist. And that lockstep Leftist ideology in academe also shows a conventionalism and a lack of openness to novelty and diversity.
Authoritarian submission: And how about subservience to authority? When those dreadful climate "deniers" (heretics) put forward facts that indicate that there is nothing out of the ordinary going on in the global climate, how do devotees of the climate cult respond? Do they question the facts or point to alternative facts? Almost never. They appeal to authority. They simply say that 97% of scientists accept global warming and that is good enough for them. They have an absurd respect for the current outpourings of scientists, quite oblivious of the 180 degree turns that scientific "wisdom" periodically undergoes. Whether or not dietary fat is good for you is a current example of that. They appeal to an authority with feet of clay
And they certainly overlook that the paper by Cook et al. from which the 97% claim originates in fact quite plainly said that only ONE THIRD of the scientific papers surveyed took any position on global warming. Two thirds of the papers did NOT give support to the global warming theory.
Cook et al. were rather peeved by that lack of support so sent out a questionnaire to the non-confirming scientists to see what they thought. Only 14% of the scientists surveyed even bothered to answer the questionnaire, however, so that tells its own story. It's all plainly there in the paper's abstract. Read it for yourself here.
Closed-mindedness: So there is much faith invested in the claim that "The science" supports global warming. The adherence by Leftist academics to the global warming theory is therefore a good instance of conventionalism, anti-intellectualism, closed-mindedness and dogmatism.
Power and toughness: And when it comes to an admiration of power and toughness, what could be a clearer example of that than their unwavering support of international Communism? They shilled for the Soviets until Ronald Reagan caused the regime to implode and to this day they have never ceased to find Fidel Castro admirable, a man who lived like an old-fashioned Spanish grandee while his people scraped by on minimal rations.
Exaggerated concern about sex: And what about an exaggerated concern about sexual matters? Is not that a pretty good description of modern-day feminism? Feminists deny basic biology and ascribe all the world's ailments to "patriarchy". They judge everything and everybody by what you have between your legs. They are completely obsessed with the importance of sex (or "gender" in their coy terminology).
Destructiveness: And what could be more destructive than the chaos unleashed on American health insurance by Obamacare? Under the pretext of making health insurance more affordable, Obamacare has in fact made it unaffordable for many. Many employers have dropped health insurance for their workers as no longer affordable by them and skyrocketing deductibles have made many Americans effectively uninsured even if they are nominally covered. When your deductible is $10,000 you have for most instances no useful insurance cover whatsoever.
Cynicism: And there is certainly vast cynicism in the Leftist response to Mr Trump. Mr Trump is certainly a flawed character in some ways but we all are. Does the Left give any credence to the thought that Mr Trump might be on to something valuable and important? Roughly half of Americans think he is but the Left greet his ideas with uniform hostility. That he has brought American unemployment down to a near-record low (3.9%) and has proven to be a Prince of Peace in the Korean confrontation they can only greet with denial. There is no openness to new ideas in the Leftist response to President Trump, just unwavering cynicism and complete intolerance of ambiguity.
Authoritarian aggression: And how about authoritarian aggression? What do we call it when Leftists (students abetted and encouraged by their Leftist professors) use all means they can to chase conservative speakers off university campuses? They do a job not dissimilar to Hitler's brownshirts. As well as being thoroughly intolerant, rigid and doctrinaire it is thoroughly tyrannical and often explicitly violent.
Intolerance: And when it comes to tolerance and openness to different ideas, what do we make of the constant censorship of conservative speech on social media? It's a bit more sophisticated than book-burning but not by much.
I could go on but I think it is clear that the proto-Nazi leaders in America today are Leftist academics, not conservatives.
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You probably have to have a Christian or Jewish background to understand how emotional this is
Vice President Mike Pence revealed on Thursday that one of the Americans who was released from North Korea handed him a note that was very inspirational.
On Thursday morning, President Donald Trump, Pence, and many members of the administration arrived at the airport to greet the three Americans— Kim Dong Chul, Kim Hak-song and Kim Sang Duk — who were held captive in North Korea.
Pence, a devout Christian himself, tweeted a picture of a handwritten note that one of the Americans handed him at the airport.
It’s unclear which of the three men wrote the note, but it features the 126th Psalm from the Bible.
"It was an amazing moment I’ll never forget… when 3 Americans stepped onto the tarmac at @JBA_NAFW & gave me a signed personal note with Psalm 126 on the back. “When the Lord brought back the captives to Zion…” To these men of faith & courage – God bless you & welcome home!" — Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) May 10, 2018
Here’s the full verse:
"When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dreamed. Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy. Then it was said among the nations, the Lord has done great things for them. The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy.”
What an amazing story, which the media has refused to report on. This personifies the power of faith and God, which helped at least one of these brave Americans get through an incredibly difficult time.
SOURCE
Their Lord has done great work among the people of Korea. Of 2014, about 30% of the South Korean population is Christian -- and growing
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Democrats' War on Capitalism
Hillary Clinton recently offered yet another reason why she lost her second consecutive race for the presidency: capitalism.
At the Shared Value Leadership Summit in New York City, Clinton was asked whether her self-proclaimed “capitalist” stance hurt her during the 2016 presidential primary season. “It’s hard to know,” she said, “but I mean, if you’re in the Iowa caucuses and 41 percent of Democrats are socialists or self-described socialists, and I’m asked, ‘Are you a capitalist?’ and I say, ‘Yes, but with appropriate regulation and appropriate accountability,’ you know, that probably gets lost in the ‘Oh, my gosh, she’s a capitalist!’”
Clinton’s right. Being a Democrat and a “capitalist” is an increasingly untenable position for a politician. Polls show that today’s Democratic Party and capitalism appear to be on a collision course. A November 2015 New York Times/CBS News poll found that 56 percent of Democratic primary voters said they held a positive view of socialism. A Morning Consult/Politico survey in June 2017 asked if a hypothetical replacement for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi should be a socialist or capitalist. More Democrats opted for socialism, with 35 percent saying it’s somewhat or very important that her replacement be a socialist, while only 31 percent said the same for a capitalist.
Indeed, one of the Democrats’ loudest voices, filmmaker Michael Moore, recently praised Karl Marx, the ideological godfather of communism. Moore tweeted: “Happy 200th Birthday Karl Marx! You believed that everyone should have a seat at the table & that the greed of the rich would eventually bring us all down. You believed that everyone deserves a slice of the pie. You knew that the super wealthy were out to grab whatever they could. … Though the rich have sought to distort him or even use him, time has shown that, in the end, Marx was actually mostly right & that the aristocrats, the slave owners, the bankers and Goldman Sachs were wrong… ‘Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!’” Tell that to the millions who died under communist repression in, among other places, China, the Soviet Union and Cambodia.
Perhaps no issue reflects this socialist view more than the Democrats’ push for “single-payer” health care. As a state senator, Barack Obama said: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer, universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. … A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. That’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately.” A few years later, then-presidential candidate Obama reiterated his stance, that if “starting from scratch” he’d have a single-payer system.
Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean called the so-called “public option” the endgame: “I think while someday we may end up with a single-payer system, it’s clear that we’re not going to do it all at once, so I think both candidates’ [Hillary Clinton’s and Obama’s] health care plans are a big step forward.”
Former Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid also said that he, too, wants to get to “single-payer.” The Las Vegas Sun reported in 2013: “In just about seven weeks, people will be able to start buying Obamacare-approved insurance plans through the new health care exchanges. But already, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is predicting those plans,” wrote the Sun, “and the whole system of distributing them, will eventually be moot. … ‘What we’ve done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever,’ Reid said. When then asked by panelist Steve Sebelius whether he meant ultimately the country would have to have a health care system that abandoned insurance as the means of accessing it, Reid said: ‘Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes.’”
The “you didn’t build that” Left does not recognize the relationship between prosperity and allowing people to keep what they produce to the fullest degree possible. By the end of eight years under President Obama, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation, we had less “economic freedom.” The United States’ score on “economic freedom” — which looks at taxes and regulations, among other criteria — dropped to its lowest level in the 23 years since Heritage began publishing its annual rankings of 180 countries. It is no coincidence that this loss of economic freedom under Obama helped produce the worst American economic recovery since 1949.
Last week brought more good news for Democrats. A Rasmussen poll found that nearly half of American likely voters support a guaranteed government job for all. This is likely to become a central presidential campaign issue for Democrats in 2020. Democrats believe that there is a free lunch and that capitalists are stopping them from eating it.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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11 May, 2018
Promise Kept — Trump Nukes Iran Deal
Keeping his promise, President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that the United States will withdraw from the "horrible" Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) and reinstate sanctions that were suspended as part of the deal. "We will not allow American cities to be threatened with destruction. We will not allow a regime that chants 'Death to America' to gain access to the most deadly weapons on earth," Trump declared. "Today's action sends a critical message: The United States no longer makes empty threats. When I make promises I keep them."
Despite attempts by the Europeans to dissuade Trump, despite John Kerry's smoke-filled-backroom efforts to save the deal, and despite Iran warning that it would be "a historic mistake" to withdraw, the president reiterated what he has said all along: "We cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb under the decaying and rotten structure of the current agreement." Trump reportedly remains open to improving the deal, and he will now have economic leverage to persuade Iran and the Europeans to do just that.
Barack Obama, who paid the Iranians $1.7 billion in ransom cash loaded on pallets as well as over a hundred billion more in sanctions relief, predictably criticized the decision to withdraw — which is tantamount to an endorsement in our book. "Walking away from the JCPOA turns our back on America's closest allies," Obama admonished, adding that it's "a serious mistake." But the biggest mistake was made by Obama and his feckless secretary of state, Kerry, caving in to one Iranian demand after another and agreeing to the deal. As we said at the time, "You want it bad, you'll get it bad."
Obama was so desperate for a foreign policy "victory" that getting a deal was more important than the content of the deal. Having agreed to a deal that he knew would never pass the Senate as a treaty, the minute the ink was dry Obama instead ran to the United Nations, which passed a Security Council Resolution establishing the deal's terms. But only laws passed by the U.S. Congress, or treaties approved by the Senate, are binding on the actions of the United States. And as "constitutional scholar" Obama and longtime Senator Kerry undoubtedly knew, any deal that really was in the United States' best interest would have been able to pass muster in the Senate and gain the two-thirds votes needed to ratify a treaty.
Obama and his various minions told us time after time that the deal would moderate Iran's behavior and help bring it back into the community of nations, but a quick survey of recent events shows the spectacular deception of that claim.
Iran is fighting a proxy war in Syria to keep Bashar al-Assad's murderous regime in power, and it probably has more troops on the ground than any group other than the Syrian Army. It continues flying military equipment into Syria via Iraq, attracting the occasional Israeli airstrike (including one just last night) and risking major escalation of the fighting there. Its proxies in Yemen have fired Iranian-made weapons at U.S. Navy ships in the Red Sea, as well as used one of Iran's signature weapons, the explosive boat, to hit and severely damage a Saudi warship. Its ballistic missile activity has continued unabated, despite UN Security Council Resolution 2231's prohibitions on such activity. In addition to missile testing, Iran has actually fired ballistic missiles at targets in Syria, and its Yemeni proxies have fired Iranian-made missiles into Saudi Arabia.
Needless to say, we don't see much moderating in Iran's behavior. Worse, Obama helped fund Iran's increased terror sponsorship.
In the coming days and weeks we expect the various actors that supported the deal — Democrats, the Leftmedia, the Europeans, the Iranians — will all make the most of the opportunity to paint President Trump as a bumptious and warmongering rube. The Europeans will follow Obama's cue and decry the undiplomatic behavior of withdrawing from a gentlemen's agreement. The Iranians will shout about the untrustworthy nature of the United States. We even expect Rep. Maxine Waters will ascribe racism to President Trump's decision, claiming it is an act of spite against his African-American predecessor.
But all the wailing and teeth-gnashing among various Europeans, Iranians, Democrats (and even some short-sighted Republicans) will merely serve to demonstrate the double injury Obama inflicted when he accepted the deal. The first injury was the deal itself. The second, as we said at the time, was that some future president would have to withdraw and harm our standing with friends and foes alike.
That day has now come, and our standing with our European allies may indeed suffer temporarily. Iran may try to create even more mischief around the Middle East. Oil markets and the U.S. and world economies may feel some pain as Iran's oil market is squeezed.
But the undeniable fact is that the existing nuclear agreement merely kicked the can down the road for a decade, ensuring that Iran would emerge with a full, UN-approved nuclear fuel cycle that would enable very rapid nuclear breakout in the future. Dealing with this problem now, even if painful, is vastly better than dealing with it later, when it may not only be painful but also deadly. Withdrawing from the nuclear deal is a first step in the right direction.
SOURCE
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Before and After Welfare Handouts
Walter E. Williams
Before the massive growth of our welfare state, private charity was the sole option for an individual or family facing insurmountable financial difficulties or other challenges. How do we know that? There is no history of Americans dying on the streets because they could not find food or basic medical assistance. Respecting the Biblical commandment to honor thy father and mother, children took care of their elderly or infirm parents. Family members and the local church also helped those who had fallen on hard times.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, charities started playing a major role. In 1887, religious leaders founded the Charity Organization Society, which became the first United Way organization. In 1904, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America started helping at-risk youths reach their full potential. In 1913, the American Cancer Society, dedicated to curing and eliminating cancer, was formed. With their millions of dollars, industrial giants such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller created our nation’s first philanthropic organizations.
Generosity has always been a part of the American genome. Alexis de Tocqueville, a French civil servant, made a nine-month visit to our country in 1831 and 1832, ostensibly to study our prisons. Instead, his visit resulted in his writing Democracy in America, one of the most influential books about our nation. Tocqueville didn’t use the term “philanthropy,” but he wrote extensively about how Americans love to form all kinds of nongovernmental associations to help one another. These associations include professional, social, civic and other volunteer organizations seeking to serve the public good and improve the quality of human lives. The bottom line is that we Americans are the most generous people in the world, according to the new Almanac of American Philanthropy — something we should be proud of.
Before the welfare state, charity embodied both a sense of gratitude on the behalf of the recipient and magnanimity on the behalves of donors. There was a sense of civility by the recipients. They did not feel that they were owed, were entitled to or had a right to the largesse of the donor. Recipients probably felt that if they weren’t civil and didn’t express their gratitude, more assistance wouldn’t be forthcoming. In other words, they were reluctant to bite the hand that helped them. With churches and other private agencies helping, people were much likelier to help themselves and less likely to engage in self-destructive behavior. Part of the message of charitable groups was: “We’ll help you if you help yourself.”
Enter the federal government. Civility and gratitude toward one’s benefactors are no longer required in the welfare state. In fact, one can be arrogant and hostile toward the “donors” (taxpayers), as well as the civil servants who dish out the benefits. The handouts that recipients get are no longer called charity; they’re called entitlements — as if what is received were earned.
There is virtually no material poverty in the U.S. Eighty percent of households the Census Bureau labels as poor have air conditioning; nearly three-quarters have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more. Two-thirds have cable or satellite TV. Half have at least one computer. Forty-two percent own their homes. What we have in our nation is not material poverty but dependency and poverty of the spirit, with people making unwise choices and leading pathological lives, aided and abetted by the welfare state. Part of this pathological lifestyle is reflected in family structure. According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children and 3 percent of white children were born to unwed mothers. Today it’s respectively 75 percent and 30 percent.
