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29 February, 2012

America has gone insane: Church Ordered to Stop Giving Away Free Water‏.

The land of the free has become the land of the Fascists. I don't think even Hitler and Mussolini were this keen on regulation

A Louisiana church was ordered to stop giving away free water along Mardi Gras parade routes because they did not have the proper permits. “We were given a cease and desist order,” said Matt Tipton, pastor of Hope Church in Metairie, LA. “We had no idea we were breaking the law.”

Tipton said volunteers from his church were handing out free coffee and free bottles of water at two locations along a Mardi Gras parade route when they were stopped by Jefferson Parish officials. The church volunteers were cited for failing to secure an occupational license and for failure to register for a sales tax.

“It kind of threw me for a loop because they weren’t in uniform,” he said. “But once they pulled the ticket out, I was conviniced.” “We apologized,” Tipton said. “We didn’t know the rules.”

The church had purchased about five thousand bottles of water labeled with the church’s name and website address. They gave the remaining bottles to a local drug rehab center.

A spokesman for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office confirmed to Fox News that the church had violated the law. The spokesman said the church was initially given a verbal warning – and then a written warning. He said it was not a citation – even though the warning clearly stated it was a “vendor warning citation.”

The sheriff’s department said there was “no validity to their complaint whatever their complaint may be.”

Ken Klukowski, a senior legal fellow at the Family Research Council, said the citation was absurd. “This is a perfect example of why so many people have a problem with big government,” Klukowski said. “The idea that a church needs a permit to hand out water to thirsty people is unfortunate.”

He said it’s hard to believe that the government would get in the way of citizens helping each other out – “especially a church which was just doing its duty to be good Samaritans and help those in need.”

Pastor Tipton said he sent an email to city leaders explaining that they were just trying to show their love to the city “and to serve the city.”

He offered to provide volunteers to clean up trash or even clean portable toilets. However, city leaders did not initially respond and Tipton said he was given the runaround – told to go through three different department heads.

Klukowski said the incident is outrageous. “The idea that you need an additional level of bureaucracy stopping a church from showing kindness to members of the community is a perfect example of a waste of taxpayer money and resources,” he said.

SOURCE

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Pettiness and Mud

Thomas Sowell

The only good news for the Republicans coming out of the seemingly endless presidential candidate "debates" is that some Republican leaders are now belatedly thinking about how they can avoid a repetition of this debacle in future elections.

What could they possibly have been thinking about, in the first place, when they agreed to a format based on short sound bites for dealing with major complex issues, and with media journalists -- 90 percent of them Democrats -- picking the topics?

The conduct of the candidates made things worse. In a world with a record-breaking national debt and Iran moving toward creating nuclear weapons, they bickered over earmarks and condoms. I am against earmarks, but earmarks don't rank among the first hundred most serious problems facing this country.

Mud-slinging has replaced rational discussions of differences on serious issues -- not only during the debates themselves, where the moderators sic the candidates on each other, but even more so in the massive television character assassination ads in which Romney supporters seem to specialize.

Groups supporting Mitt Romney have turned character assassination almost into a science. You take something that most people, outside of politics, do not understand and twist it to sound terrible to those who are unaware of the facts.

Blanketing Florida with misleading ads attacking Newt Gingrich won that state for Romney, after Gingrich scored an upset victory in South Carolina. The ads made a big deal out of charges that the former Speaker broke tax laws -- charges that the Internal Revenue Service exonerated him of, after a long investigation.

When Rick Santorum suddenly surged after his upset victories in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado, the Romney character assassination machine attacked him for having voted in the Senate for various things that conservatives don't like.

But, when it comes to voting in Congress, seldom do you get a pure bill that you can agree with in all its parts. If you never voted for bills containing anything you didn't like, you might get very little voting done.

But, if it is a bill to provide American soldiers with the equipment they need to fight a war, and somebody has put into it an earmark for a federal boondoggle in his district, are you going to vote against that bill and let American soldiers go into battle without all the equipment and supplies they need?

Taking advantage of the public's lack of knowledge is something that Barack Obama already does very effectively in his political propaganda. But is that something the Republicans want to imitate?

It has worked during the primary season, when the media are perfectly happy to see Republicans destroying each other. But it will not work in the general election campaign, when even truthful criticisms of the president will have a hard time getting out through the media, which hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil when it comes to Obama.

The pettiness and mud-slinging during the Republican primary campaigns is especially irresponsible during a time when there are very serious problems, at home and abroad, that need to be addressed in a serious way.

Discussions of particular issues, one by one, often miss the larger point that goes beyond the issue at hand -- namely, this administration's steady movement toward arbitrary government that circumvents the restrictions of the Constitution.

Nothing demonstrates this more starkly than the president's arbitrary power to waive the requirement that employers have to provide ObamaCare coverage for their workers. That can be the difference between paying, or not paying, millions of dollars. What does that mean for anybody's other rights?

What does freedom of speech mean if criticizing the administration can mean you get no exemption, while your competitor who keeps quiet, or who praises the administration, gets a waiver? The Constitution requires "equal protection of the laws" for a reason.

And what about nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran, the world's leading sponsor of international terrorism? Is that not worth discussing in something other than sound bites?

SOURCE

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Christian Conservatives Guard Religious Liberty

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution contains two clauses addressing religious liberty: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

It's a shame that in their modern misguided zeal to read the first clause as mandating a complete separation of church and state, liberals do great damage to the second clause and defeat the overarching purpose of both: ensuring religious liberty.

Ever since the so-called Christian right began its organized activism during the 1980s, liberals (and some others) have become increasingly nervous about (and critical of) Christian influence in politics, let alone the public square.

This issue has reared its controversial head during the Republican presidential primary because of candidate Rick Santorum's unashamed and outspoken commitment to his Catholic faith and Christian values. It's not just leftists who are complaining; many on the right are, as well.

For years, there has been an uneasy alliance inside the Republican "big tent," between those who embrace social conservatism and those who would just as soon see it deleted from the party platform. With our anxiety about the national debt, economic issues are naturally at the forefront of people's concerns. Some believe that those who are still articulating social issues in this period of crisis are at least annoying and possibly detrimental to the cause of electing a Republican who can build a wide enough coalition to defeat the primary culprit in America's race to bankruptcy: President Barack Obama.

I think it's a false choice to say that we conservatives must pick between economic issues and social ones. It's also a mistake to believe there is a clear dichotomy between economic conservatives and social conservatives. As I've written before, Reagan conservatism is a three-legged stool -- economic, social and national defense issues -- and the three are compatible and probably embraced by most Republicans.

Our center-right tent is big enough to include libertarians, economic conservatives who either are indifferent to social issues or consider themselves socially liberal, and so-called neoconservatives, who tend to emphasize national defense issues over the other two -- although they might reject that characterization. We all must unite to defeat President Obama.

But with Santorum's rise in the polls, many are expressing their anxiety about his perceived religiosity and are depicting him as a threat to religious liberty.

Some are abuzz about his interview this past weekend with George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week," in which Santorum stated that he does not believe separation of church and state is absolute. He stated that the First Amendment's free exercise clause guarantees that the church and its members have as much right to try to influence policy as anyone else. And he's absolutely correct.

Not only are the words "separation of church and state" not contained in the Constitution but this phrase from Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists does not mean what many people say it does.

The First Amendment's establishment clause says that Congress shall not establish a national church, because the Framers didn't want the government telling us whom or how to worship. Their overarching concern, then, was protecting religious liberty. The free exercise clause also strengthens the religious freedom guarantee.

The point is that both clauses are dedicated to religious liberty, and neither purports to ban religious expression from the public square or from the mouths of public officials.

No matter how expansively one reads the First Amendment's establishment clause, no one, including Jefferson, would have made the ludicrous argument that presidents (or other public officials) must leave their worldview at the door of the White House and govern apart from it, as if that would be possible. Advocating policy positions based on one's worldview is light-years away from establishing -- or even supporting -- a national religion.

Christian conservatives are not the ones demonstrating intolerance and threatening the freedoms of religion and religious expression. They would never consider being so presumptuous and tyrannical as to try to silence those who disagree with them, ban them from the public square, or advance the spurious argument that they are not entitled to advocate policies based on their worldview.

Ironically, it is probably the secular left that is most responsible for the dramatic rise and persistent influence of the Christian political right in politics, with their gross judicial activism in abortion jurisprudence and their judicial tyranny coercing states to accept same-sex marriage against the will of the people. They are the ones who demonize as "homophobes" and "bigots" those seeking to preserve traditional marriage. Christian conservatives don't try to shut them up, but many are now trying to shut us up -- through the specious application of the First Amendment, no less.

The last people anyone needs to fear on religious liberty are Christian conservatives, who are its strongest guardians. Above all others, they will fight to preserve everyone's right to express and practice his religion or non-religion as he pleases.

SOURCE

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The God Gap

There have been many "gaps" in modern politics. There is the gender gap, the generation gap and now the God gap, which is the gulf between people who take God's instructions seriously and those who don't. Which side of the gap you're on could influence your vote. The God gap is growing wider.

I asked Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum about this. In a telephone interview with me, Santorum, whose rhetoric is loaded with religious and cultural language, said, "While (such language) may be upsetting to some, there's a hunger out there for talking about what's true."

How, then, would he explain a recent New York Times story that reported for the first time in our history, that "more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage." Santorum acknowledged, "I'm probably talking to Republican audiences, so it's a little different. I'm not talking to the general audience at this point. Marriage is on the decline. The culture is changing."

The problem for presidential candidates -- and for President Obama, who occasionally appeals to Scripture to justify his policies -- is that fewer people are listening to the voice of God, or to voices claiming to speak for Him.

