DISSECTING LEFTISM MIRROR

The original of this mirror site is HERE. My Blogroll; Archives here or here; My Home Page. My Recipes. My alternative Wikipedia.

For a list of blog backups see here or here.

Email me (John Ray) here. NOTE: The short comments that I have in the side column of the primary site for this blog are now given at the foot of this site.
****************************************************************************************

30 September, 2017

Freedom for Catalonia!

I don't normally post anything today but this weekend is a referendum in Catalonia sponsored by the Catalan regional government that asks Catalans if they want to be an independent republic rather than part of Spain.

The Spanish government is doing all it can to prevent the referendum from taking place as it knows what the result will be -- a bit majority in favour of independence. Agitation for Catalan independence goes back a long way

As a libertarian, I always support independence movements so I feel obliged to do my little bit here to support the Catalans. Catalonia has a population similar to Israel and is very prosperous. They also have their own language. An article below gives some background -- JR

BARCELONA — In a mass demonstration of youth and enthusiasm, thousands of students marched down the Gran Via here Thursday afternoon, presenting the well-scrubbed face of a separatist movement hoping to sever the Catalonia region from Spain.

The rally, the largest in recent memory, featured throngs of university and high school students draped in Catalan flags and protected by cadres of sympathetic firefighters in yellow helmets.

The young people took countless selfies, smoked a little marijuana and plastered signposts with posters featuring cartoon characters.

The atmosphere was festive, raucous, contagious — with folk songs from a generation ago. When elderly supporters came out on their balconies to bang pots and pans in support, the students stopped to honor them with chants, “No revolutions without the grandmothers!”

But the situation is growing serious.

The secessionist leaders here are pressing forward with their promise to stage a controversial referendum Sunday that asks a seemingly simple question: Do you want Catalonia to become an independent state, in the form of a republic? Yes or no.

The central government in Madrid, led by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of the conservative Popular Party, says the plebiscite violates Spain’s 1978 constitution that declares the country indivisible — and therefore is illegal.

The Rajoy government, backed byconstitutional court rulings, has vowed to stop the vote, and it has deployed thousands of national police and paramilitary Guardia Civil officers to the region.

“We have no idea really what will happen Sunday. But it’s hard to see a peaceful ending, no?” said Pablo Sanchez Crespo, 21, a psychology major hunkered down in the courtyard of Barcelona University, which has been occupied by striking students sleeping on mattresses and swinging in hammocks.

“If they want to stop the vote, they are going to have to put many, many cops at the polling stations, and if the people still want to vote? I don’t know,” he said. “I think there will trouble.”

A few minutes earlier, Jordi Graupera, a professor and pro-independence activist, was conducting a 2017 version of a U.S.-style 1960s teach-in in the courtyard, explaining to the students the concept of civil disobedience and telling them about the winning tactics of Martin Luther King Jr.

“You don’t have to attack anyone,” the professor said. “But you have the right to resist.”

He encouraged the students, if they were willing, to occupy and defend polling places — school gymnasiums, community centers, city halls — and to bring plenty of food and water.

The professor said they would not go to jail for forcing open the polling spots but might be fined.

The showdown between the prosperous but restive region of Catalonia and the distant central government in Madrid could become Spain’s most profound political crisis since the end of the dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco four decades ago.

A lot depends on the next few days — and which side yields, and who is seen as oppressed or oppressor. Many editorialists in Catalonia describe the impasse as two locomotives rushing toward each other on the same track.

On Tuesday at a news conference, President Trump said, “I think that Spain is a great country, and it should remain united.”

A dozen Catalan functionaries have been arrested, charged and released. The police have raided warehouses and printing presses, and confiscated 13 million sheets of paper — including ballots.

Many of the students interviewed mentioned Franco and his 40-year oppression of Catalonia’s language, culture and autonomy as a rallying cry.

Asked what he knew about Franco, who died in 1975, a quarter century before he was born, Marc Garcia said, “We heard all about it from our parents and grandparents.”

Garcia and his friend Judit Marti, both 17, said they also had been informed and stirred by programing on the public broadcaster, TV3, which is sponsored by the Catalan government.

Some of the students said they thought the current standoff was a legacy of the Spanish civil war in the 1930s and all the unfinished business left after Franco’s long reign.

“Franco didn’t lose this war, he just died,” said Pau Subirana Garcia, 21, a computer science student. “All the people around him are still around.”

Subirana was carrying a black flag with a star and cross, which he said dated back to the 1714 Siege of Barcelona. “The black is about no surrender,” he explained.

The student said that many of his friends care less about whether Catalonia chooses independence than that they have the right to vote.

“Our ancestors gave their lives for these freedoms,” Subirana said. “It shouldn’t be a crime to vote,” he said. “We won’t do anything bad.”

Polls taken during the summer show that more voters in Catalonia would choose to remain in Spain than strike for independence — but moves by the central government considered heavy handed here might have shifted sentiments.

The students occupying the university and joining the rally spoke with passion, especially about their right to vote, but they were unsure exactly what independence would bring.

Catalonia pays an oversize share of its taxes to the central government, but the region enjoys fairly broad autonomy and controls its own police, education, health care, schools, parliament and media. The dominant language is Catalan.

There are now so many national police from outside the region in Catalonia that the Spanish government chartered two commercial cruise ships and docked them in the Barcelona port to berth the overflow.

One of the ships sports large cartoon drawings on its hull of Looney Tunes characters Daffy Duck, Wile E. Coyote and Tweety, and the yellow bird has been adopted by the students as their symbol of resistance.

At Barcelona University, a pair of large photocopy machines sat in the hallway, churning out ballots for Sunday’s election. The students had erected tables to pass them out. How such votes would be counted — and seen as legitimate — is unclear.

“I know lots of friends — they say yes or no about independence. But the response cannot be to send in the police against the people. That means force wins,” said Elisabet Lliteres Deia, a student who said this was the biggest youth rally she had seen in Spain.

She was marching with two friends. The three represented a mix of yes, no and unsure votes. They also believed that the referendum was not binding.

Catalan politicians, however, have vowed that if more than 50 percent of ballots read “yes,” the regional parliament will declare independence within 48 hours, no matter the size of the turnout or whether the vote is disrupted.

Many people in Catalonia and Spain suspect that this is a bluff and that low participation would weaken the leverage of separatists.

Can Madrid stop the vote?

On Thursday, Catalonia’s interior minister said the region’s own Mossos d’Esquadra police force will act to protect public safety, but it would be impossible to stop thousands from gathering to vote. Catalonia’s president, Carles Puigdemont, vowed the plebiscite would happen no matter what.

SOURCE

****************************

29 September, 2017

Bloodbath 2018

By Rich Kozlovich

It appears Judge Roy Moore - called a conservative firebrand by the media - won the vote against currently appointed sitting Sen. Luther Strange, in spite of the millions spent by the Republican Party to defeat him. I'm not shocked!

I've stated a number of times in the past this midterm election is going to be a bloodbath for both parties. Bigger than anything we've seen in recent years, and it will be pivotal in American history. I've also stated this bloodbath will be in the general election for the Democrats, but in the primaries for the Republicans. That's already being acknowledged by incumbent Republicans by retiring before being defeated. What I don't understand is Trump's willingness to support Mitch McConnell in this.

McConnell is part of the problem, not part of the solution - and time for him to go home. After the midterms he's going to be even more toothless than he is now. As for the 2020 election when his term is up - If he runs and is re-elected he'll be sworn in by January. He'll turn 79 in February. He needs to go home.

Lindsay Graham is 62 currently and will also be up for re-election in 2020, and he's not all that popular in his state. I think this will set the tone for a challenge in the primary.

Then there's John McCain. As I've said - the particular cancer he has is a death sentence with the average life span after diagnosis being 14 months. I don't think he'll live out his term, and at some point he's going to be too sick to do anything. Of course he could do the right thing and resign - but I don't think he will. I've outlined his career and life in other articles and I not impressed with his character. Everyone seems to have forgotten he was part of the Keating Five scandal where he's referred to as "The most reprehensible of the Keating Five". And there's still a hidden cloud about his military career since he refuses to release his records.

I really think after the 2020 election there's going to be changes taking place we couldn't have imagined a few years ago.   The Republican Party is going through a metamorphosis from a party of faux conservatives to a party of real conservatives. I also think those conservatives will have to attack the Republican party structure and elite to win, just as did Judge Moore.

The Democratic Party is going to remain what it is today. Irrational, leftist, Saul Alinsky radicals, and unelectable except in totally hard left districts. Maxine Waters will continue to be elected as long as she can breath and act as their Mother Teresa. Chuck Schumer will continue as the chief strategist and he's not up again until 2022.   Neither of them are going to budge an inch in their hard left approach as to how they think the world should work, and they won't let anyone change that in their party. They're going to be the gifts that keep on giving.

I also think Governor John Kasich is going to change parties. I think this will happen not long after the election. He might do it before leaving office, but I don't think so. I also think he'll do this in order to run for President of the United States as a Democrat. Strange as it may seem - given the mess the Democrat Party is facing - I think the Democrats may accept him. He has all the qualities they so admire in their leaders. He's weird, he's arrogant, he's capable of talking unendingly without saying anything, and he's a heretic. What more could they want?

Let me tell you! They're going to demand he support abortion! If he doesn't - he's done. So this question remains: Is he going to be just like Dennis Kucinich? Kucinich was a life long anti-abortion Catholic until he ran for President, and then all of a sudden had an epiphany that abortion wasn't murder after all. I think Kasich is capable of that kind of metamorphosis, but make no mistake about this - he knows that's what it will take. Heresy!

I don't see Independents taking a place on the political landscape in a large way, even if a few RINO's decide to make a play in that direction. And where they do show up - I think they'll impact the Democrats more than Republicans because the Tea Party types made up their minds long ago that forming a third party was totally counterproductive to pushing a conservative agenda. Their goal was to take over which ever mainstream party that would accept the conservative values of less government, less taxes and less regulations.

That's the Republican party. Get over it!

SOURCE

*****************************

IRONY: CNN Calls Trump Racist While They're Getting Sued By 175 Black Employees For Discrimination

News personalities and writers at CNN repeatedly try to paint President Donald Trump as a racist, which is ironic considering that they’re being sued by 175 African-American former and current employees for racial discrimination.

Whether it’s Don Lemon claiming that anyone who supports Trump is “complicit” in racism or bitter Ana Navarro calling Trump a “misogynist racist bigoted pig,” CNN’s obsession with trying to connect Trump to racism is obvious.

Ironically, the network that desperately tries to portray itself as strongly opposed to racism is being sued for just that — racial discrimination.

The lawsuit, filed in December 2016, has gone largely unreported by the media as left-leaning news organizations would rather focus on the recent struggles of Fox News instead.

The lawsuit alleges racial discrimination by CNN against 175 former and current African-American employees:

Unlike the lawsuit against Fox News, the one against CNN and sister companies is much broader, claiming among other things that African-Americans receive lower performance ratings in evaluations, that there are dramatic differences in pay between similarly situated employees of different races and that the promotion of African-American employees is blocked by a "glass ceiling."

The complaint cites hiring and advancement statistics while alleging that African-American employees have endured slurs from superiors, including "It's hard to manage black people" and "Who would be worth more: black slaves from times past, or new slaves?" …

According to a plaintiffs' motion to amend that was filed March 23, "Since the filing of this action, counsels for the plaintiffs have been contacted by more than 175 people, both former and current employees of the Defendant, requesting to be members of the putative class action, all having similar complaints of intentional racial discrimination, discrimination impact and discriminatory practices employed by the Defendants."

Despite these allegations, CNN continues to attack Trump for his “racism,” using various innuendos they have concocted but that are not rooted anywhere in reality.

For example, CNN’s White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, insinuated that Trump’s remarks about NFL players kneeling during the national anthem were based on racism.

"Why is it that the president over the weekend is going after or seeming to go after African-American athletes?" Acosta asked White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Monday. "And then this morning he's putting out a tweet praising NASCAR, which obviously is geared towards a different demographic, and the way they stand and respect and honor the flag. Is he trying to wage something of a culture war?"

None of Trump’s tweets have mentioned anything about the racial or ethnic backgrounds of any of the players or teams involved:

In addition to his tweets, none of the remarks made by the president on TV have referenced anything regarding race or ethnicity.

SOURCE

******************************

Watermelons v. Cherry Pie

For news junkies there is one consistent story at the moment: an ongoing and systematic attack on President Trump from without and within. On the outside is a web of the Fourth Estate, the Democratic Party, the Republican Establishment, the Academy and Corporate America that see in the president a threat to the prevailing left-wing cultural agenda. On the inside are the reformers who by dint of influence persuaded the president to rid his staff of Trump partisans so that the administration is essentially anti-Trump in ideology and orientation.

Notwithstanding the internal purge, anti-Trump campaigners foment fear about the White House and the often erratic and impulsive behavior of the president. Here is a Watermelon alliance of Islamists and left wing ideologues that recognizes their victory will come only after American ideals and political identity are destroyed. The major tactic this alliance employs in cultural battle is reducing American groups to silos of sex, race and class. Categorical rights, in the emerging scenario, will replace individual rights, even though this is manifestly in opposition to Constitutional principles.

Steve Coughlin, the Defense analyst, among others, has argued for years that political warfare of the Left operates under the cover of non-violent methods ultimately designed to undermine morale and serve as a prelude to violent action. The game plan was organized by Antonio Gramci in the 1920's and is still used as the operational perspective against Trump. In fact, as George Orwell pointed out, the language of political discourse must turn logic on its head. Tolerance is seen as intolerance, war as peace, truth as domination. Through these post-modern constructs Islamist groups can reach a modus vivendi with the revolutionaries even though policy narratives have them in different camps.

One area that has already captured the imagination of many Americans is the "hate speech" narrative. Hate speech memes are coordinated through a variety of domestic and international forums reducing - in ways once though unimaginable - freedom of speech. From television programming to the State Department the "hate speech" position is front and center limiting what one can say about Islam, immigration, feminism, etc. In fact, the overall objective is a more powerful government than we now have to police the violators of this meme.

The propaganda success of the Left cannot be overemphasized. News cycles are in thrall to the Marxist agenda, without the slightest recognition of the ideological content. President Trump is routinely described as illegitimate and dishonest. Clearly his impulsive response to criticism often reinforces those judgments, but even without his defensive tweets, those claims are repeated so often that they appear to be incontrovertible.

There is little doubt Trump will face this critique throughout his presidency. However, these attacks are not only about President Trump. Those seeking to bury Trump see in this administration as an opportunity to suffocate a vision of America, to place before the public a stark contrast between a "new" America that embraces Marxist assumptions and a traditional America reliant on the rule of law.

Who would have thought that the Trump victory would yield a result of this kind? This America of 2017 often resembles 1984. One wonders if we are going back or going forward.

SOURCE

******************************

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)

***************************

28 September, 2017

CNN’s Top 6 Hypocrisies and Lies in Defense of NFL Crybabies

If nothing else, the uproar over these spoiled NFL millionaires who work only 16 days a year but still feel the need to spit on the American flag and anthem, has proven once again that our national media is infected with a lethal dose of Groupthink.

Within the MSM, no one has shown the courage or even the ability to think for themselves. It is quite a thing to witness.

Just as fascinating is the media’s glaring, audacious hypocrisy — most especially from CNN. In its never-ending quest to destroy President Trump, the leftwing cable network’s credibility-killing shamelessness has been on display for quite a long time. But in defense of these crybaby one-percenters, it has been especially shameless.

CNN’s Definition of ‘Divisive’

According to CNN, it is not at all divisive for a bunch of pampered millionaires to politicize a sport, to take a side in the culture wars during a football game, to openly disrespect the American flag and anthem.

No, according to CNN, this issue only gets “divisive” when you criticize this abominable behavior.

You see, in order to keep things from becoming divisive, normal people are just supposed to shut up and take it.

* Criticizing NFL Whiners Who Trash America Is … Raaaaaacist

While I believe Trump went too far in calling for NFL players to be fired, I personally cannot think of a more important role for an American president than to shame a bunch of millionaires expressing contempt for a country that has given them everything, including the freedom to disrespect that country.

But of course proven serial liars, like CNN’s Jake Tapper, have intentionally lied by insinuating Trump’s criticism is an act of racism.

Missing from this ongoing CNN smear is the fact that Trump also spent last week criticizing a number of white people, like Hillary Clinton, and even some white people in his own party, like Senators John McCain and Rand Paul.

* Trump Given Zero Credit for Criticizing His Own Billionaire Supporters

Does CNN not want politicians who are not bought?

Does CNN not want politicians willing to stand up against their own donors?

Does CNN not want politicians who are not puppets to big donors?

Then why is Trump getting zero credit for blasting away at the nine anti-American football owners who donated more than $10 million to his campaign and inauguration?

* Suddenly CNN Claims We Have First Amendment Rights in the Workplace

CNN’s Chris Cillizza, who is both breathtakingly dumb and a proven liar, best summed up the glaring hypocrisies at work here. In defiance of Trump and in defense of millionaires trashing America, Cillizza tweeted…

"The US is literally premised on the right of people to freely express their beliefs without fear of reprisal"

And this:

"But that is the athlete’s choice. If they want to speak out, they should be allowed to. That they are athletes is meaningless."

And this:

"That we shouldn’t be allowed to express our 1st amendment rights because you happen to play a pro sport? Really?"

One question…

Where was this very same CNN’s defense of Americans expressing their constitutional right to “freely express themselves without reprisal” when Christians bakers and florists protested participating in the sacramentalization of sin that is a same-sex marriage?

Well, as we all know, CNN did not defend those Christians; in fact, CNN spent countless hours smearing those Christians as haters and bigots.

Moreover, CNN mercilessly attacked Kim Davis, a Kentucky clerk protesting same-sex marriage by refusing to personally issue gay marriage licenses.

CNN was nowhere to be found in defense of Brenden Eich, the CEO of Mozilla, after he was bullied out of his job over his support of traditional marriage.

Where was the CNN campaign to defend the Google engineer fired just last month for expressing his pro-science opinion about gender?

And where was the CNN campaign to protect these very same NFL players when the league threatened to fine them for their free expression in support of police officers. 9/11 victims, and breast cancer awareness?

CNN so believes in the right to express yourself without fear of reprisal that CNN itself threatened to destroy a man’s life after he ridiculed CNN.

* CNN Claims Trump Is Distracted from Important Stuff

As I said above, I can think of nothing more important for a president than to defend our flag and country against a bunch of crybaby one-percenters.

But because this is a winning issue for Trump, and the left hates it when the right engages in the culture wars, CNN anchors are snidely and sarcastically criticizing Trump for his focus on “important things” — as though Trump cannot possibly do more than one thing at a time.

And yet, here was this very same CNN just last year gushing over President Obama’s annual NCAA tournament picks.

Oh, and here is CNN gushing over their Precious Barry’s 2015 picks. Man alive, you just gotta see this to believe it…

* CNN Used to Be Fine With Presidents Who Told The NFL What to Do

When President Obama told the Washington Redskins to change their name, here was CNN’s reaction. No freak out, no questioning of Precious Barry’s focus on priorities…

But when a president criticizes a football team for trashing the flag, CNN goes nuclear.

What does that tell us about CNN?

SOURCE

****************************

Time to Base Nutrition Policy on Science

A recent article in the Washington Post details five nutrition “facts” we used to be believe. It ends by saying something that you rarely read but is entirely accurate: “In fact, we don’t have a lot of answers about nutrition, which is considered a relatively new science.” But to listen to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and popular food activists, you would think the only issue is that Americans just aren’t listening.

The real problems don’t start with consumers, they start with scientific and economic shortcuts. The consequences of bad policies are dire: poor nutrition is linked to chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. Unfortunately, one out of every two adults suffer from one or more preventable chronic diseases.

But the federal officials who are charged with making nutrition policies continue to make poorly informed decisions. In 2009, the USDA instituted a program that excluded white potatoes from the Special Supplemental Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), presumably to address obesity. They did this despite the fact that many Americans have shortfalls in potassium and potatoes are a great source of this nutrient. Five years later, they finally asked the Institute of Medicine whether this was a good move.

Predictably, one of the Institute’s findings was that “Intakes of … potassium … among low-income women, fall short of current nutrient intake recommendations.” The program may have slightly affected obesity in children, although it is not clear that it has anything to do with potatoes.

The FDA, meanwhile, just finalized its regulations to put calorie labeling in restaurants, theaters, and grocery stores. The rule was initially finalized in 2014 but put on hold by the current administration. Studies are mixed as to whether or not posting calories will do just a little bit or no good whatsoever. But science is not the reason this rule is going forward.

The National Restaurant Association supported the rule, originally as part of the Affordable Care Act, because there was a growing “patchwork” of local and state laws requiring it. This is a perfect example of how not to make scientifically based health policies. In letting the rule go, the Commissioner announced that the rule would institute “predictable, uniform federal standards,” precisely what industry needed. Again, the real problem was with that we did not pay attention to the first adopters, who demonstrated that the information wouldn’t help with obesity.

At least the five nutrition facts cited earlier were originally based on some science. One myth in the article was that “All fat is bad.” But it was only in 2010 when the Dietary Guidelines committee stopped recommending limits on total fats, although they still recommended reducing saturated fat. The original myth was about total fat, but recently multiple studies have found that polyunsaturated fats (and possibly monounsaturated fats) found in foods such as walnuts, salmon, and soybean oil are now considered good for you.

Even more recently, a 2014 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine was unable to conclude that even saturated fats caused heart disease. Moreover, it remains unclear whether unsaturated fats are good for you. These are still controversial findings, and, without clear scientific backing, policymakers should proceed with caution.

More specifically, public health policy must always be preceded by both sound science and cost-benefit analysis.

Sound scientific evidence must be present for a positive public health benefit to be amply demonstrated. Had there been more research to indicate what manufacturers might do to replace animal fats in the 1980s, activists might not have campaigned so hard against trans fats. As for cost-benefit analysis: “Trying” out public policies, such as nutrition labeling, without credible analysis showing that benefits exceed costs, removes public resources that can be better spent addressing public policies that do pass such a test.

These problems are exacerbated in the case of the new science of nutrition. For diet and disease relationships, dietary guidance and nutrition policy based on memory-based recall data have been shown by professor Edward Archer to be “pseudoscience and inadmissible.” These data, which underpin most of the advice from the Dietary Guidelines, ask consumers to remember what and how much they ate in the last 24 hours. Unfortunately, well over half of consumers do not report eating enough to stay alive. If the data that go into diet-disease relationships are flawed, then the correlations between dietary choices and disease may be wrong. This means that much of the current advice and policies may be wrong.

Taking shortcuts to policy without sound science and cost-benefit analysis leads to policy failures — resulting in poorer health and declining faith in nutrition policies.

SOURCE

******************************

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)

***************************

27 September, 2017

The mystery of socialism’s enduring appeal

One of the mysteries of our age is why socialism continues to appeal to so many people. Whether in the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia or Venezuela, it has resulted in the suppression of free speech, the imprisonment of political dissidents and, more often than not, state-sanctioned mass murder. Socialist economics nearly always produce widespread starvation, something we were reminded of last week when the President of Venezuela urged people not to be squeamish about eating their rabbits. That perfectly captures the trajectory of nearly every socialist experiment: it begins with the dream of a more equal society and ends with people eating their pets. Has there ever been an ideology with a more miserable track record?

Why, then, did 40 per cent of the British electorate vote for a party led by Jeremy Corbyn last June? It wasn’t as if he acknowledged that all previous attempts to create a socialist utopia had failed and explained why it would be different under him. There was no fancy talk of ‘post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory’ or ‘pre-distribution’, as there had been by his two predecessors. No, he was selling exactly the same snake oil that every left-wing huckster has been peddling for the past 100 years, and in exactly the same bottle. He reminded me of a pharmacist trying to flog thalidomide to an expectant mother while making no attempt to hide the fact that it has caused the deaths of at least 2,000 children and serious birth defects in more than 10,000 others. And yet, nearly 13 million Britons voted for Corbyn. Could it be that they just don’t know about all the misery and suffering that socialism has unleashed?

That’s a popular theory on my side of the political divide and has prompted a good deal of head-scratching about how best to teach elementary history — such as that more people were killed by Stalin than by Hitler. One suggestion is to create a museum of communist terror that documents all the people murdered in the great socialist republics — and full credit to the journalist James Bartholomew for getting some traction behind this idea. But is it really historical ignorance that prompts people to invest their hopes in Corbyn? An inconvenient fact for holders of this theory is that those who voted Labour at the last election tended to be better educated than those who voted Tory.

To try and solve the puzzle of socialism’s enduring appeal, we have to turn to evolutionary psychologists and in particular Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, two of the leading thinkers in the field. They contend that we don’t come into the world as tabulae rasae, ready to take on the imprint of whatever society we happen to be born into. Rather, we are more like smartphones that come pre-loaded with various apps, including a set of moral intuitions. The problem is, these apps haven’t been updated for 40,000 years. They were designed for small bands of hunter-gatherers rather than citizens of the modern world and prompt us to look more favourably on socialism than free-market capitalism. Why? Because in hunter-gatherer societies, where the pooling of resources is essential for survival, the principle of ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ makes perfect sense. By the same token, we have a great deal of difficulty grasping that people acting in an individual, self-interested way can create huge communal benefits, as it does under capitalism. Back in the primeval forest, our survival depended upon distrusting people who weren’t willing to engage in reciprocal altruism.

In hunter-gatherer societies, goods are finite. If someone has more than his fair share of meat, there is less for everyone else. That’s not true of capitalist societies, where successful entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs create wealth without taking anything away from others; but because we’re programmed to think of resources in a zero-sum way we cannot easily understand this. Instead, we’re inclined to believe people like Corbyn when they tell us the rich only got that way by stealing from the poor.

This zero-sum thinking doesn’t just explain why people cannot readily understand the concept of wealth being created under capitalism; it also explains why seeing people with more than us can lead to envy and resentment. We look at their lavish property and, on some primitive, hunter-gatherer level, believe they’ve only come by what they have by depriving us of what we’re entitled to. All property is theft.

This thinking can often lead to a desire to tear down the person in question, to reduce their status so it’s level with ours. The anthropologist Christopher Boehm believes that this violent impulse underpins all egalitarian ideologies, which might explain why intellectuals, Jews and middle-class property owners are often interned in prison camps and/or put to death in socialist societies. (See Russia, China, Cambodia, etc.) Interestingly, Boehm points out that chimpanzees, with whom we share a common ancestor, are also prone to the same tall-poppy syndrome. I recommend his book "Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior" if you want to learn more about the pathological roots of socialism.

So what’s the solution? Are we doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past? Hopefully not, but we need to tell a story about capitalism that is just as appealing to people’s 40,000-year-old moral intuitions as the sales patter of socialist snake oil salesmen.

SOURCE

****************************

How crazy can California get as a sanctuary state?

By Printus LeBlanc

California is one step closer to full lunacy, and the final step is expected to be taken this week. Late last week the California State Assembly passed the California Values Act. Over the weekend the Senate followed suit and passed the legislation, and Democrat Governor Jerry Brown hinted he intends to sign the bill. What kind of nation can we have if states can choose which federal laws to follow and not follow, especially when immigration is clearly a federal issue?

What California is attempting to do is nothing more than nullification. The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution (Article VI, Clause 2) establishes that the Constitution, federal laws made pursuant to it, and treaties made under its authority, constitute the supreme law of the land. To put it simply, a state cannot make a law that supersedes federal law.

California has a history of prioritizing the needs of illegal and non-U.S. citizens over their own citizens. District Attorneys are intentionally reducing violent felonies to misdemeanors in order to prevent immigration enforcement from being notified. The Santa Clara DA ignored a woman being beating and tortured for years for fear if a felony was charged the immigrant would be kicked out of the country, obviously not caring about the woman was being subjected to on a daily basis.

Just one month ago Erick Garcia-Pineda was linked to the killing of a popular community volunteer in San Francisco. Garcia-Pineda was awaiting deportation when he was picked up by local sheriffs for battery charges. Upon his arrest, ICE sent a detainer to the sheriff’s department. The department ignored the detainer and released the violent criminal on the population. The result was the murder of 23-year-old Abel Esquivel.

Many like to argue that enforcing immigration law makes communities less safe, and the job of law enforcement harder. If only someone asked law enforcement. Bill Brown, the sheriff for Santa Barbara County who serves as president of the California State Sheriffs Association stated, “It’s a hazardous law for Californians and people sworn to protect and serve Californians and we would like to see it changed.”