There are very little guts in the political arena to address the downside of the welfare state. To do so risks a politician’s being labeled as racist, sexist, uncaring and insensitive. That means today’s dependency is likely to become permanent.
SOURCE
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End food stamps
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is high on the Republican list of programs targeted for reform — and justifiably so.
The program has gone from 17 million enrollees in 2000 to about 43 million today, with outlays up from about $25 billion to more than $70 billion.
The Trump administration’s budget submitted last February includes major reforms to the program, designed to save $216 billion over the next decade.
Now the House Agriculture committee has put forth its own reforms as part of the bill reauthorizing the budget of the Department of Agriculture for the next five years.
The problem with the food stamp program is similar to the problem of the other anti-poverty welfare programs on which we spend almost 25 percent of the federal budget.
That is, what is directed in the spirit of compassion, to provide temporary assistance to those who have fallen on hard times, transforms into a way of life.
As we might expect, food stamp enrollees skyrocketed as the recession set in heavily in 2008. The number of recipients went from approximately 26 million in 2007 to a peak of 47.6 million in 2013. With the economic recovery, the number has dropped off to about 43 million.
The Labor Department now reports that unemployment has fallen to 3.9 percent — the lowest since December 2000. Unemployment peaked during the recession at almost 10 percent. Why, when unemployment has dropped by 61 percent, has the number of food stamp recipients dropped by only 10 percent? The number of recipients is about 17 million higher than before the recession.
The answer is that it’s a lot easier to get aid recipients onto a welfare program than get them off.
Although the unemployment rate has dropped dramatically, the employment rate — the percentage of the population over 16 working — is still far below where it was prior to the recession. The latest jobs report shows the employment rate at 60.3 percent. Just prior to the recession in 2007, it was at 63.4 percent. If today’s employment rate stood where it was before the recession, there would be eight million more Americans working.
These eight million Americans are not sitting on the sidelines just because of food stamps. Disability insurance and other welfare programs also leave the door open to not working.
How to solve this problem? Start with the Reagan rule: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government IS the problem.”
The more government we have, the more we make food stamps into the big business it is today. Why do we want corporate lobbyists for firms selling to food stamp EBT cardholders — Walmart, Target, Kroger, and even Amazon — lining the halls of Congress to lobby for these programs?
The Department of Agriculture is proposing that the government provide a food basket instead of cash. There is also the idea that government should manage the nutrition of food stamp recipients. The House bill incentivizes purchases of fruit, vegetables and milk. But do we really want a huge new government bureaucracy buying and packaging food baskets for 40 million enrollees?
I say no. We should not expand government interference in anybody’s life.
Instead, the best idea is to expand work requirements for getting benefits. The House bill requires 80 hours of work per month to receive ongoing benefits. This for those 18-49, with no dependents, and parents of school-age children, up to the age of 60. For any new or changed requirements, let’s have the states decide.
Government assistance should not be about changing anybody’s life. Changing lives should be left to family, friends and private charity.
SOURCE
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Pushing welfare blacks into middle class areas is now dead
Lawsuit can’t compel HUD Secretary Ben Carson to implement the Obama HUD racial and income zoning reg because Congress prohibited it!
On May 8, the National Fair Housing Alliance filed suit in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia against the Department of Housing and Urban Development for delaying the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation until 2020 or later.
This regulation allowed HUD to force more than 1,200 cities and counties that took $3 billion of annual community development block grants to rezone neighborhoods along income and racial criteria.
The lawsuit argues that HUD Secretary Ben Carson lacked authority to delay implementation of the rule when it was announced in Jan. 2018.
There’s only one problem. Even if that were true, since the announced delay, Congress has acted via the recent omnibus spending bill, which preempts everything HUD was doing on this regulation, especially in implementing it.
Under Division L, Title II of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018, Section 234, it states, “None of the funds made available by this Act may be used by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to direct a grantee to undertake specific changes to existing zoning laws as part of carrying out the final rule entitled ‘Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing’ … or the notice entitled ‘Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Assessment Tool’ …”
Yet the regulation still directs municipalities “to examine relevant factors, such as zoning and other land-use practices that are likely contributors to fair housing concerns, and take appropriate actions in response” [emphasis added] as a condition for receipt of the block grants.
Meaning, the regulation, as currently written, violates federal law. HUD could not implement it if it wanted to.
“The lawsuit is practically moot since it would be now be illegal for Carson to implement AFFH as currently written. In its present iteration, the HUD rule is illegal, since it still calls for changes to zoning,” Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning noted in a statement in response to the suit.
Manning added, “HUD should move for immediate dismissal, as it is clear that Congress has preempted whatever vision of AFFH the Obama administration implemented.”
Even the National Fair Housing Alliance, acknowledges that the regulation has been used to address local zoning in its court filing, citing changes to zoning in Austin, Texas and Paramount, California.
The fact is, it will be very difficult for HUD to separate the regulation from its built-in mandate to address zoning issues.
Undoubtedly, the National Fair Housing Alliance will want to cite the 1968 Fair Housing Act as somehow providing a statutory obligation for making zoning changes, but they should beware. By explicitly taking action in the 2018 spending bill to prohibit the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation from being used to make zoning changes, Congress has effectively changed whatever effect the Fair Housing Act might have had in this area.
If HUD were to continue implementing the regulation, particularly to make changes to local zoning, it would be doing so in violation of the law. If anything, the only case that should be brought to federal court is one overturning this regulation that still seeks to subvert local governments by usurping zoning authority in violation of federal law.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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10 May, 2018
The Left’s Chilling Refusal to Stop Flirting With Marxist Ideas
The New York Times just can’t stop talking about communism. Recently the Times ran an editorial headlined “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!”
The piece, written by Jason Barker, a professor in South Korea, is about what one would expect from a defense of communism. As one Federalist writer noted, it was “beyond parody.”
Hilariously, the article was behind a very capitalistic paywall.
The New York Times hasn’t shied away from publishing Marxist boosterism.
In 2017, the Times dedicated an entire section of its website to the 100-year anniversary of the communist revolution in Russia. It featured an assortment of absurd pieces running the gamut of declaring Lenin a hero environmentalist to claiming that women had better sex lives under socialism. This romanticized account of life under communism is a delusion.
Of course, while the most ridiculous claim in the most recent piece is that Marx has somehow proven to be correct, it’s notable it goes a step further to say that essentially nobody questions his fundamental critiques of capitalism. “While most are in agreement about Marx’s diagnosis of capitalism, opinion on how to treat its ‘disorder’ is thoroughly divided,” Barker wrote.
It seems fair to conclude that actually there is widespread doubt about Marx’s claims about capitalism—unless, of course, one lives in a neatly sealed left-wing bubble.
The fact is, Marx was wrong about everything. He was wrong about economics, wrong about the flow of history, wrong about religion, wrong about where his ideas would lead, and most importantly, wrong about human nature—which he believed could be reshaped under a communist regime.
If there was one thing that was illuminating about Barker’s piece, it was his description of modern social justice crusades as fundamentally Marxist.
“Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo owe something of an unspoken debt to Marx through their unapologetic targeting of the ‘eternal truths’ of our age,” Barker wrote. “Such movements recognize, as did Marx, that the ideas that rule every society are those of its ruling class and that overturning those ideas is fundamental to true revolutionary progress.”
This is an interesting admission that these movements are essentially “cultural Marxism,” a phrase that the left so often stridently claims is a figment of conservative imaginations.
Given the profound failures of and misery created by communism in the past, we probably shouldn’t be too hopeful about the success of its modern iterations. Unfortunately, many young people don’t know about the depths of these past failures, or have a skewed idea of what communism means in practice.
We should all worry about the consequences of historical ignorance. At least Marx could conceivably say that “real communism hasn’t been tried yet.” His modern proponents don’t have an excuse.
After nearly two centuries of experimentation with Marxist ideas, communism has failed to produce a brotherhood of man or a classless society in which everyone worked in blissful harmony.
Instead, it has produced societies notorious for their cruelty, dysfunction, and violence. It has led to the estimated death toll of just under 100 million people in the last century.
One only has to look at the Korean Peninsula to see the astounding difference of a society under communist tyranny and freedom.
As historian Sean McMeekin wrote in his book, “The Russian Revolution”: "Today’s Western socialists, dreaming of a world where private property and inequality are outlawed, where rational economic development is planned by far-seeing intellectuals, should be careful what they wish for … they may just get it.
Communism offers nothing to humanity but suffering and hopelessness.
This is not to say that life under communism was all about starvation and murderous purges.
Even at its least malignant, living under communism’s inevitable system of enforced conformity and equality where decisions are only the purview of government authorities and bureaucratic managers is hardly a system of human flourishing. This is more akin to living a lifetime stuck in the DMV.
Marx was wrong, hopelessly wrong. His ideas have been tried, tested, and spectacularly failed. It’s time to leave his legacy on the ash heap of history.
SOURCE
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Donald Trump pulls the United States out of the nuclear deal with Iran, renews sanctions
President Trump said Tuesday the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement and re-impose sanctions on Iran, a decision likely to anger allies who fear the prospect of a nuclear arms race in the heart of the Middle East.
"The Iran deal is defective at its core," Trump said during a speech at the White House.
Trump denounced the 2015 agreement as "disastrous," saying it gives Iran too much room to cheat on nuclear weapons development, though in the past he has delayed steps that would effectively render it moot.
Democratic lawmakers and other supporters of the agreement said the decision would alienate allies and encourage Iran to disregard the deal and pursue nuclear weapons.
In his speech, Trump bashed Iran for what he called support of terrorism and threats toward Israel.
SOURCE
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The War on Wisdom
Dennis Prager
There is more knowledge available today than ever before in history. But few would argue people are wiser than ever before.
On the contrary, many of us would argue that we are living in a particularly foolish time — a period that is largely wisdom-free, especially among those with the most knowledge: the best educated.
The fact that one of our two major political parties is advocating lowering the voting age to 16 is a good example of the absence of wisdom among a large segment of the adult population. What adult deems 16-year-olds capable of making a wise voting decision? The answer is an adult with the wisdom of a 16-year-old — “Hey, I’m no wiser than most 16-year-olds. Why should I have the vote and they not?”
America has been influenced and is now being largely led by members of the baby-boom generation. This is the generation that came up with the motto “Never trust anyone over 30,” making it the first American generation to proclaim contempt for wisdom as a virtue.
The Left in America is founded on the rejection of wisdom. It is possible to be on the Left and be kind, honest in business, faithful to one’s spouse, etc. But it is not possible to be wise if one subscribes to leftist (as opposed to liberal) ideas.
Last year, Amy Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, coauthored an opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer with a professor from the University of San Diego School of Law in which they wrote that the “bourgeois culture” and “bourgeois norms” that governed America from the end of World War II until the mid-1960s were good for America, and that their rejection has caused much of the social dysfunction that has characterized this country since the 1960s.
Those values included, in their words: “Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.”
Recognizing those norms as universally beneficial constitutes wisdom. Rejection of them constitutes a rejection of wisdom — i.e. foolishness.
Yet the Left almost universally rejected the Wax piece, deeming it, as the left-wing National Lawyers Guild wrote, “an explicit and implicit endorsement of white supremacy” and questioning whether professor Wax should be allowed to continue teaching a required first-year course at Penn Law.
To equate getting married before having children, working hard and eschewing substance abuse and crime with “white supremacy” is to betray an absence of wisdom that is as depressing as it breathtaking. It is obvious to anyone with a modicum of common sense that those values benefit anyone who adheres to them; they have nothing to do with race.
But almost every left-wing position (that differs from a liberal or conservative position) is bereft of wisdom.
Is the left-wing belief in the notion of “cultural appropriation” — such as the Left’s recent condemnation of a white girl for wearing a Chinese dress to her high school prom — wise? Or is it simply moronic?
Is the left-wing belief that there are more than two genders wise? Or is it objectively false, foolish and nihilistic?
Has the left-wing belief that children need (unearned) self-esteem turned out to be wise, or morally and psychologically destructive? To its credit, last year, The Guardian wrote a scathing exposé on the “lie” — its word — the self-esteem movement is based on and the narcissistic generation it created.
Is it wise to provide college students with “safe spaces” — with their hot chocolate, stuffed animals and puppy videos — in which to hide whenever a conservative speaker comes to their college? Or is it just ridiculous and infantilizing?
Is the Left’s rejection of many, if not most, great philosophical, literary and artistic works of wisdom on the grounds that they were written or created by white males wise? One example: The English department of the University of Pennsylvania, half of whose law school professors condemned Amy Wax and almost none of whose law professors defended her piece, removed a portrait of William Shakespeare (replacing it with that of a black lesbian poet).
Is multiculturalism, the idea that no culture is superior to another morally or in any other way, wise? Isn’t it the antithesis of wisdom, whose very premise is that certain ideas are morally superior to others, and certain literary or artistic works are superior to others?
And the veneration of feelings over truth, not to mention wisdom, is a cornerstone of leftism.
Here’s one way to test my thesis: Ask left-wing friends what they have done to pass on wisdom to their children. Most will answer with a question: “What do you mean?” Then ask religious Jewish or Christian friends the same question. They won’t answer with a question.
SOURCE
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Sessions GETS TOUGH With Illegal Border Crossers
Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions made a massive announcement that DHS will now refer anyone caught entering the U.S. illegally through our southern border to the Federal Justice Department for prosecution.
“If you cross the border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. It’s that simple. If you smuggle illegal aliens across our border, then we will prosecute you.”
“If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child may be separated from you as required by law.”
Sessions’ announced his new zero tolerance policy which includes the possibility that immigration authorities could separate parents and children whenever a family is apprehended attempting to cross the border. This will act as a deterrent to any illegal aliens attempting to gain access to the United States.
“We’re here to send a message to the world that we are not going to let the country be overwhelmed. People are not going to caravan or otherwise stampede our border. We need legality and integrity in our immigration system,” Sessions stated
He also warned that lying to an immigration officer, filing a fraudulent refuge claim or assisting others do any of the above would be treated as felonies and prosecuted as such.
“I have no doubt that many of those crossing our border illegally are leaving behind difficult situations,” Sessions added. “But we cannot take everyone on this planet who is in a difficult situation.”
Sessions claimed the Trump administration’s actions were necessary because of “massive increases in illegal crossings in recent months.”
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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9 May, 2018
Do firearm-control laws make you safer?
A medical journal gives the answer "yes" to that.
One of the besetting problems with science is that academics often don't keep up with previous research on their subject. Example here. They seem to think that no-one before them could have had such brilliant ideas as theirs. So they do not check that. A case in point has just emerged. It is an article in a prestigious American medical journal under the title: "Interstate Association of State Firearm Laws With Suicide and Homicide", authored by a Robert Steinbrook, MD.
Dr Steinbrook probably knows a lot about colds and flu but he appears to know very little about scientific research. In particular he seems to know nothing about bibliographical research. His article mirrors closely a 2016 article under the heading: "Firearm legislation and firearm mortality in the USA: a cross-sectional, state-level study" -- by Kalesan et al -- also published in a prestigious medical jourtnal.
Because of his failure to do comprehensive background research, he has fallen into the trap that background research is designed to prevent: He has learnt nothing from the mistakes in the previous study. He has repeated its mistakes. And the mistakes are grievous -- as I pointed out in 2016. A failure of basic scientific precautions has rendered both studies a nullity. They prove nothing. They are at best propaganda.
It rather bemuses me that a humble retired psychologist such as I has to point out basic howlers in prestigious medical journals.