Not too long ago, a report about growing numbers of out-of-wedlock births would have produced sermons calling for repentance and set revival fires burning in churches across the land. Today, there's only the sound of silence.

The Times story, citing government data compiled by Child Trends, a Washington research group, noted that the shift in the makeup of American families was likely to produce children who face "...elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems." Yawn.

How is this social virus to be cured when older religious people speak a language and advocate a belief system that either many younger people don't understand, or do not wish to hear?

The failure to communicate across the God gap brings to mind something former president George H.W. Bush said about broccoli. Bush said his mother made him eat broccoli, but he never liked it. When he became president, he said it meant he no longer had to eat it.

So people who might have been taken to religious services as children are now grown up and many feel they no longer have to "stomach" faith, or conform to a standard outside themselves. Some who grew up in a secular household are spiritually deaf, if not biblically illiterate. A general cultural morality is fast disappearing.

The God gap will not be shrunk by politicians, though to rally "the base" they often talk as if it can. The goal of cultural transformation has historically been the work of clergy, whose "hellfire" messages scared people awake from their comfortable and what used to be called "sinful" lives. But this was before having a baby without a husband became an acceptable thing to do.

Too many of today's clergy seem preoccupied with building personal empires and monstrous buildings. They go on costly TV instead of investing in the less visible "work of the church," which is people, not brick and mortar. The first Christians met in homes, not megachurches. They took care of each other and did not rely on government to sustain them. Many pastors today dislike sermons about sin and repentance because it makes people uncomfortable. And so we get instead the discomfort of social decay and an ever-widening God gap.

Materialism and pleasure contribute to social rot. Social rot precedes national decline. These have become our twin false gods; contemporary "golden calves," as unable to produce satisfaction as the idols of biblical times. Most politicians won't urge restraint or personal sacrifice and too many ministers allow the secular world to set their agenda.

And so the God gap widens and the wisdom and understanding of the older generation goes unheard and unheeded.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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28 February, 2012

A wonderful story and an evocative picture


Once upon a time everybody understood the bonds that could form between people and their horses and this picture brings that back to us.

Can someone who knows horses well read anything in the expression of the horse?

It was a race against the tide that pulled at the heartstrings.

For three hours, show horse Astro was stuck neck deep in thick mud at Avalon Beach on Corio Bay in Victoria [Australia] as the tide inched closer.

Rescue crews first tried to pull the 18-year-old, 500kg horse free with fire hoses, and then a winch before a vet turned up to sedate Astro and pull him clear with a tractor.

The crews knew by 5pm the tide would have come all the way in. But within minutes of the waters rising around him, Astro was being dragged up on to solid ground slowly but surely, the team filthy but ecstatic.

Owner Nicole Graham said she and daughter Paris, 7, set off at noon when without warning she sunk up to her waist in thick, smelly muck.

She wouldn't leave Astro's side until he was free. "It was terrifying," Ms Graham said. "Every time I moved it sucked me back down."

Source

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Highest-earning 1% in Britain pay £47billion a year... almost a third of all income tax

Similar to the USA

The highest-earning 1 per cent of Britons pay almost 30 per cent of all income taxes, according to research. The 308,000 on the 50p top rate – who earn more than £150,000 – pay £47billion a year to the Treasury.

Since 2000, the share of tax paid by the highest earners has risen from 22.2 to 27.7 per cent.

Research by Oriel Securities shows the 3.7million who earned more than £35,000 and pay 40 per cent tax, hand over £57billion in tax, 34 per cent of the total.

The lower-earning 50 per cent pay £17bn – less than the housing benefit bill.

Overall, 90 per cent of all income tax is paid by half the working population.

About 3.7m people earn between £35,000 and £150,000, placing them in the bracket that pays the 40 per cent income tax rate. Collectively they pay £57bn in income tax, about 34 per cent of the total.

Michael Spencer, chief executive of the City broker Icap and former treasurer of the Conservative party, said: ‘The debate about tax in this country has sadly become more and more about politics and less and less about what is good for the economy and for growth.

‘All we hear about is “the rich must pay more; soak the rich”. Well the facts are clear; the rich are paying much more. 'Once you factor in national insurance, for each £1m paid as a bonus the employee receives £480,000 and the Exchequer gets £658,000.

‘The top marginal rate of income tax is actually 58 per cent, the highest in the developed world. No wonder we are losing mobile high earners with rates like that. ‘This is becoming a great and increasing loss to our country and we need to realise quickly that we cannot tax our way back to growth.’

SOURCE

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FDR and his Soviet friends in WWII

FDR was as bad for Europe as he was for America. But, like Obama, he was a smooth talker

The anniversary of the Allied bombing of Dresden on February 13 and 14, 1945 has become an increasingly contentious memory for thousands of Germans. Historians have debated the military value of the old and crowded city, some saying it had little significance, with others pointing out that until the bombing it was still active with war production. What few doubt is that the war was already lost for Germany before the bombing of Dresden, and that the unconditional surrender demanded by President Roosevelt was inevitable in a few weeks no matter what.

What is even more certain is that the intractable decision of FDR to settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender by the Axis Powers cost tens of millions of lives, lengthened the war, and extended the reach of Soviet power dramatically. Such an outcome is what traitors deep within the U.S. government wanted. In Europe, the demand for unconditional surrender meant that the brave Germans who worked to end the evil of national socialism worked without hope. The Anglo-American nations threw back every overture from these anti-Nazi Germans, some of whom held positions of influence in the military and government (though not in the Nazi Party).

The impact upon other Axis Powers created a horrific muddle which prolonged the war. Italy, for example, was willing not only to quit the Axis but to actively enter the war on the side of the Allied Powers. If its overture had been cleanly and quietly accepted by the Allies, then the whole bloody battle up the Italian peninsula might have been avoided and German military units in Italy in 1943 could have been disarmed and interned.

Nations such as Finland, perversely listed on the Military Channel’s program on Nazi collaborators as a helper of Hitler, wanted simply the return of territory taken from it by Stalin, the most important “Nazi collaborator” in the world. Interestingly, the Military Channel is not including in the series this biggest collaborator — the Soviet Union — the facilitator of the division of Poland, the Marxist regime which turned over German Jews to the Gestapo, as the chilling personal accounts of Margarete Buber-Neumann demonstrate in her Between Two Dictators. Nations such as Hungary — which loathed Nazi anti-Semitism (Jews continued to serve in the Hungarian national legislature deep into the war) — likewise had no way out.

Strategic bombing, rather than negotiated surrenders, was not something that naturally appealed to Americans, most of whom wanted the concentration camps and death camps shut down as soon as possible. It is a horrific historical truth that half of those who died in those camps did so in the last six months of the war, long after most European Axis powers and a large percentage of the German army leaders saw that the war was lost.

Even if bombing had been the only way to defeat the Nazis, the immolation of Dresden was disastrously ineffective (however, in no way diminishing the courage and nobility of American airmen who fought and died in large numbers for their country). Two years before Dresden, in “Operation Gomorrah,” British night bombers and American daylight bombers pounded Hamburg around the clock until fire services were overwhelmed, streets quite literally melted, and Germans of all ages were sucked by hundred-mile-an-hour winds into firestorms which killed in a few nights as many as would die in Dresden.

What happened in Europe was mirrored in the Pacific. As Professor Anthony Kubek recounted in his magisterial work, How the Far East was Lost: American Foreign Policy and the Creation of Communist China, 1941–1941 (Regnery: 1963), there need never have been a decision about whether to drop a fission bomb on Hiroshima or later on Nagasaki. Most historians say the decision to bomb Japanese cities was the natural consequence of Japanese imperialism, which made them unwilling to surrender under any conceivable circumstances; additionally, they assert that factored into the decision was the number of American soldiers who would likely die in the initial assault on the Home Islands of Japan.

But, unlike the need for an unconditional surrender by Nazi Germany, there was no need to demand unconditional surrender of Japan. More than a year before Hiroshima, General Douglas MacArthur received surrender proposals from Japan and transmitted them, along with his own advice to accept these terms, prior to the Yalta Conference.

What did these terms provide?

1. Full surrender of the Japanese forces on the sea, in the air, at home, and in occupied countries

2. Surrender of all arms and munitions

3. Occupation of the Japanese homeland and island possessions by Allied troops under American direction

4. Japanese relinquishment of Manchuria, Korea, Formosa, as well as all territory seized during the war

5. Regulation of Japanese industry to halt present and future production of implements of war

6. Surrender of all designated war criminals

7. Release of all prisoners of war and interns in Japan proper and in areas under Japanese control

These seven terms were Japan’s initial bargaining position for peace. The proposals were made on no less than seven occasions through American and British channels. However, FDR preferred to continue the war and, critically, to seek the “help” of Stalin against Japan — this despite the fact that Stalin had scrupulously adhered to his 1941 non-aggression pact with Japan until late 1945.

MacArthur urged FDR to begin immediate negotiations and pleaded with the President not to invite Stalin to enter the war against Japan. FDR observed tersely, “MacArthur is our greatest general and our poorest politician.” But MacArthur considered that the lives of America's bravest — the Marines and infantrymen who need not have died on Okinawa and Iwo Jima in horrific campaigns if these surrender terms had been accepted — were worth something.

The grotesque failure of rational American statecraft in the last year of WWII was sadly not an accident. American and British military leaders, to say nothing of the Commonwealth Dominion democracies who had joined in the war, simply wanted what most commanders wanted: for the fighting to cease as quickly as was consistent with the objects of war.