Michael Durant, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, a union representing 70,000 law enforcement officers in California and Nevada, echoed his statements asserting, “I do believe those who voted for this law are making California less safe, and at some point, there is going to be an incident that is going to backfire on the legislature when one of these criminal aliens is released.”

President Donald Trump and Congress can help to fix this. H.Amdt 301 was introduced to the year-end omnibus to be voted on December. The amendment was introduced by Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.) and passed with bipartisan support. The legislation would block federal funds from flowing into jurisdictions that interfere with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including jurisdictions that do not honor ICE detainers.

Another option is the removal of immunity from local government officials. If a local official refuses to cooperate with federal officials and releases an illegal immigrant, the official can be held financially liable for crimes committed by the illegal immigrant after release. There is a bill in the Colorado General Assembly that does just that. It is time to bring SB17-281 to Washington D.C. Local officials will never change unless they feel the pain financially.

In the meantime, the Trump administration must be prepared to fight sanctuary jurisdictions like California in federal court to uphold the law of the land.

Illegal immigration was one of the top campaign issues across the nation that put President Trump over the top in 2016. He won on the issue of getting illegal immigration under control. Republicans were given control of the House and Senate for the purpose of backing up the President. They, particularly the GOP Congress, cannot afford ignore this threat to the Constitution and homeland security, or they will risk losing any credibility they have left.

SOURCE

*****************************

NASCAR draws line on protesting during national anthem

It appeared no drivers, crew or other team members participated in a protest during the national anthem to start the NASCAR Cup series race Sunday in Loudon, New Hampshire.

Several team owners and executives had said they wouldn’t want anyone in their organizations to protest. Richard Childress, who was Dale Earnhardt’s longtime team owner, said of protesting, “It’ll get you a ride on a Greyhound bus.” Childress says he told his team that “anybody that works for me should respect the country we live in. So many people gave their lives for it. This is America.”

Hall of Fame driver Richard Petty’s sentiments took it a step further, saying: “Anybody that don’t stand up for the anthem oughta be out of the country. Period. What got ‘em where they’re at? The United States.” When asked if a protester at Richard Petty Motorsports would be fired, he said, “You’re right.”

Another team owner Chip Ganassi says he supports Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin’s comments. Tomlin said before the Steelers played on Sunday that players would remain in the locker room and that “we’re not going to let divisive times or divisive individuals affect our agenda.”

SOURCE

******************************

Liberal Revolt Threatens Democrats’ Entire Strategy

Democratic leaders fighting to enact the DREAM Act this year are taking fire from a surprising group: liberal immigrant-rights activists.

Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus sounded off last week after top Democrats cut a tentative agreement with President Trump to pair a version of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act with tougher immigration enforcement measures.

More recently, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was heckled in her own district over the deal, with a group of young advocates urging Democrats to pass a “clean” Dream Act while protecting the other 10 million undocumented immigrants living in the country.

The episodes suggest the coming debate over immigration reform — a perennial headache for Republican leaders — will also be no small challenge for the Democrats.
Complicating matters further, the immigration activists are a multi-faceted force with their own internal disagreements.

SOURCE

******************************

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)

***************************

26 September, 2017

Former CIA Officer: On Wiretapping, Trump Was Right All Along

CNN, which had previously denounced President Donald Trump’s claims that he had been wiretapped at Trump Tower, reported late on Monday that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was tapped by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Depending on the political inclinations of the journalists covering the story, the tale has been framed as either a vindication of Trump’s generally derided claims that Trump Tower was wiretapped by the Obama Administration or yet another bit of evidence demonstrating that Team Trump was in collusion to with the Russians to influence the results of the presidential election.

Insofar as can be determined given the lack of any corroboration coming from the government, the narrative surrounding Manafort goes something like this: Manafort, together with a number of other Washington based consultants, was a top adviser to former pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich between 2004 and 2014. His involvement somehow came to the attention of the FBI in 2014 and a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant was sought by the Bureau and then issued to permit teltapping and other forms of investigation to determine if foreign lobbying laws had been broken. The initial inquiry was eventually allowed to lapse “for lack of evidence.”

A second warrant was obtained in the summer of 2016, presumably when Manafort was Trump’s campaign manager, based on apparently new information that had been obtained by the Bureau. Manafort was wiretapped, presumably to include his residence in Trump Tower, and the eavesdropping continued until early in 2017, after Donald Trump was inaugurated. Manafort reportedly spoke with Trump throughout that period though it is not clear whether the president-elect or president was personally recorded as a consequence of the tap.

Since the appointment of Robert Mueller as Russiagate special counsel in May, some of the ongoing investigation has again focused on Manafort, investigating whether his relationship with Ukraine violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), since he may have been acting on behalf of the government in Kiev, or regarding possible money laundering or tax irregularities. The principal focus, however, has been on the possibility that Manafort actively colluded with the Russian government to influence the U.S. election. To that end, Manafort has been questioned by a Grand Jury and has had his home in Alexandria raided by FBI agents in the early morning of July 26th, while he and his family were sleeping. The lock on the door to his house was picked to enable entry. His computer drives were copied, hard files were taken and even his suits were photographed to provide evidence that his attire was “expensive.” Prosecutors subsequently told Manafort that they were planning to indict him.

So based on what has been reported as well as on available evidence, you can select the “meaning” of the Manafort affair. Either Donald Trump is vindicated or Team Trump was acting in collusion with the Russians. Those who are more cautious might well be inclined to hedge their bets, positing that both interpretations are partially correct, that Trump Tower might not have been the actual target and that Manafort possibly behaved indiscreetly and might have violated FARA, but he would never have attempted to interfere with the election. So everyone would be somewhat wrong and somewhat right.

Parsing what might or might not have been is interesting but we will never know the truth until the federal government feels free to reveal more evidence regarding what triggered the two FBI inquiries in the first place. And the analysis at this point is missing some important considerations. First of all, someone in the Obama Administration had to make the extremely politically sensitive decision to secretly investigate the campaign manager of the Republican Party nominee when the surveillance was renewed in the summer of 2016. Ex-President Obama has denied that he did any such thing and a Justice Department investigation has asserted that there was no “evidence” of any Trump Tower surveillance. But sift through the lawyerly language, and it becomes clear that while Obama might not have personally approved the eavesdropping, someone in his White House surely did. And as for the Justice Department, evidence can easily be destroyed or erased or never recorded in the first place.

Second, it is being claimed that FISA warrants are only issued when there is significant probable cause that a crime has been committed, meaning that Manafort “must have done something,” but the fact is that nearly all FISA requests are approved and few of them result in actual prosecution. FISA warrants are also top secret and exposing them is a felony. The fact that details of FISA involvement with Manafort vis-à-vis Ukraine began to leak to the media shortly after the investigation was reopened in 2016 is suggestive, and it eventually forced Manafort to resign, embarrassing Trump. And the fact that stories damaging to Trump based on classified information are continuing to appear in the media is yet another indication that the war of the leaks against the current administration is continuing. As the leakers and other government officials cited in the media coverage are anonymous, conclusions drawn by allegations of guilt or innocence should be regarded with some skepticism.

Third and possibly most important, the Manafort case from start to finish demonstrates once again that the unitary executive concept that has prevailed in the White House since 2001 is alive and well. A White House team dedicated to getting its candidate elected can and will use all the mechanisms of power that are at hand to achieve that goal, including surveilling and digging up dirt on a political opponent. The possible misuse of the FBI and the FISA court is in some ways even worse that Richard Nixon’s Watergate as Nixon used mostly non-government resources to corrupt the process while the Manafort investigation has taken corruption up a notch, employing federal agencies acting in secret during a hotly contested electoral campaign.

Will anyone running for high office in the future want to be confronted by executive power acting secretly through the law enforcement and intelligence services to discredit him or her as well as a large and widening group of family and associates? It is a hostile winnowing process that many potentially good candidates would not want to endure. It is also manifestly an abuse of power. Some believe that Robert Mueller is conducting something like a fish hunt that is at its heart politically motivated. If that is so, it will ultimately become clear. Meanwhile Paul Manafort, who has fully cooperated with the multiple investigations being conducted around Russiagate, is innocent until proven guilty. So is Donald Trump.

SOURCE

**********************************

As Evidence of Election Fraud Emerges, the Media Wants to Keep You in the Dark

If you have no idea what happened at the second meeting of President Donald Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in New Hampshire on Sept. 12, I’m not surprised.

Though a horde of reporters attended the meeting, almost all of the media stories that emerged from it simply repeated the progressive left’s mantra that the commission is a “sham.”

Almost no one covered the substantive and very concerning testimony of 10 expert witnesses on the problems that exist in our voter registration and election system.

The witnesses included academics, election lawyers, state election officials, data analysts, software experts, and computer scientists.

The existing and potential problems they exposed would give any American with any common sense and any concern for our democratic process cause for alarm.

The first panel included Andrew Smith of the University of New Hampshire, Kimball Brace of Election Data Services Inc., and John Lott. They testified about historical election turnout statistics and the effects of election integrity issues on voter confidence.

Lott also testified that his statistical analyses show that contrary to the narrative myth pushed by some, voter ID does not depress voter turnout. In fact, there is some evidence that it may increase turnout because it increases public confidence in elections.

In a second panel, Donald Palmer, the former chief election official in two states—Florida and Virginia—testified about the problems that exist in state voter registration systems.

He made a series of recommendations to improve the accuracy of voter rolls, including working toward “interoperability” of state voter lists so that states “can identify and remove duplicate registration of citizens who are registered to vote in more than one state.”

Robert Popper, a former Justice Department lawyer now with Judicial Watch, testified about the failure of the Justice Department to enforce the provisions of the National Voter Registration Act that require states to maintain the accuracy of their voter lists.

He said there has been a “pervasive failure by state and county officials” to comply with the National Voter Registration Act, and complained about the under-enforcement of state laws against voter fraud.

Ken Block of Simpatico Software Systems gave a stunning report on the comparison that his company did of voter registration and voter history data from 21 states. He discussed how difficult and expensive it was to get voter data from many states—data that is supposed to be freely available to the public.

According to Block, “the variability in access, quality, cost, and data provided impedes the ability to examine voter activity between states.”

Yet using an extremely conservative matching formula that included name, birthdate, and Social Security number, Block found approximately 8,500 voters who voted in two different states in the November 2016 election, including 200 couples who voted illegally together. He estimated that “there would be 40,000 duplicate votes if data from every state were available.”

Of those duplicate voters, 2,200 cast a ballot in Florida—four times George W. Bush’s margin of victory in 2000. His analysis “indicates a high likelihood [of] voter fraud” and that there is “likely much more to be found.”

As a member of the commission, I testified about The Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database. That non-comprehensive database has 1,071 examples of proven incidents of fraud ranging from one illegal vote to hundreds. It includes 938 criminal convictions, 43 civil penalties, and miscellaneous other cases.

Heritage is about to add another 19 cases to the database. This is likely just the tip of the iceberg, since many cases are never prosecuted and there is no central source for information on election fraud.

The commission also heard about a report published by Shawn Jasper, the Republican speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives. That report stated that over 6,500 individuals in 2016 used an out-of-state driver’s license to take advantage of New Hampshire’s same-day registration law to register and vote on Election Day.

Despite a law that requires an individual with an out-of-state license to obtain a New Hampshire license within 60 days of establishing residency in the state, only 15.5 percent have done so.

Many have tried to explain this away be saying those voters must all have been college students living in New Hampshire. Perhaps that is true.

But it may also be true that voters from Massachusetts and other surrounding states decided to take advantage of New Hampshire’s law to cross the border and vote in a presidential and Senate race, which were decided by only 3,000 and 1,000 voters, respectively.

Of course, we won’t know the truth of what happened unless we do what should be done, and what the commission’s critics don’t want to be done: investigate these cases.

Finally, the commission heard from three computer experts—Andrew Appel of Princeton University, Ronald Rivest of MIT, and Harri Hursti of Nordic Innovation Labs. Their testimony about the ability of hackers to get into electronic voting equipment and just about every other device that uses the internet (and even those that don’t) was chilling.

As Appel stated, our challenge is to ensure that when voters go to the polls, they can “trust that their votes will be recorded accurately, counted accurately, and aggregated accurately.” He made a series of “technological and organization” recommendations for achieving that objective.

All in all, the Sept. 12 meeting, which was hosted by Bill Gardner, New Hampshire’s longtime Democratic secretary of state, was both informative and comprehensive. But anyone who didn’t attend would never know that based on the skimpy and biased coverage it received in the media.

The hearing is evidence of the good work the commission is already doing in bringing to light the problems we face in ensuring the integrity of our election process.

SOURCE

*************************

Sorry

Even Mrs Obama clearly likes the Nordic look. All she can do towards it is to straighten her normal "nappy" mop of hair but she regularly does that. Other than that she has no Nordic attributes at all. If her skin were white she would be seen as ugly. She has received acceptance for political reasons only

Like it or not, the de facto worldwide standard of female beauty is Nordic -- narrow faces, fine features, white skin, blue eyes and blonde hair. Light brown hair instead of blond hair can squeak into the top standard and tanned white skin is OK but that is about the only variation accepted.

More on "narrow faces":

Something that seems very little noticed -- probably because it is a subtle difference -- is that narrow faces seem to trump wide faces. Famous models and other women regarded as beautiful seem almost universally to have rather narrow faces

It's not a strong effect but it is remarkably common.

Russian women are well-known for beauty. All billionaires seem to have one. And narrow faces are notable there too.

Yana Ciganova

Inna Zobova

What about German women? There are of course women there with narrow faces but I am inclined to think that Germany is in fact the home of wide faces. The lady below is much esteemed in Germany but I think even her face is a trifle wide

lena gercke

But there are exceptions to every rule and the French girl who was once known as the most beautiful girl in the world has a rather wide face

Thylane Blondeau

The title of must beautiful girl in the world did not go uncontested however. The entrant from Russia is below and she has a narrow face

Kristina Pimenova

It may be noted that blue eyes are preponderant above -- which is part of the Nordic pattern. Blue eyes will always be well regarded but before the era of political correctness they were even more so. They were said to be "treu", a German word meaning faithful, reliable, true, honest. See, for instance the song "Die ganze Welt ist himmelblau" in the operetta IM WEISSEN RÖSSL

So there is no doubt about how well people react to blue eyes.

And then there is blonde hair. And high esteem for that goes back st least as far as Claudio Monteverdi, writing roughly 400 years ago. His madrigal "Chiome d' oro" ("tresses of gold") in praise of a blonde lady is as devoted as you get.

We may deplore the Nordic standard but saying that people should adopt other standards for females that they like to look at is pissing into the wind. It won't happen. It will have zero influence.

An episode in my life highlighted the prestige of the Nordic look. When my son was about 18 months old, we took him to Lone Pine Koala park here in Brisbane so that we could all see the Koalas. And a lot of Japanese people go to Lone Pine to see the Koalas too. And they come with cameras at the ready. So when Jenny was wheeling Joey along in his stroller, that came to the attention of the Japanese. With his paper-white skin, emerald-blue eyes and golden-blond hair he looked like an angel to them. So Joey was as much photographed as were the Koalas.

And something that Americans and Indians will find familiar has recently become big in South Africa: Skin bleaching. Even where the Nordic ideal of very white skin is not available, any approach to it is seen as prestigious.

Beauty and sexual attraction, however, are not coterminous.

The words of "Chiome d'oro can be found here in both English and the original Italian.

I can't find a translation of "Die ganze Welt is Himmelblau" so I give below my translation in interlinear form

Die ganze Welt ist himmelblau
The whole world is heaven blue
Wenn ich in Deine Augen schau'
If I look into your eyes

Und ich frag dabei: Bist auch Du so treu
And I ask then: Are you really that true
Wie das Blau, wie das Blau Deiner Augen
Like the blue, like the blue of your eyes

Ein Blick nur in Dein Angesicht
Just one glance at your face
Und ringsum blüht Vergissmeinnicht
And all around forget-me-nots bloom

Ja, die ganze Welt machst Du schöne Frau
Yes you make the whole world, beautiful woman
So blau, so blau, so blau
So blue, so blue, so blue

***************************

The Welfare State’s Legacy

That the problems of today’s black Americans are a result of a legacy of slavery, racial discrimination and poverty has achieved an axiomatic status, thought to be self-evident and beyond question. This is what academics and the civil rights establishment have taught. But as with so much of what’s claimed by leftists, there is little evidence to support it.

The No. 1 problem among blacks is the effects stemming from a very weak family structure. Children from fatherless homes are likelier to drop out of high school, die by suicide, have behavioral disorders, join gangs, commit crimes and end up in prison. They are also likelier to live in poverty-stricken households. But is the weak black family a legacy of slavery? In 1960, just 22 percent of black children were raised in single-parent families. Fifty years later, more than 70 percent of black children were raised in single-parent families. Here’s my question: Was the increase in single-parent black families after 1960 a legacy of slavery, or might it be a legacy of the welfare state ushered in by the War on Poverty?

According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children were born to unwed mothers. Today about 75 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers. Is that supposed to be a delayed response to the legacy of slavery? The bottom line is that the black family was stronger the first 100 years after slavery than during what will be the second 100 years.

At one time, almost all black families were poor, regardless of whether one or both parents were present. Today roughly 30 percent of blacks are poor. However, two-parent black families are rarely poor. Only 8 percent of black married-couple families live in poverty. Among black families in which both the husband and wife work full time, the poverty rate is under 5 percent. Poverty in black families headed by single women is 37 percent. The undeniable truth is that neither slavery nor Jim Crow nor the harshest racism has decimated the black family the way the welfare state has.

The black family structure is not the only retrogression suffered by blacks in the age of racial enlightenment. In every census from 1890 to 1954, blacks were either just as active as or more so than whites in the labor market. During that earlier period, black teen unemployment was roughly equal to or less than white teen unemployment. As early as 1900, the duration of black unemployment was 15 percent shorter than that of whites; today it’s about 30 percent longer. Would anyone suggest that during earlier periods, there was less racial discrimination? What goes a long way toward an explanation of yesteryear and today are the various labor laws and regulations promoted by liberals and their union allies that cut off the bottom rungs of the economic ladder and encourage racial discrimination.

Labor unions have a long history of discrimination against blacks. Frederick Douglass wrote about this in his 1874 essay titled “The Folly, Tyranny, and Wickedness of Labor Unions,” and Booker T. Washington did so in his 1913 essay titled “The Negro and the Labor Unions.” To the detriment of their constituents, most of today’s black politicians give unquestioning support to labor laws pushed by unions and white liberal organizations.

Then there’s education. Many black 12th-graders deal with scientific problems at the level of whites in the sixth grade. They write and do math about as well as white seventh- and eighth-graders. All of this means that an employer hiring or a college admitting the typical black high school graduate is in effect hiring or admitting an eighth-grader. Thus, one should not be surprised by the outcomes.

The most damage done to black Americans is inflicted by those politicians, civil rights leaders and academics who assert that every problem confronting blacks is a result of a legacy of slavery and discrimination. That’s a vision that guarantees perpetuity for the problems.

SOURCE

*************************

Leftist intolerance goes back a long way

Ray Joseph Cormier found out in 1976

While Americans celebrated their American Revolution, as a Canadian, I was having the best time of my life living in Venice Beach, California in the Spirit of ´76. It was my first winter in the warm sun in my lifetime. The Times and Winds of Change were favourable toward me since this unexpected Day.

At that time, Venice Beach was the self-proclaimed, last bastion of Freedom in the un-United States. The idea was anyone was Free to do anything, as long as there was no harm done to others, or diminished their equal rights.

I had a Free place to stay 1/2 block from the Ocean. I got lunch and supper for washing dishes for $1/hour at Suzanne's Kitchen on the boardwalk. For setting up the tables and chairs on the patio of the Sea And Shore Restaurant at 7am, I got a full breakfast, and could sit on the patio talking with anyone and everyone, with free coffee until closing.

One Day, I decided to test how real the right of Freedom of Speech was practised in Venice? Sitting on a bench on the Boardwalk with my back to the ocean, I started to read from the Bible in a very loud voice. It seemed as though the Wind from the sea carried the words so that they reverberated among the buildings and along the Beach.

Watching the passersby, there were so many comments to the effect, ¨You can´t do that here. Go some place else.¨ People actually covered their ears, saying ¨Stop that! Stop that!” It was appearing more and more, many people don´t practice what they preach or believe in Freedom of Speech except for their own.

Continuing to read, someone came up to me sitting on the bench and cracked an egg on my head! I was temporarily stunned as the yoke dripped down my hair and face, onto my shirt and the Bible in my hands. How to react? Should I stand up in the anger and wrath of God? Should I condemn him to Hell?

It took a few seconds, but recovering, I stood up and said,
¨Have you never read these words in this Book? Learn of me, for I am meek and lowly. Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” -- Matthew 11:28-30

After that, others came and ministered to me.

As some of you have seen, I'm still dealing with that kind of attitude on this site these 41 years later.

SOURCE

*****************************

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)

***************************

22 September, 2017

As Kurds vote for independence, Americans should cheer

I heartily agree with Jeff Jacoby below -- JR

IN A LANDMARK referendum next Monday, Iraqi Kurdistan will vote on whether to declare independence. The outcome is not in question. Iraq's Kurds have been largely self-governing for 25 years, but they yearn to be sovereign in a state of their own, just like the region's other great ethnic and linguistic groups — Arabs, Turks, Persians, Jews.

The Kurdish campaign for statehood ought to have the robust backing of the United States. Iraqi Kurds are ardently pro-American, unabashed allies in a region where the US has few true friends. The Kurds make no secret of their deep gratitude to the United States for toppling Saddam Hussein, the tyrant who waged a war of genocide against Kurdistan in the 1980s, slaughtering at least 50,000 civilians with chemical weapons and aerial assaults.

Kurdistan isn't just a grateful ally, it's a capable and skillful one. Kurdish soldiers, known as Peshmerga, are widely acknowledged to be America's most effective partners in the fight against the Islamic State. They played a central role in the recent liberation of Raqqa and of Mosul from ISIS. As waves of refugees have fled the violence unleashed by the Islamic State and the Syrian civil war, nearly 2 million have found a safe haven in Kurdistan. Among them are many thousands of Christians.

Yet instead of applauding the Kurds' bid for independence, the United States keeps dousing it with cold water.

For weeks, the Trump administration has pressed Kurdish officials to call off the scheduled plebiscite. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis worry that a vote for independence — bitterly opposed by Turkey, Iran, and the central Iraqi government in Baghdad — would imperil the coalition's efforts to crush ISIS. On Friday, the White House spokeswoman announced flatly that the United States "does not support the Kurdistan Regional Government's intention to hold a referendum."

This is foolish and short-sighted. It is also reminiscent of George H.W. Bush's notorious "Chicken Kiev" speech 25 years ago.

In the summer of 1991, when it was clear that the Soviet Union's days were numbered, pro-independence sentiment surged in Ukraine, which had long chafed under Moscow's rule. On Aug. 1, Bush traveled to Kiev and delivered a speech cautioning Ukrainians not to be seduced by "suicidal nationalism" — i.e., not to seek a path out of the Soviet empire. Ukrainians rightly scorned Bush's message. Four months later, they voted overwhelmingly to approve a declaration of independence.

Iraqi Kurds will do the same next week. And if any country should be applauding, it is the United States.

It's true that an independent Kurdistan would mean the end of Iraq as a unitary state. It's also true that it might inspire restlessness among Kurdish minorities in other countries. So what? Iraq's borders, an artifact of post-World War I colonialism, have never made much sense. Is it in Washington's interest that Iraq remain indivisible? No more than it was when it came to the USSR or Czechoslovakia.

And if an independent Kurdish state discomfits Turkey, Iran, Syria — well, what of it? For decades, all three have brutally repressed the Kurds within their borders. All three today are dictatorships largely hostile to US interests. That includes Turkey, which, though formally a NATO ally, now sides regularly with America's enemies and has moved decisively into the Islamist camp.

Kurds have earned the right to sovereignty. Like the Jews of pre-statehood Palestine, they have used their limited autonomy to prove their fitness for independence — building up the elements of democracy and civil society, developing a lively economy, choosing responsible leaders, and nourishing institutions of culture and education. A sovereign Kurdistan would advance America's goals in the Middle East, while impeding those of Russia and Iran. It would be a force for peace, stability, and minority rights, and against terrorism, tyranny, and jihadist extremism.

A free and democratic Kurdistan will be a blessing to its people, a model for the Middle East, and a rock-solid ally of America. When Kurds go to the polls next week, it should be with our admiration and support.

SOURCE

********************************

When the melting pot stops melting

No American identity any more?

At a National Archives ceremony last Friday in Washington, DC, 30 immigrants became naturalized U.S. citizens. In a video, President Trump encouraged them to embrace the “full rights, and the sacred duties, that come with American citizenship.”

It was a noble sentiment that once resonated with Americans who believed passing along their history to a new generation of citizens was something that ought to be done. Not anymore.

One of the new citizens, Juliet Sanchez, a teacher born in Colombia, told The Washington Post: “We can and should respect, celebrate and embrace our new culture, but you shouldn’t tell us to assimilate.” This attitude may be one factor contributing to an increasingly divided America. The other is equally disturbing.

A recent poll conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center discovered that Americans are ignorant about the Constitution and the rights it protects.

The poll found that 37 percent of those interviewed could not name any of the five rights protected by the First Amendment. Forty-eight percent got freedom of speech right. Thirty-three percent could not name one of the three branches of government and only 26 percent correctly named all three.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, responded to the poll: “Protecting the rights guaranteed by the Constitution presupposes that we know what they are. The fact that many don’t is worrisome.”

One can’t have a country if citizens are ignorant of its origins and purpose. When I was in public school, civics was a required subject. That it is rarely taught today likely explains the disturbing Annenberg poll results. Adds Jamieson: “These results emphasize the need for high-quality civics education in the schools and for press reporting that underscores the existence of constitutional principles.”

Good luck with that. In an era emphasizing diversity and multiculturalism and the fear that anyone teaching the superiority of the Constitution might be named a xenophobe, or bigot, even the Pledge of Allegiance is being challenged in some schools in an effort not to offend immigrants.

Another study by the Newseum Institute discovered just 19 percent of those polled know the First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion.

Ignorance about the documents that founded and have sustained America through many challenges ensures the country we have known will not be recognized by future generations. That is fine with some on the far Left who appear embarrassed and ashamed of America and think it the cause of many of the world’s problems.

Hillsdale College in Michigan is trying to make up for this ignorance about the Constitution by offering a free online course.

The problem begins in the public schools and extends into overpriced universities. Writing in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, said: “Few of the liberal arts and sciences faculty at these schools offer courses that explore the origins, structure, substance and aims of the education that they supposedly deliver. Instead they provide a smattering of classes on hot-button topics in higher education such as multiculturalism, inequality, gender and immigration. This is no trivial oversight, as the quality of American freedom depends on the quality of Americans’ education about freedom.”

Higher education’s failure to educate produces graduates who find it difficult to find jobs and must return home to live with parents. Unfortunately, when they return they’re burdened with crushing student loan debt, which, according to the Department of Education, is at an all-time high of $1.33 trillion. So desperate are graduates to wipe out their debt that the personal finance website Credible surveyed Millennials (ages 18 to 34) and found that 50 percent of them would give up their right to vote during the next two presidential election cycles in order to never make another loan payment.

What does this say about our next generation of Americans?

These polls demonstrate the failed products of a once-great American education system. It is why those who can afford it are turning to private schools or to home-schooling. Many consider public education to be America’s last monopoly, but these polls indicate that it isn’t working for individual Americans and it isn’t working for the nation.

SOURCE

**********************************

Right To Work Scores A Major Win In Wisconsin

The Free Beacon updates us on the right to work movement in Wisconsin, where the state court of appeals has just delivered a major ruling which comes as a serious blow to the state’s unions. The Badger State passed a right to work law back in 2015 which forbids companies from making union membership compulsory as a condition of employment, but the unions have been throwing their full weight into challenging the law and tying it up in court.

That may have finally come to an end this week as the justices tossed out one of their final claims. The unions argued that the law was somehow in violation of the state constitution, but the court found the argument unpersuasive.

The Wisconsin Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that the state’s right-to-work law was constitutional and ordered a district court to dismiss a union lawsuit on Tuesday.