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Two Judges in Virginia rebuke Special Counsel Mueller
As bad weeks go, last week was a pretty bad week for Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Two different judges dealt blows to the Special Counsel while breathing life into the Constitution. From the beginning it was obvious the Special Counsel was not interested in Russian collusion but was more interested in getting President Trump. Thanks to a pair of federal judges the American people are finally seeing what the Special Counsel is really up to.
In a blistering exchange with Mueller cronies, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis, overseeing Mueller’s case against one-time Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, questioned why the Special Counsel was handling a case that was years old and had nothing to do with President Donald Trump or the election. The judge stated, “You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud. … What you really care about is what information Mr. Manafort could give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prosecution or impeachment.”
The judge is correct. From the beginning, it has become increasingly clear, the investigation has absolutely nothing to do with finding a link between Russia and President Trump, but everything to do with ending the Trump presidency. The Special Counsel handed over the case involving Mr. Cohen to federal authorities in New York but did not do so in this case, even though Manafort is being charged with crimes that are alleged to have happened years before becoming part of the Trump campaign.
Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning agreed with the judge stating, “Everyone outside the Department of Justice seems to be able to see that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s only objective is to create grounds for the Democrats to impeach the president. That isn’t his job; his job is to investigate Russian collusion if there was Russian collusion in the election. The Manafort case clearly demonstrates the special counsel is well beyond his legal mandate, and Judge Ellis should throw the charges out immediately on this basis.”
Perhaps the most critical issue to come out of the hearing, was the judge ordering the Special counsel to turn over the scope memo to the court. The scope memo was written by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and laid out the parameters of the Special Counsel’s investigative powers. The DOJ has been guarding this document closely, refusing Congressional subpoenas to turn it over. If the Special Counsel and DOJ have nothing to hide and are doing everything legally, why are they refusing to hand over the document?
While Judge Ellis was slamming the Mueller investigation for targeting the President, another judge dealt a potential lethal legal blow to the case against 13 Russians and three companies indicted earlier this year. Federal District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich rejected Mueller’s motion to delay the first hearing after lawyers showed up to defend two of the companies last month when it was expected no one would show up. The lawyers made multiple requests for information, seemingly catching the Special Counsel off guard.
It is believed the requests were a plan “to force Mueller’s team to turn over relevant evidence to the Russian firm and perhaps even to bait prosecutors into an embarrassing dismissal in order to avoid disclosing sensitive information,” according to Politico’s Josh Gerstein, citing legal experts. Mueller’s team must now show up on Wednesday. If the team does not turn over all exculpatory Brady material the defendants are entitled to, it risks a dismissal and an extremely embarrassing episode for Mueller and Deputy AG Rosenstein.
Something else we also learned late last week, is that Mueller may have lied to the court. For almost a year, there have been multiple reports on the contacts between Manafort and Russian agents or people connected to Russian agents. On March 28, it was further reported by Newsweek, Mueller told the court Gates knew he and Manafort were dealing with ex-Russian intelligence agents in sentencing documents for Alex van der Zwaan. Manafort’s lawyers challenged the allegation that their client knew anything and asked the Special Counsel to produce the evidence Manafort had contact with Russian intelligence officials.
The government is allowed to deny the request for the Brady material on national security grounds, but the government is not allowed to deny the evidence exists. This is exactly what the Mueller team did. Manafort’s legal team filed papers stating, “Despite multiple discovery and Brady requests in this regard, the Special Counsel has not produced any materials to the defense – no tapes, notes, transcripts or any other material evidencing surveillance or intercepts of communications between Mr. Manafort and Russian intelligence officials, Russian government officials (or any other foreign officials). The Office of Special Counsel has advised that there are no materials responsive to Mr. Manafort’s requests.”
Two questions immediately come to mind, did Mueller lie to the court, and how can there be collusion if there is no evidence of contact? If Robert Mueller can go after Trump officials on specious charges of lying to the FBI, then Mueller’s lies to the federal court should be treated harshly. Apparently, Mr. Mueller lives in a glass house and should have known better than to throw the first three stones.
We are finally seeing the true nature of the Special Counsel. His sole objective is to be the most expensive and extensive opposition research project in history. He was created to give Congress an excuse to impeach the President, and if he couldn’t find it, make it up. Thanks to the Judicial Branch, the people can finally see who is pulling the coup strings.
SOURCE
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President Trump’s historic jobs achievement
While the media obsess over the latest palace intrigue, President Trump is quietly shaping up to be one of the best economic presidents in modern U.S. history.
Under his watch, the unemployment rate hit 3.9 percent in April, the lowest level this century. At this rate, essentially every American who wants a job could find one. Keep in mind, the unemployment rate was more than double this level as recently as President Obama's second term in office.
Unemployment has dipped below 4 percent only a few times in U.S. history. Yet the underlying figures may be even more remarkable. Unemployment among blacks and Latinos fell to 6.6 percent and 4.8 percent, respectively, their lowest levels in recorded history — and half the rates of five years ago.
This historically low unemployment isn’t part of a natural pattern — like the weather — as some left-wing pundits imply. It’s a result of the pro-business public policies created and implemented by President Trump and Republicans in Congress.
Exhibit A is the historic tax cuts passed late last year. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act delivered the biggest tax relief for small businesses in American history, reduced the tax burden on the middle class, and brought the corporate rate in line with international standards.
Taken together, the tax cuts are putting more money in Americans’ paychecks and on companies’ balance sheets. This leads to more spending, more investment and more jobs. It also means employers will pay higher wages, which are growing at their fastest pace in a decade.
No wonder small business optimism is at an all-time high. According to a national poll of small businesses by the organization that I lead, the Job Creators Network, respondents support the Republican tax cuts by a margin of 10-to-1.
As a result of this tax cut stimulus, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently raised its economic growth estimate to 3.3 percent for this year. This is more than double the growth rate of the last year of the Obama administration; it’s the type of growth that ordinary Americans can actually notice in their day-to-day lives.
Prominent left-wing economists scoffed when President Trump predicted this level of growth a couple of years ago. You’d have to believe in “tooth fairies and ludicrous supply-side economics” to believe in his 3 percent growth prediction, is how Obama's former chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, put it.
While Americans should expect this labor market and economic vibrancy as their birthright, bad public policies such as over-taxation and over-regulation threaten it. Still, leading Democrats have promised to raise taxes and increase regulations if they retake control of Congress this fall.
This is the wedge issue that Republicans must take to voters during this election season. Pocketbook issues beat identity politics and divisive social issues every time. To paraphrase the James Carville cliche: Campaign on the economy and tax cuts, stupid.
Of course, labor market challenges remain. Despite recent improvements, the labor force participation rate remains stubbornly low at 62.8 percent. Meanwhile, there are 6.3 million unfilled jobs in the country — the largest in history. Roughly half of these pay $50,000 or more, according to pay data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Closing this gap calls for a “Fight for 50,” as in a fight for $50,000 jobs. With Republican-led skills training and occupational licensing deregulation, this too can be achieved.
President Ronald Reagan famously said, “The best possible social program is a job.” Based on this criteria, President Trump is shaping up to be more than just one of the greatest economic presidents in modern history. Just don’t expect these historic achievements to interrupt programming of the Stormy Daniels soap opera that dominates today’s mainstream media.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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8 May, 2018
Tim Allen: 'The Left Wants to Tell Everybody' What to Do
Actor Tim Allen told PJM “the left” should “stop telling” people what to do, adding, “no one is stopping you from paying more taxes.”
Allen stars on the ABC show Last Man Standing, in which he plays a conservative father who owns a sporting goods store and often pokes fun at the Democratic Party. Allen was asked if he writes some of the material himself.
“I’m more of an anarchist because I’m a stand-up comic. I don’t like anybody telling me what to do and, lately, the left wants to tell everybody – it’s the ‘we all know this, you should, you should.’ Stop telling me what to do, you go do it. You want to support stuff that the government should stay out of? You go do it. No one is stopping you from paying more taxes. Then, that’s the attitude I get,” he told PJM after he left the Creative Coalition’s Inaugural Gala.
“You see my act on the road or in concert – I don’t do political stuff. I do anarchist stuff. I like making everybody laugh. Jokes should be – President Trump should laugh at it, so should Hillary – that’s the balance I like; the personal stuff is different,” he added.
Allen was likely referring to Pay.gov, which allows every American to make a donation to the Treasury Department at any time to reduce the nation’s debt.
Actors Robert De Niro and Alec Baldwin addressed an anti-Trump protest in New York City on the eve of the inauguration, encouraging the crowd to resist Trump’s policies.
“Donald Trump and Steve Bannon and Mike Pence, and all these people that are part of the Trump administration, they think that you are going to lay down. Are you going to lie down? The one thing they don’t realize is New Yorkers never lay down,” Baldwin said. “Are you going to fight? Are we going to have 100 days of resistance?”
SOURCE
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Karl Marx Gets Celebrity Status at New York Times
As the philosopher's 200th birthday approaches, too many people are still celebrating.
Among the many things the 19th century will forever be remembered for is the early proliferation of communism. The chief developer of this repressive framework was Karl Marx — a stalwart anti-capitalist combatant. He entered this world on May 5, 1818, and spent his life cultivating the collectivist philosophy ultimately bearing the name Marxism, which forms the foundation of communism.
Last year, marking the centennial of Soviet communism, our own Mark Alexander noted this staggering statistic: “Between 1917 and 1991, there were almost 150 million civilian casualties of communist dictatorships, the three largest dictatorial offenders being China (73,237,000), the USSR (58,627,000) and Germany (11,000,000). Where those dictatorships exist today, the slaughter continues.”
That’s not exactly a sterling legacy, nor is it deserving of celebration. Yet some academics continue to treat as a hero the man who laid the foundation for one of the world’s most monstrous political systems. This week, Karl Marx turns 200 years old. Enter Jason Barker, an associate professor of philosophy, who declares in a New York Times op-ed, “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!” Professor Barker ponders: “As we reach the bicentennial of Marx’s birth, what lessons might we draw from his dangerous and delirious philosophical legacy? What precisely is Marx’s lasting contribution?”
Barker’s takeaway isn’t just incredibly deleterious, it’s vehemently anti-capitalist — just like Marx was. Barker insists, “Countless books have appeared, from scholarly works to popular biographies, broadly endorsing Marx’s reading of capitalism and its enduring relevance to our neoliberal age.” He also endorses the view that “Marx’s basic thesis — that capitalism is driven by a deeply divisive class struggle in which the ruling-class minority appropriates the surplus labor of the working-class majority as profit — is correct.”
While admitting that “Marx arrives at no magic formula for exiting the enormous social and economic contradictions that global capitalism entails,” the professor asserts, “What Marx did achieve, however, through his self-styled materialist thought, were the critical weapons for undermining capitalism’s ideological claim to be the only game in town.” Amazingly, he goes on to posit: “Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, owe something of an unspoken debt to Marx through their unapologetic targeting of the ‘eternal truths’ of our age. Such movements recognize, as did Marx, that the ideas that rule every society are those of its ruling class and that overturning those ideas is fundamental to true revolutionary progress.”
He concludes by noting: “Marx, as I have said, does not offer a one-size-fits-all formula for enacting social change. But he does offer a powerful intellectual acid test for that change. On that basis, we are destined to keep citing him and testing his ideas until the kind of society that he struggled to bring about, and that increasing numbers of us now desire, is finally realized.”
The biggest irony of all? Parker is employed by Kyung Hee University, which is located in … South Korea. His anti-capitalist tirade completely ignores the nuclear threat posed by communist North Korea. Parker’s tribute to Marx is a tip of the cap to revolutionary social and economic change. Yet it’s worth repeating: Whatever qualms people have with capitalism, last we checked, it didn’t result in 150 million deaths. And as Mark Alexander also observed, “Democratic Socialism, like Nationalist Socialism, is nothing more than Marxist Socialism repackaged.”
As we noted last December, a Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation study found that “58% of Millennials would prefer living in a socialist, communist or fascist nation instead of a capitalist one.” With professors like Parker, it’s no wonder. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. Communism and its sister system, socialism, are no different.
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A journalist laments
Matt Bai
Trump’s victory in 2016 brought forth an outpouring of self-flagellation and banal reflection from people in my industry. We’d lost touch with the country, is what dozens of Washington journalists said and wrote. We didn’t know how angry all those white voters were. We didn’t know how anxious they felt about the future, how desperate they were to overturn the order.
Never have so many keyboards been worn out in the service of such nonsense. Of course we knew. No one travels the country as widely or talks to as many voters as a campaign reporter. Some of us had been writing for years, even decades, about the growing alienation of less affluent white voters. Literally thousands of stories had been devoted to the subject.
But that facile explanation — this idea that we just didn’t know the depth of the rage out there — enabled us to sidestep the harder reality, which is that a lot of that rage was directed squarely at us.
For 20-plus years now, a lot of Americans have been taking in the smugness on cable TV and watching journalists chase their own brand of celebrity, and they’ve decided that the political press corps is a pretty good stand-in for everything that’s wrong in a country where a small, educated stratum of the society reaps all the economic benefit and shapes all the public opinion.
Then, as now, the polling on Trump tells a fascinating story. A lot of people who say they support the president don’t especially like him, or admire his behavior, or agree with him on issues. But as long as every dumb thing he says makes us (and urban Democrats) jump up and down and rend our clothes and scream about the death of fact and the end of civilized society, they’re willing to overlook all that for a while.
I hear from readers all the time who say some version of this: Trump may not be great at governing, but if he’s making you feel less relevant and less powerful, then at least something’s going right. A sizable bloc of voters reviles the political establishment, and no embodiment of that establishment looms larger on their screens than we do.
So the main problem with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner isn’t the glut of almost recognizable movie stars, or the ugly brand of partisan humor, or the ill-fitting tuxedos and carbon-fiber filet mignon. The problem is the showy display of vanity, pretension and tribalism that reinforces the worst idea of what political journalism is all about.
For 364 days a year, a lot of my colleagues do work that defies Trump’s phony outrage and disproves his cliché of a lazy, elitist, attention-craved media. And then, for one stupid night, we go out of our way to prove him right.
How about this? Next year, if you want to honor the scholarship winners who are supposedly at the center of this event, then hold smaller events in each of their communities instead. Set out to change perceptions, instead of mindlessly reinforcing them.
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North Korea Just Caved To ANOTHER One Of Trump’s Demands In Historic Concession
North Korea has freed three U.S. citizens that have been detained in the communist nation for several years, bowing to another demand of President Donald Trump ahead of the U.S.-North Korea meeting in the coming weeks.
According to the Washington Times, Trump has said that the U.S. detainees needed to be released from North Korea before the historic meeting with Kim Jong Un, and the regime has honored Trump’s request.
The three Americans — Kim Dong Chul, Kim Hak-song and Kim Sang Duk, also known as Tony Kim — were released and sent to a medical treatment facility in Pyongyang.
They will reportedly be sent back home on the day of the U.S.-North Korea summit, and will reportedly be staying in a hotel outside Pyongyang until summit.
“We believe that Mr. Trump can take them back on the day of the U.S.-North Korea summit, or he can send an envoy to take them back to the U.S. before the summit,” said Choi Sung-ryong, an activist pursuing release of North Korea’s political prisoners.