By 1944, however, the Roosevelt administration was honeycombed with Soviet agents; Britain, also, had been infiltrated at different levels. The firebombing of German and Japanese cities by the Allies would insure bitterness lasting for many generations. The invitation of the Soviet Union to occupy half of Europe and half of Asia — despite Stalin’s de facto alliance with Hitler and his faithful four-year allegiance to his wartime non-aggression pact with Japan — guaranteed that that Marxist power could enslave and impoverish hundreds of millions of souls.

As Sherman said, war is hell. It is also an unnatural condition for a nation whose principal objects are liberty, faith, and peaceful relations with all other countries who wish it. The legacy of Dresden and of Hiroshima lingers because America was not guided by those who loved her, but by those who used her.

SOURCE

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Sneaky State Dept. bureaucrats giving away American territory without a shot being fired!

Obama’s State Department is giving away seven strategic, resource-laden Alaskan islands to the Russians. Yes, to the Putin regime in the Kremlin.

The seven endangered islands in the Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea include one the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. The Russians are also to get the tens of thousands of square miles of oil-rich seabeds surrounding the islands. The Department of Interior estimates billions of barrels of oil are at stake.

The State Department has undertaken the giveaway in the guise of a maritime boundary agreement between Alaska and Siberia. Astoundingly, our federal government itself drew the line to put these seven Alaskan islands on the Russian side. But as an executive agreement, it could be reversed with the stroke of a pen by President Obama or Secretary Clinton.

The agreement was negotiated in total secrecy. The state of Alaska was not allowed to participate in the negotiations, nor was the public given any opportunity for comment. This is despite the fact the Alaska Legislature has passed resolutions of opposition – but the State Department doesn’t seem to care.

The imperiled Arctic Ocean islands include Wrangel, Bennett, Jeannette and Henrietta. Wrangel became American in 1881 with the landing of the U.S. Revenue Marine ship Thomas Corwin. The landing party included the famed naturalist John Muir. It is 3,000 square miles in size.

Northwest of Wrangel are the DeLong Islands, named for George Washington DeLong, the captain of USS Jeannette. Also in 1881, he discovered and claimed these three islands for the United States. He named them for the voyage co-sponsor, New York City newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett. The ship’s crew received a hero’s welcome back in Washington, and Congress awarded them gold medals.

In the Bering Sea at the far west end of the Aleutian chain are Copper Island, Sea Lion Rock and Sea Otter Rock. They were ceded to the U.S. in Seward’s 1867 treaty with Russia.

Now is the time for the Obama administration to stand up for U.S. and Alaskan rights and invaluable resources. The State Department’s maritime agreement is a loser – it gives us nothing in return for giving up Alaska’s sovereign territory and invaluable resources. We won the Cold War and should start acting like it.

The Obama administration must stop the giveaway immediately.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

California: Bankruptcy Upon the Union Altar: "Bondholders of Stockton, California debt are about to be punished as City Manager Takes Steps Toward Bankruptcy. Stockton, California, may take the first steps toward becoming the most populous U.S. city to file for bankruptcy next week because of burdensome employee costs, excessive debt and bookkeeping errors that misrepresented accounts, city officials said today. “Somebody has to suffer and in this case the city manager has decided it should be the bondholders who suffer,” Marc Levinson of the Sacramento-based law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, which represents the city, said at a news briefing at Stockton’s City Hall today. To keep the city solvent through the end of the fiscal year June 30, the City Council will be asked to default on $2 million of debt payments owned to bond holders." [And you thought government bonds were a safe investment!]

British far-Leftist dodges tax: "Ken Livingstone used a loophole to avoid £50,000 in tax, despite having attacked tax avoiders in the past as ‘rich b******s.’ Companies House documents show that Labour’s London mayoral candidate earned £232,000 in 2009, the first year after his defeat to Boris Johnson. The money was earned from personal appearances, speech making and hosting a radio show. It was paid into a personal company set up by Mr Livingstone and Emma Beal, his then partner who is now his wife. The pair are sole shareholders in the company, Silveta Ltd. Accountants told the Sunday Telegraph that the move appears designed to ensure that Mr Livingstone paid corporation tax at 20 or 21 per cent, rather than income tax at up to 40 per cent. Three years ago, Mr Livingstone criticised tax avoiders, saying: ‘These rich b******s just don’t get it. No one should be allowed to vote in a British election, let alone sit in Parliament, unless they pay their full share of tax.’"

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

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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27 February, 2012

Progressives and the Politics of Victimhood

Charles M. Blow, communist, er, columnist for The New York Times, pulled back the curtain on the progressive mindset a little this week, as much as there is a mind behind it. Upon hearing something Mitt Romney said about single parents, Blow, who apparently is one, took exception. On Twitter he sent out the following:

"Let me just tell you this Mitt "Muddle Mouth": I'm a single parent and my kids are *amazing*! Stick that in your magic underwear."

For those who don't know, the website Buzzfeed describes the "magic underwear" this way, "Mormon men and women wear "temple garments" beneath their clothes as a reminder of their religious commitments, a rough equivalent of Jews' yarmulkes or tzitzit."

That, of course, makes Blow's tweet an attack on Romney's Mormon faith, done willingly and before the whole world. At a time when ESPN fires a writer for using the common phrase "Chink in the Armor" to describe a bad game by Jeremy Lin because Lin happens to be Asian, you'd think the blowback on Blow would be swift. You would be wrong. There was no blowback - or at least none to speak of.

Had Blow been anything but a progressive, the media would have opened up on him like he was Pat Buchanan, and justifiably so. But if you're a leftist you're allowed to be a bigot. It's practically required.

In the progressive world people can't be looked at as individuals. They must be divided and subdivided so the "professional Left" can set about making them victims when it suits their needs. It's the hyphenated Americans, the gender Americans, the Americans who like to do this with their genitals. It's the ones with this color skin, or that color skin, it's this one and that one and blah, blah.

They create these groups, then tell people to identify with "their groups," so, when a member of that group is the victim of something, it's an affront to all of them.

It's the mentality that created a group called the Asian American Journalist Association and emboldened it, without invitation, to release guidelines for how the media needs to cover Jeremy Lin. See, you can't treat Jeremy Lin like any other human being, or even any other basketball player. He's different. His ancestors were of Asian descent.

As such, phrases such as "chink in the armor," though common for decades as a clich‚ about someone being discovered to not be perfect, can't be used to describe his first sub-par performance because this previously unheard of group says so.

Their release says, "As NBA player Jeremy Lin's prowess on the court continues to attract international attention and grab headlines, AAJA would like to remind media outlets about relevance and context regarding coverage of race." See, Lin is not first a person or even a basketball player; he is a member of a race.

Has the AAJA been asked by Lin to lay these guidelines? No.

The group issued seven points of "Danger Zones" of which the rest of the world needs to be aware when talking about Lin, each more insane than the last.

It also listed some biographical information, the first point of which is the most telling. It reads, in part:

" Jeremy Lin is Asian American, not Asian (more specifically, Taiwanese American). It's an important distinction and one that should be considered before any references to former NBA players such as Yao Ming and Wang Zhizhi, who were Chinese."

Not only do the group have to divide Lin from everyone else by pointing out he's of Asian descent, it subdivides him to Taiwanese.

It continues . "It's an important distinction and one that should be considered before any references to former NBA players such as Yao Ming and Wang Zhizhi, who were Chinese." Who gives a damn?

If you're a fan of the Knicks, you care that he's good. If you're a fan of whoever is playing the Knicks, you care that he's good for the opposite reason. If you didn't care about the Knicks, or basketball, before someone with your ethnic background started playing for them and doing well, the problem is yours, not some poor schlub writer for ESPN.

But that schlub from ESPN paid with his job because he didn't refer to Jeremy Lin the way people not Jeremy Lin want Jeremy Lin referred to.

By dividing people into groups, progressives are able to easily manipulate people. If a group you've been taught you're a part of is the "victim" of an affront, it's easy to rile you up. This is not to say there aren't instances of bigotry by individuals against other individuals. It's to say jackassery by one against another is nothing more than that. Unless you're trying to remove the individual and create a collective mindset to advance an agenda.

Progressive create or exacerbate issues based on the groups they've created, demonize conservatives as the cause of, or obstruction to the solution for, the problem and, with the willing help of the media, manipulate people too busy to pay close enough attention into thinking they're trying to help. But progressives never help.

Umpteen trillion dollars into the war on poverty we have just as much poverty. Try to change anything about these failed progressive programs, such as incentivizing work or attempting to curb abuse, and progressives will mobilize the necessary groups to cry racisim, sexism or whatever ism they need to create to get the needed outrage. It's a sick game that traps people in poverty, ruins lives and families and actually harms people. But it does do one important thing - it creates a bloc of voters almost uniformly ready to vote, unthinkingly, for their oppressors.

This is not a slave mentality; slaves yearned to be free and independent. This is the mentality most closely associated with monarchy. In monarchies, peasants were told their king was chosen by God, and he had their best interests at heart. Thus, they accepted it when king stole their property and liberty and sent them off to war over ego. They were told their king was their caretaker, when, in fact, he was their oppressor. It's the prefect progressive style of government. And it has no room for dissent.

Progressives spent so much time and energy creating this group mentality, they have no time or patience for those who refuse to conform. Be a black, gay or female conservative, and you not only don't qualify for the victim status afforded others, you're purposefully, and gleefully, targeted by the very tactics those groups were allegedly created to prevent.

There is virtually nothing a of a racist, sexist or homophobic nature that a progressive can say to or about a conservative that will illicit any ill will from fellow progressives, either in or out of the media. Sickeningly, the perpetrators are often rewarded. Al Sharpton, noted bigot, inciter of riots and inspiration of murderers (Google Freddy's Fashion Mart), who made his name pulling a hoax against police based on race, now has a daily hour-long TV show on the progressives MSNBC.