The three-judge panel effectively ended a suit from a coalition of the state’s largest labor unions seeking to block the 2015 law, known as Act 1, from taking effect. The Court said the unions failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the law, which prohibits companies from mandating union membership as a condition of employment, violated the state Constitution by unlawfully denying them property without compensation.

“Act 1 does not take property within the meaning of the Wisconsin Constitution. … The Unions have no constitutional entitlement to the fees of non-member employees,” the ruling says.
What made the unions’ claim in this case so remarkably outrageous was the way they framed their objection. The plaintiffs claimed that the law deprived them of property without compensation. In essence, what they were saying was that a portion of every worker’s paycheck was theirs by right and passing a law denying them their cut of the money was therefore unconstitutional.

That’s a staggering level of hubris, but in earlier times the unions were able to get away with that sort of claim in far too many cases. Their arguments about the “free rider” problem (saying that the non-union members benefited from the unions’ negotiations) also fell on deaf ears. A federal judge in an earlier case had found that one persuasive, but that claim has now also hit a dead end.

That wasn’t the only victory on the right to work front this week. As the Free Beacon mentions later, the West Virginia state supreme court also halted a preliminary injunction placed on that state’s own 2016 right to work law on Monday.

The West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals dismissed a lower court’s preliminary injunction that blocked the state from implementing right to work legislation passed last year…

“The unions have not directed us to any federal or state appellate court that, in over seven decades, has struck down such a law,” the court said in a Friday court order. “The circuit court erred in granting the preliminary injunction.”
We’re building up a significant body of precedent in these cases. The U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t been entirely consistent on the matter, but they’ve always treated First Amendment claims in questions of mandatory union membership and dues collection seriously. This dates back to the 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education as well as Chicago Teachers Union v. Hudson in 1986. Even when forced unionization was allowed, the courts have insisted that the purpose of the dues collected had to be limited in use to actual work benefiting the workers, not political speech on their behalf.

The unions have failed in that task (intentionally by the looks of it) and the courts are increasingly rejecting their claims. The irony in all of this is that the unions don’t seem to realize that if they’d just stuck to the business of representing their members at the bargaining table and spending their dues money on strike funds, retirement programs and other direct benefits, they would probably still be holding a lot of power. But when they decided to become the primary financiers of the Democratic Party, everything began going downhill for them.

SOURCE

*************************

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)

***************************

21 September, 2017

Economic Improvement Connects to Conservative Policy

Things are looking up for the middle class, in spite of everything Obama did

America’s working class was a tremendous focus of the 2016 presidential election. Hillary Clinton took for granted voters in the Rust Belt in particular and chose to focus on bicoastal population centers, in keeping with the Democrat Party’s clear and continued leftist direction. Meanwhile, Donald J. Trump’s populist sloganeering stuck. His promises to “Make America Great Again” and to put “America First” not only resonated but created a firm foundation of an intense voter base.

Why?

From 2007 through 2016, the working class was dramatically impacted through a recession that began as a subprime mortgage crisis caused by Democrat policies, with home values tumbling 28% — a drop not seen since the Great Depression of 1929. The widespread foreclosures and the tremendous impact to lending institutions due to bad debt began sinking those whose biggest investment was their home. And, as we all remember, the beginning of massive government spending kicked in with Barack Obama’s “stimulus” of almost $1 trillion and bailouts to rescue companies.

And who bailed out the working class? What “stimulus” made its way into the family budgets of middle America, not just financiers and investment institutions? The unemployment rate spiked to 10% in October 2010 due to six million jobs being eliminated in the previous 12 months, testifying to the fact that the middle class was hurt disproportionately in the recession of 2007-2008.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) review of newly published Census data, real median household income dropped during the Obama presidency with an increase in measurable poverty. Households earned $55,683 in 2009, which tumbled to $54,398 in 2014. Food stamp participation in 2007 was 26.3 million recipients, and that number almost doubled by 2013 with more than 47.6 million Americans enrolled.

Middle-class households are only now seeing their income eclipse 1999-2000 levels. According to a Washington Post analysis on the same Census data, the income of black workers still remains lower than the high reached in the Bill Clinton/George W. Bush years — then it was $41,000, now it’s $39,490. All median household income rose to $59,039 from $54,105 when comparing earnings from two decades ago, 1996 to 2016. In 20 years, an average family had a $5,000 raise during a window of time that energy prices soared, the cost of health care and education exploded, and the value of one’s home was reduced by about a third. Oh, and don’t forget that mandatory government-run health insurance program that was supposed to save each family $2,500 each year but, instead, drove deductibles so high that no one can afford their “affordable” health care.

Compare that $5,000 earnings increase over almost 20 years to a six-year window during the era of President Ronald Reagan: From 1982 to 1988, poverty dropped 2.4% with an increase in real household income of $4,905.

So, when Trump spoke about the need to improve America’s economy after the Obama years with hopes to renegotiate trade deals, prioritize the American worker above illegals, and to repeal and replace ObamaCare, he won. Trump is president today not because of his polished campaign machine or eloquent rhetoric. He inspired workers to see hope down the economic road. He echoed the plans and policies from the Reagan administration.

And, indeed, the U.S. economy, according to Census data, tracked along with the launching of presidential campaign activity beginning in 2015 — perhaps a signal to all of America that the Obama economy would soon meet its end. Furthermore, reforms to food stamp programs permitted by the Republican-controlled Congress freed the hands of states to tie work requirements to benefits, and it clearly worked.

Between 2015 and 2016, according to the WSJ, median income for blacks and Hispanics climbed 5.7% and 4.3%, respectively, with 2.5 million Americans lifted out of poverty by work. The 99 weeks of unemployment benefits came to an end in 2014 with 3.4 million dropping from the program. Social Security Disability rolls also deflated by about 25,000 in 2015 and full-time, year-round workers increased by 2.2 million as many people moved out of part-time jobs between 2015 and 2016.

Americans are indeed “getting richer,” as the WSJ declared in its editorial headline. A recent Gallup poll shows that 64% of Americans think their “standard of living” is improving, the highest percentage since 2007.

Mercatus Center researcher Dan Griswold notes that, in real 2016 dollars, the percentage of Americans earning less than $35,000 has fallen to 30.2% while those earning more than $100,000 has almost tripled to 27.7%.

Now, at a 16-year low in unemployment due to 2.2 million jobs added to the economy, with unquestionable consumer sentiment driving a more favorable economy, any continued growth will come with serious policy changes such as tax reform. That could drive wages even higher.

These figures don’t lie. Americans express more confidence when they’re employed and have hope for more opportunity. With the responsiveness witnessed over the last 24 months to a reduction in government programs and regulations, Congress must act on its promise to restructure the U.S. tax code to incentivize work, savings and investment that creates jobs.

SOURCE

**********************************

Erasing America's History

Removing the names of Confederate soldiers is the next step in the Left's cultural revolution. Leftists hate history.

The University of Virginia’s board of visitors has voted to remove bronze tablets bearing the names of graduates who had fought and died for the Confederacy during the War Between the States. According to the board, the tablets, which have hung in the Rotunda since 1903, will be placed in an undisclosed location “where they may be preserved as artifacts of the era in which they were erected, and utilized to provide context to the history of the University.”

In the wake of the Charlottesville violence, the mayor of Chattanooga, Tennessee, site of significant War Between the States history, and the first Medals of Honor, set the pace for UVA’s board. Democrat Mayor Andy Burke announced that the city would no longer maintain its historic Confederate Cemetery. Burke opined, “Our action today makes it clear that the City of Chattanooga condemns white supremacy in every way, shape and form.” No it doesn’t. Burke just played a tune for his “social justice” constituency. He continued, “While we honor our dead, we do not honor the principle for which they fought. Our city should be invested in our future, not a discredited past. Confederates fought against America to preserve slavery. That is the truth, and we should no longer subsidize any myths to the contrary.”

So instead Burke and others like him will continue to peddle the myth that the War Between the States was fought purely out of the South’s desperate attempt to preserve racism. These leftist iconoclasts won’t even consider the other pressing political considerations and convictions of those who fought to protect their homes and families from what they perceived as tyranny from the Northern states. They wholly ignore the fact that the issues leading to war were much more nuanced than they were black and white.

Finally, in service to their divide and conquer agenda, they continue to popularize the myth that America is essentially an evil nation of white supremacists that continues to institutionalize racism and even slavery. (Never mind the Democrat-run urban poverty plantations.) And they label conservatives as motivated by bigotry and racism in order to shut down our speech — it’s easier than having to actually produce an intellectual argument to counter their social and political challenges.

SOURCE

********************************

The GOP's Last-Ditch Effort To Repeal ObamaCare Is Surprisingly Good

After nine fruitless months, Republicans have finally come up with an ObamaCare replacement plan that is simple and appealing, and that should easily pass the Senate. Will the GOP blow it again?

Put together by Sens. Bill Cassidy and Lindsay Graham, the plan would take the money being spent on ObamaCare's insurance subsidies and Medicaid expansion, and give it to states in the form of fixed block grants.

States would then have wide latitude in how they spend the money — for example, they could use it to set up high-risk pools, reduce out-of-pocket costs, pay providers or subsidize premiums. They'd also be able to get out from under ObamaCare's disruptive and costly market regulations and benefit mandates.

It would repeal ObamaCare's individual and employer mandates, and its tax on medical devices. It would expand Health Savings Accounts and for the first time let those with accounts spend HSA money on insurance premiums. It would reform the rest of Medicaid by replacing the current open-ended matching grant program with fixed per-capita payments. And it would also let states impose work requirements for able-bodied adults enrolled in Medicaid.

Interestingly, while trying to craft legislation that would appeal to Republican moderates in the Senate, Cassidy and Graham have created a plan that is in some ways more conservative than the earlier House and Senate repeal-and-replace bills.

Those plans retained ObamaCare's disastrous "guaranteed issue" and "community rating" regulations and carried over its essential health benefits mandate, replacing one federal ObamaCare subsidy scheme for another. The plans were overly complicated and difficult to defend, but easy to attack.

The Cassidy-Graham bill, in contrast, is comparatively simple and straightforward. It lets states run their insurance markets as they see fit.

This is a welcome return to federalist principles that the GOP had forgotten when crafting their earlier ObamaCare replacement bills.

Is the Cassidy-Graham bill ideal? Of course not. Liberal states could keep ObamaCare in place, or use the money to finance single-payer health care. It concedes that the federal government is responsible for providing massive health care subsidies to the states. And it leaves many other free-market reforms off the table.

Of course, the Congressional Budget Office will no doubt say that the bill will cause 20 million or so to "lose" coverage — a prediction that Republicans should ignore since, as we've pointed out in this space, it is based on outdated numbers and ridiculous assumptions.

To be sure, the chances of the Cassidy-Graham bill getting approved in the Senate are slim. The deadline for getting a repeal bill approved is September 30.

Two senators — Rand Paul and Susan Collins — have already come out against it, but John McCain says he'll back this. That means Alaskan Sen. Lisa Murkowski would have to change her previous "no" votes to "yes" if there's to be any hope of passage. (With a 52-seat majority in the Senate, the GOP can only afford to lose two GOP votes.)

Someone needs to remind Murkowski that she ran for election in 2016 repeatedly vowing to repeal ObamaCare. In May 2016, for example, she said on the Senate floor that "I have consistently supported full repeal of the ACA and have voted to do so on several occasions." But those votes, which took place while President Obama was sure to veto any repeal measure, were meaningless.

SOURCE

*************************

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)

***************************

20 September, 2017

China’s size may not make it dominant

Economic historian MARTIN HUTCHINSON below has a very different view of the emerging China. There should however be no doubt that China today is very modern in economic development. Great steel skyscrapers, masses of cars and huge highways are everywhere

For sheer Silicon Valley silliness, the FT article “China is leaving Donald Trump’s America behind” by Sequoia Capital boss Michael Moritz will take some beating. It is inaccurate and politically unbalanced about the United States, but even more so about China. It also misjudges China’s present position, its actual policies and its future prospects. China’s share of global GDP could double from what it is now, but without good management it would still be geopolitically puny.

For proof of that apparently extreme statement, I would refer you to Angus Maddison’s admirable calculations of countries’ share in world GDP, dating back 2,000 years. China’s current share of world GDP, based on purchasing power parity, is estimated by the website visualcapitalist.com at 18.3%. In AD1000, in the early years of the highly intelligent Song dynasty, in many ways China’s relative high point in civilizational terms, it was somewhat higher, at 23%. Since its share of the world’s population in AD1000 was only 22%, it was slightly richer than the average country, and it is reasonable to believe that its global influence and its share of human knowledge and innovation were both at least proportionate to its economic and demographic size.

But according to the Maddison figures, China’s share of world GDP did not peak in AD1000, it peaked around 1820, when China had a munificent 33% of world GDP, nearly double the current percentage. It was still near the mid-point of world wealth, with population 37% of the global total it was about 10% poorer than the global average. Yet it was close to helpless militarily and economically, ruthlessly exploited through the opium trade by a country with a pathetic 2% of world population and 5% of world GDP.

The 1820 figures illustrate the fallacy of assuming that a mighty share in world GDP equates to global domination, militarily, economically or intellectually. China had more than six times the GDP of Britain, yet under the Jiaqing Emperor (1796-1820), feeble son of the great Qianlong Emperor (1735-96), it counted for nothing in international diplomacy, its economy was stagnant and intellectually it was even more so (several discoveries of the Song period had subsequently been lost.) The only thing it had in superabundance was population, which had increased from 59 million in AD 1000 to no less than 381 million, at a time when the world’s great Industrial Revolution population bloat had yet to take off. (China today represents only 18% of world population, about in line with its output.) Britain, on the other hand, even with an 1820 population of only 21 million, had already had the Scientific Revolution, and was in the most dynamic phase of the Industrial Revolution.

The point is clear. Simply outstripping the United States in GDP (which it has so far done only on a purchasing power parity basis) will not automatically make China likely to become more powerful militarily or intellectually. The Jiaqing Emperor never faced a military challenge from Lord Liverpool’s Britain, because Liverpool’s was a peaceable and non-expansionist regime, but 20 and 40 years later, against the more aggressive Palmerston, China’s military performance was abysmal, losing the Opium War and seeing the Summer Palace burned. (Palmerston’s over-aggression was a significant contributor to the decline of Britain’s transient hegemony, but that is another story.)

Moritz’s Sequoia is a big investor in China, possibly the leading US venture capitalist in China, so it’s not surprising its leader would tout China’s virtues. All the same, when he explains about China’s “tolerance for Muslims” we should be reminded that the country force-installs spyware onto Muslims’ phones, detains thousands of Muslims in “training camps” without trial and removes loudspeakers from their mosques so Muslims cannot issue the call to prayer.

Moritz is very impressed with Chinese payments systems. Indeed, the Chinese government is assigning everyone a credit score, compulsorily, whether or not they have credit outstanding. However, it wants to use a “social credit system” so that the quality of your citizenship, your adherence to Party norms, your social networks and behaviors, etc. are used not only for credit ratings, but to deny you air travel, for example. The People’s Daily denied indignantly that the system was “Orwellian” but it would say that, wouldn’t it. Looked at in this light, the sophistication of China’s payment systems appears less benign.

Big Data in the Chinese government’s hands is a truly sinister force. Not only is there universal surveillance, but the data so collected is for sale – not just to major reputable corporations, but to anyone, no questions asked, such is the level of China’s corruption. Conversely, Chinese private citizens are strictly regulated in what they can know – the Great Firewall prevents access to international sites, unauthorized VPN networks are strictly forbidden, and even the Big-Brother-friendly Google found itself unable to operate there.

You should also remember that China, the supposed export powerhouse of the world, is still so frightened of what its citizens might do with their money that it operates a system of exchange controls. Moritz, as I did, grew up under exchange controls, in force in Britain until 1979; he will thus be able to confirm that they are highly destructive both economically and psychologically. As Moritz must surely remember, the citizens of a country with exchange controls automatically regard themselves as economically inferior to those lucky people without them; the controls produce a kind of “economic cringe” similar to Australia’s “cultural cringe” but more damaging.

Given China’s data policies, if China’s entrepreneurs are “facing the future with an unrivalled sense of adventure and curiosity” as Moritz claims, they must be a pretty frustrated lot. Finally, Moritz suggests that Trump should send his hotel staff to visit hotels in Shanghai, where they will find “a level of service unparalleled in New York.” Alternatively, Trump could send his staff to almost any U.S. small town, where he will also find service unparalleled in New York, whose service quality is lousy, second only to London and Paris for hostility and greed. Further, it is a long time since I was in Tokyo or Singapore, but I’ll bet they both still beat Shanghai hands down.

One problem with writing about China is that its figures are dodgy. GDP figures are produced almost immediately after the end of the quarter, and clearly come from the Planning Ministry’s computer rather than through actual observation of reality. Furthermore, China’s growth rates have always been suspiciously high, and its consumption a suspiciously low percentage of GDP, for a country whose richer citizens are famous for their bling.

So, let us suppose that the GDP figure is overstated, but that the consumption figure is approximately accurate, and that China’s consumption is in reality not 37% of GDP but 57%, close to that of India (59%), Indonesia (55%) and Japan (57%). Then its GDP at purchasing power parity is 37/57 x $23.2 trillion (the official 2017 estimate) or $15.1 trillion, just 78% of the U.S. level, and its growth rate, if you amortize the GDP shortfall over the past 20 years, is about 4.5% annually rather than 6.7%.

At that rate, if it continues to grow 2% faster than the U.S. on average, it will pass the United States in purchasing power GDP in about 2030, and in market-exchange-rate GDP about a decade after that. China will still have heavy social and information controls over its citizens, and therefore will still operate less efficiently than the truly free society of the United States. It is also quite likely that it will have retained its exchange controls, and so still have an “economic cringe.”

Given the existence of nuclear weapons, it is probably unlikely that a future aggressive U.S. President will burn whatever is China’s current equivalent of the Summer Palace (the Great Hall of the People?) But if China’s society remains as restricted as it now is, with gigantic loss-making state corporations, an official ideology of Communism and exchange controls on its domestic citizens, then it will still be limited to a position in world affairs like that of the Jiaqing Emperor, isolated and uninfluential. However large its population, and however dominant its share of world GDP, China will not be central to the surging economic, intellectual and political forces of the world, any more than was the Jiaqing Emperor’s celestial domain.

SOURCE

****************************

True socialism always ends with the Stasi

Leftwingers who boast that they’d never kiss a Tory are blind to the intolerance at the heart of their own ideology. Daniel Finkelstein comments from Britain

Laura Pidcock doesn’t like me. I don’t take it personally because it isn’t personal. I’ve never met her and she’s never met me. But I’m a Conservative and she doesn’t like Tories.

Fair enough. It’s a free country. For the time being. And the new Labour MP for North West Durham is entitled to pick her friends. She’s not alone, anyway. Her attitude — that Tories are “the enemy” and “I have absolutely no intention of being friends with any of them” — is quite prevalent on the left.

Hatred of Conservatives is common currency on social media, and at Labour conferences you can buy mugs with the words “Never kissed a Tory” on them. The Guardian’s deputy opinion editor, Joseph Harker, complained only that Pidcock didn’t go far enough. His aim (tricky for an opinion editor, even of The Guardian one would have thought) was to avoid Blairites and Liberal Democrats too.

Not unreasonably, many Conservatives are quite hurt. It’s never nice to be thought evil by someone. And the misunderstanding, that Tories are like Mr Burns out of The Simpsons, is quite frustrating. There is also something quite amusing about people who check someone’s position on free schools before they kiss them.

Yet my reaction to Ms Pidcock’s unfriendly (though, it should be acknowledged, civil) comments, and to abusive criticism on Twitter, is somewhat different. I am relaxed about her social attitudes, I don’t agree that they make it hard for her to do her job, and I’m sure (indeed I know) that there are a few Tories with a similarly short-sighted view.

But I think nevertheless that this attitude to Conservatives is of profound importance, and points to a big hole in socialism.

Ever since 1956, when news of Nikita Khrushchev’s so-called secret speech began to leak out to the West, socialists have been trying to find an alternative form of socialism. One that works. One that does not lead to the errors of Stalinism that Khrushchev identified at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Social democratic parties and new liberals had succeeded in reforming capitalism, with a welfare state and progressive tax systems, but after decades of trying still had no model for replacing it. The only attempts that had been made had produced dictatorship, murder and relative economic failure. A new left, the secret speech indicated, was needed.

There is no workable, sensible alternative to western capitalism
For more than 60 years since then, this has been the project of socialist intellectuals and politicians from Ralph Miliband to Tony Benn. The new left has, with progressives and liberals, been involved in important campaigns to end colonialism, to promote gay rights and women’s equality, and to reduce and eventually eliminate racial discrimination. But how successful has it been in identifying and propounding an alternative to capitalism?

Completely unsuccessful. After six decades of thought and political action there remains not a single successful example of a socialist society anywhere in history and anywhere in the world. Most recently they all got very excited about Venezuela. We were told by Jeremy Corbyn that we could honour Hugo Chávez by treating him as an example to us all.

This does not, of course, mean that there haven’t been successful centre-left governments or that there are no alternatives to whatever policy the Tory party puts in its manifesto. I am not equating Yvette Cooper with Mao Zedong. I am simply saying that for all the slogans about the evils of capitalism, nobody has come up with a workable, sensible alternative. Not ways of changing it, you understand. An actual alternative.

Remember the kid with all the badges in class who tried to explain to you what socialism was, and you couldn’t quite understand how it worked? Well we are still basically there, and the failure in comprehension wasn’t yours.

And this is where Laura Pidcock comes into it. Paul Mason, the former BBC journalist and political ally of the Labour leader, recently published a book called Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. It attempts bravely to articulate what modern socialism, operating without central state planning, might look like.

I confess I was hanging on for dear life trying to grasp his scheme, but I think I got there in the end. He sees a future, as did the Occupy movement, as did the authors of New Left Review and the Bennites, in which market exchange is replaced by friendly, voluntary co-operation and free provision. Wikipedia is his model.

Reading his book on the Tube, I was wondering how he might get someone, for instance, to clean station platforms or do an extra shift without being paid. But socialists do have an answer to this of sorts. Amity.

Corbyn’s spin doctor regrets the demise of East Germany
Without the market competition that makes us ruthless and has us jostling for position, we will all muck in. Someone will notice that there is a need for someone to work in the human resources department of the organisation that produces the ink that is used on Twix wrappers, and they will pop in and do it. For nothing.

I am sorry if this sounds preposterous but it’s not my idea, is it? And if I’ve misunderstood how it all works, then answers on a postcard please. But I think you will see where Pidcock fits in. Socialism depends entirely on love and complete trust in the willingness of every person, after capitalism, to co-operate in a spirit of friendship.

So where are you left if there are whole groups of people with whom friendship is impossible, on account of their view of the world? Counterrevolutionary elements who don’t accept their socialist responsibilities. Either these people make socialism impossible, or they have to be eliminated on the grounds of their counterrevolutionary position.

Pidcock would probably laugh at this. She’s just saying she doesn’t want to chum up with Sajid Javid, and here am I saying she wants to obliterate him. And she’s probably right to laugh. But not because socialism wouldn’t require such obliteration. It would. It’s just that socialism is so vague and incomprehensible she probably won’t get anywhere near it.

The other day I was listening to a (really quite shocking) interview that Jeremy Corbyn’s adviser Seumas Milne gave to George Galloway. Have a listen on YouTube. It’s amazing.

In it, Milne regrets the passing of East Germany, really he does. He adds that obviously we wouldn’t want the Stasi back. But he misses the point. You can’t have East Germany without the Stasi.

SOURCE

*************************

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)

***************************

19 September, 2017

Why Democrats fear voter fraud investigations

As President Trump's Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity met on Tuesday in New Hampshire to discuss voter fraud, the usual liberal suspects cried wolf.

During last year's election, the president voiced what we know - that voter fraud exists. The only question is to what degree, and that's the mission of the commission.

For anyone who dismisses concerns about voter fraud, the unhinged reaction by the left at investigating it should, at the very least, make a logical person wonder what they're so concerned about.

After all, if you believe the issue is false, or at the most an irrelevant factor in end results, you should welcome confirmation of that fact. Unless, of course, one fears the actual outcome may prove how voter fraud impacts local and state races to the point of shifting the balance of power in Washington, D.C.

Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and vice chairman of the president's commission, has already caused quite the stir. In a Breitbart article, Mr. Kobach revealed that out-of-state voters may have changed not only the outcome of the New Hampshire U.S. Senate race, but also could have impacted who won the state's presidential contest.

Mr. Kobach's assertion is quite simple and demands an investigation, which is exactly what the commission will do. He noted that New Hampshire is a state with same-day voter registration, which eliminates the ability to determine the eligibility of those voters. He said that last year there were 6,540 same-day registrants with out-of-state driver's licenses.

The state requires residents to obtain a state driver's license within 60 days of moving, yet since the election "5,313 of those voters neither obtained a New Hampshire driver's license nor registered a vehicle in New Hampshire. They have not followed the legal requirements for residents regarding driver's licenses, and it appears that they are not actually residing in New Hampshire. It seems that they never were bona fide residents of the State."

This number, Mr. Kobach pointed out, is large enough to have made the difference in the state's U.S. Senate race as well as the presidential election. Hillary Clinton won the swing state by only 2,738 votes. Incumbent Republican Kelly Ayotte lost her Senate seat to Democrat Maggie Hassan by the slim margin of 1,017 votes.

Some critics of Mr. Kobach's assertion argue that the driver's license issue could reflect voting by out-of-state college students who live in New Hampshire. Sure, that's possible, so let's find out, shall we?

Liberals usually claim if there is fraud, it's so small and isolated that it doesn't impact end results. The margins in New Hampshire prove the falsity of that argument.

This issue and others were discussed in Manchester on Tuesday, as a cacophony of liberal whiners and harpies demanded a dismantling of the commission itself.

Because, you know, it's just so much easier to burn down something with which you disagree. Just ask the #Resist gang antifa.

The ACLU's farcical headline serves as a good example of how panicked the left really is: "Kris Kobach Pushes Voter Fraud Lies While Meeting With Fellow Suppression Activists."

Looks like they ran out of room for "Klan," "Nazi," and "Puppy killers."

Prior to this week's meeting, Stephen Dinan of The Washington Times reported on the thousands of comments that have poured into the commission.

"For a problem that critics say doesn't exist, Americans seem to have a lot of stories of voter fraud or the potential for it. They are sharing those stories with President Trump's voter integrity commission as it wades into one of the administration's thorniest fights," Mr. Dinan reported.

"Democrats have vowed to use the legislative process to try to derail the commission. Last month, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer of New York compared the commission to the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, and said he would try to eliminate the panel as part of a must-pass bill," The Times noted.

Why so afraid, Chuck?

The issue of voter fraud must be addressed so every voter can be sure that their right as a citizen is not being erased by a fraudulent vote. Last year, this newspaper reported on a variety of fraudulent situations demanding reviews, including dead people voting in Colorado, illegals voting in Virginia, some Pennsylvania citizens voting twice, underage voters voting in the Wisconsin primary, and vote rigging in Texas.

Meanwhile, "[A] Heritage Foundation database tracking documented voter fraud now contains 492 cases and 773 criminal convictions, with untold other cases unreported and unprosecuted," the National Review reported.

"Across the country, as Heritage's database shows, voter-fraud convictions include everything from impersonation fraud and false registrations to ineligible voting by felons and noncitizens. American voter fraud continues apace, and the United States remains one of the only democracies in the world without a uniform requirement for voter identification," the magazine continued.

Democrats and their allies are afraid of something - an end to a scheme that they have relied on for far too long. And now, with the president's voter fraud commission and the tenacity of people like Mr. Kobach, perhaps they're also afraid of losing a Senate seat and an increase of Mr. Trump's 2016 electoral college victory.

SOURCE

********************************

Deputy Attorney General Says Rule of Law Is About `Character of the People' Enforcing the Law

As judge Learned Hand once put it: "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it."

The Constitution's 230th anniversary is Sept. 17, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein says it is incumbent on the American people to help preserve the rule of law as the Founders intended.

"On Constitution Day, it is appropriate to keep in mind that although the power of the federal government is vast, it is expressly limited, and those who are entrusted with the exercise of federal authority must be energetic in enforcing the law," Rosenstein said at an event at The Heritage Foundation Thursday.

The challenge, nearly two centuries later, Rosenstein said, is to stay within the confines the Constitution dictates.

"We must restrain ourselves from assuming authority beyond our lawful [place]," Rosenstein said. "Our power is limited by law, and we are obligated to respect those limits, even when no one objects."