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Australia tipped to soon produce more than half of the world's lithium
Giving security of supply to the Western world
Western Australia is tipped to produce more than half of the world’s lithium supply by the end of this year, as new mines come online and the world’s appetite for the materials used to make batteries for electric vehicles grows. [Batteries in small appliances such as phones also use lithium]
That forecast, made by Citi analyst Clarke Wilkins last week, came on the same day that the managing director of lithium miner Pilbara Minerals, Ken Brinsden, said Australia was in "pole position in lithium raw materials", and described one part of WA as "lithium valley".
But with Australia’s emerging lithium industry growing so fast, investors have also been reminded that there will be “bumps and curves” and twists along the way.
Most of the world’s lithium now comes from hard rock mining of spodumene deposits, or via the extraction of lithium from brine deposits in Argentina and Chile.
But given the handful of hard rock mines now operating in Western Australia or soon to start, Australia is well placed to capitalise on the rapid growth in the use of electric vehicles over coming years in major car markets such as Europe and China.
“If you look at all the hard rock (lithium) mines, WA is going to dominate. West Australia will be over half of the (world’s) lithium supply, effectively, by the end of this year. Because all of the world’s hard rock mines are basically in WA,” Mr Wilkins said.
“There are projects outside of Australia, but it’s unlikely that any of those will be really of material scale production until a number of years away. Because you’ve got infrastructure, you’ve got a mining culture, the biggest projects tend to be in Australia, so Australia does lead the world in terms of development of these hard rock mines."
Lithium is a key ingredient in the manufacture of lithium ion batteries used in electric vehicles, large battery storage units, and electronic devices like mobile phones and laptop computers.
In an address to the Melbourne Mining Club on Friday, Mr Brinsden said Pilbara Minerals’ Pilgangoora mine would be “one of the world’s largest lithium mines”, and that the company was only a week or two away from turning on its processing plant. The plant will crush and process rocks from the mine to produce spodumene concentrate containing lithium.
“We expect to make our first shipment of spodumene concentrate sometime in late June,” Mr Brinsden said.
Mr Brinsden said Australia was the world’s largest producer of spodumene concentrate with mines already in production, and with several more to come.
“Australia commands pole position in lithium raw materials, and will likely hold that mantel for many years to come as a result of the incredible mineral endowment we have in hard-rock lithia sources,” he said.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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7 May, 2018
Stop Talking About Race and IQ
Does WILLIAM SALETAN deny the humanity of blacks?
My heading above is copied from a recent, very long-winded article by Saletan, who is a sort of token conservative among prominent journalists. Saletan accepts that there are large differences between black and white IQ averages but thinks we should not talk about it. To help us think about the matter, let us look at some hypothetical statements about dogs:
Long tails in dogs are hereditary
Great Danes have long tails
Therefore long tails in Great Danes are hereditary
That conclusion seems pretty reasonable, does it not? From my memory of my studies in formal logic of over 50 years ago, I think it is in fact a valid syllogism.
Here is another very similar syllogism that refers to the centrepiece of the Saletan article.
Low IQs are hereditary
Blacks have low IQs
Therefore low IQs in blacks are hereditary.
Is that syllogism not as valid as the first?
Saletan wants to say that that conclusion is NOT logical or is at least unproven. The only way he can do that, however, is to attack one or both of the premises. He attacks the statement that low IQs are hereditary. He says that statement is overly broad. It may be that among blacks IQ is not hereditary or is hereditary in some different way.
But there have now been many studies of brain function (GWAS studies) which show that IQ involves a large number of brain components and the most recent studies have in fact shown that neuron size is heavily involved in IQ. Smart people have bigger neurons. And note that the brain is almost entirely composed of neurons.
So Saletan is saying that all those GWAS features are different in blacks. He is denying the humanity of blacks. He is in effect saying that blacks are a different species, almost something extra-terrestrial. I am betting that he does NOT want to say that but his argument leads to it. He would not want to say that because he places great stress on kindness to blacks as being a big issue in the debate. Telling blacks that they are on average dumber and can't change that is unkind.
I don't think it is unkind. It is lies that are unkind. As Eysenck often said, the policies you derive from low average black IQs could as well be kind as anything else. By having lower expectations of blacks, you could be relieving stresses on them to keep up in various ways, for instance.
And we do in any case ordinarily make it very clear to all blacks that they are on average dumber. That is the famous educational "gap". In their school studies, blacks lag behind white pupils by about the degree you would expect from their much lower average IQ. And the best brains among American educators have for years striven mightily to find ways of closing that gap. Many things have been tried but nothing works. The gap remains no matter what is tried. It remains just as it has to be if it is genetically-based on IQ.
And all that educational failure is vividly brought home to blacks time and time again. They are repeatedly shown that they are on average dumber than whites and that nothing will fix that. Many blacks drop out of education as as result. They just can't do the work but know that whites can.
So we already make plain to blacks exactly the message that Saletan want to avoid. So the lies about black IQ come to naught anyway.
Saletan also bows down to convention in saying: “Race science, the old idea that race is a biologically causal trait, may live on as an ideology of hate. But as an academic matter, it’s been discredited"
It is Saletan who has been discredited. In recent years, there have been a number of factor-analytic and other studies which have shown that the traditional racial categories do emerge in international data. Saletan might want to start here if he wants to catch up with the research concerned. Does he really believe that there is no biological cause for the many obvious differences between blacks and whites? Do you get born black or white at random? Insane.
Note that I am not the lone psychometrician in pointing to genetics as the cause of black/white IQ differences. In 2013, a survey of 228 intelligence researchers found that the typical scientist in this field agrees:
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A Good Economy Is Bad for Democrats
Fresh off the socialist May Day protests, Hillary Clinton's hilariously bad socialist/capitalist blame game and a day ahead of Karl Marx's 200th birthday, there's some positive news for our lower-taxed, less-regulated, free-market economy.
April saw another 164,000 jobs created, which isn't fantastic but it's progress, and the headline unemployment rate dropped to just 3.9%, an 18-year low. The fuller measure of unemployment fell to 7.8%, a 17-year low. Black unemployment hit a new record low of 6.6% — doubly interesting in the midst of the Kanye West controversy. March's jobs numbers were revised up from 103,000 to 135,000. Government payrolls declined by 4,000. People applying for unemployment benefits for the first time is now at the lowest level since 1973. Wages grew at an unimpressive 2.6% annualized rate, which bewilders experts, but according to the Employment Cost Index, first-quarter wages grew at the fastest pace in 11 years. That would be prior to the Democrat-caused financial collapse of 2008 for those keeping score.
The lone dark cloud was that unemployment dropped in part because more people aren't even looking for work. As Reuters reports, "236,000 people dropped out of the labor force. The labor force participation rate, or the proportion of working-age Americans who have a job or are looking for one, fell to 62.8 percent from 62.9 percent in March." That said, job growth can't help but slow when the labor market is at essentially full employment.
Meanwhile, the Commerce Department recently announced its estimate for first-quarter GDP growth of 2.3%, which is better than expected. Of course, Americans who rely on nightly newscasts didn't hear about that good news. Other news organizations spun it in a negative light for President Donald Trump.
And that right there is the key. A lot of the Leftmedia churn undermines consumer confidence, and the economy is all about confidence. To the extent Democrats — with the help of their Leftmedia allies — can erode confidence in the administration, the more they undermine the economy. The trick is for Republicans to hammer home the message of tax cuts, deregulation and a growing economy.
SOURCE
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Trump refugee policy favors Christians over Muslims, 3-1
President Trump’s move to change U.S. refugee policy has led to a radical change in the religious makeup of the population, with Christians now outnumbering Muslims by some three to one, according to the State Department.
In data analyzed by the Pew Research Center, some 10,500 refugees entered the U.S. in the current fiscal year, of which 6,700 were Christians. Another 1,800 were Muslim.
The shift breaks a pattern of allowing equal numbers of Muslims and Christians into the U.S. from dangerous and war-torn nations.
Under Trump, the number of refugees allowed has been slashed. Under former President Obama it reached 100,000, but under Trump it is set for a fraction of that.
Also, the president has targeted some mostly Muslim nations with a travel ban, though there are millions of Muslims in other nations not hit by the ban who are seeking to flee.
In past years, some Christian groups said that Muslims were favored by refugee officials, especially during the Obama years.
Pew did the math and said, “As a result of these changes, Christians account for a far larger share of refugees admitted than Muslims the first half of fiscal 2018 (63 percent vs. 17 percent). By comparison, in full fiscal 2017 Christians (47 percent) and Muslims (43 percent) were more evenly split, and in fiscal 2016 the Muslim share (46 percent) slightly exceeded the Christian share (44 percent).”
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The swamp still has the power to destroy you
On May 2, the Daily Caller reported, “House Democrat Warns Trump Team: You’ll End Up ‘Sullied’ Like Ronny Jackson,” writing, “Democratic Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen warned on Wednesday that members of President Donald Trump’s inner circle will end up ‘sullied’ like former White House physician Adm. Ronny Jackson — if they stick with the president for long.”
On May 2, the Washington Examiner reported, “Ex-Trump aide Michael Caputo warns: Investigations espousing ‘punishment strategy’ to deter future Trump-like candidates, stating, “Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign aide, said that he doesn’t think anybody should work on a Republican campaign ever again, unless they are compensated for any legal fees that may come out of it. Speaking out Wednesday evening, Caputo also said he believes there is a ‘punishment strategy’ to ‘destroy’ Trump and deter any other billionaires in the future from thinking about running for president. Just out of an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, Caputo told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson he’s certain that federal investigators are fixated on collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Caputo said he firmly believes there was never any collusion. Caputo also griped about the crushing legal costs of being a witness in the Russia investigations. He excoriated the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday in his closing remarks, blaming the investigation for forcing his family out of their home due to mounting legal costs and death threats. He concluded the statement saying, ‘God damn you to hell.’”
On May 3, NBC News reported, “Feds tapped phones of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and caught one call with White House: NBC News,” stating, “Federal authorities wiretapped the phone lines of President Donald Trump’s long-time personal lawyer Michael Cohen, NBC News reported Thursday. At least one call between Cohen’s phone and the White House was captured by the wiretap, according to the story.”
The NBC story was later retracted, with Fox News reporting, “Sources with knowledge of the proceedings told Fox News that investigators used a pen register, or dialed number recorder (DNR), on at least one of Cohen’s phones. A pen register records all numbers dialed from a given phone number, as well as the length of each call.”
To believe that the FBI went and got a court to violate the President’s attorney-client privilege via wiretap and did not record the contents of the wiretap, it seems like bull. It’s clearly an attempt to obscure the fallout of this egregious abuse of power, to cover up the fact that the President’s attorney was under surveillance. Either way, it’s surveillance of the President’s attorney.
Are you picking up a theme?
Support Donald Trump and you will be destroyed. It doesn’t matter if the public has ever heard your name, you will be targeted and driven into bankruptcy or worse. The crime? Supporting the President of the United States.
And it is all happening right before our eyes in plain sight.
It is no secret that Special Counsel Mueller is a heat seeking missile with only one goal – to take down the Trump presidency.
It is no secret that senior officials within the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Obama Department of Justice similarly sought to undermine the Trump candidacy and subsequently the legitimacy of his presidency.
It is no secret that the Democrats with the aid of some key Senate Republicans have engaged in full blown obstruction of the President’s ability to staff his own Administration.
And now, anyone can read with their own eyes that the seek and destroy campaign goes beyond just the President and those closest to him, and aims at anyone who had the audacity to work in the Trump campaign, to large donors who support conservative causes, and even to those who dare to fight for traditional constitutional governance.
The message is clear. If you dare step outside the accepted socialist orthodoxy that pervades dominant thought in the United States, you will be silenced.
But they cannot silence the people, and ultimately that is the strength of America. Unfortunately, those who seek to destroy the President and anyone who dares to support him know this and that is what the campaign of intimidation is about.
On the Cohen wiretap, it is an obscene abuse of power for the Department of Justice to use wiretaps or pen registers or whatever on the phone of the President’s personal attorney in an apparent attempt to listen to an attorney/client privileged conversation(s). Whether at least one conversation between someone at the White House and the President’s attorney was recorded or even simply its metadata registered, this brazen judicial abuse should have civil libertarians apoplectic.
Of course, the reality is that the left can justify any action, no matter how egregious, in their effort to take down President Trump.
In the mid-terms, the people will decide if they want to reward those who are engaged in a silent coup, not just against Trump, but also against the very premises of our constitutional republic of innocence until proven guilty and the right to free speech and political activity. President Trump was elected in spite of the D.C. swamp, and threats from the swamp will do nothing but show the people who the real swamp creatures are. If the people want to maintain their freedoms, they better be taking names also.
It is clear to anyone who is paying attention that those who vowed before the election to impeach Trump if he won will stop at nothing to end or disable his presidency. We can no longer be shocked by this ongoing abuse of prosecutorial power, the only question is how long the American people will tolerate it.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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6 May, 2018
Secret to intelligence? New link between brain cell size and IQ may help scientists find a way to enhance human intellect
For the first time, scientists have discovered that smart people have bigger brain cells than their peers.
As well as being bulkier, the cells are better connected to their neighbours, allowing them to process more information at a faster rate.
If results of the study are confirmed, it could help researchers find a way to enhance our intelligence.
A study, led by Natalia Goriounova at the Free University Amsterdam, gave an IQ test to 35 people who were due to undergo brain surgery, according to report in New Scientist.
During surgery, doctors took a small sample of healthy brain tissue from the temporal lobe of the volunteers. This piece of human brain was then kept alive for testing in a lab.
Dr Goriounova compared the size and shape of the brain cells with volunteers' IQ scores. They found that the brain cells are significantly bigger in people with higher IQs.
Brain cells from smarter people also have more dendrites, which are short extensions of the main neuron that connect to other cells. These tiny projections are important in transferring information from one cell to another.
The study is the first to ever show that the physical size and structure of brain cells is related to a person's intelligence levels.
Christof Koch at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle told New Scientist: 'We've known there is some link between brain size and intelligence. The team confirm this and take it down to individual neurons.
The concept of intelligence being derived from brain structure could ruffle feathers among some in the academic field.
Dr Koch said: 'Some people will say intelligence is so elusive and complex that the idea it can be tied to individual neurons is implausible.'
The research team also tested people's ability to transmit electrical signals, mimicking the processing of information.
What they found was that people with a low IQ coped at a low frequency, but rapidly became fatigued. The smarter people did not slow down and continued to transmit even at a high rate of stimulation.
'What they did here is extraordinary neuroscience,' says Richard Haier at the University of California, Irvine. 'It's the beginning of being able to study intelligence neuron by neuron, and circuit by circuit.
'This research could lead to neuroscience-based ways to enhance human intelligence – perhaps dramatically. 'We might be able to treat intellectual disabilities or prevent them from occurring.'
'Theoretically, we can say that with both pluripotent and embryonic stem cells that we can create larger brain cells which, when combined with this recent research, would indicate that we could increase intelligence,' Michele Giugliano, co-author and professor at the University of Antwerp told MailOnline.
'This was shown in rodents as we grafted these cells into the brain of mice.
'The problem is that we do not know if the size of the cell is from genetic cause or neurophsycical cues.
It does seem that it would be theoretically possible to restore human brain matter in the next 50 years to restore cognitive deficit. Ethically, I am not sure if that would be allowed.'
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Wisconsin and Welfare: Work Works
“It’s so evident that work is the only way to get people out of poverty.”
Chris Kapenga, a Wisconsin state senator, said the sentence above in regard to welfare reform legislation recently passed in the Badger State. “We’re going to help people get 30 hours of work and move them closer to being self-sustained.”