Sharpton's past is not anything sane people dispute, yet his hiring went largely unquestioned in the media. No one resigned from NBC News out of protest over the tainting of their brand because Sharpton's politics and tactics ARE their brand.

Were Sharpton's politics unknown, or if he were - gasp - conservative, and he'd written, "Chink in the Armor," he would've been fired. Since his views are known, and shared by the vast majority of those in position to take a stand against him, he is granted a platform to spread his lies.

The same goes for Charles Blow. There was no outcry from the Times' editorial staff or readers that Blow should be fired. We don't even know if there was any pressure on him to apologize. The entirety of their anemic response was limited to AFTER Blow tweeted an "I shouldn't have done it" non-apology apology a day and a half later, and reads, "It is enough. We are in agreement with him that the comment was inappropriate and we're glad he acknowledged it." To put it another way, they wish Blow would save that sort of talk for where it's appropriate - Upper East Side cocktail parties where everyone agrees and no one will talk about it it outside the room.

Blow never mention it again or actually use words like "I'm sorry," just moved on like it never happened. And why should he? He's a progressive, after all, which means he thinks correctly.

SOURCE

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Act of Valor Trumps Hollywood’s Asinine Squalor

By Pastor Doug Giles

Finally, a 21st century movie that doesn’t portray our military as corrupt, stupid, confused torturers who murder innocent babies.

Act of Valor, which opened this weekend, features active (and anonymous) Navy SEALs in the re-creation of real events that showcase our crème de la crème rescuing our operatives and crushing our enemies in an OMG type of way.

I’ve got two words for the manner in which our boys were depicted in this flick … Sa-lute!

If I were a wannabe enemy of the U.S.A. (foreign or domestic) I’d be crapping my cargo pants (or tunic) after viewing Act of Valor—chiefly because our special forces are some bad mamajambas who have the tools and the tenacity to jack you up.

Yep, be afraid, villains, as our troops are effective ministers of God poised, ready and willing with stealth and style to inflict the wrath of God on those who do evil. I’m talkin’ Romans 13:1-5 style. Look it up if you don’t know what I’m talking about.

Another thing that I truly enjoyed about this film was the unambiguous patriotism of the soldiers and their families. Yep, no whining about their missions from their families or the SEALs who sacrificed their lives and limbs for God and country. It almost felt like I was in America again as I watched this movie. It was weird—but a good weird.

Even though it’s shocking to see our troops displayed in a magnificent manner within this Occuculture that loathes them, it was not a shocker to me; I have had the good fortune to spend time with many of our special ops and other soldiers in hunting camps from Alaska to Texas and have found them just as the movie displayed them: consummate class acts without a hint of the BS Hollyweird has smeared them with over the last decade.

I can’t say enough good things about this movie. In the theater in which my wife and I watched it we spotted several older gents and couples who sat in their seats and silently wept as the credits rolled. It was sacred.

I’m sure all the scabs and the venomous wood lice of the Left are going to crawl out from under the rocks where they dwell and bash this war pic, but that’s alright. Our SEALs and others have afforded you the right to be stupid and bray your insanity by keeping bad guys at bay, both at home and abroad, and thereby giving you the wherewithal to play your silly and ungrateful games against our fair land.

Lastly, parents, take your teenagers to see Act of Valor. Maybe, just maybe, some of the courage, patriotism and dignity depicted in this film will erase the film this crappy culture has slimed your kid with.

God bless America, our warriors who protect her, and those involved with this movie. Amen.

SOURCE

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Why Does the Left Despise Valor

Because they are personally gutless, too yellow to risk their own precious skins for anybody or any thing. And yes: I have served in the army myself -- JR

There is a pretty reliable predictor in America today. If someone says something nice about our military, the need to support them, or show demonstrative appreciation for them outright--that person is likely a person of the political and theological right.

I'm not sure why that's the case, but it is so doggone accurate in the circles of punditry, media, and entertainment, I have to think it's not much different in other places where hard core partisan ranks exist.

This weekend is the perfect example.

One of the most important films to be made in such a long time--honoring our military--reinforces the love of family, the honor of sacrifice, the love of country, and most importantly deep appreciation for men who do things most of us would shrink from. Yet almost universally in media, punditry, and entertainment circles it is being panned as pro-war-mongering-propaganda-responsible-for-all-that-is-wrong. They base these arguments on everything from video games, to perceived war crimes.

They lay these charges at the feet of Act Of Valor, an independently produced film debuting this weekend.

But what I want to know more specifically is why? Why were there repeated articles on GAWKER and HUFFINGTON POST this week--prior to the film’s release and in a couple of instances complete admission by the person writing the critique that admitted they hadn't seen more than the trailer--that included denouncements of danger, lies, and propaganda that this film contained?

Everybody knows that the left hates war. To a fault. I've debated leftists who believed freeing slaves, stopping the Holocaust, or liberating fifty million people from the suffocation of tyranny is somehow an abuse.

What the media will never tell you is that the right doesn't like war either.

But the difference between the two mindsets is simple: sometimes stopping a known evil is worth the sacrifice of the price paid.

The overarching problem for the left is that increasingly evil is indistinguishable, unrecognizable, and in some cases ignored. Pious platitudes about negotiating, compromising, or blaming America for her wrongs, somehow become a relevant response from the left when staring into the eyes of a tyrant who would kill us if he had the power to do so.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Santorum on Obama Pushing College for All Americans: "What a Snob": "Well said, Santorum -- well said. At a campaign stop in Michigan on Saturday morning: "Not all folks are gifted in the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands... and want to work out there making things. President Obama once said, he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob. There are good decent men and women, who go out everyday to put their skills to test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college -- he wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his."

Another crooked Kennedy: "The son of Robert F. Kennedy has been arrested for allegedly attacking two nurses who tried to stop him removing his newborn baby from hospital. Douglas Kennedy, a journalist, is charged with harassment and endangering the welfare of a child following the altercation, which happened last month. He is alleged to have twisted the arm of one nurse and kicked another in the crotch as they tried to make sure his two-day-old son Boru was not being treated roughly. Mr and Mrs Kennedy started to take the baby for a walk outside, but were stopped by nurses concerned for the boy's safety. They asked him to return the newborn to the emergency room, but he refused. When Mr Kennedy ignored them and walked in to the elevator, nurses triggered a 'code pink', which alerts staff that someone is trying to abduct a baby. But Mr Kennedy then allegedly kicked her in the pelvis and caused her to fall over. Mr Kennedy then fell on the floor, still holding his son, and jumped up to run downstairs, according to the police report, but was 'stopped by security and escorted back to the infant's room'."

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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26 February, 2012

In the Soviet era, American "liberals" tried to deceive America into not defending itself against Communist hostility. Now they are trying to deceive Americans into not defending themselves against Muslim hostility

The idea of America being punished for its success and prosperity gives them erections so they do anything they can to bring disaster to America

Federal law enforcement has amassed an impressive record identifying and interdicting would-be jihadists bent on waging terrorist attacks before they can acquire the means to kill people. The American military has killed or detained senior terrorist leaders, including those tied to a slew of homegrown terror plots.

So when a spike in those plots from 2009 ebbs, those seeking an explanation might start by looking at these documented successes.
Not University of North Carolina sociologist Charles Kurzman.
In a report issued last week, Kurzman tallied 20 terrorism prosecutions in 2011 as further proof of his theory that the threat of Islamist terrorism is exaggerated and the country's response still rooted more in emotion and fear than reason.
The New York Times promoted the report a day before its release, leading with Kurzman's conclusion that, "A feared wave of homegrown terrorism by radicalized Muslim Americans has not materialized."

"The public perception of threat does not match actual case-by-case attacks," Kurzman also told the Raleigh News & Observer. "We're getting a skewed perception of the prevalence of these figures."

Neither newspaper challenged Kurzman's premise and methodology and neither sought out an opposing viewpoint. For the Times, it is yet another example of its long time collaboration with uncritically and falsely presenting militant Islamist groups and officials as "moderate."

But the Kurzman report is flawed by its assumptions and by Kurzman's conclusion that the data shows the threat of radicalization has been repelled, an opinion for which he offers no evidence.

He is careful to say there is a threat, noting that "revolutionary Islamist organizations overseas continue to call for Muslim-Americans to engage in violence." But in a Muslim-American population of 2 million, such cases barely register a blip in a country "on track to register 14,000 murders in 2011."

Murderers and terrorists both kill. But the comparison ends there. Murders tend to be individual acts, committed for personal or monetary reasons. Terrorist attacks seek mass casualties and seek to instill mass fear to deep economic harm and political surrender.

Kurzman authored a book last year detailing his theory. In a question-and-answer posting on his webpage, he explains that if Islamic radicalism were a genuine crisis, "we would see far more than the 20 Muslim-Americans, on average, who engage in terrorist plots each year." Until perspective comes to the debate, he writes, "we may wind up scaring ourselves into panicky policy decisions and a paranoid quality of life."

James Carafano, deputy director of the Heritage Foundation's Institute for International Studies, said it was misleading to use raw numbers on an issue like terrorism. Terrorists are "fringe elements of society" whose number never will equate to the damage they can cause.

"You could quadruple the number of attacks by Islamic terrorists and it would still be a small number [of the population]," said Carafano, who studied 40 disrupted homegrown terror threats. "Would people say that's not a problem because it is less than 2 percent? No, they would be apoplectic."