Another challenge, Rosenstein said, is communicating to society the importance of the Constitution.

"Unfortunately, too few American citizens know the details of our Constitution," Rosenstein said. "And some discount the rule of law. If you ask whether a particular legal decision is right, most of the citizens focus on whether they favor the policy outcome."

Rosenstein, who assumed office as the 37th United States deputy attorney general on April 26, recounted a story about how Benjamin Franklin, a signer of the Constitution, warned about the struggle future Americans would have staying true to the Founders' vision.

As the story is told, Franklin was walking home from the Constitutional Convention when he encountered a woman named Mrs. Powell who asked Franklin what kind of government the Founders had created.

"And Franklin replied with these words, `A republic, madam, if you can keep it,'" Rosenstein said. "Mrs. Powell's question illustrates that it was not inevitable that our nation would begin as a democratic republic."

Ordinary citizens play a significant role in preserving the role of the Constitution as the Founders saw it.

"The rule of law is not just about words on paper. The rule of law is about the character of the people who are charged with enforcing the law," Rosenstein said. "If they uphold it faithfully, the result will be a high degree of consistency and uniformity. Those features are among the primary reasons why our nation has flourished."

The Justice Department has a unique role in upholding the Constitution and the rule of law, Rosenstein said.

"The Department of Justice does not choose sides because of the identity of a party," the deputy attorney general said, adding:

We do not enforce the law among some people, and ignore others based on our own biases, or any other inappropriate considerations. We follow mutual principles. The point of the rule of law is to maintain a fair and rational system, characterized by impartiality and universality. That is, it applies equally to each person.

The task sounds simple, Rosenstein said, yet it remains a detailed process.

"To say that we enforce the law impartially does not mean that we enforce it mechanically," Rosenstein said. "It means that we enforce it rationally, and the results must be based on different facts, and the differences need to be objective."

The task of a good prosecutor is "to select cases for prosecution, and to select those for which the offense is the most flagrant, the public harm the greatest, and the proof almost certain."

He added:

Such power calls for the exercise of discretion and the wise use of that discretion. So when asked, `Why did you prosecute this case?' it will not do for the prosecutor to respond, `Because I can' or `Because I must.' The right answer is, `Because I should.' The task of enforcing the law is not devoid of discretion.

The event, "A Constitution Day Address," was hosted by Edwin Meese III, who served as the nation's 75th attorney general and is The Heritage Foundation's Ronald Reagan distinguished fellow emeritus.

Rosenstein praised Meese's role in upholding the Constitution during his service in the Reagan administration.

"General Meese famously told the American Bar Association in 1985, `We will peruse our agenda within the context of our written Constitution of limited and energetic powers,'" Rosenstein said, adding:

`Our guide in every case will the the sanctity of the rule of law and the proper limits of government power.' Those words resonate today. The rule of law is not merely a feature in America. The rule of law is the foundation of America.

SOURCE

New online

I have just put online the last article I ever had published in a learned journal. It was published in 2004 but I had lost my copy of it. But I recently did a big clean-out of my library and found then that which was lost. It is Ray, J.J. (2004) "Explaining the Left/Right divide". Social science and modern society. 41(4), 70-78 .

The first half of the article does a brief survey of the last 1500 years of history and shows that a concern for individual liberty and a distrust of government has always been central to conservatism.

The second half looks at the various theories about the psychological underpinnings of conservatism. I think all the theories discussed there do reduce to my more recent formulation that conservatives are the dispositionally contented people. For more on that formulation, see here, here and here

*************************

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)

***************************

18 September, 2017

Ms Zuckerberg regrets

There is a rather strange article here by Mark Zuckerberg's Leftist sister under the title "How to Be a Good Classicist Under a Bad Emperor". In it, she claims to have the "right" ideas about classical literature but never says what they are.

She rightly recognizes that serious conservative thinkers tend to be impressed by the classics of ancient Greece and Rome and find some inspiration in them. Some of us even study the classical languages -- as Sean Gabb does. And VD Hanson's references to antiquity are both frequent and well-known.

But she deplores the ideas that conservatives take from antiquity and refers to a group of Leftists classicists -- of whom she is one. I presume she refers to what is taught these days in the classics departments of major universities. How the poor souls in those departments manage to reconcile modern Leftist victim culture with the robust values of antiquity must be quite a challenge but Ms Zuckerberg clearly likes what she hears there. So she is saying: "The classics are ours. Hands off!".

The curious thing is that Leftist classicists exist. History for most members of the Green/Left seems to start yesterday. Learning from the past is not their scene. Green/Left writers, for instance, treated the recent hurricanes as if there had never been such things before, when it is perfectly easy to document even more severe storms in the past. And how come anybody believes in any form of socialism these days? From Robespierre, through Stalin, through Hitler, through Mao through PolPot and many others, the lesson of history is that socialism rapidly degenerates in to ghastly tyrannies once they gain full power. Leftists can't afford to know history.

But against all logic there are apparently some Leftists who do study history. And I have seen something of what they say. Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" typifies the approach. In accord with the great Leftist tradition of cherrypicking, they find all the disreputable bits in the history of a time or place and ignore the admirable bits. Leftists never even attempt balance. They don't think they have to. Just to show bad bits gives them a glow and the glow is what they seek.

So Ms Zuckerberg is trying to defend an intellectually disreputable Leftist tradition from those who really want to learn from the classics. And she is right in seeing lots of such people on the political Right. I had read most of the Greek canon by the time I was 18 and greatly enjoyed my Thucydides. And all the other writers I have encountered who quote Thucydides have been conservatives. The twisted little tales told by Ms Zuckerberg and her clique will simply never interest us, if we note them at all.

And it seems that she regrets that. The subtext of her article seems to be that she is not getting enough recognition and support: A very Leftist preoccupation. Maybe she just wants to get laid.

******************************

I have been restored!

On 10th, I put up an amused post reporting that Quora.com had blocked me from commenting when I mentioned that the ferociously Leftist game designer Ernest Adams was probably born that way. I sent quora a link to the post. I heard nothing further from them but, Lo and behold, the block has gone and I can comment once more. I guess they must have learned something.

*******************************

Boris Johnson wants to make Britain great again

Boris Johnson today sets out a grand vision of Britain’s “glorious” post-Brexit future as a low-tax, low regulation economy paying nothing to the EU for access to the single market.

In a 4,000-word article for the Telegraph, the Foreign Secretary restates the key demand of the Leave campaign - that £350m a week currently sent to Brussels should be redirected to fund the NHS.

He says that Britain should not continue to make payments to the EU after Brexit and that ongoing membership of the European single market and customs union would make a "complete mockery" of the referendum.

Mr Johnson, who has said virtually nothing about Brexit in the wake of the election, makes no reference to any transition period after 2019 and makes repeated reference to how EU bureaucracy is a drag on economic performance.

The blueprint and vision he sets out today differs markedly from the plan set out by Philip Hammond and other Cabinet ministers - who have stressed the need to remain close to the single market and pay money to maintain access.

It comes less than a week before Theresa May delivers a pivotal Brexit speech in Florence, and effectively amounts to an ultimatum to the Prime Minister on what she is expected to say.

It is understood that the Foreign Secretary wished to make a speech about Brexit but has not had the opportunity. Whitehall sources suggested that the Prime Minister and Chancellor were unaware of Mr Johnson's article.

His Brexit blueprint will send shockwaves through the Tory ranks and will inevitably spark speculation that Mr Johnson - who sources say supports the Prime Minister and her agenda - may still harbour leadership ambitions, as the Conservative Party prepares to meet at its annual conference next month.

In his passionately patriotic article he insists that Britain can be “the greatest country on earth” and rounds on so-called Remoaners “who think we are going to bottle it”.

He also accuses Labour of “chickening out” of Brexit.

The most striking inclusion in his article is the repetition of his claim that Britain will be £350 million per week better off after leaving the EU and that the money could be spent on the NHS. The controversial claim appeared on the side of the Leave campaign bus during last year’s referendum campaign and has been bitterly disputed by Remainers ever since.

However, Mr Johnson says: “Once we have settled our accounts, we will take back control of roughly £350m per week.

“It would be a fine thing, as many of us have pointed out, if a lot of that money went on the NHS, provided we use that cash injection to modernise and make the most of new technology.”

Mr Johnson is also dismissive of the suggestion that Britain should pay to access the single market during the transition period or beyond, saying: “We would not expect to pay for access to their markets any more than they would expect to pay for access to ours.”

He deploys soaring rhetoric in the tub-thumping article to insist that Britain “will succeed in our new national enterprise, and will succeed mightily” while slapping down opponents of Brexit who are “woefully underestimating this country” and who think Brexit “isn’t going to happen”.

The Foreign Secretary also settles old scores by attacking those who tried to prevent the Leave vote, such as “the government, the BBC, Barack Obama, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the CBI [Confederation of British Industry], every major political party and much of the media”.

Under Mr Johnson’s blueprint for Brexit, leaving the EU must “logically entail” leaving the single market, the customs union and the European Court of Justice.

He says Britain will “keep environmental and social protections that are fair and wise”, but will ditch EU regulations that he says cost anything between 4 and 7 per cent of GDP.

Treading heavily on Mr Hammond’s toes, Mr Johnson says: “We should seize the opportunity of Brexit to reform our tax system,” pointing out that the Bank of England’s chief economist said in 2015 that the system is “skewed” and discourages investment.

He adds: “Outside the EU there are obvious opportunities… in the setting of indirect taxation. At the stroke of a pen, the Chancellor will be able to cut VAT on tampons; often demanded by parliament but – absurdly – legally impossible to deliver.”

Boris Johnson and Rex Tillerson photo call Boris Johnson and Rex Tillerson photo call
00:40
He also suggests that Britain should think about taxing foreign buyers of British property to prevent them forcing house prices up.

Another way of tackling the housing crisis, he says, would be to simplify planning laws and environmental impact assessments.

He singles out the Communities Secretary Sajid Javid and the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt for praise, but makes no mention of the Brexit Secretary David Davis or the Chancellor Philip Hammond.

On immigration, he says that businesses should be able to access the skills they need but “will no longer be able to use immigration as an excuse not to invest in the young people of this country”. He also wants a Britain where “fat cat” bosses are no longer rewarded for failure.

On trade, Britain will be able to “get on and do free trade deals” around the world, particularly with Commonwealth countries, rather than looking to the EU for ways to expand.

His view directly challenges Mr Hammond’s preference for a lengthy transition period leading to a “jobs first” agreement with the EU.

Mr Johnson sees Brexit as a “chance to catch the wave of new technology, and to put Britain in the lead”. As automated vehicles take over the car market, the car industry will transform itself in Britain, while the protectionist EU will try to hold back the revolution.

He also accuses Jeremy Corbyn of “chickening out” of Brexit with his party’s preference for remaining in the single market and customs union, or nearest equivalent.

“He would make a complete mockery of Brexit,” he writes, “and turn an opportunity into a national humiliation.”

SOURCE

*****************************

OBITUARY

An obituary for Chris Brand is now online here. It is in a journal he often wrote for and is by a former student of his plus his wife and his son

*************************

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)

***************************

17 September, 2017

Contentment

In 1974 I had a book published under the title "Conservatism as Heresy". It is now online here. The very title was a challenge to the dictionary definition of conservatism, which refers to support for the status quo or opposition to change. And it was obvious that the definition had problems. It was before the era of either Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher but there were already rumblings from conservatives of dissatisfaction with the status quo and a desire for change. And not long afterwards Thatcher and Reagan upset the status quo comprehensively -- to cheers from conservatives.

So what, then, IS conservatism? There has not been much discussion of that. In their usual deaf and blind way, the Left insist on sticking to the dictionary definition despite all the evidence to the contrary. So they don't debate what conservatism is.

Roger Scruton wrote a book in 1980 called "The meaning of conservatism" and he summasrizes his thinking here. He has many valuable insights but he is more a reactionary than a conservative. Is there ANY American -- conservative or not -- who would agree that "the future is the past"? That is Scruton's summary of a core conservative outlook.

And there have of course been a variety of conservative philosophers and intellectuals who have offered their definitions. I summarize them one by one here. Of them all I like Ronald Reagan's comment best: "I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.... The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom" And that definition is by now mainstream among conservatives themselves.

But Trump has come along and upset that applecart. Trump is no libertarian. Restrictions on trade and immigration are the antithesis of libertarianism. And a concentration on national greatness is unknown to libertarians.

But we should not have been be surprised at Trump's irruption onto the scene. The libertarian party has been standing in American elections for many years and getting nowhere. It is a outrider in American politics, not a main player. Libertarian ideas do help conservative thinking but they are not the whole of it.

And yet Trump has gained wholehearted support from a majority of conservative voters, first in the primaries and then in the presidential election. And despite his ups and downs most of those voters still support him. People who had found their only refuge in the wishy washy Republican party suddenly found a new champion who was much more after their own hearts. The previous GOP offering to Trump in a presidential election was Mitt Romney. Need I say more?

So I think the GOP old hands will have to accept it sooner or later that Trump has taken conservatism back from the siren of libertarian and Leftist ideas and given it new heart. Trump has redefined conservatism. And non-establishment conservatives love him for it. I do.

But after such an upheaval someone is going to have to pick up the pieces and define the new core of conservatism. And I want to add a few thoughts in that direction. And I hope in what I say that I can point to an underlying core theme that explains all the ideas that have been and are described as conservatism. That is a big ask but I think I can get most of the way there.

For a start, there can be little doubt that conservatism is NOT a selection of political policies. The policies that conservatives have espoused over the last 200 years or so have been all over the shop. Finding a common theme among them could only give something impossibly vague. No. We have to go down to the psychological level to explain conservatism. And Scruton and many other conservatives over the years have been agreed on that. I am not being at all innovative is saying that. What I hope to do is to zero in on exactly WHAT psychological trait separates conservatives from others. And I obviously have to explain Leftism too. The great opponents of Left and Right obviously cannot be understood by themselves

And my proposal for the psychological trait that ties all conservatives together is in the heading of this essay. I believe that conservatives are dispositionally contented. They are not contented with everything nor are they contented at all times but contentment is their natural state.

And that contentment leads to some obvious policy preferences. They like their traditional religion and don't like to be told it is wrong (about homosexuality, for instance) and they don't like new laws that might upset arrangements they are content with. They are for instance comfortable with the age-old division of labor between the sexes so don't at all see the point of setting quotas for the proportion of women in business management or politics. And they see no reason why their normal descriptions of people as "fat", "short", "retarded" etc. have to be changed.

And, in the normal human way, they like best people of their own kind and that extends to groups of people as well as individuals. They are proud of their ancestors and proud of their country. They are happy to be what they are and happy about how they got there. The constant Leftist need to denigrate their ancestors and their fellow countrymen as "racists" just does not feel right to them and makes no sense. They like their country and want to make it great again.

My own 1974 claim that conservatism was heresy reflected the fact that, already at that time, the political consensus had settled around policies that tended to disturb conservative contentment. In particular, Australia had just come out of a long reign (1949 to 1972) of somnolent conservative governments into an era governed by a Leftist Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, who seemed determined to upset everything he could.

I could go on from there with more examples of the role of contentment but I think other examples of conservative policies springing from a contented disposition are pretty easy to think of.

So what is Leftism? Leftists are the discontented people. They dislike heaps in the society around them and want to tear down as much of that as they can. And there is more to it than mere discontentment. They are also angry and hostile most of the time. Their natural inclination is to be angry with everything. They probably are never really content. They are always looking for ways to destroy anything that provokes their anger. They often achieve their policy aims but that does not content them for a moment. There are always new "injustices" to attack. They are insatiable. They never reach a state that they are remotely happy with. They somehow think that there is a new Eden around the corner but they can never seem to get anywhere near it.

For example, they think homosexuality should not be illegal. They get that. Then they want homosexuals to be broadly accepted socially. They get that. Then they want homosexuals to be able to enter into a form of marriage, They get that. Then they want all criticism of homosexuals, including Bible criticisms, to be stigmatized as "homophobia". And they are mostly there with that. And just around the corner "homophobia" will be illegal.

So we see why there will always be a fierce political polarity. Leftists have had many triumphs in destroying existing arrangements and they want more. Although conservatives would rather be left alone to enjoy their friends, their families, their church, their sports or their national identity, they will always have to gird up their loins and try to block Leftist destructiveness. Though sometimes the Left sabotages itself, with the implosion of Obamacare being a good example of that. Leftists are so angry that they usually can't think straight. They overlook important realities and thus generate "unexpected" outcomes that destroy what they set out to achieve.

It may be noted that the account I have given of conservatism is not a million miles from the old claim that conservatives oppose change and support the status quo. Where my account differs is that it takes note of what conservatives have to face. The idea that conservatives oppose ALL change is absurd. They oppose destructive change. There is always a torrent of actual and proposed Leftist changes that have to be opposed to prevent chaos and preserve order. Leftists think their changes are so obviously right that conservatives could only oppose them through an ornery disposition to oppose ALL change. The idea that conservatives might have good reason to oppose their changes they just cannot consider. The idea that conservatives oppose all changes whatsoever is just Leftist propaganda.

My claim that contentment is an enduring psychological disposition does imply that it is hereditary. And the evidence that the level of happiness/contentment in us is substantially pre-set is strong. See here.

And all the general population surveys show conservatives to be happier. Pew, for instance, reports that: "Some 45% of all Republicans report being very happy, compared with just 30% of Democrats and 29% of independents. This finding has also been around a long time; Republicans have been happier than Democrats every year since the General Social Survey began taking its measurements in 1972"

Leftists hate that finding. In their usual projective way, they think conservatives should be miserable. So there have been innumerable attempts to explain it away -- even going to to the lengths of measuring the crinkles around the eyes of congresscritters! You couldn't make it up.

I put up an earlier version of this essay a year ago. It has some points additional to those above -- JR

****************************

Trump is a limited government president

Because of his emphasis on broader aspects of conservatism, some fear that Trump may have lost focus on the importance of individual liberty and limited government but Printus LeBlanc below shows that not to be so

Recently, the Competitive Enterprise Institute issued a report comparing the number of rules issued by President Obama between Jan. 20 through June 7, 2016, and the same time period for President Trump in 2017. Trump issued 7 percent fewer rules and regulations, with many of the President’s rules rolling back Obama era regulations.

Most important is the difference in the number of “significant” rules. These are rules that have an economic impact of $100 million or more. President Trump has issued 44 percent fewer significant rules than Obama, and once again, many of Trump’s rules are rollbacks of Obama era rules.

It gets even better, the American Action Forum estimates President Trump’s rollback of regulations have saved the taxpayers and private businesses over $86 billion in his first three months in office. Reducing regulatory costs by tens of billions of dollars in only a few months hardly sounds like the work of an anti-limited government president.

Not since President Ronald Reagan has any President taken such an aggressive approach to deregulation, and been so committed to private sector growth in the economy.

The size of government has always been a thorn in the side of conservative and libertarian groups. The government never seems to shrink. Agencies get added and additional employees are hired regardless of who is power. President Trump is changing that.

Already the federal workforce has shrunk by an astounding 11,000 workers since President Trump’s inauguration. By this time in President Obama’s first term, the federal government added 60,000 new workers. The President’s budget proposal indicated he would like further cuts to the federal workforce by 200,000 employees.

Many former Presidents have promised to reduce the size of government, but few have delivered. For once, a President is reducing the size of the federal government and he is being labeled anti-limited government for his efforts.

President Trump announced to the world that the U.S. would be withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on June 1, earlier this year. The Paris Agreement had nothing to do with climate change and was nothing more than a U.N. scheme to redistribute U.S. wealth to more “needy” nations.

Trump understood two things about the agreement. Number one, it was meant to hurt the U.S. economy, and number two, President Obama implemented the agreement without sending it to the Senate, as all treaties are supposed to. President Trump once again showed his fidelity to the Constitution, limited government, and the American worker.

Another globalist agenda item ended by President Trump was the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). It was pitched as a trade deal between nations around the Pacific Ocean, but don’t be fooled. TPP was a massive extra governmental bureaucracy designed to circumvent U.S. sovereignty. President Trump believed the deal would hurt American workers and damage U.S. competitiveness, hardly the actions of an anti-limited government President.

Whenever anyone mentions the words “limited government” the Constitution comes to mind. President Trump’s recent decision on DACA proved his loyalty to the Constitution. President Obama had issued the unconstitutional edict without going through Congress, as Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 of the Constitution states. Despite enormous pressure from both sides of the aisle, the President put the issue where it belongs, in Congress.

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning recently stated, “Trump’s hands-off legislative approach where he sets broad goals while expecting Congress to do its job without micromanagement is a recognition of Congress’ Article I responsibilities under the Constitution. For those who are still stuck in year-old campaign rhetoric, it’s time for them to update their hard drives, because Donald Trump is proving to be the most surprising limited government president in America’s history.”

This is only scratching the surface of the limited government agenda being pursued by the President. As we speak, Trump is making a big push to get tax reform through Congress. The President has signed legislation and initiated reforms at the Department of Veterans Affairs that no one thought possible, and the list goes on and on.

It is time to get over petty jealousy because you or your candidate didn’t win and admit the once in a generation limited government opportunity the President is presenting us with.

SOURCE

***************************

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)

***************************

15 September, 2017

Bannon has good answers

Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon does not need lectures on race relations from “limousine liberals” and the media elites who hang out in largely homogenous crowds and whose oh-so-progressive-and-forward-looking organizations and outlets do not have the effortless diversity of Breitbart News’ masthead.
In a 60 Minutes interview, Bannon told CBS anchor Charlie Rose that he was raised in a desegregated neighborhood on the North Side of Richmond, Virginia, that is “predominantly black.”

“I went to an integrated school, a Catholic school. I served in the military,” he continued. “I don’t need to be lectured … by a bunch of limousine liberals, okay, from the Upper East Side of New York and from the Hamptons … about any of this. My lived experience is that.”

Bannon also suggested that left-wing activists and the legacy media may be trying to play the race card because they know how successful and unifying the economic nationalist agenda, which Bannon said will unify Americans of all races, nationalities, religious, and sexual orientations—can be. Bannon has consistently denounced ethno-nationalists and white supremacists. He did so again to Rose.

“[T]he Neo-Nazis and Neo-Confederates and the Klan, who, by the way, are absolutely awful – there’s no room in American politics for that,” Bannon said. “There’s no room in American society for that.”

And he told Rose that the legacy media give a platform to irrelevant white supremacists who stage rallies because the media want to “make them up as some huge part of Donald Trump’s coalition” when they are not.

In the end, Bannon said he is singularly focused on the economic nationalist message that will help and unite Americans–U.S.-born Americans and legal immigrants–of all backgrounds.

“I don’t need the affirmation of the mainstream media,” Bannon said. “I don’t care what they say. They can call me an anti-Semite. They can call me racist. They call me nativist. You can call me anything you want. Okay? As long as we’re driving this agenda for the working men and women of this country, I’m happy.”

SOURCE

********************************

Poll warns GOP: Back the Trump Agenda or Face Defeat in 2018

“You dance with the one who brung you to the dance.” The wisdom of that old political adage might seem outdated in this age of expensive consultants, focus groups with instantaneous tracking of reactions, and micro-targeting of voters. But the McLaughlin & Associates poll released this week reinforces the wisdom of that adage for any Republican who wants to avoid defeat in the 2018 primary season and in the general election that follows.

The message of that McLaughlin poll could not be clearer or simpler for Republicans as they choose in the coming weeks between the agenda of President Trump and the agenda of the Beltway insiders: The base that brought you to the dance supports the Trump agenda.Dance with your base and win.Dance with the Beltway and lose.

To be fair, elected Republicans face many practical pressures inside the Washington Beltway. There are always K Street lobbyists for various special interests and for large corporations wanting special favors, all offering generous campaign contributions.

And there are the Alinskyite Democrats and their leftist media threatening personal attacks, smears, and ruin for anyone who crosses their socialist agenda.

And then there are some old hands who have learned to thrive in that environment, whose advice is to tell the folks back home anything they want to hear but do the bidding of the Beltway insiders in order to survive.

Candidate Trump called all of that a swamp, promised to drain it, and stunned most of the political experts with a victory those experts said was impossible. And now Republican officials are doubtless hearing from those same experts that the Trump phenomenon is a fluke, an aberration, and that the smart move is to wait it out.Maintain your distance from the Trump agenda and it will all go away

But the McLaughlin poll of likely voters tells a different story. Here are just a few highlights:

Voting to increase the debt ceiling without new constraints on spending will make 62% of voters less likely to vote to re-elect a Member of Congress.

“Bailing out health insurance companies without repealing Obamacare” leaves 53% overall less likely to re-elect a representative, and only 29% more likely. That 53% figure jumps to 67% among Trump voters.

Conservatives (70%) and Trump voters (67%) are less likely to support a Member of Congress who has failed to support President Trump’s efforts to vet immigrants more carefully, especially those from countries with a strong terrorist presence.

Refusing to repeal the burdensome Obamacare mandates and taxes leaves 75% of conservatives, 68% of Trump voters, and 66% of Republicans overall less likely to vote to re-elect a Member of Congress.

Eighty-five percent of likely voters still believe that freedom of speech is a fundamental right, even if it offends some people. Only 9% support restrictions on speech. That is not good news for the proponents of political correctness, or for those who bow to its dictates.

In stark contrast to the impression one gets from the leftist news media, when voters are reminded of the violence of the ANTIFA protesters, 81% of conservatives and 63% of voters overall oppose ANTIFA. Only 21% overall support them.

And, as things stand now, 49% of likely voters see the Republican Leadership as “supporting the swamp that President Trump promised to drain,” with only 22% seeing them as helping to drain that swamp.

And those are just the highlights.

Now here is the point that Republican officials cannot afford to miss. The issues of concern to the GOP base – conservatives, self-identified Republicans, and Trump voters – are the same kinds of issues that gave rise to the Tea Party movement in 2009 and led to GOP victories in 2010 and 2014. The Trump phenomenon is not just a fluke, but is instead a sign that the sleeping giant of mainstream America is waking up and demanding that Washington get control of our spending, secure our borders, repeal and replace Obamacare, and stop giving in to the stifling demands of political correctness. Trump’s agenda is their agenda.

Elected officials who have not helped to carry out the Trump agenda will not only be going against President Trump; they will also be pitting themselves against the movement that elected him.

The Democrats have become increasingly radicalized and unified since the 1960s. And when Democrats are in power, they enact their socialist agenda. Their voters get what they vote for, with no waffling and no excuses.

And, even with all its internal debates, the Republican party is still the political vehicle for the center-right mainstream. But mainstream America is beginning to wonder why the results they are seeing do not match the rhetoric they heard during the campaign.Why is it that the Democrats can enact the socialist agenda but the Republicans cannot carry out the agenda of mainstream America?

Looking at the McLaughlin poll, “the Democrats won’t let us” will not play well during the primaries, let alone in the general election. The music is starting for the 2018 election. Base or Beltway. Choose your partner.

SOURCE

************************************

The Destruction of the Individual

The American Left makes a show of disapproving any but the most denatured, toothless and universalist religious beliefs. They are suffused with a sexual ethos that is amoral and libertine by the standards of the recent past. Their intellectual post-modernism specifically prevents any moral judgement or ethical framework. In fact they pride themselves on the ability to“deconstruct” the traditions and values that under-pin our civilization. Yet, they seem able to put aside their fractious identity politics in order to be unaccountably tolerant- even supportive of Radical Islam That political religion commits terror against the rest of the world and has spawned despotisms of religious elites of some degree in the entire Muslim world. They also demand the killing of apostates, the torture and murder of homosexuals, the subjugation, rape and “honor” murder of women and children: This begs for explanation.

I have a simple answer, and I want to hold it up for my liberal friends so that they will see themselves in it and think again about their current leftist doctrine.

Some have said that the affinity between the Left and Islam has to do with the historic crimes of the West and the Judeo-Christian culture. In doing so, they willingly ignore the murder and terror that accompanied the Islamic conquest of Arabia, The Levant, North Africa, large swaths of Western Asia and even parts of Europe in the heyday of the Caliphate. Although there may be some element of truth to the accusations of Western crimes, it does not compare in scale, ferocity or longevity to the crimes of Islam. In any case, the affinity is deeper and more central to the Left and Islam than that.