Of course, the state senator is only half right; the other steady road out of poverty is a healthy marriage. But the basic facts about the gains of work and marriage still seem to elude some people.
Promoting work and marriage are the goals of welfare reform. Contrary to the caricature painted by liberals, conservatives don’t lack compassion for the poor. Quite the opposite. We know a failure to institute work requirements robs those in poverty of their dignity — that if they’re able to work, we do them no favors by engaging in a simple handout. And the collapse of marriage in low-income communities has had devastating effects on men, women and children.
That’s why Gov. Scott Walker and his state deserve credit for taking the lead on reform issues. Among other things, the latest reforms establish work requirements for housing programs and strengthen already existing work requirements in food stamp programs.
It may surprise some people that such requirements are even necessary. Don’t we, they may ask, already have them at the federal level?
We do, but it’s not as widespread as they may think. There are more than 80 means-tested federal welfare programs, yet only two have substantial work requirements: The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
And of the 3,000 federal housing authorities, only 39 require any sort of work as a condition for housing assistance.
That’s where the Wisconsin reforms come in. They expand work requirements to all work-capable state residents who receive federal housing assistance.
“The generosity of federal housing subsidies and the expense of the program make it a good target for reform,” writes welfare expert Marissa Teixeira. “This measure will help those who utilize housing vouchers to reduce their dependency on government.”
Another new Wisconsin measure that would encourage self-sufficiency: Increasing the number of work hours required of able-bodied adults without dependents from 20 a week to 30. The state is also expanding work requirements for parents with children above the age of six who apply for food stamps.
Some critics paint this an unreasonable. But if we’re interested in actually lifting individuals and their dependents out of poverty — to break the crippling cycle that often ensnares multiple generations — this is what we need to do.
Consider the success of the 1996 reform, which the Wisconsin one is built on. “That law, among other things, introduced work requirements to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program,” Ms. Teixeira writes. “The result was a 50 percent increase in employment among never-married mothers and a one-third decrease in poverty among that group.”
Wisconsin’s latest reforms offer a model for other states. Its efforts, in fact, remind me of a key recommendation in “Solutions 2018,” The Heritage Foundation’s latest policy briefing book: that when it comes to welfare reform, we should return fiscal responsibility to state governments.
Those governments administer many federally funded welfare programs, but inefficiency abounds — which is hardly surprising, considering that it’s not their money on the line. But if we began to shift things so that states not only administer but pay for the programs with state resources, we can expect that to change.
The final crucial element of reform, courtesy of “Solutions 2018”: We need to do much more to promote marriage, which is a proven weapon against child poverty.
Marriage reduces the probability of child poverty by a whopping 80 percent. Children in single-parent homes, by contrast, are more than five times more likely to be poor, compared to their peers in homes with both parents.
As President Lyndon Johnson said of the War on Poverty, “Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it.” Wisconsin is pointing the way. Will other states follow?
SOURCE
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Leading Economist Now Says Trump Policies Are Restoring America’s Economy
Sean Snaith is not a household name but he is one of the nation’s top economists and highly regarded in economic circles for the depth and accuracy of his projections.
So much so that he is on multiple national economic forecasting panels, including The Wall Street Journal’s Economic Forecasting Survey, the Associated Press’ Economy Survey, CNNMoney.com’s Survey of Leading Economists, USA Today’s Survey of Top Economists, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Survey of Professional Forecasters, Bloomberg and Reuters.
All this is stated upfront because what he says rightly carries weight in a lot of influential circles, and probably should outside those circles. And he is now supremely optimistic about the American economy going forward.
He made projections last year he said were based on the assumption of a Hillary Clinton victory and her policies being instituted — because that is what all of the political pundits told him. When Trump won, he says, he had to re-think things. He went back to the drawing board and began a new set of calculations which he is constantly updating. The differences are dramatically better for the American economy and the American worker.
In fact, to hear Snaith speak recently to a large Florida economic development group, its almost jarring how much of a MAGA Trumper he sounds like — well, on economic policies anyway. And the projections he announced were almost goose-bumpy good.
Snaith said the tax cuts and deregulatory efforts will generate a 3.5 percent national GDP this year — much higher than at any point since before the Great Recession — and will remain very strong at least through 2020. He said this is more where the American economy should be and will be (barring any major, unforeseen disruptions.)
That has positive implications for American workers. The jobless rate is hovering at about 4 percent right now, but he predicted that as policies really start generating economic activity, the unemployment rate will fall to 3.4 percent by late 2020 — and that is even as the labor participation rate increases. So even as more Americans re-enter the job market after giving up for the past six years or more, they will all be absorbed into new jobs, plus some.
This tight labor market means there will be competitive market pressures driving wages and salaries specifically at the lower ends to begin with. In fact, that is already beginning to happen.
“Markets are magical and will solve the labor problem” by increasing wages to attract workers, he said. “The lowest end jobs are seeing the fastest income growth rate right now.”
Snaith, director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Economic Competitiveness, said there are two driving policies at work here. The Tax Cut and Jobs Act and the ongoing regulatory relief.
The key elements of the tax reform package boosting the economy include: lower income tax rates; higher standard deductions; expansion of the child tax credit; reducing the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world from 35 percent to 21 percent; tax breaks for small businesses; and a one-time tax break to 15.5 percent to repatriate American companies’ offshore profits — which Apple already announced they will take advantage of to the tune of $252 billion.
The tax package will increase take-home pay for American workers — something that has not happened since President Bush was in office — and will generate more consumer spending, stimulating the economy and GDP growth. American companies will be more apt to keep their profits at home and reinvest a portion of them — several have already announced their intentions with plant expansions and sharp increases in employee pay.
But Snaith sees deregulation as every bit as important because of the tremendous drag that excess regulation places on companies and the economy. “Deregulation is the special sauce that will juice the economy,” Snaith said.
The Code of Federal Regulations exploded from 140,000 pages in 2005 to 185,000 today, he said. Those endless rules strangled the economy by trillions of dollars as companies spend so many resources on compliance rather than innovation, expansion and employee pay. Last year, the Trump administration took 22 deregulatory actions for every one new regulation, saving about $8 billion in regulatory compliance costs alone.
Interestingly, Snaith is not worried about a trade war undercutting his economic projections because he does not think there will be one.
“Are we going to have a trade war? My answer is no. Everybody knows that no one wins in a trade war,” he said. However, he thinks that some of the nation’s trade deals do need renegotiating because they were unbalanced, and China was cheating on them.
“If you are a manufacturer, you are not on an even playing field with China,” he said.
Snaith is about as mainstream as you can get in the economics field. And his projections record is stellar. His optimism is worth paying attention to.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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4 May, 2018
Israel Exposes Iran’s Nuclear Lies
Huge intelligence find proves Trump’s suspicions correct
Israel now has proof of what many suspected all along about the disastrous nuclear deal that former President Barack Obama reached with the Iranian regime. “Iran did not come clean on its nuclear program,” Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu charged, claiming that more than 100,000 Iranian documents Israel’s intelligence agents obtained from a secret “atomic archive” in Tehran prove the nuclear deal is "based on lies.” This latest development should make President Trump's decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal a no-brainer.
Prime Minister Netanyahu announced in a press conference that the trove of secret nuclear weapons files came from a hidden Iranian site where they were moved in 2017. He said the files contain materials, which Israel has shared with the United States, that include “incriminating documents, incriminating charts, incriminating presentations, incriminating blueprints, incriminating photos, incriminating videos and more.” The prime minister added that the United States has confirmed its authenticity, a claim supported by Trump administration officials who have reviewed the secret documents.
"Prime Minister Netanyahu gave a powerful presentation today of compelling new evidence documenting Iran's determined pursuit of a nuclear weapon," a senior Trump administration official said, as quoted by the Free Beacon. "It certainly would have been helpful to have this information when the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] was negotiated but the Iranians decided to lock it away in a secret vault for future reference. Only the regime knows what else they're hiding, but the revelations today don't give us much confidence in their protestations that they have never had interest in militarizing their nuclear program."
The “atomic archive” documents reportedly reveal details about a hush-hush nuclear weapons plan known as Project Amad that began back in the early 1990’s. It was supposedly shut down in 2003, but, in actuality, the project work was carried on under different guises with the same Iranian scientists involved. The work has focused on what the prime minister said were five elements. As described by the Times of Israel, these elements consisted of “designing nuclear weapons, developing nuclear cores, building nuclear implosion systems, preparing nuclear tests and integrating nuclear warheads on missiles.” Since the flawed nuclear deal itself did not directly address Iran’s ballistic missile research and development program as it should have, Iran has felt free to work on perfecting the technology for nuclear warhead missile integration.
“Even after the deal, Iran continued to preserve and expand its nuclear know how for future use," Prime Minister Netanyahu pointed out, no doubt having the deal’s sunset clauses in mind. As Debkafile commented, “The material presented by the prime minister demonstrated that Iran’s nuclear program had been secretly stored intact for use at a time of its choice and posed an ever-present peril.”
Iran has played the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN watchdog which has repeatedly given Iran a clean bill of health for supposedly complying with its commitments under the nuclear deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA for short. Iran misled the IAEA into believing that Iran had discontinued the use of any technology for developing nuclear weapons.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif mocked Prime Minister Netanyahu, tweeting, “The boy who can’t stop crying wolf is at it again… You can only fool some of the people so many times.” Zarif is right about only being able to fool some of the people so many times, but his comment applies to the Iranian regime itself. The regime fooled Obama and Kerry, who in turn sold a bill of goods to Congress and the American people. President Trump is not so easily fooled.
Indeed, President Trump now has the proof he needs to announce withdrawal from the JCPOA on May 12th, reimpose harsh sanctions for Iran’s lies to the IAEA and other deceptions, and at the same time send a message to the North Korean regime that he will not tolerate a meaningless paper agreement in his negotiations with Kim Jong-un. As the president noted in response to the evidence of Iran’s lies, it “really showed that I've been 100 per cent right. That is just not an acceptable situation.”
Meanwhile, missile attacks in Syria Sunday evening struck two pro-Iranian Shiite command centers, including a depot with 200 Iranian missiles said to have been slated for transport to Hezbollah. Reportedly, eighteen Iranians were killed, including a senior officer. Israel has not claimed responsibility. However, Israel may be girding for a Hezbollah attack from the north, or possibly for a direct attack by Iran itself. According to Debkafile, there has been unusually heavy Israeli military traffic spotted going north. Israel has also announced that its northern airspace will be closed to civilian flights until the end of May.
As reported by the Washington Times, “Israeli defense officials have told their American and Russian counterparts that if Iranian-backed forces attack Israel from inside Syria, Jerusalem will not hold back from retaliating with direct strikes against Tehran or other targets in Iran.” Iran’s nuclear facilities may well top the target list.
SOURCE
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May Day: Dems Seek to Replicate Failed Socialist States
Proponents of socialism see all migration as good, while ignoring what causes the problem
Across the world yesterday, crowds of leftists demonstrated, protested and rioted all in celebration of that failed egalitarian pipe dream known as socialism. Meanwhile, as the infamous caravan of illegal aliens demands asylum, many of these May Day protests focused on advocating any and all kinds of immigration. Democrats and their Leftmedia cohorts continue to insist that President Donald Trump’s efforts to secure the border and enforce our nation’s immigration laws are dangerous expressions of bigotry and racism. When pressed on why the U.S. should essentially ignore its own immigration laws and allow for the unlawful entry of illegal aliens, they offer a ridiculous non sequitur: Because we are “a nation of immigrants.” The fundamental question is this: Why do these people want to leave failed socialist states to come to America?
The Left’s vacuous logic was on full display recently when Fox News’ Tucker Carlson interviewed Univision senior anchor Jorge Ramos. Carlson asked Ramos why the U.S. should let into the country these illegal alien asylum seekers. Ramos responded by saying that the U.S. is the richest and most powerful nation in the world and therefore has a moral obligation to take in these illegals. Tellingingly, Ramos, who has dual citizenship with Mexico and the U.S., was absolutely unwilling to grant that Mexico has any role to play in helping to deal with the illegal immigration problem. And again, a question: Why is the U.S. the richest nation in the world? Liberty and free-market capitalism.
What this interview displayed was the corrupting influence of a socialist worldview. Never was the question of who is ultimately responsible for the “plight” of these illegal alien asylum seekers legitimately addressed. Rather, as is often the case, Ramos blamed the U.S. for the situation in which these foreign individuals find themselves. And this is the fundamental problem with socialism: It lays the blame for failure at the feet of the successful. Since the U.S. is so wealthy and powerful, and since it enjoys this status due to its free-market economy, leftists blame America for the failure of socialist nations across the globe. Never can the failure of those socialist nations be attributed to the corrupting agent of socialism itself. This was exposed in the controversy over Trump’s alleged reference to “s-thole countries.”
While Democrats are quick to criticize Trump and Republicans for wanting to enforce our nation’s immigration laws, they are amazingly reticent to offer any criticisms of those nations and their socialist systems of government that are directly responsible for creating the dismal economies these illegal aliens are fleeing. Worse, Democrats want to turn our country into exactly the kind of failed socialist states these migrants are fleeing. Democrats preach the glories of socialism as a more “just” and “equitable” system when all we see are examples of its failures.
SOURCE
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State of the Resistance
A digest of remarks by CONRAD BLACK
The house of cards of the Trump Resistance is collapsing with accelerating speed, as anything propelled by the force of gravity does. The “comedy” act at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday and the groans from the audience must have caused even some of the more militant Democrats to wonder what the whole White House press beat had become.
It was a vicious, unfunny replication of the late-night television laughing hyenas, while the president whipped up his supporters at a large rally in Washington, Mich. (televised nationally).
Nothing to do with the White House, and especially not the correspondents, amounts to anything without the president. This was always a good-natured back and forth between the president and the reporters who follow him every day and was a pleasant, if fairly predictable, Washington event, like Alfalfa and Gridiron.
It is now just mudslinging in absentia, revealing the White House media as essentially the partisan pack of defamers and myth-makers that they have made of themselves, and that their employers have tolerated. The country doesn’t trust them and doesn’t much listen anymore. It is potentially dangerous when a free press had made itself so dispensable.
The evidence continues to accumulate that not just former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, but his boss James Comey, and the partisan intelligence directors James Clapper and John Brennan will all be facing perjury charges, and that those responsible for the phony surveillance warrant on Carter Page (including the former attorney general, Loretta Lynch, and her chief collaborators) and ultimately a considerable swath of the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration will all be responding to serious allegations.
It is at that point that the Resistance will have to show whether it has any backbone, and not just an ability to orchestrate the bigotry of the media and the stunned, dethroned solidarity of the OBushinton joint-incumbency under which the political confidence of the country largely eroded.
Like officers on a sinking vessel directing passengers toward an insufficient number of lifeboats, Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi are now urging Democrats to be more subtle and restrained in calling for the impeachment of the president. As some of the leaders of the Resistance are arraigned for serious misdeeds, the impeachment of a president whose only misdemeanors are in areas of style and etiquette (though those are sometimes jarring) will increasingly seem esoteric.
It is a reasonable inference, though not one that can be made with much confidence, that Rudolph W. Giuliani, former mayor and U.S. attorney of New York, has joined the president’s legal team to negotiate with Robert Mueller a series of written questions for the president to be answered in writing, and a conclusion, at least of the Russian aspect of this inquiry, which will then have to show cause why its mandate should be extended to other fields.