More HERE

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Shoulder-Fired Defense Missile Systems to Be Installed on All Israeli Passenger Planes

No sign that Americans will be similarly protected. It would cost only a fraction of what Obama has wasted on all his failed "green job" schemes

Defense officials have decided that systems against shoulder-fired missiles will be installed onboard all Israeli passenger planes, due to increased terror threats. Prior to this decision, discussions proposed the installation of the system on some of the aircraft, primarily those routinely traveling to “problematic" destinations.

El Al, Arkia, and Israir will all install the C-MUSIC system onboard all aircraft. The C-MUSIC system was designed and developed by Elbit System's ElOP division. Elbit Systems is presently completing the production of the initial systems, and several aircraft will be equipped with the system before the middle of the year.

The installation of the systems will conclude one of the largest failures in the history of the Israeli defense establishment. Several warnings which were brought up in the past year concerning the threat posed by shoulder-fired missiles have accelerated the process that began nearly a decade ago. On November 2002, terrorists attempted to shoot down an Arkia passenger plane departing from Mombasa airport.

The missiles were launched and missed, and a disaster was narrowly avoided.

El Al is readying for the installation of the initial systems. The company will serve as an installation contractor for Arkia and Israir as well. The system has generated tremendous interest throughout the world, and professional delegations from numerous aircraft companies interested in protecting their aircraft from the threat posed by shoulder-fired missiles are expected to arrive to Israel after the installation of the first system.

SOURCE

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Obama to Law Enforcement: Stop Linking Muslims to Terrorism

In yet another curtsy to the politically correct orthodoxy, President Barack Obama's White House plans to tinker with federal police curriculums for counterterrorism training classes. The first bit of "revamping" is the removal of all material that groups, such as the Council on American Islamic Relations, or CAIR, find offensive or containing a "negative" image of Muslims.
It’s a government-wide call to end Islamophobia, according to a blog by a Washington, DC-based watchdog group that investigates, exposes and prosecutes government corruption.

A few months after the Obama White House ordered an investigation of government counterterrorism training, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has destroyed instructional material that characterizes Muslims as prone to violence or terrorism, according to the Judicial Watch blog.

So far 700 pages of documents from about 300 presentations given to agents since the 2001 terrorist attacks have been purged, according to a new report published this week. The White House order came after the same publication reported in late November that the FBI, Department of Justice (DOJ) and Pentagon taught employees that mainstream Muslims embrace violence and compared the Islamic religion to the death star.

And the purge of training material regarding Islamic terrorism from law enforcement training is only the beginning. Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress that anti-Muslim instructional materials hurt the country’s fight against terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. As a result of this mentality, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were asked to collect counterterrorism training materials at all military academies and academic centers such as the National Defense Intelligence College and the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center.

"The goal, evidently, is to banish any material that could be viewed as offensive to Muslims," said the Jihadist Watch blog.

To fulfill this politically-correct mission, the FBI enlisted the Army Combating Terrorism Center at West Point to purge material that conflates terrorism with mainstream Islam, according to inside information cited in the Judicial Watch report. The cleansing also includes a White House review on any information related to “cultural awareness” training for troops that were preparing to deploy to the Middle East.

This appears to be part of a wider Muslim outreach effort on the part of the Obama Administration and the president’s allies in Congress. Last spring, for instance, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee quietly scheduled a special hearing to better protect Muslim civil rights in America. Organized by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin -- arguably one of the most sympathetic lawmakers to Islamic causes -- the event came in “response to the spike in anti-Muslim bigotry” and marked the first ever congressional hearing on Muslim civil rights.

It was Durbin who on the floor of the Senate in 2004 called U.S. soldiers Nazis, and detention centers such as Guantanamo Bay "gulags." He later apologized, but his constituents were happy to hear him denigrating U.S. troops since his district has a very large Muslim population, according to news reports.

According to the Examiner, other Muslim outreach efforts under Obama included: Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano meeting to discuss national security matters with a group of extremist Muslim organizations including members of the Muslim Brotherhood; the nation’s space agency (NASA) being ordered to focus on Muslim diplomacy; and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signing a special order to allow the re-entry of two radical Islamic academics whose terrorist ties long banned them from the U.S.

SOURCE

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"Liberals" and the Cult of Moral Relativism

Liberals as seen from a libertarian viewpoint -- by Sam Wells

Beyond the myths and fallacies of socialism, Keynesianism, and regulatory welfare statism, and beyond the junk science of fraudulent sham environmentalism, and beyond the rotten philosophical and ethical underpinnings of leftism, when it comes to basic motivations and the attitudes that drive the left-wing mindset, one will look in vain for a non-psychological explanation -- and one does not have to be a trained psychologist to be able to discern the whim-worshipping, power-lusting infantile complex that underlies leftism and its hatred for private property, capitalism, freedom, humankind, the United States, and non-arbitrary morality.

One reason dizzy liberals hate and fear principled freedom advocates so much is that we individualists often render value judgments -- and when the Liberal Mentality hears someone render a value judgment with which the "liberal" disagrees, the liberal wants to pretend that the value judgment is "invalid" because "there are never any absolutes" (a statement which, if true, is self-contradictory and therefore false). So, when a rational individualist renders a value judgement that a liberal doesn't like, the liberal often tries to attack ALL value judgements as invalid rather than dealing with the specific issue at hand -- and sometimes even accuses the principled individualist of wanting to "legislate morality" or somehow forcibly impose his moral judgement on him!

For example, if the rational individualist claims that using heroin and cocaine can be addictive and is bad for one's health, the liberal relativist reacts very defensively and with barely suppressed guilt symptoms, perhaps even petulantly stamping his or her foot in indignation and screeching something like "What right do you have to impose your moral judgements on me or other people! I have a right to do what I want!"

Notice that the rational individualist has in no way used force, either personal or political, to impose his views on the "liberal" or anyone else -- nor has he advocated using the force of political legislation to impose his observations about private personal behavior or anyone; but, the "liberal" -- almost always intellectually dishonest to the core -- wants to try to get away with portraying those who express moral sentiments as somehow threatening to impose their morality on others.

What the "liberal" really feels threatened by is not legislation but the idea that the morality of human behavior might not be arbitrary and subjective but based on rational principles and on absolute standards which if ignored could affect his life and happiness.

(Of course this same liberal sees nothing wrong or hypocritical with him using Big Government to impose his notions of morality on other people -- from compulsory school attendance laws, forced bussing of school children, anti-discrimination laws, Affirmative Action, compulsory seat belts, FDA restrictions on what vitamins you can take, laws against "quack" cancer cures, compulsory Social Security taxes, restrictions on using one's own land, antitrust laws, income taxes, price controls, and many other coercive interventions against peoples' freedom to engage in capitalist acts among consenting adults.)

The irony is that ONLY in a free society -- a society in which government is restricted by a policy of Laissez Faire -- are (adult) individuals recognized as responsible human beings who are free (from coercive interference) to do with their own bodies and properties whatever they want as long as they do not violate (through coercive interference) the same right of other adult citizens to do what they want with their own bodies and properties. This INCLUDES the freedom to do some things the rational individualist himself may disapprove of, such as self-mutilation, using LSD or heroin, putting gerbils up ones rectum, eating banana peels, drilling holes in the top of ones skull, sniffing glue, watching Jerry Springer or Geraldo Rivera, or reading Newsweek magazine.

Under the Laissez-Faire Republic which we advocate, people would be free to perform immoral follies on up to and including suicide -- as long as such actions do not involve the initiation of the use of coercive force in violation of the rights of others to their own persons and properties. Under freedom, ALL citizens' rights to person and property would be recognized, respected, and defended by law, including that of the "liberals" as well -- but not JUST the freedom of "liberals" to indulge in their own whims. The law would also protect the freedom of other people to disagree with the "liberals" and even the freedom of speech and of press to express disapproval of the immoral personal behaviors or foolish practices that are condoned and championed by the "liberals" and other moral relativists. It is this freedom -- the freedom to disagree with and disapprove of their pet vices and social programs -- that enrages "liberals" so much -- and why the "liberal"-left has sought to suppress any and all dissent and disagreement with its agenda by using its fascistic program of "political correctness" on college campuses and in the kept media. Their goal is to stamp out all publicly expressed views contrary to their own -- and especially those that reject epistemological and moral relativism in favor of rational standards and absolute principles and values.

The implicit reason that liberal relativists want to try to pretend that "there are no absolutes" or that morality is "relative" is that they want to reject any and all PRINCIPLES as such -- not just political legislation imposed by the power of the state, but also any NON- IMPOSED rules dealing with good conduct and bad habits to avoid. They want to be able to flaunt their vices & follies publicly while imposing a gag on anyone who would dare call their behavior "immoral" or foolish or imply that there could be any rational, absolute standards for behavior beyond their own personal whims or momentary feelings. They want the "luxury" of pretending that any and all chosen behavior has no consequences, no relevance one way or another to human life and morality. They want to replace rational principle with their own arbitrary whims. Of course, this is a recipe for disaster, both in the life of an individual and in the course of a nation.

The advance of human progress and civilization has been the result of the discovery, recognition, and implementation of sound principles and the abandonment of the arbitrariness of whim and the irrationality of superstition. By their vehement rejection of rational principles and absolute standards, today's left-wingers and "liberals" have abandoned progress and civilization and true science in favor of their own mystic religious cult, no longer pretending (as did Marx) that their socialism is "scientific" and rational.

Beyond that, it must be kept in mind that relativism in the areas of truth and morals necessarily leads to absolute tyranny in politics. If reality is seen as subjective and relative, that is, if reason is abandoned, then reality can no longer serve as an independent frame of reference or common ground by which disputes may be resolved, so that the only other way disputes can be dealt with is by brute force -- might makes right. Thus, the relativist premises of modern "liberalism" lead inevitably to more conflict in society and eventually to some form of statist tyranny.