It is about human nature, and the urge to change and control it. Islam, you see, is about surrendering the individual will to Allah, and although Progressivism purports to be about compassion and “humanity”,it shares with Islam a kind of surrender of the individual. The Left and Islam are united in their animus toward individualism, family loyalty, nationhood, liberty and and an open and questioning religious faith. At the very bottom of the issue, Islamic Jihad and the progressive Left have this in common: as Dostoevsky put it in The Brothers Karamazov, “…the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.”

That’s a harsh thing to say, so for clarity’s sake let me stipulate that I do not mean they are incapable of loving individual people. There is a difference between what we call “the individual” and a particular person. You may love one or many people but if you cannot love, or at least accept as human, someone who does not behave as you think fit or subscribe to the same political doctrine that you do, then you are denying and hating “the individual”.

The name “Progressivism” itself implies that there is a ‘humanistic’ ideal that can be reached in an orderly, planned and (if necessary, enforced) progression. This is nothing more than the same intellectual fantasy that has given birth to all of the utopian movements in history. Utopias always seem so promising at their invention, but they lead only to dystopia and suffering. The annals of socialism, communalism and communism are replete with failure and horror.

At their worst, they have led to mass killings in Ukraine, Russia, Nazi Germany, China, Cambodia, and Venezuela (to mention just a few) and at their best they offer a kind of tepid, quasi-democratic environment where individual advancement is all but impossible for any but the members of the elite. Even the best, Post War Germany, Sweden and Denmark, for example, are fast succumbing to the fecklessness of their fuzzy progressive ideals and the incompetence or their effete leadership. In the face of (irony of ironies!) Muslim immigrant hordes that serve as a Trojan Horse for Jihadists and the terror they bring the socialist democracies of Europe are dying before our eyes.

All they offer us as a rational for their failure is hatred dressed up as love and tolerance. Only consider what passes for political polemic from the Left. The “Nazi” meme, thinly veiled character assassination and other unproven ad hominem attacks prevail. In the liberal media Donald Trump is constantly characterized as a heartless, vicious, greedy fascist, and even insane. Anyone who supports him (or even refuses to denounce him!) can count on being vilified and dismissed.

Disagree with his policies and personal conduct if you want, but this is all out of proportion and a shameful proof that the Left is without any means of logical or reasonable argument for what they believe. Its not just Trump either. There is not a single conservative that is immune. They have even condescended to despise Ronald Reagan- arguably the last successful U. S president. The best they could do against Reagan, though, was to call him an “amiable dunce” or a tool of the corporations, even though his policies lifted the nation out of the self described “malaise” of the Carter administration into the headiest era of prosperity and universal well-being we have known since. But that is really just further proof that they hated him- not just for being different from them but also for proving that Jimmy Carter, one of their own, was hateful and incompetent. Whatever small respect they had for Reagan and the office, if they could only muster something like it for Trump, we might again experience a new “Morning in America” era.

Unfortunately, that does not appear to be what they want. They sooth their discontent by assassinating the character of individuals who stand for The Individual. Their so-called humanism seems to be more of a means toward other ends…which begs the question… What is this “progress” the Progressives have in mind for us?

SOURCE

***************************

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)

***************************

14 September, 2017

Wow! This is the end of the scares about hormone replacement therapy

Because it is so helpful to many women, HRT had to come under attack from the superior souls in the medical community. If you like it, it is bad for you seems, in fact, to be a majority view among health commentators.

But the evidence that HRT is bad for you was always flimsy and the latest finding could not be clearer. HRT does you no harm at all. Women who find it helpful should not hesitate to use it. It doesn't give you cancer, it doesn't give you heart attacks and it doesn't make you die sooner. How's that?

Study abstract below:

Menopausal Hormone Therapy and Long-term All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality: The Women’s Health Initiative Randomized Trials

JoAnn E. Manson et al.

Abstract

Importance: Health outcomes from the Women’s Health Initiative Estrogen Plus Progestin and Estrogen-Alone Trials have been reported, but previous publications have generally not focused on all-cause and cause-specific mortality.

Objective: To examine total and cause-specific cumulative mortality, including during the intervention and extended postintervention follow-up, of the 2 Women’s Health Initiative hormone therapy trials.

Design, Setting, and Participants: Observational follow-up of US multiethnic postmenopausal women aged 50 to 79 years enrolled in 2 randomized clinical trials between 1993 and 1998 and followed up through December 31, 2014.

Interventions: Conjugated equine estrogens (CEE, 0.625 mg/d) plus medroxyprogesterone acetate (MPA, 2.5 mg/d) (n?=?8506) vs placebo (n?=?8102) for 5.6 years (median) or CEE alone (n?=?5310) vs placebo (n?=?5429) for 7.2 years (median).

Main Outcomes and Measures: All-cause mortality (primary outcome) and cause-specific mortality (cardiovascular disease mortality, cancer mortality, and other major causes of mortality) in the 2 trials pooled and in each trial individually, with prespecified analyses by 10-year age group based on age at time of randomization.

Results: Among 27?347 women who were randomized (baseline mean [SD] age, 63.4 [7.2] years; 80.6% white), mortality follow-up was available for more than 98%. During the cumulative 18-year follow-up, 7489 deaths occurred (1088 deaths during the intervention phase and 6401 deaths during postintervention follow-up). All-cause mortality was 27.1% in the hormone therapy group vs 27.6% in the placebo group (hazard ratio [HR], 0.99 [95% CI, 0.94-1.03]) in the overall pooled cohort; with CEE plus MPA, the HR was 1.02 (95% CI, 0.96-1.08); and with CEE alone, the HR was 0.94 (95% CI, 0.88-1.01). In the pooled cohort for cardiovascular mortality, the HR was 1.00 (95% CI, 0.92-1.08 [8.9 % with hormone therapy vs 9.0% with placebo]); for total cancer mortality, the HR was 1.03 (95% CI, 0.95-1.12 [8.2 % with hormone therapy vs 8.0% with placebo]); and for other causes, the HR was 0.95 (95% CI, 0.88-1.02 [10.0% with hormone therapy vs 10.7% with placebo]), and results did not differ significantly between trials. When examined by 10-year age groups comparing younger women (aged 50-59 years) to older women (aged 70-79 years) in the pooled cohort, the ratio of nominal HRs for all-cause mortality was 0.61 (95% CI, 0.43-0.87) during the intervention phase and the ratio was 0.87 (95% CI, 0.76-1.00) during cumulative 18-year follow-up, without significant heterogeneity between trials.

Conclusions and Relevance: Among postmenopausal women, hormone therapy with CEE plus MPA for a median of 5.6 years or with CEE alone for a median of 7.2 years was not associated with risk of all-cause, cardiovascular, or cancer mortality during a cumulative follow-up of 18 years.

JAMA. 2017;318(10):927-938. doi:10.1001/jama.2017.11217

******************************

Trump as a lone hero battling hostile forces on all sides

Dramatic events that signify the turning points of history usually come when they are least expected. The election of Donald Trump was one of those events, the depth and historical importance of which are not being fully understood. History was made twice in a single day. The defeat of the well-organized and well-funded Democratic machine by a political upstart epitomized the most stunning election upset in American history. But even more important history was made by the defeat of socialism in the United States. This watershed moment may serve as a catalyzing event of American renewal: Never before has the incumbent socialist government been repudiated at the ballot box.

Ironically, winning the elections and defeating socialists may not be Donald Trump's greatest accomplishment. Standing against a congressional bipartisanship determined to bring him down may prove the President's ultimate triumph.

The spiteful Democrats hate him for their defeat in 2016; the vindictive Republicans cannot forgive him for their victory.

Inebriated by the defeat and lacking any plausible explanation for their loss, since it could not possibly be the Democratic Party's socialist policies, the only politically acceptable alibi was an outside influence. A perilous blend of hostility, anger and disbelief drove the Democratic Party to embrace a strategy of fanatical resistance and ferocious investigations. Democrats are no longer acting as a political party-they are an egalitarian cause.

In contrast, Republicans had gotten comfortable being in opposition. For the previous eight years they had been making grand pronouncements on the academic theories of conservatism, secure in the knowledge that they were not in power to implement them. Many of Republicans hoped that day would never come.

Stunned by unexpected victory, Republicans were not in a position to offer superior rationality. They found themselves woefully unprepared to face the scope of challenges arrayed against them and live up to their election promises. Furthermore, their duplicity was going to be exposed by a new president who cared less about the theoretical aspects of conservative ideology and more about the practical implementation of his agenda.

This unforeseen political reality forced the leadership of the Republican Party to take extraordinary measures to alleviate the impending disaster.

Acting on the political instinct of self-preservation, Republicans have joined with Democrats to undermine the President. In a concerted effort to paralyze executive authority, they blatantly subvert almost every program on the President's agenda and actively support a collective mania for ever more sweeping investigations of dubious claims, rumors, unsubstantiated allegations and innuendos that has descended over the President, his family and his associates. No president has ever been vilified and attacked in such a systematic and vicious manner by his own party.

While the President continues to advance his agenda, a troubling coalescence is emerging across a political Grand Divide. As stated earlier, the Democratic Party has become a cause, and cause leads to intolerance and intolerance to violence.

To be sure, in order to preserve socialist gains the Democrats prior to the 2018 elections will mobilize hordes of disturbed souls looking for a motive to unleash their anger, creating riots accompanied by vandalism and confrontations with police on a scale not seen since the 1960s. The upheaval will be led by professional provocateurs such as AntiFa, left-wing domestic terrorists, and aimed to create a virtuous dynamic leading to the President's impeachment. Whether the ongoing revolts are in the name of anti-racism, anti-capitalism, anti-police, anti-Confederate statues or anti-anything else doesn't really matter. As mass staged protests grow in number and calls for impeachment become louder, congressional Republicans indifferent to the common principles of constitutional legitimacy, will be tempted to go along with any shady enterprise designed by the socialists to remove Trump from office.

In this environment Paul Ryan may not be able to resist the temptation to become vice president, and the Republican Party establishment, which never supported Trump in the first place and had prepared itself for a comfortable co-existence with President Hillary Clinton, would not be terribly disappointed with a President Pence.

But nothing is going to degrade the President's fortitude as he stands alone against a legion of enemies united by common danger. This is the characteristic that makes him dear to millions of Americans. Trump understands the mood of the people better than almost any other politician of our time and is poised to have the candidates supporting his agenda to win in the 2018 elections, transforming the conservative-in-the-name-only Republican Party and writing "Donald J. Trump" on the ruins of Obama's Social-Democratic Party.

SOURCE

*********************************

Supreme Court restores Trump's travel ban: Justices say administration CAN bar thousands of refugees from entering the country

The Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to maintain its restrictive policy on refugees.

The justices on Tuesday agreed to an administration request to block a lower court ruling that would have eased the refugee ban and allowed up to 24,000 refugees to enter the country before the end of October.

The order was not the court's last word on the travel policy that President Donald Trump first rolled out in January.

In a statement, the justices said: 'The application for stay of mandate presented to Justice Kennedy and by him referred to the Court is granted, and the issuance of the mandate of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in case No. 17-16426 is stayed with respect to refugees covered by a formal assurance, pending further order of this Court.'

The justices are scheduled to hear arguments on October 10 on the legality of the bans on travelers from six mostly Muslim countries and refugees anywhere in the world.

It's unclear, though, what will be left for the court to decide. The 90-day travel ban lapses in late September and the 120-day refugee ban will expire a month later.

The administration has yet to say whether it will seek to renew the bans, make them permanent or expand the travel ban to other countries.

Lower courts have ruled that the bans violate the Constitution and federal immigration law. The high court has agreed to review those rulings. Its intervention so far has been to evaluate what parts of the policy can take effect in the meantime.

The justices said in June that the administration could not enforce the bans against people who have a 'bona fide' relationship with people or entities in the United States. The justices declined to define the required relationships more precisely.

The appeals court also upheld another part of the judge's ruling that applies to the ban on visitors from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen

A panel of the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district judge's order that would have allowed refugees to enter the United States if a resettlement agency in the U.S. had agreed to take them in.

The administration objected, saying the relationship between refugees and resettlement agencies shouldn't count. The high court's unsigned, one-sentence order agreed with the administration, at least for now.

The appeals court also upheld another part of the judge's ruling that applies to the ban on visitors from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

Grandparents and cousins of people already in the U.S. can't be excluded from the country under the travel ban, as the Trump administration had wanted. The administration did not ask the Supreme Court to block that part of the ruling.

SOURCE

***************************

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)

***************************

13 September, 2017

Progressive Democracy Works for the 1%

Leftism enables the "Swamp"

The Occupy Wall Street movement that began in 2011 protested government policies that favored the 1%, the elite, over the 99%, the masses. Their protests were justified. The Wall Street fat cats who owned mortgage-backed securities were bailed out, but homeowners who had lost their jobs and couldn’t pay their mortgages were foreclosed. But that’s the way Progressive Democracy works.

We can look at those two ideas of Progressivism and Democracy to see why.

Democracy can be thought of in several ways. One is that it is a method of peacefully choosing and replacing those who hold government power. But that view of democracy has been replaced by a broader one. People view democracy as a type of government that carries out the will of the people, as determined by the outcomes of democratic elections.

This view of democracy, widely accepted today, legitimizes anything the government does, because a democratic government is just implementing the policies chosen by the voters.

Progressivism is an ideology that views the role of government as not only protecting individual rights but also looking out for people’s economic well-being. Often, this means imposing costs on some for the benefit of others.

Progressivism originated in the late 1800s as a reaction to concentrated economic power. The Progressive view was that “Robber Barons” were using their economic power to take advantage of those with less economic power. Progressivism was explicitly redistributional from its beginnings. It was designed to impose costs on the economic elite to protect the economic well-being of the masses.

In the twenty-first century, Progressivism is even more explicitly redistributional. Welfare payments, Medicaid, food stamps, and other Progressive transfer programs explicitly take from some for the benefit of others.

Now, look at the combined ideologies of Progressivism and Democracy.

Progressivism says one role of government is to take from some for the economic benefit of others, and Democracy says that when government does this, it is carrying out the will of the people.

Because Progressivism is deliberately redistributional, under the idea that Progressive governments look out for the economic well-being of their citizens, the ideology of Democracy, which says democratic governments carry out the will of the people, legitimizes everything Progressive Democracies do.

After the bursting of the housing bubble which led to the Great Recession, the Wall Street fat cats were bailed out to prevent a financial meltdown that would have been bad for everyone, or so we were told. The 99% paid the cost to bail out the 1%.

Who makes public policy? It is the elite, the 1%. The ideology of Progressive Democracy gives the 1% license to benefit whomever they see fit, based on the idea that whatever they do, they are carrying out the will of the people. If the 1% has the ability to decide who benefits from public policy, we should not be surprised to see that the benefits of public policy go to the 1%.

The idea that the 1%, the elite, benefit at the expense of the 99%, the masses, is well-recognized, and the twenty-first century has seen substantial criticism of cronyism, corporatism, and government favoritism by various other names (including corruption).

This has happened because citizens accept the ideology of Progressive Democracy. They accept the idea that it is legitimate for government to benefit some at the expense of others, and that when democratic governments do this, they are carrying out the will of the people.

Not surprisingly, when the 1% can, with the appearance of legitimacy, decide who should benefit from public policy, public policy favors the 1%. The surprising thing is that when the masses see that the elite are designing public policy to favor themselves, their recommendation is to give the elite even more power.

SOURCE

******************************

Tax Reform Is a Trump Family Affair

As President Donald Trump tweets his chiding remarks to a U.S. Congress that has moved its 200-day checklist of accomplishments into a “wish list” of items that may or may not ever happen, it’s pretty obvious: tax reform is a Trump priority and even a family affair.

While the president is consistently on message about both lowering America’s corporate tax rate (the highest among developed nations) and reducing the burden for middle class workers, Ivanka Trump is focused on the role of tax policy to bring relief to working families. She advocates a higher child tax credit to help families dealing with child care — often to the tune of five-figures per year in order to remain employed.

Back in September 2016, candidate Donald Trump began to speak of the policy inspired and driven by his daughter, a working mother of three children. The simplest explanation of the proposal is either a doubling of the child tax credit or to allow dependent care — for up to four children and elderly dependents for individuals earning less than $250,000 — to be deducted from income taxes or a partially refundable tax credit for low-income families.

Ivanka noted last year, “As a society we need to create policies that champion all parents, enabling the American family to thrive.” This statement is so true to recognize the value of families and to understand that removing an obstacle for productive adults to support their families is critical, especially in a world where welfare entitlements are never reformed and easily accessed.

Last week, Ivanka joined Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ), Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist in a panel discussion regarding the plan to pass legislation providing tax credits that offset the cost of dependent care. In the audience of this forum were representatives of several conservative and Christian organizations interested in policies that impact families, including the Faith & Freedom Coalition, Live Action, the Family Research Council, Americans for Prosperity, the National Taxpayers Union, American Enterprise Institute, Focus on the Family, March for Life and the Southern Baptist Convention.

A passionate Ivanka Trump began with opening remarks citing specific statistics that point to the reality of the burden for those who want to raise a family and yet strive to achieve an adequate income to raise that family. Ivanka declared that the current child tax credit of $1,000 should “at least double” with “this administration pushing for the largest child tax credit possible.”

The legislators, Lee and Schweikert, spoke of details of a proposed Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit that would be increased to $2,500 and that would be partially refundable — though at a cost of at least $500 billion in taxpayer funds over 10 years, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Research shows that corporate paid parental leave policies do increase work opportunities and wages while reducing dependence on government benefits like food stamps. However, when government mandates policies within businesses, those mandates cost jobs, just as America witnessed in the change of many jobs from full-time to part-time in response to the mandates of ObamaCare. Instead, the use of tax credits can boost overall wages kept by workers who struggle to remain in the workforce while juggling child and dependent care. These credits would also require that at least one parent be actively employed to qualify, making this a support to workers, not an entitlement.

Norquist noted the unique approach to this tax proposal within the comprehensive reforms for business: “We’ve never had a successful tax reform that was not both pro-growth and pro-family. That’s how we put together a winning coalition to understand why we need to do it. It’s also important to do both of those things as we move forward.”

Politically, this approach balances the impersonal, big-business nature of corporate tax reform to address a day-to-day issue within middle class families. While business analysts clamor for the dramatic impact to our nation’s economy that will result from a corporate tax rollback to President Trump’s proposed rate of 15%, middle class families will certainly see a greater earnings potential for those choosing and able to work.

In light of President Trump’s recent pivot to include Democrat minority leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi in his legislative efforts after the impotence of the Republican House and Senate majorities to lead, a child tax credit would provide cover for Democrat support of an overall tax proposal that was broad, not “just for the rich, greedy corporations.”

The White House has not yet released a detailed proposal of its desired tax reforms, however, President Trump has remained steadfast in his call for both corporate and individual tax cuts that expand the benefit to businesses and workers. Knowing that his base of working class Americans are looking to see tax reforms that benefit them, not some unseen market that always serves corporate interests, Trump and his oldest daughter seem willing to fight the big money protecting corporate lobbying to see this through.

SOURCE

***************************

Foiled Virginia Attack Brings Total US Terror Plots to 97 Since 9/11

Last year, FBI agents and undercover operatives watched as Lionel Williams, 27, of Suffolk, Virginia, revealed plans to help Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq, as well as plans for an attack against the U.S. homeland.

Last month, Williams pleaded guilty in federal court to attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, a designated foreign terrorist group, and will be sentenced in December.

Williams’ plot brought the total number of Islamist terrorism plots and attacks against the U.S. homeland since 9/11 to 97. Chronologically, Williams’ was the 94th plot since 9/11, but since his plot was foiled three additional plots have been uncovered or carried out, making the total 97.

In March 2016, a former associate of Williams tipped off the FBI that Williams was posting ISIS materials on his Facebook page and that he had purchased an AK-47-style rifle the day after the deadly December 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California.

Local police reported that Williams had been practicing with the rifle near his home.

An FBI agent then contacted Williams through Facebook, pretending to be a radical Islamist. Williams then met with an undercover agent, stating that he supported attacks on “hard targets,” likely referring to police or military targets.

Williams stated that the only reason he hadn’t already carried out an attack was because he was caring for his grandmother.

Williams said he wanted to provide funding to ISIS in the meantime. Through multiple undercover agents, he sent $250 to an individual he was led to believe was working for the Islamic State. He thought the money purchased a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and ammunition.

While he was funding ISIS, Williams continued to discuss a “martyrdom operation,” or attacks at home that would result in his death. He believed that unless he had something to live for, his attack might not be pure, and his death would be considered a suicide rather than martyrdom.

To solve that problem, he arranged a marriage to a woman outside the U.S., which led him to conclude that after he married her, “the next time I see her will be in [heaven].” He went on to say he was planning to send the rest of his money to ISIS so that he would die without a dollar to his name.

With Williams clearly moving toward an attack and already in possession of firearms, the FBI arrested him in December 2016.

On Aug. 16, he pleaded guilty to charges of attempting to provide material support to ISIS and will be sentenced on Dec. 20. He faces up to 20 years in prison.

SOURCE

***************************

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)

***************************

12 September, 2017

Trump’s respect for voters confounds the Left

The Leftist commentor below gets an important point. She says that, unlike the patronising Democrats, the president gives pride back to blue-collar Americans

I’ve begun to worry about the effectiveness of the barrage of indignation that people like me are directing at this president. The daily denunciations of him are cogent and passionate. I fear they are also, in their righteous fury, misunderstanding what it will take to oust or defeat him.

If liberal outrage was all that was needed, Trump would never have won. His opponents seem to think they only have to prove him a monster and a charlatan for his shamefaced supporters to admit they were wrong, and creep back into the Democrat fold. That ignores the basis for his success and why the vast majority of his base still back him.

Trump’s appeal to his voters isn’t just his promises of a better life; it’s something intangible and even more critical: respect. He promised more than great jobs, great health and a great America; he told his voters that they themselves were great. That resonated because he was mostly addressing people who feel neglected and overlooked by economic and social changes, and who fear they are losing jobs and status to immigrants and non-white Americans.

Trump’s message was so powerful because, as the Nobel prizewinning economist John Harsanyi said, “apart from economic payoffs, social status seems to be the most important incentive and motivating force of social behaviour”. Apes and chimps crave it and so do we. We are acutely aware of and affected by our individual standing and the standing of our group.

The lower we perceive our status to be, the more stressed and depressed we are, the less likely we are to perform well in tests, the likelier we are to get sick and to die early. As research by the American academic psychologist PJ Henry shows, low status also makes us angrier and more defensive because our position is so precarious that we are constantly watching out for social insults. Any decline in status is likely to affect us even more deeply since we will be agonisingly aware of the contrast between our past and our present.

Denunciations of the president miss the secret of his success
Trump offers his voters relief from this, which is why they are so loyal. His praise gives them something precious: pride and identity. It’s also genuine. I listened to Trump defending himself at his much-criticised Arizona rally and was struck by something besides dismay; the near-reverence with which he speaks of his voters. He told his audience that he only minded media attacks when they were aimed at his honest, hardworking supporters, “who love our nation, obey our laws and care for our people”. He did the same in Texas this week, telling his crowd: “We love you, you’re special, we’re here to take care”.

The observers who denounce his self-obsession are missing this critical connection. It stems from his own profound insecurity, and his identification as a resentful social outsider who has never had the respect he craves from America’s elite.

It electrifies his base because they are being respected by someone who embodies what they aspire to. The Californian academic Joan Williams, in her book White Working Class, makes clear just how much this group dislike salaried professionals and how they feel patronised and despised by lawyers, doctors and government employees. They are contemptuous of the anxious conformity of the professionally employed, infinitely preferring the rugged independence of people who are their own bosses and are free to speak their own minds.

They don’t want to change their culture. Their aspiration is to keep their own network of friends, family and way of life, but with added wealth. Trump, with his crudity, defence of civil war statues, fondness for gilt furniture, burgers and rewarding his family with high-powered jobs, represents their dream.

Everything that incenses liberals about that behaviour is further proof to this group that Trump is their man and that they are his team. Liberals’ denunciations of him are implicit criticisms of them, their values and their choices, and threaten their self-respect. They double down behind the president and blame the media or “the swamp” for any setbacks. Gallup reports that even after the chaos and scandals of this year, Trump’s support among Republicans has only fallen by 12 percentage points. Almost half his base would back him even if he shot someone.

Only a fool would assume that the accusations of Russia or racism will reverse the Trump tide. Michael Moore, the leftwing filmmaker and one of the few to predict Trump’s victory, is warning that he’s on track to win again in 2020. But so far the Democrats, who lost because they patronised or ignored the electorate in key states, delude themselves that moral superiority alone will win back the White House. They are offering nothing to those voters except condescension and denigration. If they cannot learn how to bind Americans together rather than divide them, I fear it is they who will be humiliated again.

SOURCE

******************************

A chance for Congress to get its mojo back

by Jeff Jacoby

WHEN PRESIDENT TRUMP last week started a six-month countdown clock to end his predecessor's executive order protecting immigrants who were brought illegally to America when they were children, the denunciations came fast, furious, and fevered. Angry outrage has become the standard reaction to almost everything Trump says and does, often with reason. But on the issue of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, that fury is misplaced. Trump has created an opening that should gladden conservatives and liberals alike — one that members of Congress on both sides of the aisle should exploit.

For years, legislators have allowed presidents to push the limits of executive power, bypassing Congress on issues ranging from warrantless wiretaps to health care subsidies. Lawmakers, constantly battling each other, have failed to defend what should be their exclusive power to make the nation's laws. Unexpectedly, Trump has just handed them a chance to reclaim lost ground.

Barack Obama's DACA policy was a classic example of achieving an excellent end through terrible means. It offered to protect 1 million or so young people from deportation and allow them to work legally, so long as they stayed out of trouble, finished school, and registered with the government. More than three-fourths of eligible immigrants signed up for DACA status, and by all accounts they have been a productive and law-abiding cohort. Some have been downright heroic.

The problem with DACA is that it was imposed unilaterally by Obama in 2012. He claimed he had to take "action to change the law" by executive order because Congress had failed to pass a bill (the proposed DREAM Act) that would do so legislatively. At first he insisted that DACA was only a "temporary stopgap measure." But as hundreds of thousands of so-called "Dreamers" signed up, DACA became institutionalized. Two years later, Obama tried to expand it, sheltering not only Dreamers from deportation, but their parents — a population numbering more than 4 million. When a group of states sued to block the expansion, federal courts backed them up. Obama's action was "manifestly contrary" to existing immigration law, ruled the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and presidents cannot make immigration law by fiat.

But DACA itself remained in force, and there is no question that the policy is popular. An overwhelming 76 percent of voters, say DACA enrollees should be allowed to stay legally in the United States; only 15 percent want them deported. Majorities of Democrats (84 percent), independents (74 percent), and Republicans (69 percent) believe Dreamers should able to remain in America as permanent legal residents. Even among self-identified Trump voters, two-thirds think Dreamers should stay.

Trump himself has repeatedly expressed unwillingness to hurt Dreamers. "I have a love for these people," he said on Tuesday. "Hopefully, now Congress will be able to help them and do it properly."

That's exactly what Congress should do.

Even granting Trump's habit of saying "X" on Monday and "not-X" on Thursday, it seems plain that a clean bill giving Dreamers legal status is one he would relish signing — if only to tout it as an achievement only he could have engineered. "Congress now has 6 months to legalize DACA (something the Obama Administration was unable to do)," Trump tweeted on Tuesday. "If they can't, I will revisit this issue!"

No one should miss the significance of Trump's surprising deference to Congress. Trump used to say he would end DACA the way Obama created it: unilaterally. In his campaign kickoff speech in the Trump Tower lobby two years ago, he vowed that if elected he would "immediately terminate President Obama's illegal executive order on immigration."

But he didn't. He hesitated for months on DACA — and when he finally moved it was because of a looming legal threat: A group of state attorneys general were about to challenge DACA in court. If Trump wanted DACA killed without having to pull the trigger himself, he could have invited that lawsuit and ordered the Justice Department not to oppose it.

Instead he is urging Congress to take the lead and "legalize DACA." To put it differently, Trump is urging the legislative branch to reclaim its proper constitutional authority — to take back a measure of power that Obama usurped.

In modern times, presidents of both parties have routinely overstepped their bounds. Obama arguably went further down that path than any previous president. "Once a presidential candidate with deep misgivings about executive power," The New York Times observed last year, "Obama will leave the White House as one of the most prolific authors of major regulations in presidential history." It took a while for Obama to get over those "misgivings" — after all, he had sharply criticized George W. Bush's reliance on unilateral orders. But once he did, he pursued executive power without apology.