Failing some such agreement, the president could well ask a Supreme Court review of the validity of Mueller’s proceedings, given that they were launched by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at the instance of Comey’s leaked and partially classified documents (that were probably wrongly removed government property), because he wanted a special investigation into the Russian issue, despite the fact that Rosenstein had recommended the firing of Comey, who himself confirmed that Trump was not a target of the Russian investigation and had made no effort to interfere with the Russian investigation.
There has never been any excuse for any of it, and it has accomplished nothing except to drag Trump’s accusers into a quagmire of their own making. At some point in James Comey’s tortuous book tour, as he twists and turns to square irreconcilably conflicting assertions and actions of his recent past, there will be a moment that will recall Joseph Welch’s counter-attack on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy: “Have you no decency, sir?”
As we wait hopefully for such a moment, I declare the opening front-runners for next year’s Pulitzer Prizes: Tucker Carlson, Mollie Hemingway, and Mark Penn. The first three have declared cogently and forcefully that Comey’s briefing of the president-elect on the Steele dossier was a “set-up,” so that Clapper, the director of the National Intelligence Agency, could leak it to CNN (his future employer), lie to Congress about it as he had about other things, and smear the incoming president with all the spurious defamations that Comey had himself told Trump were “salacious and unverifiable.”
Alan Dershowitz also deserves much credit because, with the great weight of his legal eminence, he has joined Victor Davis Hanson and me in seeking an investigation of Mueller’s role in the horrible Deegan-Bulger scandal of the FBI in Boston in the Sixties to Eighties, when innocent men were knowingly prosecuted and condemned for murder, while the real killers were sheltered because of their assistance in attacking the Patriarca crime family in New England.
Comey conveniently tied a bow on his own misfeasances by condemning the pardon of former vice president Dick Cheney’s completely unoffending chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and by engaging as his counsel in the legal hellfire that is about to burst on him, the special prosecutor in that case, his fascistic doppelganger Patrick Fitzgerald, and his designated leaker, Daniel Richman.
There is now little to do but watch the collapse of the proud façade of the corrupt prosecutocracy that Mueller, Comey, and Fitzgerald personify, corroded and bloated by a 99 percent conviction rate, 97 percent without a trial, because of the hideous mutation of the plea-bargain system. They are all very self-righteous: “Great will be the fall of it.”
Robert Mueller, after nearly 20 indictments (most of them empty gestures at absentee Russians), is on course to discover the extent of collusion with Russia and the identity of the colluders. Even now (issue of April 21), Republicans should “know that Mr. Trump is bad for America and the world.” The Republicans must rally to the bill “to protect Mr. Mueller’s investigation from sabotage.” It was implied that Mike Pompeo would be defeated as nominee for secretary of state, and that Sean Hannity might be the succeeding candidate.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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3 May, 2018
Fear of the Left: The Most Powerful Force in America Today
By DENNIS PRAGER
The dominant force in America and many other Western countries today is fear of the Left.
This is a result of the fact that the most dynamic religion of the past 100 years has been neither Christianity nor Islam. It has been leftism. Whoever does not recognize this does not understand the contemporary world.
Leftism — in its incarnations, such as Marxism, Communism, and socialism; expressed through egalitarianism, environmentalism, and feminism; in its denigration of capitalism and Western civilization, especially in America and Israel; in its supplanting of Christianity and Judaism; through its influence on Christianity and Judaism; in its celebration of race; and in its replacing of reason with romanticism — has almost completely taken over the news and entertainment media and institutions of education.
There is a largely (though not entirely) nonviolent reign of ideological terror in America. In almost every area of life, people fear antagonizing the Left.
Last week, before my speech at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a man employed by the university (I will not say in what department) walked over to me, looked around to see whether anyone was watching, and whispered in my ear, “I’m a conservative.”
This happens just about everywhere I speak. People whisper — yes, whisper — that they are conservative or they support Trump. The last time I experienced people looking around to check whether they were seen speaking to me was with dissidents in the Soviet Union.
People call my radio show from all over the country to say that their fellow musicians, nurses, teachers, or employees do not know that they are conservative, let alone that they support the president.
I have called contemporary conservatives in America Marranos, the name given during the 15th-century Spanish Inquisition to Jews who hid their Judaism while appearing to be Catholics, lest they be persecuted. I do not compare the consequences: Losing one’s friends or employment is not the same as losing one’s home or one’s life. But otherwise, the label is apt.
Because of my widely covered conducting of the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra at the Walt Disney Concert Hall last summer, members of some of the most prestigious orchestras in America have opened up to me, telling me they are conservative but would never reveal this fact to their fellow musicians. They fear either losing their position or, more likely, being socially ostracized.
Why are so many Democrats shocked when a Republican is elected president? Because, as they themselves say, they “don’t know anyone” who voted for the Republican. The primary reason for this is that the people in their lives who voted for Donald Trump — professional colleagues, and even friends and relatives — are afraid to tell them.
There are two reasons the Left labels most conservatives and all Trump supporters “white supremacists,” “neo-Nazis,” and “racists.” One is to defeat conservatives without having to defeat conservative ideas. The other is to instill fear: Speak out and you will suffer the consequences.
Parents call my radio show and ask what they should tell their children at college when they ask whether they should risk receiving a lower grade for divulging their conservative politics in a paper or on an exam.
It is becoming more and more common for leftist mobs to gather in front of a conservative’s home, scream epithets at the conservative’s family members, and vandalize the home. Just last week, the Associated Press reported:
Protesters are targeting the northern Virginia home of the National Rifle Association’s top lobbyist . . . Chris Cox . . . as well as his wife’s nearby decorating business. . . . Libby Locke, a lawyer for the Cox family, said the vandalism included spraying fake blood and defacing the home with stickers.
Left-wing student mobs routinely take over the offices of university deans, professors, and even presidents. The few non-left-wing professors on any campus understand their lives will be made miserable if they speak out. The widely reported case of liberal biology professor Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State College in Washington is directly on point.
In May 2017, Professor Weinstein was surrounded by about 50 left-wing students, who screamed curses at him outside of his classroom for refusing to participate in an event during which white people were asked to leave the campus for a day.
On May 24, 2017, Weinstein tweeted: “The police told me I am not safe on campus. They can not protect me.”
Within a few months, left-wing students and the left-wing Evergreen administration made life so miserable for the lifelong liberal professor that he left the university.
Since the Left began spreading the lie that a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., shot a black youth because he, like most police officers, was a racist, police officers in many cities have feared taking proactive measures to prevent violent crime in black neighborhoods. They fear the left-wing mob known as the news media will ruin their reputation and end their career.
In the recent case of a Philadelphia Starbucks manager who asked two black men to purchase something before giving them the code to the restroom, Starbucks immediately appeased the left-wing mob. The company didn’t wait until any facts came out; it simply abandoned the manager and announced it would close every U.S. store one day in May to educate all Starbucks employees about “unconscious bias.”
These are only a few examples of the left-wing intimidation that dominates much of American life.
SOURCE
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Yes, Obama's Iran Nuke Deal Really Was the Sum of All Lies
Benjamin Netanyahu's damning report of Iran's lies undermines the whole foundation of the deal
Just yesterday, we wrote about the upcoming negotiations and policy considerations surrounding Barack Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal — how President Donald Trump was facing pressure from European allies to once again waive sanctions and continue pretending everything is all well and good. Soon after we published, along came Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to effectively nuke the idea that Iran has ever done anything but lie about its nuclear program.
Israeli intelligence collected a massive amount of intelligence — literally half a ton of materials — proving that Iran hid its nuclear weapons program for two decades. And the U.S. has verified it. “I am here to tell you one thing: Iran lied,” Netanyahu said. “After signing the nuclear deal in 2015, Iran intensified its efforts to hide its secret files.” He continued, “We’ve known for years that Iran had a secret nuclear weapons program called Project Amad. We can now prove that Project Amad was a comprehensive program to design, build and test nuclear weapons. We can also prove that Iran is secretly storing Project Amad material to use at a time of its choice to develop nuclear weapons.” Those weapons include a goal of five 10-kiloton nuclear warheads, all to go with its ballistic missile program that Obama allowed to continue.
As part of the ruse, Iran ensured that some of its program was dual-use — nuclear energy, not weapons. But it continued covert work on nuclear weapons, particularly at its Fordow facility, and lied to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about that work and Project Amad. So much for what it insisted were “peaceful purposes.”
Obama’s nuclear deal was built on lies, just as we said from the beginning. The worst part is that Obama and his secretary of state, John Kerry, weren’t duped — they were part of the con, all in search of a legacy for Obama. And what a horrible legacy it was, too.
Bloomberg’s Eli Lake observes, “Advocating for a pact in 2015, John Kerry said American agencies had ‘absolute knowledge’ about the regime’s past nuclear efforts. Oops.” Except it wasn’t an “oops.” Team Obama deliberately looked the other way and deceived the world. Now, Lake says, “Beyond the fate of the nuclear deal, the Israeli intelligence also presents a crisis for the [1970] Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a member. If verified, it shows that Iran has systematically lied to weapons inspectors for nearly 20 years. If Iran doesn’t pay a price for its deception, then what is to stop future rogues from following the Iran model?”
Even if Trump now pulls out of the deal, however, Europe may stand by it. The Washington Examiner’s Tom Rogan argues, “Yet while Israel’s intelligence community, the Mossad in particular, deserves immense credit for successfully seizing and extricating this material from an Iranian stronghold, it is unlikely to persuade Europe’s big three (Britain, France and Germany) to join Trump in withdrawing from the deal. To persuade those leaders to do so, Netanyahu would have needed to show evidence of continuing, covert Iranian efforts either to construct a nuclear weapon or to secretly enrich uranium beyond the low-level cap the current agreement allows for medical research. That was not on display [Monday].”
Time will soon tell what Trump does, but in discussing Netanyahu’s report in a Monday press conference, he made another important strategic point: Pulling out of the Iran deal would send “the right message” to North Korea.
SOURCE
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Prosecution for Immigration Crimes Rising Again
Fell under first year of Trump, but now returning to Obama levels
Prosecutions of criminal immigration offenses are projected to rise almost 20 percent in FY 2018, a new report from the Transaction Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) shows.
TRAC bases its estimates on the 7,020 new criminal immigration prosecutions in March of 2018, an increase of 23.9 percent from the previous month. TRAC projects that, if the federal government continues to prosecute criminal immigration offenses in accord with this trend, there will be more than 70,000 prosecutions by fiscal year's end.
Criminal immigration offenses importantly do not include simple illegal immigration, which is a civil, rather than criminal offense. Rather, criminal offenses include acts such as reentry of a previously deported person, the smuggling of illegal immigrants, or visa or other document fraud.
Prosecutions for criminal immigration offenses are historically quite low, TRAC noted, with fewer than 20,000 per year under the last term of the Clinton administration and the first term of the Bush administration. They increased some under Bush's second term, but only really took off with the swearing in of President Barack Obama. The number of criminal immigration prosecutions almost reached 100,000 in 2013.
Immigration prosecutions began to decline thereafter, likely due to a more selective prosecution policy during Obama's second term. That trend continued in the first year of President Donald Trump's administration: Fiscal year 2017 saw the fewest prosecutions of any administration in a decade. This is likely due in part to the conspicuous decline in immigration in Trump's first year, a phenomenon often referred to as the "Trump effect."
However, as immigration rates rise again, so too are prosecutions. The most common charges faced by defendants are entry at improper time or place and reentry subsequent to deportation, combined making up well more than half of all charges. Charges unsurprisingly concentrate within the federal judicial districts along the southwestern border; a previous Free Beacon analysis found that those regions were responsible for the plurality of federal offenses, primarily due to the concentration of immigration offenses.
While immigration charges concentrate along the southwestern border, certain districts are seeing less activity than they used to, TRAC noted. Texas's northern district, Florida's southern district, and the eastern district of Michigan were all immigration crime hot spots twenty years ago, but have now fallen out of the top ten.
This renewed concentration of criminal immigration offenses along the southwestern border helps to explain why earlier this month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions implemented a "zero tolerance" policy for immigration offenses in that region. Under the Obama administration, the Department of Justice generally sought to prosecute only violent or criminal immigration offenders. Sessions has instructed U.S. attorneys to prosecute all offenders to the maximum extent allowable by law.
This zero tolerance has been shown historically to drive down illegal immigration levels, according to Sessions, a claim he based on analysis by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency which has in turn been questioned by the Department of Homeland Security.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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1 May, 2018
Cognitive flexibility rides again
The article below revives a very old tale. It originated in a book called "The authoritarian personality" published in 1950 under the lead authorship of prominent Marxist theoretician Theodor Wiesengrund (AKA Adorno). The story was that conservatives are rigid thinkers, prone to oversimplified categories and generally unable to think straight. Since almost all psychologists are Leftist, the story was wildly popular and generated much research based on it. I had a lot of articles published which pointed out holes in that research.
As early as 1954, however, it emerged that the supposed measures of rigid/flexible thinking correlated very poorly with one another. In one popular measure, the Budner scale, I found that the supposedly positive and negative items of the scale were totally uncorrelated with one-another. The conclusion had to be that there was no such thing as cognitive flexibility -- as the various alleged measures of it disagreed with one another.
Whenever it was examined, however, they showed a correlation with IQ, suggesting that they were all just clumsy measures of IQ and should therefore be either abandoned or used only in conjunction with an IQ measure. So the various correlations found with flexibility/rigidity were in fact correlations with IQ.
And that very well explains the findings below. The heavy Brexit vote came from generally depressed centres in Northern England which would have had few bright sparks left there. Smart people in England gravitate to London. And it was the London vote which was most pro-EU. So the most probable explanation of the findings below is simply that it confirms the well-known IQ gradient from the big city towards rural areas. The interpretations the authors put on the findings simply reflect their own intentions and prejudices. The correlates with "flexibility" were in fact correlates of IQ.
Interpreting that, however, would be a whole new story. Why are Brexit opponents dumber? Probably because of a third factor. Probably because the EU really is bad for areas where poor people live. A comparison with Northern affluence before and after membership of the EU would probably be adverse to the EU.
The academic journal abstract is appended to the summary immediately below
The Cambridge Analytica scandals have made it obvious that some people’s votes can be predicted and manipulated by knowing their emotional triggers. But new research suggests that the way people think, in apparently unemotional ways, is also a reliable predictor of political attitudes, and in particular, of nationalism and enthusiasm for Brexit.
Leor Zmigrod, a Cambridge University psychologist, set out to investigate whether a preference for clear categories in thought mapped on to a preference for clear national boundaries and precise, exclusionary definitions of citizenship. Instead of relying on self-reported habits of thought, as previous surveys have done, she had participants (who were not students) take part in some standard psychological tests. One of them tested how easy it is for participants to adapt to changes in the rules of the game they are playing; the other is a test of the ability to associate words and ideas across different contexts, so that it works as a measurement of cognitive flexibility, or woolly-mindedness, as the more rigid would no doubt say.
Even with a reasonably small sample of about 330, the differences that appeared were large and startling. In particular, her team found that less cognitive flexibility correlated strongly with “positive feelings toward Brexit and negative feelings toward immigration, the European Union, and free movement of labour”. This not to say that there is anything abnormal about people on either side of the question. There is a lot of normal variation in temperament and imagination among perfectly healthy and sane people, even those who disagree with us. But it is still extraordinary to think that some political differences can quite reliably be traced to cognitive ones which seem to have no connection with politics at all.