Force -- especially the legal force of political government -- must never be allowed to be wielded by subjective Whim. Our Founding Fathers knew this. That's why they wanted to bind down men in government by the chains of a written Constitution. The relativist premises of modern liberalism are contrary to the vision, intent, and spirit of the American idea of using law to impose limitations on political government. It is high time Americans reimposed Constitutional limits on government by putting it under an iron-clad strait jacket called the policy of Laissez Faire based on the rational principle of individual human rights; otherwise, the tyranny of Whimarchy will continue down the road to absolute statism.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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25 February, 2012

Sheriffs standing with the people against the Feds

I have reported earlier that sheriffs in New Mexico are threatening to arrest federal agents if they attempt to enforce unconstitutional federal acts in contravention of state law.

The even better news is that sheriffs in other states are doing the same. Sheriff Brad Rogers of Elkhart County, Indiana has told Food and Drug Administration agents they will be arrested if they go on Amish farmer David Hochstetler’s land. Having falsely alleged that raw, unpasteurized milk sold by Hochstetler had caused several cases of food poisoning, the FDA filed a complaint in federal court to support their attack on the farmer.

I have consumed raw milk for years and can affirm that it is not only safe, but much healthier than pasteurized milk.

The threat of incarceration led the feds to withdraw their complaint against Hochstetler. This was even after US Department of Justice attorney Ross Goldstein emailed the Sheriff that he would be arrested if he protected Hochstetler. When Sheriff Rogers refused to back down, the FDA cried uncle.

Rogers’s communication to the feds seemed to have been quite convincing: “Any further attempts to inspect this farm without a warrant signed by a local judge, based on probable cause, will result in Federal inspectors’ removal or arrest for trespassing by my officers or I.” The feds have gotten used to acting without due process — in this case, that means not bothering to get a search warrant.

Rogers’ campaign website listed his number one objective as “Upholding the Constitution.” He is also concerned about the heart condition of his inmates and is determined to help “Provide Hope to Change a Heart.” Under that header he says, “The Elkhart County jail has 74 church services a month and allows unprecedented access to ministry volunteers. Not only can we impact inmates for the here and now, but for eternity.”

Sheriff Rogers requires his deputies to take three, two-day classes on the Constitution (at a tuition rate of $125 per person).

Rogers is not alone in his love for the Constitution. Ellis County, Texas Sheriff Johnny Brown has stated that he would resist any effort by the federal government to confiscate firearms in his county.

Sheriff Joe Baca in Sierra County, California told his county commission that he will not enforce road closures on Bureau of Land Management and Gila National Forest Lands.

Sheriff Gil Gilbertson of Josephine County, Oregon has told the Forest Service that he will protect those using the forest in his county. He has written a short treatise entitled, “Unraveling Federal Jurisdiction within a State.” It is actually a scholarly piece based on citations from the Constitution, court cases and statutes and concludes that the Forest Service has no authority in any county.

Siskiyou County, California Sheriff Jon Lopey has said: “I have told federal and state officials over and over that, yes, we want to preserve the environment, but you care more about the fish, frogs, trees and birds than you do about the human race. When will you start to balance your decisions to the needs of the people?…We are right now in a fight for our survival.” Lopey spearheaded a coalition of eight sheriffs calling themselves: “Defend Rural America.”

In the days after Hurricane Katrina, power was out for days. Food and medicine were about to be lost. So Sheriff Billy McGee of Forrest County, Mississippi — a Democrat — took action when he realized that a federal shipment of six trucks of ice bound for Hattiesburg turned out to be only four. McGee went in search of the other two and found them being guarded by some Army reservists who possessed bureaucratic mindsets.

McGee took steps to secure the ice, but was told he was not authorized to take the vehicles. When a reservist would not get off one of the trucks, McGee had him handcuffed. The ice was delivered where it was needed in Hattiesburg, explaining why McGee is also known as The Ice Man.

Not surprisingly, the feds have brought suit against the Sheriff in federal court. Perhaps McGee will arrest any marshals seeking to interfere with the duties of a peace officer.

It is encouraging that men of integrity, who understand that the sheriff is the top law enforcement officer in his county, have been elected in counties around the country. We should be looking for more who fit this description.

SOURCE

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Important Victory for Religious Liberty in Washington State

I’m pleased to report that a federal district court in Washington state today delivered an important victory for religious liberty. As I outlined in several posts some weeks ago, Washington state regulations violate the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment by compelling pharmacies and pharmacists to dispense the abortifacient drug Plan B, notwithstanding their religiously informed conscientious convictions not to participate in the destruction of the life of an unborn human being.

In its opinion today, the federal district court correctly ruled that the regulations do violate plaintiffs’ Free Exercise rights. Specifically, the court determined that the regulations are not neutral for purposes of deference under Employment Division v. Smith. Rather, they “are riddled with exemptions for secular conduct, but contain no such exemptions for identical religiously-motivated conduct” and thus amount to an “impermissible religious gerrymander.” Likewise, the regulations are not “generally applicable” but rather “have been selectively enforced, in two ways”: First, the rule that pharmacies timely deliver all lawful medications has been enforced only against the plaintiff pharmacy and only for failure to deliver plan B. Second, the rules haven’t been enforced against the state’s numerous Catholic-affiliated pharmacies, which also refuse to stock or dispense Plan B.

For each of these reasons, the regulations are therefore subject to strict scrutiny, which they can’t survive.

The court also found that the state regulations were “aimed at Plan B and conscientious objectors from their inception.” Indeed, “the predominant purpose of the rule was to stamp out the right to refuse.”

Congratulations to the Becket Fund and to the Seattle law firm of Ellis, Li & McKinstry on their important victory.

Just a couple of additional observations:

1. The argument that the HHS mandate violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is far simpler to grasp than today’s sound ruling is. In part that’s because, in the case of the HHS mandate (a federal action subject to RFRA), there’s no need to reach the Free Exercise issue, including the threshold question whether the mandate is a neutral and generally applicable law for purposes of deference under Employment Division v. Smith (it’s not). In part that’s because it’s so immediately obvious that the HHS mandate flunks the “least restrictive means” test.

Before today, I already regarded the position that the HHS mandate violates RFRA as a slam-dunk winner, as a 9-0 ruling in the event that the issue ever reaches the Supreme Court. (It probably won’t reach the Court, as it’s highly unlikely that any court of appeals will get this one wrong.)

2. Some might be inclined to discredit today’s ruling on the ground that the judge who issued it, Judge Ronald B. Leighton, was appointed by President George W. Bush and therefore might be thought to have, and to have indulged, social-conservative biases. That’s an extremely improbable hypothesis. Set aside the fact that Leighton had to pass the scrutiny of Washington’s Democratic senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, ever to get nominated. More telling is that Leighton, “in a sometimes emotional ruling from the bench,” ruled in September 2010 that the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law could not constitutionally be applied to a lesbian who had been discharged from the military and ordered her reinstated.

SOURCE

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American Majority Dependent on Government: How Dangerous is it?

In an effort to bolster the political fortunes of President Obama, the media panjandrums have been cheerleading about the improvements in the American economy. Recovery appears to be building, notes the New York Times. The GDP growth is now projected at 3.5 percent, a tonic for the sleepy start of the fiscal year. The unemployment rate has declined, notwithstanding those who no longer seek employment.

The lights are synchronized in green for Obama’s reelection, or that is the growing sentiment. But there is an argument, far more telling than present statistical improvement, which must be made. The policies of Obama’s last four years have moved the nation down the road of serfdom. Give away programs have tied free individuals to the shackles of the state.

As of 2011, almost 45 million Americans are on foodstamps, approximately one in seven people. In New York City 1.8 million citizens collect foodstamps, one in four. Forty-seven percent of Americans do not pay a personal income tax and most of these people receive subventions from the government. Thirty-six percent of Americans who file tax forms do not a pay personal income tax. The number of those in a condition of poverty increased 9.5 percent since 2009, with a total of 43.6 million.Again, almost all of these individuals receive government assistance of one kind or another.

My contention isn’t merely that we spend more than we can afford—an obvious and well treated concern. I would assert that despite positive signs in the economic picture, we are nearing the “tipping point,” a transformative moment when a majority of Americans are dependent on government largess. This is the path Americans have been on for some time, but it has been accelerated by the policies of the Obama administration.

Thomas Jefferson once noted, “a government that can give you everything you want can take everything you have.” Frédéric Bastiat echoed this sentiment when he wrote “Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else,” and Voltaire captured this concern with his claim, “In general the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.” It is not surprising that in taking from Peter to give to Paul, Paul doesn’t complain.

This isn’t merely the essence of class warfare, it is the entrapment of leviathan. Former President Bill Clinton said “the age of big government is over.” By any standard this comment is absurd. Big government is alive, well, and growing. There isn’t the slightest sign it can or will abate until a crisis arises.

Moreover, it is difficult to envision what happens at that point since depending on one’s calculation, the majority is already feeding from the public trough. Will a majority vote to reduce its benefits? Will a president about to be reelected on the basis of public give-aways tell the truth about economic conditions?

This presidential campaign offers a unique opportunity to tell the truth about what ails us. But the Republicans are afraid of “Third Rail” repercussions if they bring up unfunded liabilities in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. And the Democrats want to create the illusion they are the compassionate party, eager to assist the poor and downtrodden, a stereotype that is inconsistent with Big Labor support and the endorsement of the Plaintiffs Bar.