Improbably, Trump has now handed Congress a perfect vehicle to undo an act of presidential overreach and enhance its own authority. For Republicans, this is an opportunity to roll back one of Obama's most blatant acts of "pen-and-phone" aggrandizement. For Democrats, it is a way to deter Trump from engaging in overreach of his own — from, say, ordering a wall to be built along the Mexican border on the grounds that Congress hasn't acted. For both, it is a chance to pass a bill that Americans by a wide margin would welcome.

Trump should be cheered, not cursed, for handing off DACA to Congress. For years, lawmakers of both parties have fumed as presidents have gotten away with wielding power unilaterally. Now Capitol Hill has a chance to do something about it, and with White House encouragement. Blow this opportunity, and they may never get another.

SOURCE

**********************************

2 Democrat Senators Show Hostility to Religion in Questions for Judicial Nominee

“Do you consider yourself an orthodox Catholic?” is an unusual and inappropriate question for a senator to ask a judicial nominee. In fact, the Constitution forbids it.

But that didn’t stop Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., from probing Notre Dame Law professor Amy Coney Barrett about her faith. Sen. Dianne Feinstein. D-Calif., also chided Barrett for being a practicing Catholic, proclaiming, “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern.”

Both senators appear to have forgotten Article VI’s admonition that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Officer or public Trust under the United States.”

The senators’ hostility to religion was loudly on display as Barrett and Michigan Supreme Court Justice Joan Larsen appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday, having been nominated by the president to fill two federal appellate vacancies.

President Donald Trump nominated Larsen for the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Michigan and Barrett for the 7th Circuit in Indiana. Both women have faced bitter scrutiny from the left. This makes sense, as both are brilliant, young, conservative, and female, making them serious contenders for a future Supreme Court vacancy.

After a delay, Democratic senators from both Michigan and Indiana have returned the nominees’ blue slips, allowing their nominations to move forward.

SOURCE

***************************

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)

***************************

11 September, 2017

Fascism's forgotten philosopher

The myth that fascism and Nazism are phenomena of the right relies heavily on Americans not knowing what fascism and Nazism really mean, what those ideologies stand for. Leftists in academia and the media have worked hard to portray fascism and Nazism in terms of sheer demagoguery and generic authoritarianism, carefully concealing the ideological roots that would reveal fascism and Nazism’s true political colors.

Think about this: We know the name of the philosopher of capitalism, Adam Smith. We also know the name of the philosopher of Marxism, Karl Marx. So, quick: What is the name of the philosopher of fascism? Yes, exactly. You don’t know. Virtually no one knows. This is not because he doesn’t exist, but because the political left – which dominates academia, the media and Hollywood – had to get rid of him to avoid confronting fascism and Nazism’s unavoidable leftist orientation.

So let’s meet the man himself, Giovanni Gentile, who may be termed fascism’s Karl Marx. Gentile was, in his day, which is the first half of the 20th century, considered one of Europe’s leading philosophers. A student of Hegel and Bergson and director of the Encyclopedia Italiana, Gentile was not merely a widely published and widely influential thinker; he was also a political statesman who served in a variety of important government posts. How, then, has such a prominent and influential figure vanished into the mist of history?

Let’s consider some key aspects of Gentile’s philosophy. Following Aristotle and Marx, Gentile argues that man is a social animal. This means that we are not simply individuals in the world. Rather, our individuality is expressed through our relationships: we are students or workers, husbands or wives, parents and grandparents, members in this or that association or group and also citizens of a community or nation. To speak of man alone in the state of nature is a complete fiction; man is naturally at home in community, in society.

Right away, we see that Gentile is a communitarian as opposed to a radical individualist. This distinguishes him from some libertarians and classical liberals, who emphasize individuality in contradistinction to society. But Gentile so far has said nothing with which conservatives – let’s say Reaganite conservatives – would disagree. Reagan in 1980 emphasized the importance of five themes: the individual, the family, the church, the community and the country. He accused the centralized state – big government – of undermining not merely our individuality but also these other associations.

Gentile now contrasts two types of democracy that he says are “diametrically opposed.” The first is liberal democracy, which envisions society made up of individuals who form communities to protect and advance their rights and interests, specifically their economic interests in property and trade. Gentile regards this as selfish or bourgeois democracy, by which he means capitalist democracy, the democracy of the American founding. In its place, Gentile recommends a different type of democracy, “true democracy,” in which individuals willingly subordinate themselves to society and to the state.

Gentile recognizes that his critique of bourgeois democracy echoes that of Marx, and Marx is his takeoff point. Like Marx, Gentile wants the unified community, a community that resembles the family, a community where we’re all in this together. I’m reminded here of New York Gov. Mario Cuomo’s keynote address at the 1984 Democratic Convention. Cuomo likened America to an extended family where, through the agency of government, we take care of each other in much the same manner that families look out for all their members.

While Marx and Cuomo seem to view political communities as natural, inevitable associations, Gentile emphasized that such communities must be created voluntarily, through human action, operating as a consequence of human will. They are, in Gentile’s words, an idealistic or “spiritual creation.” For Gentile, people by themselves are too slothful and inert to form genuine communities by themselves; they have to be mobilized. Here, too, many modern progressives would agree. Speaking in terms with which both Obama and Hillary would sympathize, Gentile emphasized that leaders and organizers are needed to direct and channel the will of the people.

Despite Gentile’s disagreement with Marx about historical inevitability, he has at this point clearly broken with modern conservatism and classical liberalism and revealed himself to be a man of the left. Gentile was, in fact, a lifelong socialist. Like Marx, he viewed socialism as the sine qua non of social justice, the ultimate formula for everyone paying their “fair share.” For Gentile, fascism is nothing more than a modified form of socialism, a socialism arising not merely from material deprivation but also from an aroused national consciousness, a socialism that unites rather than divides communities.

Gentile also perceived socialism emerging out of revolutionary struggle, what the media today terms “protest” or “activism.” Revolutionaries, Gentile says, must be ready to disregard conventional rules and they must be willing to use violence. Gentile seems to be the unacknowledged ancestor of the street activism of Antifa and other leftist groups. “One of the major virtues of fascism,” he writes, “is that it obliged those who watched from the windows to come down into the street.”

For Gentile, private action should be mobilized to serve the public interest, and there is no distinction between the private interest and the public interest. Correctly understood, the two are identical. Gentile argued that society represents “the very personality of the individual divested of accidental differences … where the individual feels the general interest as his own and wills therefore as might the general will.” In the same vein, Gentile argued that corporations too should serve the public welfare and not just the welfare of their owners and shareholders.

Society and the state – for Gentile, the two were one and the same. Gentile saw the centralized state as the necessary administrative arm of society. Consequently, to submit to society is to submit to the state, not just in economic matters, but in all matters. Since everything is political, the state gets to tell everyone how to think and also what to do – there is no private sphere unregulated by the state. And to forestall resistance to the state, Gentile argued that the government should act not merely as a lawmaker but also a teacher, using the schools to promulgate its values and priorities.

“All is in the state and nothing human exists or has value outside the state.” Mussolini said that, in the Dottrina del fascismo, one of the doctrinal statements of early fascism, but Gentile wrote it or, as we may say today, ghost wrote it. Gentile was, as you have probably figured by now, the leading philosopher of fascism. “It was Gentile,” Mussolini confessed, “who prepared the road for those like me who wished to take it.”

Gentile served as a member of the Fascist Grand Council, a senator in the Upper House of Parliament, and also as Mussolini’s minister of education. Later, after Mussolini was deposed and established himself in the northern Italian province of Salo, Gentile became, at il Duce‘s request, the president of the Italian Academy. In 1944, Gentile was accosted in his apartment by members of a rival leftist faction who shot him at point-blank range.

Gentile’s philosophy closely parallels that of the modern American left. Consider the slogan unveiled by Obama at the 2012 Democratic Convention: “We belong to the government.” That apotheosis of the centralized state is utterly congruent with Gentile’s thinking. Only Gentile would have provided a comprehensive philosophical defense that the Democrats didn’t even attempt. In many respects, Gentile provides a deeper and firmer grounding for modern American progressivism than anyone writing today.

John Rawls, widely considered a philosophical guru of modern progressivism, seems like thin gruel compared to Gentile in offering an intellectual rationale for ever-expanding government control over the economy and our lives. While Rawls feels abstract and dated now, Gentile seems to speak directly to leftist activists in the Democratic Party, in the media, and on campus.

One might naively expect the left, then, to embrace and celebrate Gentile. This, of course, will never happen. The left has the desperate need to conceal fascism’s deep association with contemporary leftism. Even when the left uses Gentile’s rhetoric, its source can never be publicly acknowledged. That’s why the progressives intend to keep Gentile where they’ve got him, dead, buried and forgotten.

“The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of American Left,” Dinesh D’Souza’s stunning new explanation of what makes the the leftists in America tick, is now available at the WND Superstore.

SOURCE

**********************************

Appeals court reinstates Texas voter-ID law

The courts have watered down the law to the point where it is zero deterrent to illegal voting. This is no triumph. Now all anybody needs to do to vote illegally is to SAY they are entitled to vote. What a joke!

A federal appeals court revived Texas’s voter ID law Tuesday, saying the state’s updated version does enough to protect the right to vote for everyone in the state.

In backing Texas, the court said the state accommodated voters by allowing those without an ID to cast a ballot as long as they swear under penalty of perjury that they are legal voters.
That, the court said, would solve the problems for each of 27 different voters who had said they lacked ID.

The judges said that with elections looming, it made sense to stick with the existing law rather than change things up. “A temporary stay here, while the court can consider the argument on the merits, will minimize confusion among both voters and trained election officials,” the judges said.

Texas had enacted one of the stiffest voter-ID laws in the country but Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos, an Obama appointee to the district court, blocked it in 2014, finding Texas intended to discriminate.

Texas added its new attestation provision to try to solve her complaints, but late last month she ruled the law was still too harsh.

The appeals court Tuesday delivered a bit of a spanking to Judge Ramos, saying she “went beyond” the limited scope of what she was supposed to be decided by looking at Texas’s updated changes.

The U.S. Justice Department, which under President Obama had opposed Texas, sided with the state now that President Trump is in office.

A Justice Department spokeswoman cheered Tuesday’s decision.
“Preserving the integrity of the ballot is vital to our democracy, and the Fifth Circuit’s order allows Texas to continue to fulfill that duty as this case moves forward,” the spokeswoman said.

SOURCE

********************************

REPORT: Out-Of-State Voters Changed The Outcome Of U.S. Senate Race

For years, the mainstream media has ignored the problem of voter fraud and belittled those of us who are trying to do something about it. And when secretaries of state like me identify cases of fraud, we are told that the number of incidents of voter fraud is too insignificant to matter.

Now, however, facts have come to light that indicate that a pivotal, close election was likely changed through voter fraud on November 8, 2016: New Hampshire’s U.S. Senate Seat, and perhaps also New Hampshire’s four electoral college votes in the presidential election.

New Hampshire is one of fifteen states that allow same-day voter registration. The benefit of same-day registration is that it allows a person who has procrastinated or has forgotten to register to nonetheless cast a ballot on election day. The downside of same-day registration is that it does not allow the state time to assess the eligibility of the voter. A volunteer poll worker simply accepts a modicum of identification and takes the voter at his word that he’s a U.S. citizen resident of the state who is eligible to vote.

New Hampshire is also a battleground state. Unlike neighboring Massachusetts and Vermont, which reliably vote for the Democrat in presidential elections, New Hampshire can swing either way. It has long been reported, anecdotally, that out-of-staters take advantage of New Hampshire’s same-day registration and head to the Granite State to cast fraudulent votes.

SOURCE

***************************

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)

***************************

10 September, 2017

Hooray! I have been censored

I was beginning to feel neglected. I frequently write relentlessly factual things about race, IQ and social class -- and they must be the big trifecta of political incorrectness. If those topics don't get me censored what would? Actually there IS one thing more likely to get me censored: Praise for Donald Trump. And I do a lot of that. I am as Trumpian as you can get.

And I think that is what lies behind the ban that has been placed on me. I spend more time than I should reading the questions and answers on Quora.com. Most of the questions there are puerile but some of the answers are interesting.

The answers I have myself been putting up there have all however been very brief, usually only a few words. For instance, in answer to the question "What would you do if someone threw a basketball to you?" my answer was "Dodge". And in answer to "Who is the most influential person in history? Why?", I wrote "Hitler. People will never get over him". And in answer to "If first contact was established with aliens, what one person, dead or alive, would you use to represent the human race?", I answered "Trump. He speaks in simple sentences"

And in my answer to "Why does Ernest Adams hate social conservatives so much?" I wrote "He was born that way". And that seems to have torn it. That answer was apparently so incorrect that I was banned from putting up any more answers or asking any questions.

For background Adams is a Quora heavyweight and a very supercilious Leftist. He is absolutely full of himself and conservative Quorans do criticize him for that at times.

So why was my answer so bad? It is a common research finding that political dispositions are highly hereditary so my answer was highly factual. It's not the political opinions by themselves that are inherited so much as the underlying psychology that determines those positions. Basically, conservatives are the contented people and Leftists are the angry people. And that has a big impact on your policy preferences. Leftists want to attack whatever they are angry about and conservatives want stability.

And where you stand on the happiness/contentment scale has repeatedly been found to be very much inborn. Some people will be happy no matter what and some will be miserable no matter what. So both the actual opinions and the underlying psychology have been found to be hereditary.

So Quora penalized me from giving a scholarly and well informed comment. To them it was so wrong that it couldn't be right. I have no idea of the details of their angry thinking but I suspect that their objection was really a pretext. My constant praise of Trump would undoubtedly have jarred them. It was that which really lay behind my banning, I suspect. It is a very Leftist site.

I won't protest my banning. Matthew 7:6 tells you why.

Footnote: If you doubt that Leftists are the angry people and conservatives are the contented people, just ask any Leftist what he thinks of Mr Trump! And if you doubt that conservatives are the contented people ask yourself why the Congressional GOP has done so little to give Mr Trump the changes he wants.

*******************************

House Republicans Unhappy That Trump Siding With Democrats on Debt Ceiling

It was only a minor concession that Trump made to the Donks but it is a big shot across the bows of the shilly-shallying GOP. There is a big tradition in American politics of "log-rolling" -- an exchange of favors. So Trump could leave the GOP to stew while he did deals with the Donks. He could, for instance make concessions to the "dreamers" in exchange for border wall funding. With solid Donk support plus a few RINOs he could get a lot done. And the Obamacare vote told us who the RINOs are, The "Tuesday Group". If they can vote once with the Donks they can do it again

President Donald Trump’s decision to side with Democrats in their push to attach a three-month debt ceiling increase to must-pass hurricane relief funding is not sitting well with House Republicans.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.; Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin; House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.; and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., all advocated a longer debt limit extension. But the president opted to concede to Democrats’ request, a source briefed on leadership’s meeting with the White House told The Daily Caller News Foundation on Wednesday.

McConnell, Ryan, McCarthy, and Mnuchin were all in favor of raising the debt ceiling longer than Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., wanted, the source said. Republican leadership in Congress pitched the president on an 18-month, and later a six-month, raising of the debt ceiling, which Schumer and Pelosi refused to accept.

Both Republican and Democratic leadership at the meeting were going to agree to disagree when the president unexpectedly sided with the Democrats, the source said.

Instead of aligning with members of his own party and his administration, Trump agreed Wednesday afternoon to raise the debt limit and fund the federal government through mid-December, allowing members of Congress to deal with the federal budget in the coming months.

Trump’s decision directly conflicts with Ryan’s call for a long-term debt ceiling increase. He referred to Pelosi and Schumer’s proposal as “ridiculous and disgraceful” during his press conference ahead of the White House meeting.

The Wisconsin Republican alleged that Democrats were playing politics, arguing the three-month increase put the areas affected by the hurricanes at risk of not receiving the Federal Emergency Management Agency funding needed to begin recovering from the storms.

While GOP leadership supported combining long-term debt ceiling language with Harvey funding, conservative members—who have long pushed for spending cuts to a debt ceiling bill—blasted the idea, arguing that linking the two politicizes disaster funding, which would easily pass on its own. The Senate is slated to add language on the debt ceiling to the House-passed, stand-alone aid package before sending it back to the lower chamber.

Republican Study Committee Chairman Mark Walker, R-N.C., said he currently doesn’t think he can vote in favor of the deal.

“I’m hearing about it, my initial impulse is I’m not very pleased with it,” Walker said. “We will need to know a little more information, but just on the surface, obviously coming out of a classified hearing, but my first glimpse is I don’t know that I can support it.”

Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., said that, while a longer timeframe would be more beneficial to the country, he believes the legislation will pass the lower chamber.

“In the broader interests of raising the debt ceiling, a longer time period gives the markets more certainty,” he told reporters. “But look, the White House and the president made a decision and I think we can be able to get this, we can get this done very quickly with very little drama.”

SOURCE

**********************************

More Leftist hate

Hurricane Irma is massive, killing dozens and destroying homes as it barreled through the Caribbean on its way to Florida.

And that's just how one leftist website would have it. In fact, DeathandTaxes.com, which says it's "for lovers of news, culture, and politics" and "produces some of the best-loved social content on the web," hopes the deadly hurricane does more destruction.

"If it’s any consolation, Hurricane Irma might fuck up Trump’s Caribbean mansion," the website wrote on Tuesday, before the storm ripped through St. Martin.

The only silver lining is that while Irma ravages the Caribbean, one building at risk is the president’s $16.9 million, 11-bedroom compound on Plum Bay in the French territory St. Martin.

According to the Washington Post, the estate is named Le Château des Palmiers (“Castle of the Palms”) and sports two villas, a tennis court, marble floors, gold curtains, gold-hued wallpaper, and a two-story master suite. Despite ethics concerns, Trump’s been trying to sell the thing for months and recently cut the price by 40% because nobody is biting. It’s located directly in Irma’s path and will likely get destroyed.

Yesterday, the Post confirmed the estate had suffered damage, saying "one of the causalities has been President Donald Trump’s vacation home, Le Chateau des Palmiers on the island of St. Martin."

While the extent of the damage is not known, officials that control the side of the island where Trump’s beachfront property is located, told the Washington Post that the territory suffered widespread destruction.

“We know that the four most solid buildings on the island have been destroyed, which means that more rustic structures have probably been completely or partially destroyed,” French Interior Minister Gerard Collomba told AFP.

The Post also ran its own destruction watch on Trump properties.

After barreling across the Caribbean, Hurricane Irma is headed for South Florida, potentially threatening Trump’s signature Mar-A-Lago club and three golf courses he owns in Doral, West Palm Beach and Jupiter. Forecasters said it is too soon to know whether they will be in the direct path of the hurricane, but all are likely to face tropical storm conditions, at minimum.

SOURCE

*********************************

President Donald Trump took his crusade for tax reform to North Dakota Wednesday

Though he said the tax reform plan will boost prosperity and make America more competitive during the remarks at the Andeavor Refinery in Mandan, North Dakota, Trump jokingly singled one industry that wouldn’t grow under a reformed and simpler tax code.

“A staggering 94 percent of families need professional help to do their taxes, they have to get it, which is why the tax preparation industry generated $10 billion in revenues last year. That’s one business I want to drive down,” Trump said. “H&R Block will not be supporting Donald Trump.”

He said tax forms can run for 241 pages. But, under his plan, Trump claimed, 95 percent of taxpayers could file on a single page.

“We’re giving hardworking Americans their time back and we’re giving them their money back,” Trump said.

This is the second time in two weeks Trump has taken his push for tax reform on the road. He hit Springfield, Missouri, last week.

“All told, it will be the greatest tax reduction in the history of our country, greater than ever before, so that’s going to be something. You’ll see a rocket ship. You will see something happen like you’ve never seen.”

Trump said the current system punishes companies for investing in the United States and rewards investment abroad.

“Our painful tax system has become a massive barrier to America’s economic comeback. It costs us millions of American jobs, trillions of dollars, and billions wasted on paperwork and compliance. Our tax code is a giant economic self-inflicted wound,” Trump said.

Capitalizing on his anti-establishment theme, Trump framed the reform as tackling special interests.

“We no longer have to accept a tax code that lets special [interests] win at the expense of the middle class. We no longer have to accept a rigged system,” Trump said. “We talked about that a lot in the campaign.”

Trump earlier called several North Dakota officials to the stage, including Democratic U.S. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, saying, “Everybody’s saying: What’s she doing up here?” Trump added, “I hope we’ll have your support”

He also called Heitkamp, who flew to her state with Trump aboard Air Force One, “a good woman.”

Then later, as if to add a little more pressure, Trump noted Democrats have backed tax reform before.

“Both of the Reagan tax cuts were passed by a Democratic majority in the House, a Democratic speaker, and a vast majority of Democrats in the Senate, including a Democratic senator from the great state of North Dakota,” Trump said. “So it can happen. Are you listening, Heidi?”

SOURCE

***************************

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)

***************************

8 September, 2017

Give Max the boot?

Max Boot has some record as a conservative but his writing below shows him as a typical Leftist. As a NY Jew that is no surprise. American Jews voted overwhelmingly for Obama. Again as a Leftist, he has no respect for the truth at all. He does the typical Leftist trick of misrepresentation by omission. It would be tedious to fisk his whole outpouring but let me mention a few of his misrepresentations.

He mentions that he received some antisemitic abuse recently and probably hopes to persuade us that antisemitism is now common in America and that it comes from conservatives. He offers no proof of either of those things. It is true that in the last decade or two there has been a gradual upwelling of antisemitism in America -- from the Left. Many Leftists joyously particpate in the BDS movement, for instance, which aims at eradicating the State of Israel. No matter what spin they put on it, it's essentially modern-day Nazism. Max mentions none of that.

He says: "Trump came to office vilifying Mexicans and Muslims". He did no such thing. He advocated more control of illegal immigration and immigration from terrorist infested nations. Most Muslim nations were NOT subject to his restrictions. Max is quite simply lying -- deliberately ascribing motivations to certain actions without any evidence that such motivations were in play.

Max says that Trump praised the Charlottesville protesters. He did not. He said of both the marchers and their attackers that they included good people on both sides. He gave no blankret approval to anyone.

Max criticizes the pardoning of Sheriff Joe, without mentioning that Sheriff Joe was simply doing his job despite obstacles to immigration control created by Obama. Obama was by far the real lawless actor in the matter.

But what seems to have set Max off is the withdrawal by Trump of the DACA regulations promulgated by Obama with no legislative authority. That Trump is simply reasserting the rule of law that Obama undermined he does not mention.

Max could well mislead less informed people by his lies so we conservatives do need to combat them but it is a weary task. Lies just seem to flow of of every pore of Leftists. Lies are essentially all they've got.

I am white. I am Jewish. I am an immigrant. I am a Russian American. But until recently I haven’t focused so much on those parts of my identity. I’ve always thought of myself simply as a normal, unhyphenated American.

Ever since I arrived here, along with my mother and grandmother, from Russia in 1976 at age 7, I have been eager to assimilate. And I’ve done a pretty good job of it.

Last year I experienced the first sustained anti-Semitism I have ever encountered in the United States. Like many other anti-Trump commentators, I was deluged with neo-Nazi propaganda on social media, including a picture of me in a gas chamber, with Herr Trump in a Nazi uniform pulling the lever to kill me. This was accompanied by predictable demands that I leave this country to “real” Americans and go back to where I came from — or, alternatively, to Israel.

At one time it was easy to dismiss such sentiments as the ravings of a handful of marginal losers. That’s harder to do now that the president of the United States has embraced the far-right agenda. Trump came to office vilifying Mexicans and Muslims. As president, he has praised the protesters who marched with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville as “very fine people” and come out against taking down Confederate monuments, symbols of white supremacy. He has pardoned former sheriff Joe Arpaio, who became a symbol of racism and lawlessness for locking up Latinos, in defiance of a court order, simply on the suspicion that they might be undocumented immigrants. And now Trump has set in motion the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which prevents 800,000 law-abiding people from being deported because their parents brought them to the United States illegally.

SOURCE

******************************

How bureaucracy destroys research in U.S. hospitals

There is a long article here which gives a blow by blow account of a doctor trying to get permission to do a research study -- a study that seemed to need doing. He spent years dealing with the bureaucracy only to be defeated by all the nitpicking in the end. He was not able to do a perfectly reasonable study.

The article had a particular resonance to me because what he wanted to do -- a questionnaire survey -- was something I did many, many times in my research career. And I never asked ANYBODY for permission. I just did it. So how come the difference? Several possible reasons:

I did my research in the '70s and '80s. Things may have tightened up more by now.

I also did my work mostly in Australia, a much less uptight country than the USA. Many of my fellow academics, including the head of school, would have had a pretty good idea of what I was doing but trying to rein me in would have needed effort and they just could not be bothered with that

But perhaps the key factor was that I did not ask. I did not set the bureaucratic machinery in motion. The bureaucracy just did not know of me. I was below their horizon. I had not foolishly set their rumbling machinery into motion. "Just do it" was an old piece of Hippie advice from the '60s and I was there in the '60s.

So with my experience I read with great horror what this guy experienced. But he makes the correct point that bureaucracy does that. The job of the bureaucracy is to say "No" to anything that might conceivably be dangerous in some conceivable world and it takes a lot to get around that. And sometimes you can't.

And the end result? I had 200+ academic journal articles published whereas this guy had none. What a waste!

I think his final comments are worth reproducing:

"I sometimes worry that people misunderstand the case against bureaucracy. People imagine it’s Big Business complaining about the regulations preventing them from steamrolling over everyone else. That hasn’t been my experience. Big Business – heck, Big Anything – loves bureaucracy. They can hire a team of clerks and secretaries and middle managers to fill out all the necessary forms, and the rest of the company can be on their merry way. It’s everyone else who suffers. The amateurs, the entrepreneurs, the hobbyists, the people doing something as a labor of love. Wal-Mart is going to keep selling groceries no matter how much paperwork and inspections it takes; the poor immigrant family with the backyard vegetable garden might not.

Bureaucracy in science does the same thing: limit the field to big institutional actors with vested interests. No amount of hassle is going to prevent the Pfizer-Merck-Novartis Corporation from doing whatever study will raise their bottom line. But enough hassle will prevent a random psychiatrist at a small community hospital from pursuing his pet theory about bipolar diagnosis. The more hurdles we put up, the more the scientific conversation skews in favor of Pfizer-Merck-Novartis. And the less likely we are to hear little stuff, dissenting voices, and things that don’t make anybody any money.

There are so many privacy and confidentiality restrictions around the most harmless of datasets that research teams won’t share data with one another (let alone with unaffiliated citizen scientists) lest they break some arcane regulation or other. Closed access journals require people to pay thousands of dollars in subscription fees before they’re allowed to read the scientific literature; open-access journals just shift the burden by requiring scientists to pay thousands of dollars to publish their research. Big research institutions have whole departments to deal with these kinds of problems; unaffiliated people who just want to look into things on their own are out of luck.

SOURCE

******************************

Obama Rages Against the Constitutional Machine

President Donald Trump acted Tuesday to rescind Barack Obama's controversial and unconstitutional 2012 executive order known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Trump emphasized, "I am not going to just cut DACA off, but rather provide a window of opportunity for Congress to finally act. 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."

Unlike former presidents who have had enough personal humility and respect for this nation, its history and the office to refrain from directly criticizing their successors, Obama sees himself as being above such decorum. Following Trump's DACA announcement, Obama took to Facebook, raging that Trump's decision is "cruel" and a violation of "basic decency." Worse, he scolded the president with his favorite moralizing cudgel, "It's about who we are as a people." Which prompts the question: Is Obama's view of America one of a nation where law and order are merely subjective suggestions that lack any real meaning or limiting power? A country without laws is no country at all.

Obama also explained his own decision, saying, "I asked Congress to send me such a bill. The bill never came. And ... my administration acted." That's not how our constitutional system works. You'd think a "constitutional law professor" would know better. He did once upon a time, and then political gain came knocking.

In 2013, he taunted, "You don't like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election."

Well, Trump did.

No, Mr. Obama, it is not Trump who lacks "basic decency" on this issue, it is you. It is you who lack a basic respect for the Rule of Law and the borders that define this great nation, which were designed to protect American citizens first and foremost. It was you, Obama, who thumbed your nose at American citizens and our laws in order to promote your own globalist social agenda. And now you're upset that Trump wants to restore constitutional order to how laws are made. How pathetically cynical.