One of the strongest links was between cognitive flexibility, as measured by these two tests, and disagreement with Theresa May’s statement that “a citizen of the world is a citizen of nowhere”.
These cognitive styles do not work directly on attitudes to Brexit, says Zmigrod. They predispose people to wider ideological attitudes, and those in turn determine the attitudes people took to the referendum. And the test results she found work differently to each other: in particular, nationalism and authoritarianism were very strongly predicted by a preference for fixed rules and categories, whereas political conservatism (as self-reported) was influenced by an inability to take words out of familiar contexts and make fresh connections between them (which the second test measures).
Nonetheless, the correlation between the style in which people think and the way that they voted was very much stronger than any of the other factors in the sample: controlling for class, age and sex only changed the results by 4%, although there was a strong, and possibly related, correlation with the length of time in education.
“The way the brain constructs internal boundaries between conceptual representations and adapts to changes in environmental contingencies has been shown here to be linked to individuals’ desire for external boundaries to be imposed on national entities and for greater homogeneity in their cultural environment. Information-processing styles in relation to perceptual and linguistic stimuli may also be drawn upon when dealing with political and ideological information,” she writes.
What this suggests to me is that some kinds of political argument are going to be literally interminable. Obviously this isn’t true of any particular issue. Even the question of our relations with Europe will be settled some time before the heat death of the universe. But it may be replaced by something else which arouses the same passions and splits the population in the same way, because the cognitive traits she is analysing are all part of the normal variation of humanity.
Despite what you learn on the internet, the people who disagree with you about Brexit do not all have something terrible wrong with their brains. Progress is not necessarily on our side. Nor is it even on the other side. One of the underlying tendencies of political argument at the moment is that both left and right expect the other side to be proved conclusively wrong by history – either to be swept away by progress or to be destroyed by the return of traditional reality. But if ideologies arise in part from differences in cognitive style which are evenly distributed through the population, the war between progress and reaction will continue for as long as humanity does.
SOURCE
Cognitive underpinnings of nationalistic ideology in the context of Brexit
Leor Zmigrod, Peter J. Rentfrow and Trevor W. Robbins
Abstract
Nationalistic identities often play an influential role in citizens’ voting behavior and political engagement. Nationalistic ideologies tend to have firm categories and rules for what belongs to and represents the national culture. In a sample of 332 UK citizens, we tested whether strict categorization of stimuli and rules in objective cognitive tasks would be evident in strongly nationalistic individuals. Using voting behavior and attitudes from the United Kingdom’s 2016 EU referendum, we found that a flexible representation of national identity and culture was linked to cognitive flexibility in the ideologically neutral Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and Remote Associates Test, and to self-reported flexibility under uncertainty. Path analysis revealed that subjective and objective cognitive inflexibility predicted heightened authoritarianism, nationalism, conservatism, and system justification, and these in turn were predictive of support for Brexit and opposition to immigration, the European Union, and free movement of labor. This model accounted for 47.6% of the variance in support for Brexit. Path analysis models were also predictive of participants’ sense of personal attachment to the United Kingdom, signifying that individual differences in cognitive flexibility may contribute toward ideological thinking styles that shape both nationalistic attitudes and personal sense of nationalistic identity. These findings further suggest that emotionally neutral “cold” cognitive information processing—and not just “hot” emotional cognition—may play a key role in ideological behavior and identity.
SOURCE
UPDATE: A reader has sent in a comment on why London people voted so strongly against BREXIT:
Now, I can think of a much more cogent reason: London is foreign. It is the one place in the sceptred isle where the indigenous population, the so-called "white British" are marginally in a minority. The others are not necessarily black or brown, but they hail from somewhere else - especially Europe.
Indeed, I might add an anecdote of my own. Last year, I spoke to a guard outside a major hotel in London, and discovered that he worked for a company which provided guards. I then said, "I could tell you weren't employed by the hotel, because you have a British accent. There seems to be some rule that nobody who works for a major hotel can be native born."
"You're not the first person to make that comment," he replied. (To be fair, the hotel staff were very helpful and efficient.)
The majority "Remain" vote came from Scotland and SE England. The heartland of England voted for Brexit just as the heartland of the US voted for Bush. In fact, the two best predictors for Brexit were:
Age, Older people (who remembered what it was like to be independent) were more likely to vote for Brexit.
Englishness. People were asked whether they considered themselves (say) more English than British, more British than English, British but not English etc. The more they self-identified as English, the more likely they were to vote for Brexit.
Incidentally, they were more likely to vote for Brexit if they self-identified as Anglican, even if they didn't attend church. The established church is part of their English identity, whereas many Roman Catholics and, of course, non-Christians, have affiliations outside the UK.
Also, it was pointed out that, in many market towns, the local church has a central social function irrespective of its spiritual function - something I've noted on British TV.
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Has Maine found a bipartisan solution to easing health care costs?
Might we ever see a bipartisan health care bill that addresses costs and receives unanimous legislative support? Although one emanating from Washington seems unlikely anytime soon, an innovative bipartisan health care bill — referred to as Right to Shop — unanimously passed the Maine Legislature in 2017 and merits a closer look.
The Maine Right to Shop law begins by giving patients direct access to price information, enabling them to make informed decisions about costs of their care. It simultaneously incentivizes them to shop for high-quality, lower-cost providers by offering them financial rewards when they do so.
Maine’s bill was developed by a local lawmaker who was fed up with the rising cost of coverage at his small, family-owned business. He borrowed from initiatives promoting transparency in at least three other states — Arizona, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire — and cleverly coupled these with cash (or other) incentives to encourage patients to shop. This combination has already shown promising results with state employees and at large companies, but until this legislation, it was largely nonexistent for those at small companies or buying insurance on their own.
But will this work to lower health spending? Some have questioned the effectiveness of price transparency, and others have reported mixed outcomes with transparency alone. But this shouldn’t be surprising, because price transparency has rarely been coupled to meaningful incentives — like paying cash to patients who use high-value providers.
Today, most of us make online purchasing decisions to obtain savings of a few dollars. But remarkably, we remain indifferent to choices between care options whose prices differ by tens of thousands of dollars, despite numerous studies showing that higher health care prices do not correlate with better quality. Choosing the wrong provider might cost patients and the overall system more, with no improvement or even with lower quality care.
Until providers are incentivized to compete for patients based on both the cost and quality of care, the massive waste of resources produced by this predictable market failure is unlikely to be remediated. The Maine law is one approach that just might open the door to such developments.
In addition to transparent pricing and rewards, a third key feature of the Maine law allows out-of-network providers to compete for patients on a level playing field. In other words, you can see any provider you want out of network, as long as they are lower-cost. Together, these ingredients could set off a race to provide high-quality care at lower prices. In addition, this policy would provide a counterweight to the growing trend toward hospital consolidation and narrower insurer networks, both of which reduce patient options. Consolidation drives prices and expenditures higher.
By combining transparent prices that enable a patient to shop with financial rewards for accessing the best-value providers — independent of insurer network — incentives may finally align to improve quality and reduce cost of care.
Like many legislatively driven health care solutions, Maine’s new law certainly won’t solve all the problems in health care. But broader application of Right to Shop could catalyze innovation to improve both cost and quality. Indications of bipartisan interest in the Maine law on the part of state lawmakers across the country suggest this approach could help break today’s partisan health care legislative gridlock. Why? At the risk of overgeneralizing: Republicans are drawn to the potential for more competition and Democrats to greater access to care, and both like the outcome of lower costs.
Some incumbent providers will probably resist this change, fearing price competition, and insurers may claim this would burden them with added administrative costs. Yet without innovations like Right to Shop, we’ll be stuck with high prices and inconsistent quality — the worst possible combination.
In 2018, federal lawmakers would be wise to consider similar efforts by rewarding patients who can shop on both private and public-subsidized insurance, like Healthcare.gov, Medicare, and Medicaid. Without such sensible innovations, many patients, whether insured or not, will struggle to afford care. With respect to both cost and quality of health care, Maine’s new law could be just what the doctor ordered.
SOURCE
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There are idiots and then there are real idiots
Why would Trump sign it? A pocket veto would kill it
According to The Hill, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to APPROVE legislation that would protect special counsel Robert Mueller on Thursday.
The panel approved the bill in a 14-7 vote that go support from both Democrats and Republicans. Four GOP senators supported the legislation, including Sens. Tillis, Graham, Grassley, and Flake.
The Republicans who opposed the bill were Senators Hatch, Lee, Cornyn, Crapo, Sasse, Kennedy, and Cruz.
“The vote marks the first time Congress has advanced legislation to formally protect Mueller from being fired by President Trump, who has railed against him in public and reportedly talked in private of dismissing him,” reports the Hill.
The bill doesn’t have the 60 votes necessary to pass the Senate, and has even less of a chance to pass the more conservative House. It also would be unlikely to win the two-thirds support needed to override a presidential veto.
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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1 May, 2018
Student Confronts Pelosi: Actually, Tax Reform 'Crumbs' Are Helping My Family Put Me Through College
A college student confronted House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi at an on-campus event sponsored by Georgetown University's Institute of Politics on Tuesday, challenging her rhetoric referring to the GOP-passed tax cuts and related bonuses as "crumbs." Other Democrats have followed suit, sneering at the tangible benefits being experienced by everyday American families -- all thanks to a law that people like Pelosi wrongly predicted would inflict "Armageddon" on the US economy and trigger "the end of the world." The student, who identified himself as freshman from Virginia, relayed his family's positive experience with tax reform and pressed Pelosi on whether she would stand by her dismissive formulation
“You’ve spoken about the effects of the Republican tax plan, specifically referring to its effects on average Americans as crumbs,” the student said. As the son of small business owners, I know that it’s helped my parent hire more employees. It’s helped us pay off our mortgage, helped put me through college...Would you still refer to the effects of this tax plan on average Americans as crumbs?”
Pelosi conceded that some people are benefitting from the new law, but referred to the economic arguments in favor of the Republican policy as "BS." She also made the following claim: "Here's a tax bill that they advertise as a benefit for the middle class, and did you know 83 percent of the benefits of the tax bill go to the top one percent? ...In the life of the bill, 86 million middle class families will pay more taxes."
The first part of that statement is flat-out false. The second, carefully-parsed attack is deeply misleading. Let's unpack each element. It's simply wrong to say that 83 of the new law's tax benefits go to the top one percent. Here's the truth:
Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute points out, “The bottom 80 percent of families currently pay 33 percent of all combined federal taxes, yet will get 35 percent of the tax cuts. By contrast, the top one percent currently pays 27 percent of all federal taxes, but will get just 21 percent of the tax cuts. This means the share of all federal taxes paid by upper-income earners will slightly rise.”
That's a far cry from what Pelosi said (and while we're at it, read this piece about tax burdens and "fair shares"). So where did she come up with that number? By embracing a total distortion that we've dismantled in previous analyses. Here is FactCheck.org exposing her dishonest point back in January:
"The Republican tax plan was signed into law just last month, and Democrats already have a well-worn, and misleading, talking point about it: 83 percent of the tax cuts go to the wealthiest 1 percent. That’s true for 2027 but only because most of the individual income tax changes expire by then. In 2025 — the last year before those tax changes expire — a quarter of the tax cuts go to the top 1 percent. It’s a classic case of politicians using a technically accurate statistic but without the context or explanation it requires...
The important missing context is that the final tax legislation, which President Donald Trump signed into law Dec. 22, allows most of its individual income tax provisions to expire by 2027, making the tax benefit distribution more lopsided for the top 1 percent than in earlier years.
In other words, the only way transform Pelosi's statement into something remotely accurate is to pretend as if the years 2018 through 2026 do not exist. That's preposterous and goes well beyond mere "misleading," especially considering how she used that statistic to describe the entirety of the law. That's a lie.
Her talking point also assumes that all of the tax cuts will, in fact, expire by 2027. How likely is that? Not bloody likely. Indeed, Republicans are already planning to call votes to make the middle class tax cuts permanent, which would completely blow up this critique from Democrats. Her latter statistic, which was preceded by the caveat about "the life of the bill," relies on the same sleight of hand. She was slapped with Pinocchios by the Washington Post over a previous iteration of this fear-mongering, so she's added a qualifier to make it slightly less deceitful.
Again, the bottom line is that these alleged "tax increases" on 86 million middle class families would only hypothetically occur if the GOP tax cuts go away years from now. Republicans are on the record in favor of extending them indefinitely, but couldn't make the "reconciliation" math work in order to pass the original bill with a simple majority in the Senate. That's why the on-paper expiration date was included; it was a necessary budget gimmick, and everyone knew it.
Will Democrats oppose efforts to keep those tax cuts in place? If so, they would be to blame for a potential politically-painful and therefore extremely unlikely tax hike in the future. And what's especially galling about this line of attack from Pelosi is that she's endorsed repealing the law, which would guarantee a massive middle class tax increase.
Back in reality, the law is reducing taxes for roughly 90 percent of all taxpayers, across all income groups, including an estimated 91 percent of middle income families. The corporate tax cuts have resulted in hundreds of companies announcing expansion plans, new investments, enhanced benefits, and special bonuses for millions of workers.
Financial optimism among voters, manufacturers and small business owners has soared, as have employment projections for the wider economy -- all of which has spurred stepped-up GDP growth. Pelosi can wave this all away as "crumbs" and "BS," but she's living in an alternate, anti-math universe. But that's nothing new, especially on this front. I'll leave you with Mitch McConnell calling out Indiana Democrat Joe Donnelly (not by name, but by obvious implication) for voting with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi against a law that has precipitated a great deal of good news for Hoosiers:
“As my colleague, Senator Young, reports, the results in Indiana are adding up. He heard from a Hoosier in Cedar Lake who’s expanding his family milk-hauling business, and a Kokomo small business owner who’s now hiring more workers. And I recently read that over in Ellettsville, one family has found an additional $200 in their monthly paychecks -- enough to cover a week’s worth of groceries. I don’t think my colleagues across the aisle intended to make life more difficult for middle-class families across the country. It’s just that left-wing policies make it harder, not easier, for American workers and job creators to get ahead.
But when my Democratic friends had the chance to join us and deliver historic tax relief to American families, they stood firm and tried to block tax relief on party lines. One of Indiana’s own senators tried to block all that good Indiana news from happening. I’m proud Republicans overcame that obstruction and got tax reform done for Americans.”
Don't be surprised to see a "Joe voted no" reprise in Indiana sometime soon.
SOURCE
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Democrats Won’t Be Pleased with Ben Carson’s Plan for Public Housing
President Donald Trump’s administration will propose increasing the minimum percent of income that poor families living in subsidized housing will pay in rent, according to suggested legislation The Washington Post first reported.
Currently, the lowest-income residents in housing provided by the Department of Housing and Urban Development pay 30 percent of adjusted salary toward rent.
However, Secretary Ben Carson’s proposal would raise that to 35 percent.
Carson’s proposal suggests raising the minimum rent for the poorest families to $150 a month, compared to the current monthly minimum of $50, according to The Post.
The suggested legislation text stipulates the secretary may raise the minimum rate through regulation.
The administration’s proposal would have to be approved in Congress, which is currently considering proposals to reform HUD’s rent assistance model in line with Trump’s goal of encouraging poor families and welfare recipients to participate in the workforce and become self-sufficient.
Carson also hopes to reduce the burden of Byzantine rules housing authorities and tenants must navigate to calculate rent costs for families with similar incomes.