As a consequence, the truth is buried and the Hayakian scenario of the Road to Serfdom is ominously palpable. Perhaps it is time for both parties to accept Edmund Burke’s admonition that “No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.” My hope is that this campaign is the beginning of a “little,” to reverse the emerging tipping point in the American economy.

SOURCE

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Higher tax rate REDUCES revenue in Britain

The amount of income tax paid fell sharply last month in the first formal indication that the new 50p higher rate is not raising the expected amount of revenue.

The Treasury received £10.35 billion in income tax payments from those paying by self-assessment last month, a drop of £509 million compared with January 2011. Most other taxes produced higher revenues over the same period.

Senior sources said that the first official figures indicated that there had been “manoeuvring” by well-off Britons to avoid the new higher rate. The figures will add to pressure on the Coalition to drop the levy amid fears it is forcing entrepreneurs to relocate abroad. [Many businesses have already done so]

The self-assessment returns from January, when most income tax is paid by the better-off, have been eagerly awaited by the Treasury and government ministers as they provide the first evidence of the success, or failure, of the 50p rate. It is the first year following the introduction of the 50p rate which had been expected to boost tax revenues from self-assessment by more than £1billion.

Although the official statistics do not disclose how much money was paid at the 50p rate of tax, the figures indicate that it is falling short of the money the levy was expected to raise.

A Treasury source said the relatively poor revenues from self-assessment returns was partly down to highly-paid individuals arranging their affairs to avoid paying the 50p rate.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Federal court: DOMA unconstitutional: "Another federal judge has found unconstitutional a key part of the Defense of Marriage Act, the federal law which forbids providing federal government benefits to same-sex spouses. U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White, who sits in San Francisco and was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, issued the ruling Wednesday afternoon in a case involving federal judicial law clerk Karen Golinski's request for benefits for her female spouse."

Wife of Assassinated Iranian Scientist: Annihilation of Israel was his ultimate goal: "The wife of Martyr Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan Behdast, who was assassinated by Mossad agents in Tehran in January, reiterated on Tuesday that her husband sought the annihilation of the Zionist regime wholeheartedly. "Mostafa's ultimate goal was the annihilation of Israel," Fatemeh Bolouri Kashani told FNA on Tuesday. Bolouri Kashani also underlined that her spouse loved any resistance figure in his life who was willing to fight the Zionist regime and supported the rights of the oppressed Palestinian nation. Iran's 32-year-old Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan Behdast, a chemistry professor and a deputy director of commerce at Natanz uranium enrichment facility, was assassinated during the morning rush-hour in the capital early January. His driver was also killed"

Times Square Billboards: ‘Don’t Believe the Liberal Media!’: "The Media Research Center (MRC), a watchdog group that tracks liberal bias in the news, had two massive billboards erected in New York City’s Times Square on Tuesday. The billboards say “Don’t Believe the Liberal Media!” and they are expected to be viewed by 1.3 million onlookers over the next four weeks, according to the MRC. “There is no better location for this billboard than the liberal media’s own backyard,” said MRC President Brent Bozell in a statement."

DOJ harassment of Gibson guitars: "Last August, in a strange fit of regulatory scrupulousness, the Department of Justice swooped into Gibson Guitar factories in Memphis and Nashville, interrupting productivity with the claim that the musical instrument manufacturer might be using certain "illegal" imported woods. Six months later, however, the DOJ still hasn't filed charges -- surprise, surprise. "They...come in with weapons, they seized a half-million dollars worth of property, they shut our factory down, and they have not charged us with anything," says Gibson Guitars CEO Henry Juszkiewicz"

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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24 February, 2012

Another lot of Obama soulmates getting the gravy

None dare call it corruption

Not content with making the health insurance industry unprofitable, through rules and regulations set out in enacting Obamacare, the Obama administration released the first eight grants/loans under the Consumer Oriented and Operated Plan (CO-OP) program.

The CO-OP program was established under the Obamacare law to put into place one federal government selected group in every state that is supposed to provide an insurance alternative to those few companies that remain after the imposition of the law.

The grants/loans have raised the political antenna of Bill Wilson, the President of Americans for Limited Government who said, “These grants/loans reek of political payola as one group, the Saul Alinsky-affiliated, Common Ground Healthcare Cooperative of Wisconsin was formed in August, 2011 just three short months prior to applying for the taxpayer money. In true, Rules for Radicals fashion, Obama’s administration found this group worthy of receiving $56,416,000 in taxpayer largesse.”

Common Ground is an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation, a group the radical Saul Alinsky founded, as reported by the Journal Sentinel in Milwaukee.

The provision of $56 million taxpayer funds by the federal government for health care organizing comes at a time when Wisconsin’s public employee unions are orchestrating a recall election of the Governor after failing in a retaliatory bid for power in the Senate last year. Wisconsin’s state government moved forward with changes in the state’s collective bargaining rules early in 2011 over the objections of the unions. Ironically, those changes have allowed the state to bring the budget into balance without having to lay off any public employees.

Wilson continued his analysis stating, “Only the most naïve would believe that this $56 million injection of money into the political charged atmosphere in Wisconsin is anything more than an attempt to buy votes in favor of the public employee recall election of Governor Scott Walker and to tip the balance in this important swing state in November.

“There are no lengths that Obama won’t go in his attempt to use Chicago-style politics to drive his election bid, and this $56 million to a group with no track record and dubious connections is just one more outrage,” Wilson concluded.

Shockingly, the rules governing the grants issued by Obama’s Health and Human Services Department projected that the CO-OPs would have a 35-40 percent default rate. With $3.4 billion budgeted for the program, the most conservative loss estimate is $1.19 billion, or twice the total cost to taxpayers of the Obama Energy Department funded Solyndra failure.

Other groups receiving grants are the Freelancers CO-OP of New Jersey, Freelancers CO-OP of Oregon, Freelancers Health Service Corporation (based in New York), New Mexico Health Connections, Montana Health Cooperative and Midwest Members Health (Iowa and Nebraska.)

According to Politico Pro, a private subscription news service, the CO-OPs have been termed government funded “venture capital for health care” by the executive director of the Freelancers Union Insurance programs. Ironically, the Freelancers programs have come under fire over the years for inefficient operations and a variety of difficulties regarding member coverage. The CO-Ops will be able to offer health plans starting on January 1, 2014.

SOURCE

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If Economy's Improving, Why Is Dependency Growing?

The government is at full throttle to present the economy as improving especially in light of the upcoming election. At the same time, there has been a stunning rise in dependency as most recently presented by the Heritage Foundation.

Heritage defines dependency as significantly depending on the government for help in two of the following basic expense items: housing, food, shelter, income security or higher education.

At the end of 2007, Heritage conservatively estimates there were 59.4 million Americans significantly dependent on the government. By the end of 2010, this number had risen to 67.3 million, an increase of nearly 8 million. It is likely that another two or three million were added in 2011, for a net increase of 10 million to 11 million over the past four years.

It is not a coincidence that the number of people participating in the labor force has comparably declined over the same period.

At the end of 2007, participation in the labor force was 66% of the available working age population, with a labor force of 146.2 million. By the end of 2011, it was 64%, with a decrease of 5.4 million workers to 140.8 million. The official number of unemployed people rose from 7.7 million at the end of 2007 to 13.1 million at the end of 2011, without any accounting for those who were "too discouraged to look for work."

Nevertheless, as the government has included fewer and fewer people in the category of searching for work, the official unemployment rate continues to fall because both the numerator and the denominator used to make that calculation are losing equal amounts.

In fact, the January BLS report that was so joyfully received by the market showed an Unemployment Rate of 8.3% but a decrease in labor force participation to 63.7% because another 1.2 million people left the labor force.

How can we have falling unemployment and falling labor force participation at the same time? I heard a story a while ago about a woman who had been making $50,000 per year who was laid off. After some months of casually searching for a full time job, she was offered one paying $40,000, but she refused it.

Her logic was, I am getting $20,000 per year from unemployment benefits, and I am collecting $18,000 per year from baby-sitting off-the-books three days a week, which, after accounting for my lower taxes, works out to almost the same for less work.

Why should she work harder than necessary to pursue happiness? When 67.3 million other Americans are taking easy money from the government, why should she stand on ceremony? Where is the shame? Where is the stigma? Is she "too discouraged" or just selfish? My fear is that many people will look at her experience and say, how can I work only three days a week and collect the same money?

Certainly, the government is not going out of its way to stop this waste, particularly because her example, repeated over and over again, allows the government to point to a falling unemployment as proof that we are on the road to recovery.

The government imagines that as more people become dependent on it, the official unemployment numbers will look better, and our animal spirits and therefore the economy will revive.

But the corruption of the workforce is utterly corrosive to America in the long term. We are supposed to be the "land of the free, and the home of the brave." But we are drifting closer to the European attitude of "Sauve Qui Peut," or "Every man for himself."

We may have something that looks like a recovery between now and the election, but if it is based on people leaving the workforce to take benefits and work off the books, it will be a Potemkin recovery.

SOURCE

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The USA is already in the same boat as Europe

With seemingly every day bringing more bad news from Europe, many are beginning to ask how much longer the United States has before our welfare state follows the European model into bankruptcy. The bad news is: It may already have.

This year, the fourth straight year that we borrowed more than $1 trillion to support the U.S. government, our budget deficit will top $1.3 trillion, 8.7 percent of our GDP. If you think that sounds bad, it’s because it is. In fact, only two European countries, Greece and Ireland, have larger budget deficits as a percentage of GDP. Things are only slightly better when you look at the size of our national debt, which now exceeds $15.3 trillion, 102 percent of GDP. Just four European countries have larger national debts than we do — Greece and Ireland again, plus Portugal and Italy. That means the U.S. government is actually less fiscally responsible than countries like France, Belgium, or Spain.