SOURCE

*********************************

Majority of Minorities Suffer No Discrimination

A recent study finds that only 25% of Americans say they have ever experienced discrimination. The study, conducted by Brian Boutwell, a criminology professor from Saint Louis University, surveyed 14,000 Americans across all racial backgrounds. He found that 27% of Hispanics, 31% of blacks, 23% of whites and 18% of Asians surveyed claimed to have experienced discrimination "sometimes" or "often." The findings suggest that discrimination is less prevalent than is often assumed, especially in light of today's polarized political climate and raging debate over DACA in particular.

Boutwell cautioned, "People have rightly pointed out that 25 percent of the population is a lot of people. That's still millions of people. That's far higher than what we'd like to see." Most people surveyed believed that "race" was the largest motivating factor behind unfair treatment. Boutwell noted that another potentially growing factor may be political beliefs. He states, "If anyone feels that their political alignment creates blowback for them in daily life, that's one possibility ... a reasonable one, given the data on political polarization."

Certainly Dennis Prager thinks this is true, writing, "Millions of Americans who hold conservative and/or pro-Trump views rationally fear ostracism by their peers, public humiliation, ruined reputations, broken families, job loss and the inability to work in their field. Under these circumstances, they have decided that coming out as conservative or pro-Trump is not worth the persecution they would endure."

It's also worth noting that surveys like this rely on data that is obtained via the subjective perception of individuals' experiences. What someone perceives may not accurately reflect the reality of what they have experienced. However, contrary to what is preached by race hustlers and social justice warriors, America is a broadly accepting and Liberty-loving nation. Americans' recent response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey typifies this spirit more than fascist malcontents rioting in the streets.

SOURCE

***************************

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)

***************************

7 September, 2017

Republican Senator On DACA Fallout: President Obama Created This Unconstitutional Mess

Is the RAISE act a solution?

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that originated under Obama is winding down. Liberals are freaking out—and Congress now has to deal with this as they return from August recess.

The executive action has been controversial, with many making the argument that it’s an unconstitutional overreach from the White House on immigration policy. In fact, the Trump administration’s lawyers felt it was indefensible in its current form, while the Department of Homeland Security was adamant that an act of Congress was needed to keep DACA as it stands today.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), along with Sen. David Perdue (R-GA), proposed the RAISE Act, which was one of the most extensive overhauls in our green card policy, placing an emphasis on language and skills requirements. It’s aimed to protect American workers. Now, with the fate of the so-called DREAMers in Congress’ court, there could be a window to pass the RAISE ACT, along with legalizing the 800,000 DACA recipients who are vulnerable to deportation.

Cotton is certainly in favor of this, though reminded everyone on Hugh Hewitt today that DACA is one giant constitutional mess that was created by Obama and left in the lap of the Trump White House

HUGH HEWITT: Senator, will you agree with me to stipulate to get this started, DACA is un-constitutional, and but for the President’s six month action, which adds a ripeness element, the state attorneys general who were about to challenge it would have been successful, in my opinion, and that the President did a favor to every DACA kid by giving a ripeness argument to every court to delay ruling it un-constitutional?

TOM COTTON: Hugh, those points are almost undisputable. President Obama created this mess. And it’s landed in President Trump’s lap and our lap in the Congress. The reason we know it’s unlawful is President Obama himself said it was unlawful in 2010 and 2011 when he was asked to take these steps and did not. But he did so in 2012 in the middle of his reelection.

I don’t know if any capable and forthright lawyer who argues that the administration can defend this proposition in court. They certainly have weaker ground to stand on than President Obama did when he refused to defend the Defense of Marriage Act a few years ago in court. So it’s just not, this is all a mess of President Obama’s making.

HEWITT: And President Trump has done a favor to the Dreamers by giving a six month order which will cause courts to pause. Now the next question is will Democrats give up what they perceive to be a political advantage in having the Dreamers screwed to work with you and Senator Perdue and others to come up with a comprehensive bill that combines protections for DACA Dreamers with reform of immigration to make it more coherent?

COTTON: Well, Hugh, I certainly hope the Democrats will focus on the art of the possible here, what kind of agreement we can reach to achieve the President’s own stated goals. He has said repeatedly that he wants to “take care” of the DACA recipients. I have no objection to that. But we have to recognize there are going to be two negative consequences of that action.

One, we create a new opportunity for citizenship through chain migration for their parents, the very people who violated the law by bringing them here as children in the first place.

And two, we encourage other people around the world to bring their children here illegally. So we have to do something to stop chain migration. My bill does that, and we have to do something to enhance enforcement. That’s a very simple, logically-coherent legislative package. It’s not comprehensive reform. It’s not the Gang of 8 bill. It’s not trying to blow ocean. It’s trying to take the action that Democrats say they want, which is to give legal status to approximately three-quarters of a million of these people in their 20s and 30s while also mitigating the consequences of that action.

When asked about the prospects of Congress acting on legislation to reform immigration, Cotton was “optimistic,” while also saying he’s not just for blanket amnesty for the DREAMers.

“Hugh, I’m pretty optimistic. You know, the Democrats have said for years they want to give legal status to these people. The President says he wants to, but he also knows that we have to control the consequences of that,” said Cotton, “and there’s a very, like I said, logically coherent, straightforward, relatively small package that can be negotiated here. That’s what I’m going to work on. I’m not going to support just a blanket amnesty with nothing to control the consequences of it, or some kind of rebate Gang of 8 legislation. I’ll be an opponent of that.”

SOURCE

****************************

There Is No Such Thing As a 'Deserving DREAMer'

Since when did DACA become the Depression and Anxiety Cure for Amnesty-seekers?

It's this insatiable appetite for collective entitlement that demonstrates the perils of blanket amnesty. Give a privileged political class an inch and they'll take, take, take until feckless public servants give away their country.

The proper response to illegal alien activists demanding that Washington act "NOW!" to preserve their comfort, allay their anxieties and extend their unconstitutional protections indefinitely is this:

Five million American young people between 16-34 were unemployed last year and 50 million more are not even in the labor force. Imagine their anxiety.

Hundreds of thousands of law-abiding people from around the world are waiting patiently for their backlogged visa and green card applications to be reviewed. Imagine their frustration.

Why don't their dreams come first?

Nancy Pelosi called on House Republicans to help her "safeguard our young DREAMers from the senseless cruelty of deportation and shield families from separation and heartbreak."

Never has this Bay Area elitist called on House Republicans to join her in shielding native-born and law-abiding immigrant families from the senseless and preventable violence committed by criminals in this country illegally who've caused immeasurable heartbreak for decades in her overrun California sanctuary.

Jamiel Shaw Sr., whose son was mercilessly shot to death by a sanctuary-protected gang member living in outlaw-coddling Los Angeles illegally, administered a bracing reality check:

"You want to talk about families being separated? Try spending your holidays talking to a grave!"

The left-wing DREAM racket is a self-perpetuating political marketing machine. Its primary contribution to American society? Lashing out at how cruel, racist, ignorant and ungrateful the rest of us are for not bowing down before the hallowed angel children of the Obama administration's amnesty program. It's no coincidence that the publicity-hungry leaders of the DREAMer movement are full-time fulminators in government-funded academia, community organizing outfits, immigration law foundations and the grievance-nursing media.

A deserving DREAMer would respect the sovereign right of an independent nation to determine who stays and who goes based on its national interest and constitutional obligations to put its citizenry first.

The deserving DREAMer, in other words, would admit he or she is owed nothing and deserves nothing. There is no such thing as a "deserving DREAMer."

SOURCE

*****************************

Conservatives in America -- Like Marranos in Medieval Spain

For those unfamiliar with the term, Marranos was the name given to Jews in medieval Spain and Portugal who secretly maintained their Judaism while living as Catholics in public, especially in the 15th century during the Spanish Inquisition.

There is, of course, no Spanish Inquisition in America today -- no one is being tortured into confessing what they really believe, and no one is being burned at the stake. But there are millions of Marrano-like Americans: Americans who hold conservative views -- especially those who hold conservative positions on social issues and those who voted for Donald Trump for president.

Millions of Americans who hold conservative and/or pro-Trump views rationally fear ostracism by their peers, public humiliation, ruined reputations, broken families, job loss and the inability to work in their field. Under these circumstances, they have decided that coming out as conservative or pro-Trump is not worth the persecution they would endure.

In terms of the percentage of the population effected, there is no parallel in American history. Coming out as a homosexual prior to the 1960s and 70s, or publicly announcing oneself as a member of the Communist Party in the 1950s would have often led to similar dire consequences in one's social, work and family life. But gays and Communist Party members comprised a tiny percentage of the American population. And Communists supported true evil.

I wish I could share all the emails sent to me from professional musicians who play in some of the premier orchestras in America. They wrote to me following the nationally publicized attempts by left-wing members of the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra and the Santa Monica city government to prevent me from conducting a Haydn symphony at the Walt Disney Concert Hall three weeks ago. These people publicly called on members of the orchestra to refuse to play and members of the public to refuse to attend.

These people wrote to encourage me and tell me how they are compelled to hide their conservative views -- how, in effect, they live as Marranos.

A violist with one of the most prestigious orchestras in the country (I figured out which orchestra using the internet; she was even afraid to tell me wrote to me last week about how quiet she is about her conservatism. While she could not be fired for it, she said, she would be socially ostracized within the orchestra for which she has played for decades.

A middle-aged professional musician told me that he wears his hair very long in order to appear hippie-like and camouflage his conservative politics. He is no more likely to tell fellow musicians that he supports President Trump than a Marrano in medieval Spain would have been to go public with his Jewish beliefs.

One musician in Minnesota wrote to me: "I was a professional musician from the age of 17. I wanted you to know that I, too, lost my career because of my views. My choice, actually; I just could no longer take the abuse."

I'm fortunate. As a radio talk-show host and columnist, I'm paid to express my opinions. As for my avocation of conducting orchestras, I'm lucky there, too. Because the permanent conductor of the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra and the orchestra's board remained principled, and because so many people support me and my values, the efforts to thwart me failed. The Disney hall, with 2,000-plus seats, was sold out -- a first for a community orchestra in that venue.

Of course, American conservative Marranos don't just live in the world of music. They are in every profession. We know about the high-profile cases, the conservatives whose careers have been ruined by saying the "wrong" thing, or supporting the "wrong" candidate or ballot proposition; we know about the conservative speakers who have been physically attacked and prevented from speaking on college campuses. But we don't know about the millions who are just afraid to speak up, who remain silent in a business meeting or at a dinner party when someone casually expresses a view with which they strongly disagree. These Americans live in fear, legitimately so in many cases, that if they do speak out, there will be severe consequences -- a job lost, a promotion not given or even a child who will no longer speak to them.

This is all new in our country.

Had anyone predicted that in America -- the land more renowned than any other for liberty and free speech -- the word "Marrano" would ever accurately characterize citizens, let alone close to half the voting population, that individual would have been regarded as a charlatan.

But given the intolerance and hatred on the left, and its dominance over almost every area of American life, that individual would have been a prophet.

SOURCE

*****************************

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)

***************************

6 September, 2017

Union Bosses Have Too Much Control. It’s Time to Protect the Rights of American Workers

Rep. Phil Roe

For the past eight years, union bosses have held the upper hand over East Tennessee workers, as the previous administration tried to stack the deck in favor of unionization.

The National Labor Relations Board and the Department of Labor combined to pursue an agenda that put union bosses and special interests ahead of the rights of individual workers and job creation.

If there was any doubt the Department of Labor was pushing a partisan agenda, just look at former Labor Secretary Tom Perez’s new job: head of the Democrat Party.

It is time to restore employee rights and create a pro-growth, pro-employee environment within the workplace, and I am pleased to already see the new administration working aggressively to create jobs by undoing job-killing regulations.

I’ve said time and time again that promoting fair and free labor policies in the workplace have nothing to do with whether or not you are pro- or anti-union, and everything to do with the rights to which every American worker is entitled.

Still, current law does not accurately reflect the 21st century we live in today. In fact, these laws have remained largely unchanged since the National Labor Relations Act was passed 70 years ago.

A striking statistic finds that 94 percent of workers represented by a union today never voted for that union to represent them. Today, labor unions’ membership is down to about 11 percent of the workforce as more and more employees have opted for a free-market economy.

For this reason I introduced the Employee Rights Act.

The Employee Rights Act is a comprehensive labor law update that will allow places of employment to serve the interest of their employees—not unions or other special interests.

The Employee Rights Act would ensure the right to a secret ballot is always protected.

It would also require permission from union members for the use of their dues for any purpose other than collective bargaining, ensuring union members’ dues cannot be used for political purposes without members’ knowledge or permission.

The bill requires periodic recertification of union elections so every employee has a chance to weigh in on whether or not they wish to be represented by a union.

Finally, the Employee Rights Act requires a majority vote of all employees—not just those present—to decide whether to unionize or strike.

These are commonsense protections every worker deserves.

The right to a secret ballot is one of the most fundamental protections of American democracy. It’s how we elect our presidents, our representatives, and our local leaders.

A secret ballot protects employees from intimidation during union elections—from both sides. Further, requiring employees to recertify their union regularly will keep union leaders attentive to the needs of workers.

This commonsense measure will help protect employee privacy and create safeguards for the American worker, and I look forward to working with the Trump administration to ensure worker rights are protected.

SOURCE

************************************

In a World of Real Evil, the Left Fights Fake Evil

Dennis Prager

All my life, I have known this rule about people: Those who don’t fight the greatest evils will fight lesser evils or make-believe evils. This happens to be the morally defining characteristic of the left.

During the Cold War, many liberals and nearly all conservatives fought communism, but the left fought anti-communism.

The left opposed American military buildups and regarded the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union as nothing more than two scorpions in a bottle fighting to the death. It loathed Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, not Communist Party Secretary-General Leonid Brezhnev.

It regarded Reagan’s labeling of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” with contempt.

Typical was the reaction of one of America’s best-known intellectuals, Henry Steele Commager, then a professor of history at Amherst College. He said, “It was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I’ve read them all.”

With regard to fighting communism—which, aside from Nazism, has been the greatest evil in the modern world (it killed and enslaved far more people than Nazism)—the left was an obstacle, not an ally.

The left in the West and elsewhere did far more to enable communist evil than to stop it.

The same holds true with regard to the greatest evil in the world at this time: totalitarian Islam, or Islamism.

The left is doing precisely what it did during the war against communism: It’s fighting the anti-Islamists, not the Islamists. Just as it labeled anti-communists “cold warriors” and other derisive epithets, the left labels those fighting Islamism as “Islamophobes” and, of course, “racists.”

In the moral order as perceived by the left, it is the anti-Islamists who are the enemy of the good.

In this battle, the left fights American conservatives—and Israel, the country in the front line against Islamism. In a nutshell, rather than fighting evil, the left fights those who fight evil.

Therefore, if you have moral clarity, you are not on the left. If you have moral clarity, you can be a liberal, a conservative, a centrist, an atheist, a believer, a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a black, a white, a Latino, an Asian, a Native American, a gay, a straight, or a bisexual.

But you cannot be a leftist.

The problem, however, is that people want to feel morally good about themselves, and no one wants this more than the left. It has written the proverbial book on moral self-esteem. Therefore, it does not merely believe that it is morally superior to all others; it knows it is.

Leftists know they are more compassionate, more enlightened, more intellectual, and more intelligent than conservatives. And they know that they care more about the “downtrodden,” the “marginalized,” and the “disenfranchised” than conservatives.

But to feel good about yourself, you have to fight against something bad. Since the left doesn’t fight real evil (that would take moral courage in addition to moral clarity), it has to fight lesser evils or made-up evils.

For example, the left relentlessly fights racism in America, even though America is the least racist multiracial society in history; it relentlessly fights sexism in America, the country that has afforded unprecedented equality and liberty to women (but it does not fight the terrible sexism that pervades the world’s most women-suppressing societies—those in the Muslim world); and, of course, it fights Nazis and white supremacists—who, though evil, constitute an utterly negligible threat to America today.

Fighting Nazis in Germany between 1933 and 1945 was an act of moral heroism. Given their negligible numbers and nonexistent power, fighting Nazis in America in 2017 is an act of moral onanism.

There’s a lot more on the list of made-up or lesser evils that the left fights instead of fighting real evil.

It fights religious Americans, specifically religious Christians and especially evangelicals. Now that’s an enemy worth fighting—those mean Christians (and Jews) on the religious right. And it fights conservatives, or at least the conservatives who fight them.

And, of course, it fights global warming. Leftists have convinced themselves that the real fight against evil in the world today is not against Islamism; it’s against carbon emissions.

And now, we can add statues to the list. The left was AWOL against communism, and it’s AWOL against Islamism. But it’s in the vanguard of fighting statues.

SOURCE

*******************************

Leftist hate never falters

The nation’s eyes are fixated on dramatic flooding in Houston after Hurricane Harvey, where the death toll (so far) is thankfully small compared to flooding in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The government response on all levels seems to be fairly effective, and unlike with Katrina, the press coverage hasn’t been dominated by accusations of racism or inhumanity in the rescue effort.

There’s one obvious exception: cartoonists for the Left. Politico tweeted an image by radical artist Matt Wuerker in which he mocks Christian wackos wearing Confederate flag shirts. A man being rescued from his rooftop declares: “Angels! Sent by God!” A Coast Guard pilot is shown correcting him. “Er, actually Coast Guard … sent by the government,” he says.

After mocking the victims still suffering from a hurricane as stupid religious folks, Wuerker tried to dig himself out of a hole on Twitter. He lamented: “Just trying to point out times like this we’re lucky to have rescue services. Don’t see how this takes away from private individuals heroism.” Then he added: “Respectfully — it’s making fun of the Secessionist movement. Not at all aimed at all Texans.” Politico soon deleted its promotional tweet, but not the cartoon.

A poll taken in 2016 (by Democrat pollsters) showed that 59 percent of Texans opposed secession, and only 26 percent expressed support. Wuerker claimed that his job is to prod people into considering “the ironies and subtleties of the world we live in,” but cartoons like this aren’t ironic or subtle. They’re ham-fisted and ignorant.

Wuerker also felt it was safe to mock conservatives. “Times like this it’s ironic to say that the government is the enemy,” he said. It’s not conservatives who have protested the front-line heroes of local government but leftist street agitators who have endlessly denigrated the police as racist child killers.

Then there’s the scabrous French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose latest cover shows a bunch of Nazi flags mostly underwater and a few white hands sticking out of the water in the “Heil Hitler” salute. The cover text in French translates to “God Exists! He Drowned All Neo-Nazis of Texas!”

To liberal elites, all Texans are somehow bigoted white Christian males. Even a hurricane can’t restrain their rage about their satirical targets having any power in America. Cartoons like these strongly underline why so many Americans find that the secular-progressive media are either tone-deaf or blatantly hostile toward what (and Who) they hold dear.

SOURCE

*****************************

By their deeds shall ye know them

*****************************

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)

***************************

4 September, 2017

Why the Democratic Party Hates the President of the United States

Now that Hillary Clinton has lost the presidential election, the Democrats feel emotionally betrayed and have lost all hope. They see President Trump as a human wrecking ball who will destroy the U.S. welfare state through his policies of deporting criminal illegal immigrants, the extreme vetting of refugees entering the U.S. and those immigrating from countries that are state sponsors of radical Islamic terrorism, building a wall on our southern border, the deregulation of business, the lowering of personal and corporate taxes, supporting the fossil fuel industry, repealing and replacing the ACA, etc. This explains, in large part, why the Democrats keep repeating the statement that President Trump is “not my president.”

The impending destruction of the U.S. welfare state has thrown the Democratic Party and most of the mainstream news media into a frenzy because, although President Obama had expanded it throughout the eight years of his presidency, the Democrats needed Hillary Clinton to win the election to continue the expansion. Now that President Trump has won the election, their goal of building a utopian society in the United States has been shattered.

Because the Democrats view President Trump as a threat to their Progressive ideology, there is no line they will not cross in opposing him, his supporters and the Republican Party. This explains the fake news stories, the identity politics, the protests and the misrepresentations of President Trump’s words and deeds. The Democrats are using their negative rhetoric to disrespect both our president and his supporters while simultaneously attempting to undermine his presidency by creating misconceptions in the minds of the American people concerning his character and his policies.

Additionally, from the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign to the present day, some very prominent Democratic politicians have been playing the race card, calling President Trump a racist and a bigot, and his supporters deplorables and irredeemables.

These vile accusations were factored into the decisions made by the voters in formerly blue states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania who voted overwhelmingly for President Trump. Their votes, combined with the additional votes from the other flyover states, enabled him to achieve a total of 304 electoral votes, well over the 270 required to win the presidency.

The Democratic Party’s predictable response to their electoral defeat has been to assert that Hillary Clinton should have been elected because she won the popular vote. They blame her loss on the electoral college, stating that it is a voting system that is both unfair and outdated, and should be abolished.

Abolishing the electoral college is a very serious undertaking because its legitimacy is established by the 12th Amendment of the United States Constitution. The electoral college provides for the indirect election of the president and the vice president of the United States in order to give every voter in every state an equal say in our presidential elections. By denying the legitimacy of the electoral college, the Democratic Party is denying the democratic principle of free and fair elections. The conclusion can be drawn that the Democrats’ thirst for power has become so great that they would be willing to abolish the electoral college from our Constitution if it would help their party win the next presidential election.

The message sent from the Trump voters to both the Democratic and Republican Parties is loud and clear: They are sick and tired of the corruption in the U.S. government, the ever-rising costs of health insurance and pharmaceutical drugs, the $19.9 trillion in national debt, the 94 million Americans out of the labor force, the radical Islamic terror attacks, the murders of innocent U.S. civilians perpetrated by criminal illegal immigrants, the extreme violence in the inner cities, the smuggling of drugs and the human trafficking occurring at our southern border and the condescending political correctness of the Democratic political elites, most of the national news media outlets, many Hollywood celebrities and a large percentage of far-left college professors and their students.

It is obvious to President Trump’s supporters that their message to the Democrats has fallen upon deaf ears. Many Democratic politicians, aided by a largely Democratic mainstream news media, continue to viciously malign President Trump, using the same identity politics they employed throughout most of the presidential campaign. I believe they will continue their smear campaign throughout the 2020 presidential election because of their deep, personal hatred of our president. Some of them are already calling for his impeachment!

In the 2016 presidential election, millions of honest, hard-working, middle-class Americans voted for President Trump, believing that as president he would work with Congress to restore the job security of every able-bodied U.S. citizen, address the domestic and national security concerns of all Americans and restore the dignity and respect of our great veterans.

Under President Trump’s administration, the American citizens will be spared the negative consequences of the welfare state, such as the loss of personal freedoms and the continued decline in wages and job opportunities within the middle class. The election of President Trump highlights the intelligence of the American voters because they have elected a president who possesses the administrative experience necessary to dismantle the welfare state and replace it with free market policies designed to produce high economic growth.

I believe that the Democratic Party has unwittingly endangered itself with the constant repetition of its victimization narrative. It maintains that President Trump and the Republican Party are a group of wealthy capitalists tied to extremely wealthy shareholders of multinational companies and Wall Street banks, all having the same goal of increasing the oppression and victimization of minorities through institutional racism and economic inequality in order to achieve an ever-greater accumulation of wealth and power.

Overplaying the victim card could eventually lead many of the Democratic minority voters, including the Millennials and others, to the conclusion that their party is involved in the same capitalistic system of institutional racism and white privilege the Democratic politicians are accusing the Republican Party of maintaining. If these voters reach the conclusion that they are being victimized by their own party, it’s possible that they could reject it altogether. If that were to occur, the Democratic Party would cease to be a viable, mainstream political party.

SOURCE

*********************************

Impressive Economic Growth Steadily Continues

The Commerce Department revised its second-quarter GDP numbers up to 3%, better than previously reported news.

The Commerce Department released its revised figures for U.S. gross domestic product in the second quarter, and there’s good news — GDP grew not 2.7% but 3.0%. In other words, the U.S. economy is growing faster than was initially thought, and Donald Trump’s ambitious target of 3.0% annual growth for 2017 is closer than many had believed legitimately possible. Now some economists are estimating that third-quarter growth could be has high as 3.4%, based on early job numbers from August. There is a word of caution here, as Hurricane Harvey’s devastation of Houston, America’s fourth largest city, is bound to produce a negative hit to the U.S. economy. But even so, many experts believe it will be minimal and short-lived.

Trump’s greatest contribution to the economy has been his focused Washington deregulation crusade. It has saved Americans billions of dollars and has freed businesses from mountains of over-reaching, economically stifling regulations. But is this growth sustainable? This is where congressional action is needed in the form of tax reform.

Thus, on Wednesday, Trump kicked off his tax-reform push in a speech in Missouri by pressing Congress. Trump said, “This is our once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver real tax reform for everyday, hard-working Americans. And I am fully committed to working with Congress to get this job done. And I don’t want to be disappointed by Congress. Do you understand me?” He pushed for Democrats and Republicans to work together, stating, “What could possibly be more bipartisan than allowing Americans to keep more of what they earn and creating an environment for real job and wage growth in the country that we love so much?” Well, it would counteract Democrats’ class warfare strategy, for one thing.

On a final note, the good economic news was buried by The Washington Post on page 16 in “the digest” without even a headline. Evidently for the Post, good economic news in the era of Trump must die in darkness.

SOURCE

*******************************

Florida Democrat Election Official Admits Noncitizens, Felons Voting

A veteran Democrat chief election official in Florida has conceded in court that noncitizens and felons possibly voted, in a case that could have national implications for how localities clean up voter rolls.

Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes is defending her office against a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Rights Union, a conservative legal group that contends there are more voters registered on Broward’s rolls than there are eligible voters in the county.

Those rolls are said to be inflated with not only noncitizens and felons, but also other ineligible people who have voted illegally.

On July 31, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper reported that, in court, “Snipes acknowledged the processes her office [has] been using aren’t perfect and that some noncitizens and felons have voted despite not being eligible—especially right before major elections, when groups are actively registering new voters.”

Burnadette Norris-Weeks, a lawyer for Snipes and Broward County, said the statement was “blown out of proportion” and was in response to a question, rather than a statement of definite voter fraud in the county.

“This wasn’t a suggestion there was rampant voter fraud in Broward County,” Norris-Weeks told The Daily Signal in a phone interview. She added that suggested improvements were “no admission of anything.”

“The supervisor will try anything to improve the system,” she said.

As of Aug. 30, just over half of the county’s 1.18 million registered voters, 595,688, are Democrats, according to county figures. About 21.6 percent of them, 254,966, are Republicans, while 326,405 are not affiliated with a political party, and 3,891 are described as “other.”

Snipes has been the county’s top election official since being appointed in mid-2003, and has won subsequent elections starting in November 2004.

U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom of the Southern District of Florida in Miami, an appointee of President Barack Obama, has not yet rendered a decision. A ruling will likely come in October, Norris-Weeks said.

“One of the things that is the beauty of this country is that anybody can sue for anything on any day,” Norris-Weeks said. “This is just a right-wing conservative organization trying to make sure it’s more difficult for people to vote.”

The case’s four-day trial this summer came at a time when voter fraud has become a national issue. President Donald Trump in May named a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to examine the issue nationally.

Broward County’s problems reportedly included voter registration lists with 130-year-old voters (or would-be voters, if they were living), felons, duplicate registrations, and commercial addresses listed as residential addresses.

“Snipes said she does not use Social Security death records to check up on extremely old voters—like age 130. She waits for a death certificate to fall in her lap. She won’t even look at local obituaries as a starting point,” Logan Churchwell, a spokesman for the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which is representing the plaintiffs in the case, told The Daily Signal in an email.

Foundation President J. Christian Adams, a member of Trump’s elections commission, is arguing in court on behalf of the American Civil Rights Union.

The Snipes testimony provided many disclosures about noncitizens voting, Churchwell noted.

“Of those outing themselves as noncitizens, she has seen records of ballots cast prior,” he said.

Still, the case is not a voter fraud case, but about whether Broward County manages voter records in accordance with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, also known as the “motor voter” law. That law allows people to register to vote when they apply for their driver’s license, but also requires local elections offices to keep their voter lists accurate.

Snipes reportedly said in court that her office was applying to be connected to Florida’s Driver and Vehicle Information Database.

“She made references to episodes involving voter registration drives before an election that turned in bad information. She gave the example of fictitious names on the stand,” Churchwell said. “She agreed that her office had registered ‘hundreds’ of voters claiming illegal commercial addresses as residential ones. They were usually rented mailboxes.”