“The system we currently use to calculate a family’s rental assistance is broken and holds back the very people we’re supposed to be helping,” Carson said Wednesday.
“HUD-assisted households are now required to surrender a long list of personal information, and any new income they earn is ‘taxed’ every year in the form of a rent increase,” he added.
“Today, we begin a necessary conversation about how we can provide meaningful, dignified assistance to those we serve without hurting them at the same time.”
The current rental structure for subsidized housing encourages families to work few hours and doesn’t provide incentives raise incomes, critics said.
SOURCE
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Mattis On Russian Mercenaries In Syria: I Ordered Them 'To Be Annihilated'
On Thursday, Secretary of Defense James Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he ordered Russian mercenaries in Syria to be annihilated once he found out that they were not part of the Russian military.
Mattis revealed that the military used a deconfliction line with Russia to make sure that forces with which they were engaged in conflict were not part of the Russian military. Once the military received confirmation from Russia, Mattis ordered U.S. military forces to destroy the Russian mercenaries, The Washington Free Beacon reported.
"The Russian high command in Syria assured us it was not their people, and my direction to the chairman was for the force, then, to be annihilated," Mattis said. "And it was."
Mattis added that at this point he couldn't attribute responsibility for who was behind the Russian mercenaries to the Russian government, noting that there are multiple forces involved in the operations in Syria.
"I cannot target the responsibility to the Russians right now," he said. "It is a crowded battlefield; it’s also got Iranians there and, of course, the regime forces as well."
SOURCE
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Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman: Palestinians Need To Negotiate Or 'Shut Up And Stop Complaining'
According to Barak Ravid of Israel’s Channel 10 News and Axios, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman shocked Jewish attendees during a meeting in New York in March, saying:
In the last several decades the Palestinian leadership has missed one opportunity after the other and rejected all the peace proposals it was given. It is about time the Palestinians take the proposals and agree to come to the negotiations table or shut up and stop complaining.
Bin Salman also slammed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, reports Ravid, citing inside sources.
Mohammed Bin Salman has risen to fame on a rocket after he was made Crown Prince in June 2017. Since he came to power, bin Salman has begun to open up the nation to more Western values — if only by inches. According to TIME:
In June, women will drive on Saudi roads, independent from male chaperones. Music festivals and movie theaters are opening, though questions remain about separate seating for men and women. The kingdom’s religious police are being reined in. In a setting as sterile and controlled as Saudi Arabia, these modest changes have generated genuine enthusiasm among activists, many of whom had been skeptical of bin Salman.
However, the Saudi government has also continued to conduct itself in a manner more befitting a dictatorship.
The New York Times reports that in November, a number of Saudi businessmen and royals were imprisoned in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton at the behest of bin Salman, some of whom were allegedly manipulated or forced into handing over “more than $100 billion” collectively.
This act was billed as an “anti-corruption campaign,” according to the Saudi government — although some critics say it was the opposite, a move designed to gather power.
SOURCE
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Broward Deputy Union Drops Hammer On Sheriff Scott Israel
In an overwhelming vote, the Broward Sheriff's Office Deputies Association announced it has "no confidence" in Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel and is going to ask Florida Governor Rick Scott to remove him from office over his handling of the Parkland shooting.
Out of the 628 officers in the union, 534 voted that they had no confidence in Sheriff Israel. Union President Jeff Bell said that it was the "union's first vote of no confidence against a sheriff."
WPBF Investigative reporter Terri Parker noted that the union said Sheriff Israel was a liar, deputies were demoralized and the police force was understaffed.
In response to the vote, Israel claimed that Bell was trying to "use the Parkland tragedy as a bargaining tactic to extort a 6.5 percent raise."
Bell responded by telling the newspaper, “Amazing leadership starts from the top, and there is no amazing leadership here. We are a ship out at sea with no power — adrift,” adding that “members have displayed great courage to come out and vote under threat of retaliation and reprisal from the sheriff.”
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), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party. And now a "Deplorable"
When it comes to political incorrectness, I hit the trifecta. I talk about race, IQ and social class. I have an academic background in all three subjects but that wins me no forgiveness
At its most basic psychological level, conservatives are the contented people and Leftists are the discontented people. And both are largely dispositional, inborn -- which is why they so rarely change
As a good academic, I first define my terms: A Leftist is a person who is so dissatisfied with the way things naturally are that he/she is prepared to use force to make people behave in ways that they otherwise would not.
So an essential feature of Leftism is that they think they have the right to tell other people what to do
Leftists are the disgruntled folk. They see things in the world that are not ideal and conclude therefore that they have the right to change those things by force. Conservative explanations of why things are not ideal -- and never can be -- fall on deaf ears
Leftists aim to deliver dismay and disruption into other people's lives -- and they are good at achieving that.
Leftists are wolfs in sheep's clothing
Liberals are people who don't believe in liberty
German has a word that describes most Leftists well: "Scheinheilig" - A person who appears to be very kind, soft natured, and filled with pure goodness but behind the facade, has a vile nature. He is seemingly holy but is an unscrupulous person on the inside.
The new faith is very oppressive: Leftist orthodoxy is the new dominant religion of the Western world and it is every bit as bigoted and oppressive as Christianity was at its worst
There are two varieties of authoritarian Leftism. Fascists are soft Leftists, preaching one big happy family -- "Better together" in other words. Communists are hard Leftists, preaching class war.
Equality: The nonsensical and incoherent claim that underlies so much Leftist discourse is "all men are equal". And that is the envier's gospel. It makes not a scrap of sense and shows no contact with reality but it is something that enviers resort to as a way of soothing their envious feelings. They deny the very differences that give them so much heartburn. "Denial" was long ago identified by Freud as a maladaptive psychological defence mechanism and "All men are equal" is a prize example of that. Whatever one thinks of his theories, Freud was undoubtedly an acute observer of people and very few psychologists today would doubt the maladaptive nature of denial as described by Freud.
Socialism is the most evil malady ever to afflict the human brain. The death toll in WWII alone tells you that
You do still occasionally see some mention of the old idea that Leftist parties represent the worker. In the case of the U.S. Democrats that is long gone. Now they want to REFORM the worker. No wonder most working class Americans these days vote Republican. Democrats are the party of the minorities and the smug
We live in a country where the people own the Government and not in a country where the Government owns the people -- Churchill
The Left have a lot in common with tortoises. They have a thick mental shell that protects them from the reality of the world about them
Definition of a Socialist: Someone who wants everything you have...except your job.
Let's start with some thought-provoking graphics
Israel: A great powerhouse of the human spirit
The difference in practice
The United Nations: A great ideal but a sordid reality
Alfred Dreyfus, a reminder of French antisemitism still relevant today
Eugenio Pacelli, a righteous Gentile, a true man of God and a brilliant Pope
Leftism in one picture:
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.
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
Leftist writers usually seem quite reasonable and persuasive at first glance. The problem is not what they say but what they don't say. Leftist beliefs are so counterfactual ("all men are equal", "all men are brothers" etc.) that to be a Leftist you have to have a talent for blotting out from your mind facts that don't suit you. And that is what you see in Leftist writing: A very selective view of reality. Facts that disrupt a Leftist story are simply ignored. Leftist writing is cherrypicking on a grand scale
So if ever you read something written by a Leftist that sounds totally reasonable, you have an urgent need to find out what other people say on that topic. The Leftist will almost certainly have told only half the story
We conservatives have the facts on our side, which is why Leftists never want to debate us and do their best to shut us up. It's very revealing the way they go to great lengths to suppress conservative speech at universities. Universities should be where the best and brightest Leftists are to be found but even they cannot stand the intellectual challenge that conservatism poses for them. It is clearly a great threat to them. If what we say were ridiculous or wrong, they would grab every opportunity to let us know it
A conservative does not hanker after the new; He hankers after the good. Leftists hanker after the untested
Just one thing is sufficient to tell all and sundry what an unamerican lamebrain Obama is. He pronounced an army corps as an army "corpse" Link here. Can you imagine any previous American president doing that? Many were men with significant personal experience in the armed forces in their youth.
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 alleged good intentions are sufficient to absolve them from all blame for even the most evil deeds
In practical politics, the art of Leftism is to sound good while proposing something destructive
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 clever 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"
Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out
Insight: "A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him." —Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
Leftists think of themselves as the new nobility
Many people in literary and academic circles today who once supported Stalin and his heirs are generally held blameless and may even still be admired whereas anybody who gave the slightest hint of support for the similarly brutal Hitler regime is an utter polecat and pariah. Why? Because Hitler's enemies were "only" the Jews whereas Stalin's enemies were those the modern day Left still hates -- people who are doing well for themselves materially. Modern day Leftists understand and excuse Stalin and his supporters because Stalin's hates are their hates.
Hatred has long been a central pillar of leftist ideologies, premised as they are on trampling individual rights for the sake of a collectivist plan. Karl Marx boasted that he was “the greatest hater of the so-called positive.” In 1923, V.I. Lenin chillingly declared to the Soviet Commissars of Education, “We must teach our children to hate. Hatred is the basis of communism.” In his tract “Left-Wing Communism,” Lenin went so far as to assert that hatred was “the basis of every socialist and Communist movement.”
If you understand that Leftism is hate, everything falls into place.
The strongest way of influencing people is to convince them that you will do them some good. Leftists and con-men misuse that
Leftists believe only what they want to believe. So presenting evidence contradicting their beliefs simply enrages them. They do not learn from it
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
Thomas Sowell: “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” Leftists don't understand that -- which is a major factor behind their simplistic thinking. They just never see the trade-offs. But implementing any Leftist idea will hit us all with the trade-offs
Chesteron's fence -- good conservative thinking
"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 their theories fail badly.
Mostly, luck happens when opportunity meets preparation.
Most Leftist claims are simply propaganda. Those who utter such claims must know that they are not telling the whole story. Hitler described his Marxist adversaries as "lying with a virtuosity that would bend iron beams". At the risk of ad hominem shrieks, I think that image is too good to remain disused.
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"
In his 1888 book, The Anti-Christ Friedrich Nietzsche argues that we should treat the common man well and kindly because he is the backdrop against which the exceptional man can be seen. So Nietzsche deplores those who agitate the common man: "Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the chandala [outcast] apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker's sense of satisfaction with his small existence—who make him envious, who teach him revenge. The source of wrong is never unequal rights but the claim of “equal” rights"
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
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 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.
It was Democrat John F Kennedy who cut taxes and declared that “a rising tide lifts all boats"
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.
Seminal Leftist philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel said something that certainly applies to his fellow Leftists: "We learn from history that we do not learn from history". And he captured the Left in this saying too: "Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself".
"A man who is not a socialist at age 20 has no heart; A man who is still a socialist at age 30 has no head". Who said that? Most people attribute it to Winston but as far as I can tell it was first said by Georges Clemenceau, French Premier in WWI -- whose own career approximated the transition concerned. And he in turn was probably updating an earlier saying about monarchy versus Republicanism by Guizot. Other attributions here. There is in fact a normal drift from Left to Right as people get older. Both Reagan and Churchill started out as liberals
Funny how to the Leftist intelligentsia poor blacks are 'oppressed' and poor whites are 'trash'. Racism, anyone?
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.
A Conservative manifesto from England -- The inimitable Jacob Rees-Mogg
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
Hatred as a motivating force for political strategy leads to misguided decisions. “Hatred is blind,” as Alexandre Dumas warned, “rage carries you away; and he who pours out vengeance runs the risk of tasting a bitter draught.”
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.
Three examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):
Jesse Owens, the African-American hero of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, said "Hitler didn't snub me – it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram." Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt never even invited the quadruple gold medal-winner to the White House
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
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!
High Level of Welfare Use by Legal and Illegal Immigrants in the USA. Low skill immigrants receive 4 to 5 dollars of benefits for every dollar in taxes paid
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.
The association between high IQ and long life is overwhelmingly genetic: "In the combined sample the genetic contribution to the covariance was 95%"
The Dark Ages were not dark
Judged by his deeds, Abraham Lincoln was one of the bloodiest villains ever to walk the Earth. See here. And: America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here
At the beginning of the North/South War, Confederate general Robert E. Lee did not own any slaves. Union General Ulysses L. Grant did.
Was slavery already washed up by the tides of history before Lincoln took it on? Eric Williams in his book "Capitalism and Slavery" tells us: “The commercial capitalism of the eighteenth century developed the wealth of Europe by means of slavery and monopoly. But in so doing it helped to create the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, which turned round and destroyed the power of commercial capitalism, slavery, and all its works. Without a grasp of these economic changes the history of the period is meaningless.”
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"
Some people are born bad -- confirmed by genetics research
The dark side of American exceptionalism: America could well be seen as the land of folly. It fought two unnecessary civil wars, would have done well to keep out of two world wars, endured the extraordinary folly of Prohibition and twice elected a traitor President -- Barack Obama. That America remains a good place to be is a tribute to the energy and hard work of individual Americans.
“From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time.” ― Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution Of Liberty
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 wisdom from the past: "The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment." —George Washington, 1783
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.
Leftist hatred of Christianity goes back as far as the massacre of the Carmelite nuns during the French revolution. Yancey has written a whole book tabulating modern Leftist hatred of Christians. It is a rival religion to Leftism.
"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."
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
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see." -- Arthur Schopenhauer
JEWS AND ISRAEL
The Bible is an Israeli book
There is a view on both Left and Right that Jews are "too" influential. And it is true that they are more influential than their numbers would indicate. But they are exactly as influential as their IQs would indicate
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.
It’s a strange paradox when anti-Zionists argue that Jews should suffer and wander without a homeland while urging that Palestinians ought to have security and territory.
"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.
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!)
The Australian flag with the Union Jack quartered in it
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
A small personal note: I have always been very self-confident. I inherited it from my mother, along with my skeptical nature. So I don't need to feed my self-esteem by claiming that I am wiser than others -- which is what Leftists do.
As with conservatives generally, it bothers me not a bit to admit to large gaps in my knowledge and understanding. For instance, I don't know if the slight global warming of the 20th century will resume in the 21st, though I suspect not. And I don't know what a "healthy" diet is, if there is one. Constantly-changing official advice on the matter suggests that nobody knows
Leftists are usually just anxious little people trying to pretend that they are significant. No doubt there are some Leftists who are genuinely concerned about inequities in our society but their arrogance lies in thinking that they understand it without close enquiry
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
DETAILS OF REGULARLY UPDATED BLOGS BY JOHN RAY:
"Tongue Tied"
"Dissecting Leftism"
"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.
Queensland Police
Australian Police News
Paralipomena (3)
Of Interest
Dagmar Schellenberger
My alternative Wikipedia
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)
Some more useful links
Alt archives for "Dissecting Leftism" here or here
Longer Academic Papers
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General Backup
General Backup 2
Selected reading
MONOGRAPH ON LEFTISM
CONSERVATISM AS HERESY
Rightism defined
Leftist Churches
Leftist Racism
Fascism is Leftist
Hitler a socialist
Leftism is authoritarian
James on Leftism
Irbe on Leftism
Beltt on Leftism
Lakoff
Van Hiel
Sidanius
Kruglanski
Pyszczynski et al.
Cautionary blogs about big Australian organizations:
TELSTRA
OPTUS
AGL
Bank of Queensland
Queensland Police
Australian police news
QANTAS, a dying octopus
Main academic menu
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basic home page
Pictorial Home Page
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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/42197/20151027-0014/jonjayray.comuv.com/
OR: (After 2015)
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