SOURCE

*****************************

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)

***************************

3 September, 2017

Why the Media Are in a Never-Ending Hunt for Right-Wing Violence

ANN COULTER below points out that, on past form, the media characterization of the Charlottesville marchers as "white supremacists" is almost certainly wrong. I pointed out from the beginning that most of them were probably just Southern sentimentalists and Mr. Trump also said from the beginning that they were a mix of people. It will be fascinating to see what emerges from the trial of the man who drove his car into some of the Antifa people. That he was attacked first could give him a good self-defense claim. What howls there will be if he is acquitted! It would be another good instance of what Ann describes below

After I’d spent a decade begging Republicans, including a few presidential candidates, to take up the immigration issue, Donald J. Trump came along, championed the entire thesis of Adios, America, and swept all contenders aside.

It’s too late for the likes of Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan to avoid humiliation, but if they don’t want to keep making asses of themselves in public by, for example, praising today’s version of the KKK, they should read my entire corpus of work, starting with Demonic. (Trump somehow grasped the whole point of that book, too.)

The reason normal people are suspicious of the media’s narrative on Charlottesville is that we’ve heard this exact same story many, many times before.

Facts on the ground:

— Approximately every other year since forever, liberal hooligans have been rampaging through the streets, beating people up, setting off bombs, killing cops, smashing store windows, assassinating politicians and burning down neighborhoods — against capitalism, Vietnam, Nixon, Wall Street, a police shooting, Trump, Starbucks, a sunny day.

— Conservatives, mostly families, have generally avoided even the mildest forms of political protest, and, when they finally are driven to petition the government over their grievances, they pick up after themselves — at tea parties, townhalls, Trump rallies and so on.

Result: The entire media are constantly on Red Alert for the threat of Right-Wing Violence.

The explanation for this apparent madness is that the left — both the scribblers and the shock troops — bear all the characteristics of a mob, as set forth more than a century ago by the father of group-think, French psychologist Gustave Le Bon. No behavior of the left is mysterious if you’ve read Le Bon — or “Demonic.” In The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Le Bon observed that the “complete lack of critical spirit” prevents crowds from “perceiving … contradictions.”

No matter the year or the circumstances, the media and their eunuch politicians are quick to blame any surprising violence on the Right-Wing Nazis of their imaginations — from Lee Harvey Oswald (communist) to Jared Lee Loughner and James Holmes (psychopaths) to the two stabbing murders on a Portland train earlier this year committed by a Bernie Sanders supporter, whom the media — to this day — insist, all evidence to the contrary, was a Trump supporter.

When, a few months after the first murders by a Sanders supporter, a second Sanders supporter opened fire on a congressional Republican baseball practice, putting GOP Rep. Steve Scalise in critical condition, that political attack was simply discarded. The media put the story of left-wing assailant James Hodgkinson in a lead casket and dropped it to the bottom of the sea.

There are scores of other examples of imaginary right-wing violence invented by the media — then quietly abandoned when the facts come out. After weeks of hair-on-fire headlines, suddenly you just stop reading about the Duke lacrosse “rapists,” homicidal maniac Officer Darren Wilson or legions of Trump-supporters ripping off Muslim women’s hijabs.

But I remember! Here are as many as my word limit allows –- maybe more!

SARAH PALIN AND THE RISE OF NAZISM IN AMERICA

During the 2008 campaign, the media were in a perpetual state of fright that racist Republicans would assassinate Barack Obama.

Naturally, when a local reporter claimed he’d heard someone in a crowd at a Sarah Palin rally yell, “Kill him!” about Obama, the media didn’t wait for more facts! The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank promptly reported the reed-thin allegation, which was then repeated in hundreds of other news outlets.

On CNN, David Gergen said that Palin was “whipping up these crowds,” creating “ugly scenes” with audience members yelling, “Kill him. Kill him” — and also claimed (without evidence) that they were yelling “racial epithets.” A CNN article on the alleged shout-out appeared under the headline: “Rage rising on the McCain campaign trail.”

Vice presidential candidate Joe Biden weighed in, somberly calling the alleged incident “dangerous.”

MSNBC’S Rachel Maddow railed against the “mere mention of killing someone at a political rally,” saying, “it’s horrific.”

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann took the gold, yammering on and on about the claim in nightly updates, culminating in one of his prissiest ever “Special Comments,” in which he demanded that John McCain suspend his campaign until “it ceases to be a clear and present danger to the peace of this nation.”

Needless to say, the Secret Service undertook a complete review. Agents listened to tapes of the event, interviewed attendees and interrogated the boatloads of law enforcement officers spread throughout the crowd.

Conclusion: It never happened. As even the nutty left-wing site Salon noted, “If (the Secret Service) says it doesn’t think anyone shouted, ‘kill him,’ it’s a good bet that it didn’t happen.”

No apologies, no retractions, no memory.

THE TEA PARTY AND THE RISE OF NAZISM IN AMERICA:

Remember when polite, hardworking Americans came together to oppose Obamacare at tea party rallies in 2009 and 2010?

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Steny Hoyer called the protesters “un-American.” The Democratic National Committee called them “rabid right-wing extremists.” Sen. Harry Reid called the tea partiers “evil-mongers.” Jimmy Carter pronounced an “overwhelming portion” of them racists.

ABC called them a “mob.” CNN called them “rabble-rousing critics.”

Democratic congressman Brian Baird of Washington accused tea partiers of using “close to Brown-shirt tactics.” The AFL-CIO called them an “extremist fringe,” using “mob rule.”

As Le Bon explained, “one of the surest means of making an idea enter the mind of crowds” is to affirmatively state something, “free of all reasoning and all proof.” Indeed, “the more destitute of every appearance of proof and demonstration” a claim is, “the more weight it carries” with a mob.

As usual, once the dust had settled, the only violence at the tea parties and town halls had been committed by liberals.

On Aug. 6, 2009, for example, a black tea partier was beaten up by union thugs shouting the N-word at him at a St. Louis town hall. Six members of the Service Employees International Union were arrested. About a month later, on Sept. 3, 2009, 65-year-old tea partier Bill Rice had his finger bitten off at a health care rally in Thousand Oaks, California, by a lefty Obamacare supporter.

To this day, The New York Times has never mentioned either incident, so it can happily return to railing against the non-existent right-wing rage surging in the red states.

THE CENSUS WORKER AND RISE OF NAZISM IN AMERICA:

In the fall of 2009, the naked body of Census worker Bill Sparkman was found hanging from a tree in southwestern Kentucky, with the word “fed” written across his chest.

Liberals wasted no time in concluding that right-wing extremists had murdered Sparkman in a burst of anti-government hate.

A Census worker? Who hates Census workers? Unlike an IRS agent, an EPA inspector or even an agriculture inspector, a Census worker can’t arrest you, seize your property or fine you hundreds of thousands of dollars. They just hand out questionnaires.

No matter. The left has been waiting for right-wing violence for centuries and, finally, here it was!

New York magazine ran an article about the dead Census worker, asking, “Has Nancy Pelosi’s Fear of Political Violence Been Realized?”

The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan blamed “Southern populist terrorism” for Sparkman’s death, “whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts.”

But MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow owned the Bill-Sparkman-was-murdered-by-right-wingers story. Night after night, she breathlessly reported this “breaking national news.” Although Rachel’s main move is giggling and eye-rolling, she was all deadly earnestness when it came to the “troubling story” and the “worry that he was killed in fact because he was a federal employee.”

In case you missed the point, Maddow reminded viewers there’s “a strong suspicion of government generally among people who live in that area.”

A month later, investigators announced that Sparkman had committed suicide in an insurance scam. Rachel left it to her guest host, Howard Dean, to break the bad news to her conspiracy-minded viewers, sparing her the humiliation.

And then we never heard the story of the Census worker again.

A media capable of turning tea partiers, Palin supporters and a random insurance scam into weeks of terror at right-wing violence are not going to let a few nuts waving Nazi flags at a “Unite the Right” rally pass without leaping at the opportunity to outlaw conservatism.

Based on the media’s 100-year history of fantasizing a burgeoning Nazi Party in America, the rest of us would like to wait for the facts on Charlottesville.

SOURCE

***************************

Christians Sign Statement of Christian Faith, Left Goes Nuts

Christians aren't supposed to believe what the Bible teaches but what social justice warriors demand

Christians aren’t supposed to believe what the Bible teaches; Christians are instead supposed to believe what 21st century social justice warriors allow them to believe. That’s essentially the message of progressives in the wake of the signing by many prominent Evangelical Christians of the Nashville Statement.

National Review’s David French, who was among the signers, sums it up: “It’s a basic declaration of Christian orthodoxy on sexuality, sexual orientation, and sexual identity. Its 14 articles can be boiled down to a simple statement: We believe the Bible is the word of God, and the word of God declares that sexual intimacy is reserved for the lifelong union of a man and a woman in marriage. It acknowledges the reality of same-sex attraction as well as the reality of transgender self-conceptions, but denies that God sanctions same-sex sexual activity or a transgendered self-conception that is at odds with biological reality. In other words, it’s basic Christianity.”

Naturally, that’s vile bigotry to many on the Left. In addition to the leftist Christians whose politics often trump their belief in the Bible’s teachings, Nashville’s Democrat Mayor Megan Barry weighed in, tweeting, “The @CBMWorg’s so-called ‘Nashville Statement’ is poorly named and does not represent the inclusive values of the city & people of Nashville.” But given the large conservative Evangelical presence in Nashville, we’d say that the statement is in fact a fair and accurate representation.

But as French notes, Barry’s proclamation, as representative of Nashville’s government, is “a declaration of state against church.” It’s the mayor telling many of her own citizens that they do not represent their city. This line of totalitarian thinking is exactly what drove the Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage, among other things.

Americans are being told what to think by the Rainbow Mafia and its Big Media enablers. Or should we say feel? Because that’s what this is — emotion-driven, “love wins” policymaking that subjects those who disagree to disdain, mockery and even criminal penalty. Is that the kind of religious liberty the Pilgrims came here to establish?

SOURCE

*****************************

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)

***************************

1 September, 2017

Right, Left, Facts, and Values

Since my job is to proselytize on behalf of economic liberty, I’m always trying to figure out what motivates people. To be blunt, I’ll hopefully be more effective if I understand how they decide what policies to support. That’s a challenge when dealing with my friends on the left since some of them seem to be motivated by envy.

Unsurprisingly, there are people on the other side who also contemplate how to convert their opponents.

Harvard Professor Maximilian Kasy wrote a column for the Washington Post that advises folks on the left how they can be more effective when arguing with folks on the right. He starts with an assertion that conservatives are basically impervious to facts.

    Worries about…our “post-factual era” impeding political debate in our society have become commonplace. Liberals…are often astonished at the seeming indifference of their opponents toward facts and toward the likely consequences of political decisions. …A common, though apparently ineffective, response to this frustration is to double down by discussing more facts.

This is a remarkable assertion. I’m a libertarian rather than a conservative, so I don’t feel personally insulted. That being said, conservatives generally are my allies on economic issues and I’ve never found them to be oblivious or indifferent to facts (I’m speaking about policy wonks, not politicians, who often are untethered from reality regardless of their ideology).

So let’s see how Mr. Kasy justifies his claim about conservatives. Here’s more of what he wrote.

    …maybe the issue is not conservatives’ ignorance of facts, but rather a fundamental difference of values. Taking this point of view seems essential for effective communication across the political divide.

I basically agree that differences in values play a big role, so I’m sort of okay with that part of his analysis (I’ll return to this issue in the conclusion).

But my alarm bells started ringing at this next passage.

    Much normative (or value-based) reasoning by liberals (and mainstream economists) is about the consequences of political actions for the welfare of individuals. Statements about the desirability of policies are based on trading off the consequences for different individuals. If good outcomes result from a policy without many negative consequences, then the policy is a good one.

Huh? Since when are liberals (and he’s talking about today’s statists, not the classical liberals of yesteryear) and mainstream economists on the same side?

Though I admit it’s hard to argue about the rule he proposes for policy. He’s basically saying that a change is desirable if “good outcomes” are more prevalent than “negative consequences.”

That’s probably too utilitarian for me, but I suspect most people might agree with that approach.

But he makes a giant and unsubstantiated leap by then claiming it would be wrong to repeal a supposedly good policy like Obamacare.

    When Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) remarked on the Affordable Care Act this spring, for example, she said, “…we’re talking about something that would deny those in need with the relief and the help that they need, that they want and deserve…” In other words, if a policy will harm the welfare of individuals in need, it’s a bad policy.

Huh? What happened to his utilitarian formula about “good outcomes” vs “negative consequences”? Sure, some additional people have health insurance coverage, but is he blind to rising premiums, job losses, higher taxes, loss of plans and loss of doctors, dumping people into Medicaid, and other downsides of Obamacare?

If facts are important, shouldn’t he be weighing the costs and benefits?

In other words, Kasy must be in some sort of cocoon if he thinks the Obamacare fight is between Republicans motivated only by values and Democrats motivated by helping individuals.

His analysis of the death tax is similarly off base.

    …consider the example of bequest taxes, labeled “estate taxes” by liberals and “death taxes” by conservatives. A liberal might invoke various empirical facts…our empiricist liberal might conclude that bequest taxes are an effective policy instrument, providing public revenue and promoting equality of opportunity. The conservative addressee of these facts might now just shrug her shoulders and say “no thanks.” Our conservative likely believes that everyone has the right to keep the fruits of her labor, and free contracts of exchange between any two parties are nobody else’s business. …Taxing bequests thus means punishing moral behavior, the exact opposite of what the government should do.

Once again, Kasy is deluding himself. Conservatives do think the death tax is morally wrong, so he’s right about that, but they also have very compelling arguments about the levy’s negative economic impact. Simply stated, the death tax exacerbates the tax code’s bias against capital formation and results in all sorts of economically inefficient tax avoidance behavior (with Bill and Hillary Clinton being classic examples).

His column concludes with some suggestions of how folks on the left can be more persuasive. He basically says they should appeal to conservatives with values-based arguments such as these.

    We should evaluate the policy based on its effect on individuals, and assign a higher weight to the majority of less wealthy people. …nobody can be said to consume only the products of their own labor. We rely on social institutions including markets and governments to provide us with all the goods we consume, and absent a theory of just prices (which present day conservatives don’t have) there is no sense in which we are entitled to specific terms of exchange.

I’m not the ideal person to speak for conservatives, but I don’t think those arguments will win many converts.

Regarding his first suggestion, Kasy’s problem is that he apparently assumes that people on the right don’t care about the poor. Maybe I’m reading between the lines, but he seems to think conservatives will automatically favor lots of redistribution if he can convince that it’s good to help the poor.

I think it’s much more accurate to assume that plenty of conservatives have thought about how to help the poor, but they’ve concluded that the welfare state is injurious and that it is more effective to focus on policies such as school choice, economic growth, and occupational licensing.

Indeed, I hope most conservatives would agree with my Bleeding Heart Rule.

And his second idea is even stranger because economic conservatives have a theory of just prices. It’s whatever emerges from competitive markets.

Let’s close with a column by Alberto Mingardi of the Bruno Leoni Institute in Italy. Published by the Foundation for Economic Education, the piece is relevant to today’s topic since it looks at why an unfortunate number of intellectuals are opposed to economic liberty.

    …some have replied that the main reason is resentment (intellectuals expect more recognition from the market society than they actually get); some have pointed out that self-interest drives the phenomenon (intellectuals preach government controls and regulation because they’ll be the controllers and regulators); some have taken the charitable view that intellectuals do not understand what the market really is about (as they cherish “projects” and the market is instead an unplanned order).

Alberto then shares Milton Friedman’s answer.

    I think a major reason why intellectuals tend to move towards collectivism is that the collectivist answer is a simple one. If there’s something wrong pass a law and do something about it. If there’s something wrong it’s because of some no-good bum, some devil, evil and wicked – that’s a very simple story to tell. You don’t have to be very smart to write it and you don’t have to be very smart to accept it.

My two cents, based on plenty of conversations with well-meaning folks on the left, is that there’s actually a lot of agreement of some big-picture values. We all want less poverty and more prosperity. In other words, I think most people have similar good intentions (I’m obviously excluding communists, Nazis, and others who believe in totalitarianism).

But similar good intentions doesn’t translate into agreement on policy because of secondary values. Especially differences in whether we view “equality of outcomes” as an appropriate goal for government. Some on the left openly are willing to sacrifice growth to achieve more equality (Margaret Thatcher even claimed that they would be willing to hurt the poor if the rich suffered even more). Folks on the right, by contrast, are much more focused on helping the poor with growth rather than redistribution.

SOURCE

*****************************

A Plea for Do-Nothing Government

Nothing promotes bad public policy as much as disaster. An economic depression gives rise to demands for Keynesian “economic stimulus” spending; elevated rates of unemployment among low-skilled workers give rise to demands for increases in the legal minimum wage; shortages of goods and services caused by floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other such acts of God give rise to demands for legal prosecution of “price gougers”; and so on and on.

Probably the single most beneficial amendment to the U.S. and state constitutions would be an amendment to forbid the government from “doing something” beyond its normal actions in response to national or local emergencies. Nearly everything the government does on such occasions makes matters worse, ultimately if not immediately. If only the people understood that the government waits for emergencies with saliva flowing, knowing that it can then get away with extensions of its power and the enrichment of its cronies to an extent that would be impossible in normal circumstances.

SOURCE

****************************

The defense of truth is motivated by love, not hate

Last week, I made a short video about how the media and the Southern Poverty Law Center were getting “hate” wrong, slandering good groups such as the Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom by calling them hate groups.

Liberal activist groups do this because they disagree with conservatives on marriage and gender identity. But it’s wrong to think every disagreement is the result of hate.

Anti-gay bigotry exists. It’s wrong. And we should condemn it.

But support for marriage as the union of husband and wife isn’t anti-gay. Believing the truth about marriage—that it unites a man and woman as husband and wife in an act that makes them one flesh—isn’t “anti” anything.

Believing that men and women aren’t interchangeable, and that mothers and fathers aren’t replaceable, that children deserve both a mom and a dad—that’s not hate. It’s truth. And even if you disagree, you should acknowledge that it’s motivated by love, not hate.

Anti-trans bigotry is real—and it’s wrong. And we shouldn’t tolerate it.

But biology isn’t bigotry. The best biology, psychology, and philosophy conclude that sex is a biological reality and that gender is the social expression of that reality. And it’s entirely reasonable to have concerns about privacy and safety when males who identify as women can go into the ladies’ and girls’ bathroom and locker room.

Likewise, having concerns about giving children puberty blockers, or performing sex reassignment surgery on adults, isn’t anti-trans. It’s a disagreement about medicine.

The most helpful therapies for gender dysphoria focus not on achieving the impossible—changing bodies to conform to thoughts and feelings—but on helping people accept and even embrace the truth about their bodies and reality.

These are difficult questions. We need to be able to disagree about them without smearing our opponents, on either side.

SOURCE

*****************************

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)

***************************

1 September, 2017

Right, Left, Facts, and Values

Since my job is to proselytize on behalf of economic liberty, I’m always trying to figure out what motivates people. To be blunt, I’ll hopefully be more effective if I understand how they decide what policies to support. That’s a challenge when dealing with my friends on the left since some of them seem to be motivated by envy.

Unsurprisingly, there are people on the other side who also contemplate how to convert their opponents.

Harvard Professor Maximilian Kasy wrote a column for the Washington Post that advises folks on the left how they can be more effective when arguing with folks on the right. He starts with an assertion that conservatives are basically impervious to facts.

    Worries about…our “post-factual era” impeding political debate in our society have become commonplace. Liberals…are often astonished at the seeming indifference of their opponents toward facts and toward the likely consequences of political decisions. …A common, though apparently ineffective, response to this frustration is to double down by discussing more facts.

This is a remarkable assertion. I’m a libertarian rather than a conservative, so I don’t feel personally insulted. That being said, conservatives generally are my allies on economic issues and I’ve never found them to be oblivious or indifferent to facts (I’m speaking about policy wonks, not politicians, who often are untethered from reality regardless of their ideology).

So let’s see how Mr. Kasy justifies his claim about conservatives. Here’s more of what he wrote.

    …maybe the issue is not conservatives’ ignorance of facts, but rather a fundamental difference of values. Taking this point of view seems essential for effective communication across the political divide.

I basically agree that differences in values play a big role, so I’m sort of okay with that part of his analysis (I’ll return to this issue in the conclusion).

But my alarm bells started ringing at this next passage.

    Much normative (or value-based) reasoning by liberals (and mainstream economists) is about the consequences of political actions for the welfare of individuals. Statements about the desirability of policies are based on trading off the consequences for different individuals. If good outcomes result from a policy without many negative consequences, then the policy is a good one.

Huh? Since when are liberals (and he’s talking about today’s statists, not the classical liberals of yesteryear) and mainstream economists on the same side?

Though I admit it’s hard to argue about the rule he proposes for policy. He’s basically saying that a change is desirable if “good outcomes” are more prevalent than “negative consequences.”

That’s probably too utilitarian for me, but I suspect most people might agree with that approach.

But he makes a giant and unsubstantiated leap by then claiming it would be wrong to repeal a supposedly good policy like Obamacare.

    When Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) remarked on the Affordable Care Act this spring, for example, she said, “…we’re talking about something that would deny those in need with the relief and the help that they need, that they want and deserve…” In other words, if a policy will harm the welfare of individuals in need, it’s a bad policy.

Huh? What happened to his utilitarian formula about “good outcomes” vs “negative consequences”? Sure, some additional people have health insurance coverage, but is he blind to rising premiums, job losses, higher taxes, loss of plans and loss of doctors, dumping people into Medicaid, and other downsides of Obamacare?

If facts are important, shouldn’t he be weighing the costs and benefits?

In other words, Kasy must be in some sort of cocoon if he thinks the Obamacare fight is between Republicans motivated only by values and Democrats motivated by helping individuals.

His analysis of the death tax is similarly off base.

    …consider the example of bequest taxes, labeled “estate taxes” by liberals and “death taxes” by conservatives. A liberal might invoke various empirical facts…our empiricist liberal might conclude that bequest taxes are an effective policy instrument, providing public revenue and promoting equality of opportunity. The conservative addressee of these facts might now just shrug her shoulders and say “no thanks.” Our conservative likely believes that everyone has the right to keep the fruits of her labor, and free contracts of exchange between any two parties are nobody else’s business. …Taxing bequests thus means punishing moral behavior, the exact opposite of what the government should do.

Once again, Kasy is deluding himself. Conservatives do think the death tax is morally wrong, so he’s right about that, but they also have very compelling arguments about the levy’s negative economic impact. Simply stated, the death tax exacerbates the tax code’s bias against capital formation and results in all sorts of economically inefficient tax avoidance behavior (with Bill and Hillary Clinton being classic examples).

His column concludes with some suggestions of how folks on the left can be more persuasive. He basically says they should appeal to conservatives with values-based arguments such as these.

    We should evaluate the policy based on its effect on individuals, and assign a higher weight to the majority of less wealthy people. …nobody can be said to consume only the products of their own labor. We rely on social institutions including markets and governments to provide us with all the goods we consume, and absent a theory of just prices (which present day conservatives don’t have) there is no sense in which we are entitled to specific terms of exchange.

I’m not the ideal person to speak for conservatives, but I don’t think those arguments will win many converts.

Regarding his first suggestion, Kasy’s problem is that he apparently assumes that people on the right don’t care about the poor. Maybe I’m reading between the lines, but he seems to think conservatives will automatically favor lots of redistribution if he can convince that it’s good to help the poor.

I think it’s much more accurate to assume that plenty of conservatives have thought about how to help the poor, but they’ve concluded that the welfare state is injurious and that it is more effective to focus on policies such as school choice, economic growth, and occupational licensing.

Indeed, I hope most conservatives would agree with my Bleeding Heart Rule.

And his second idea is even stranger because economic conservatives have a theory of just prices. It’s whatever emerges from competitive markets.

Let’s close with a column by Alberto Mingardi of the Bruno Leoni Institute in Italy. Published by the Foundation for Economic Education, the piece is relevant to today’s topic since it looks at why an unfortunate number of intellectuals are opposed to economic liberty.

    …some have replied that the main reason is resentment (intellectuals expect more recognition from the market society than they actually get); some have pointed out that self-interest drives the phenomenon (intellectuals preach government controls and regulation because they’ll be the controllers and regulators); some have taken the charitable view that intellectuals do not understand what the market really is about (as they cherish “projects” and the market is instead an unplanned order).

Alberto then shares Milton Friedman’s answer.

    I think a major reason why intellectuals tend to move towards collectivism is that the collectivist answer is a simple one. If there’s something wrong pass a law and do something about it. If there’s something wrong it’s because of some no-good bum, some devil, evil and wicked – that’s a very simple story to tell. You don’t have to be very smart to write it and you don’t have to be very smart to accept it.

My two cents, based on plenty of conversations with well-meaning folks on the left, is that there’s actually a lot of agreement of some big-picture values. We all want less poverty and more prosperity. In other words, I think most people have similar good intentions (I’m obviously excluding communists, Nazis, and others who believe in totalitarianism).

But similar good intentions doesn’t translate into agreement on policy because of secondary values. Especially differences in whether we view “equality of outcomes” as an appropriate goal for government. Some on the left openly are willing to sacrifice growth to achieve more equality (Margaret Thatcher even claimed that they would be willing to hurt the poor if the rich suffered even more). Folks on the right, by contrast, are much more focused on helping the poor with growth rather than redistribution.

SOURCE

*****************************

A Plea for Do-Nothing Government

Nothing promotes bad public policy as much as disaster. An economic depression gives rise to demands for Keynesian “economic stimulus” spending; elevated rates of unemployment among low-skilled workers give rise to demands for increases in the legal minimum wage; shortages of goods and services caused by floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other such acts of God give rise to demands for legal prosecution of “price gougers”; and so on and on.

Probably the single most beneficial amendment to the U.S. and state constitutions would be an amendment to forbid the government from “doing something” beyond its normal actions in response to national or local emergencies. Nearly everything the government does on such occasions makes matters worse, ultimately if not immediately. If only the people understood that the government waits for emergencies with saliva flowing, knowing that it can then get away with extensions of its power and the enrichment of its cronies to an extent that would be impossible in normal circumstances.

SOURCE

****************************

The defense of truth is motivated by love, not hate

Last week, I made a short video about how the media and the Southern Poverty Law Center were getting “hate” wrong, slandering good groups such as the Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom by calling them hate groups.

Liberal activist groups do this because they disagree with conservatives on marriage and gender identity. But it’s wrong to think every disagreement is the result of hate.

Anti-gay bigotry exists. It’s wrong. And we should condemn it.

But support for marriage as the union of husband and wife isn’t anti-gay. Believing the truth about marriage—that it unites a man and woman as husband and wife in an act that makes them one flesh—isn’t “anti” anything.

Believing that men and women aren’t interchangeable, and that mothers and fathers aren’t replaceable, that children deserve both a mom and a dad—that’s not hate. It’s truth. And even if you disagree, you should acknowledge that it’s motivated by love, not hate.

Anti-trans bigotry is real—and it’s wrong. And we shouldn’t tolerate it.

But biology isn’t bigotry. The best biology, psychology, and philosophy conclude that sex is a biological reality and that gender is the social expression of that reality. And it’s entirely reasonable to have concerns about privacy and safety when males who identify as women can go into the ladies’ and girls’ bathroom and locker room.

Likewise, having concerns about giving children puberty blockers, or performing sex reassignment surgery on adults, isn’t anti-trans. It’s a disagreement about medicine.

The most helpful therapies for gender dysphoria focus not on achieving the impossible—changing bodies to conform to thoughts and feelings—but on helping people accept and even embrace the truth about their bodies and reality.

These are difficult questions. We need to be able to disagree about them without smearing our opponents, on either side.

SOURCE

*****************************

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)

***************************

BACKGROUND NOTES:

Home (Index page)

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

"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.

"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
Johnray links
Academic home page
Academic Backup Page
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
Menu of recent writings
basic home page
Pictorial Home Page
Selected pictures from blogs (Backup here)
Another picture page (Best with broadband. Rarely updated)

Note: If the link to one of my articles is not working, the article concerned can generally be viewed by prefixing to the filename the following:
http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/42197/20151027-0014/jonjayray.comuv.com/

OR: (After 2015)
https://web.archive.org/web/20160322114550/http://jonjayray.com/