And as bad as things are right now, we are on an even worse course for the future. If one adds the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare to our official national debt, we really owe $72 trillion, by the Obama administration’s projections for future Medicare savings under Obamacare, and as much as $137 trillion if you use more realistic projections. Under the best-case scenario, then, this amounts to more than 480 percent of GDP. And, under more realistic projections, we owe an astounding 911 percent of GDP.

Meanwhile, counting both official debt and unfunded pension and health-care liabilities, the most indebted nation in Europe is Greece, which owes 875 percent of GDP. That’s right, the United States potentially owes more than Greece. France, the second most insolvent nation in Europe, owes just 549 percent of GDP. Even under the most optimistic scenario, we owe more than such fiscal basket cases as Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain.

So far we have been able to avoid the consequences of our profligate ways because the very public turmoil in Europe has helped prop us up as the world’s safe haven for foreign investment. Compared to the euro’s problems, the dollar looks pretty safe. This means that others are still willing to lend us money at absurdly low rates. But that won’t last forever. In fact, already seven European countries, including Germany and Sweden, have better credit ratings than the U.S.

Perhaps we can take some solace in the fact that our welfare state is not yet as big as Europe’s. But the key word here is “yet.” Today, our federal government spends more than 24 percent of GDP. Throw in state and local spending, and government at all levels consumes over 43 percent of everything produced in this country over the course of a year. As bad as that is, it’s still less than Europe, where the average of government spending at all levels is slightly more than 50 percent of GDP. But the Congressional Budget Office projects that federal-government spending in this country is currently on a path to exceed 42 percent of GDP by 2050. Government spending at all levels will exceed 59 percent of GDP. And CBO assumes state and local spending will decline in the future, which seems unlikely.

By way of comparison, today, Ireland is the only country in Europe with a bigger government than the U.S.’s will be in 2050. That’s right, one can look at countries like France and Greece, or even Denmark and Sweden, and realize that we will eventually have bigger governments than those quintessential welfare states have today.

At that point does the United States cease being the United States as we have known it? At the very least, can our economy survive such a crushing burden of government spending, and its attendant level of taxes and debt?

Given this looming disaster, President Obama has just submitted a budget that explicitly rejects “austerity,” avoids any reform of Medicare or Social Security, and adds some $7 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years. And Republicans? They are busy debating the pros and cons of birth control. What is wrong with this picture?

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

White House economic team never believed ‘stimulus’ would work: "Former White House Council of Economic Advisors head Christina Romer apparently never thought the $800 billion “stimulus” that was supposed to turn the economy around would work, a new book shedding light on the early days of the Obama Administration says. A memo brought to light in “The Escape Artists” by Noam Scheiber shows Romer originally proposed a spending plan that totaled $1.8 trillion, but the figure was dismissed as politically infeasible by Larry Summers, Director of the White House Economic Council. Romer came back with a watered down proposal of $1.2 trillion, but that was left out of the final proposal brought before Barack Obama himself. Nonetheless, even though the final proposal was a full $1 trillion short of what she thought would work, Romer penned the political document that justified the $800 billion figure."

IAEA: Latest Iran talks a failure: "The UN nuclear agency has declared its latest inspection visit to Iran a failure, with the regime blocking access to a key site suspected of hosting covert nuclear weapon research and no agreement reached on how to resolve other unanswered questions. The statement from the International Atomic Energy Agency was issued shortly after an Iranian general warned of a pre-emptive strike against any nation that threatens Iran."

The third-party payment problem: "Taking out insurance (or paying taxes) so that some third-party pays when a big-ticket, catastrophic health expense comes your way is perfectly rational. But paying someone else to take responsibility for your predictable, routine, run-of-the-mill health costs is crazy. It introduces huge dead-weight administrative costs and seriously distorted incentives, and is one of the key drivers of out-of-control healthcare inflation."

Politicians fiddle while fiscal crisis looms: "Imagine this family budget: Last year, you earned $24,700. But you spent $37,900, incurring $13,300 in debt, and you were already $153,500 in debt. So you say, 'I promise I'll spend $300 less this year!' Anyone can see that your cutback is pathetic and that you need to spend much less. Yet if you add eight zeroes, that's America's budget."

IN: Lawmaker opposes Girl Scout honor: "An Indiana lawmaker won't support a resolution celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Girl Scouts because he believes it is a 'radicalized organization' that supports abortion and promotes homosexuality. Rep. Bob Morris of Fort Wayne has sent a letter to fellow Indiana House Republicans explaining why he opposes the nonbinding resolution."

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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23 February, 2012

The compulsive religion of Leftism trumps all other loyalties, even among many alleged Christians

Regular readers of Townhall may have noticed a column penned last week by this writer questioning the easy expectations of many observers that most liberal Catholics will abandon President Obama over the birth control mandates. Quite a number of commentators claimed that Obama achieved the impossible by uniting liberal and conservative Catholics into a united “tribe” hotly opposing the new HHS mandates. Some of the commentators claimed that this misstep would cost Obama the November elections.

The aforementioned column took issue with the easy assumption that left wing Catholics would rally to Mother Church and desert Obama, and suggested that most of those Catholics would vote Democratic in November, proving that social liberalism trumps religious orthodoxy nearly every time. Liberal clerics, however, placing social activism above theology and praising it as the highest possible virtue is certainly nothing new. It is, part of a continuum which has marked Anglo-American history for at least the last century-and-a-half.

The earliest strains of this tendency to replace traditional religious piety with the social reform impetus can be seen as far back as the mid-1820s with the spread of Unitarianism. The Unitarians preached a flexible and rationalist theology, and combined it with a low-key ritual, which attracted many upper class types, scientists, and intellectuals. In the words of Paul Johnson, the British historian, Unitarianism became for many intellectuals, “…a halfway house on the long road to agnosticism”.

This trend led, in the late nineteenth century, to the emergence of what became known as the “Social Gospel”. Theologians like Dwight Sunday and Mary Baker Eddy all sang from the social reform hymnbook. Washington Gladden coined the term “Social Gospel” by which he meant the churches promoting social reform, aiding the poor, and remaking the world for the supposed benefit of the ordinary citizen. Many of the Social Gospellers vigorously criticized the American economic system, saving particular scorn for competition and the profit motive, condemning them as wasteful and mercenary.

In point of fact, this movement and the entire habit of confusing theology with social reformism could be seen in much of Christendom by the early Twentieth Century. Efforts to use Christianity as a means to transform the social order could be seen in continental Europe where the development of “Christian Socialism” took an overtly political turn after 1910. In Britain high clerics including Archbishops of Canterbury Cosmo Lang and William Temple fully supported the idea of religious social activism. Lang often quoted the line credited to the American political humorist Finley Peter Dunne, stating that “…the purpose of religion is not to comfort the afflicted, it is to afflict the comfortable.” William Temple, for his own part, became the first avowed Socialist to head the Anglican Church.

The turn of American religious denomination away from theology and toward social activism continued apace throughout the Twentieth Century. The growing secularization of society, both in thought and action, led many traditional mainline Protestant Churches including the so-called “Seven Sisters” (United Church of Christ, United Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church-USA, Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, Episcopal Church-USA, American Baptist Churches of the USA, Disciples of Christ) to blithely follow along by liberalizing and secularizing themselves. While these changes alienated some church members, the new secular emphasis fully engaged numerous clerics and considerable numbers of younger members of church congregations.

The Catholic Church fell prey to these same secularizing and liberalizing tendencies. The Second Vatican Council (1962-65) institutionalized many of the generally Social democratic ideas which had taken root in the church by the late 1940s and the propagation of such ideas proceeded apace, as formerly conservative Catholic religious orders, particularly the Jesuits, radicalized during the 1960s. By the early 1980s Catholic priests and the lay religious played a central role in the nuclear freeze movement, critiqued capitalism (and found it wanting) and adopted a permissive, even encouraging, attitude toward homosexual conduct, even among their own officially celibate membership.

Today the social activist strain among American Protestants can be seen in the sense that most denominations began ordaining women priests years ago. The Episcopals and the United Church of Christ have waged very public internal battles recently over the installation of openly Gay bishops. Finally, the African Methodist Episcopal Church serves as a bully pulpit for the lunatic Anti-American ranting of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

On the Catholic side, the radicalism of the 1980s has been tamed, to a certain extent. Still, among a sizable segment of lay Catholics and among some nuns and priests there exists open support for birth control and support for legalized abortion, although this is carefully qualified as “…only when medically necessary”. Catholic congregations regularly hear sermons supporting mildly socialist ideas, criticizing Republicans, and counseling “peace” even when confronted with the conclusive evidence of radical Islamic intent to wage war on Christianity and the USA.

The point of this column is not to impugn the integrity of the often dedicated and selfless people who comprise the Religious Left in America. These folks deserve commendation for the fact that, in an increasingly nihilistic world, they have values and they largely stick to them. The point, however, is to state that among the Religious Left, their leftism generally trumps their religiosity. Few of the Protestants who support women priests, Gay bishops, or the anti-American hysteria of the Reverend Wright will disown the Democratic Party in November. Likewise, one would be wise to refrain from betting that the pro-abortion, pro-birth control Catholics will permanently stray from their home in the Obama wing of the Democratic Party. They may be making a little noise right now, but they will return home this coming Fall.

In a world that now equates social work with piety, and rallies, demonstrations and “occupations” with theology, the activist side gets the upper hand. Among liberal Christians their liberal side usually takes the measure of their Christianity. This is a grim fact that those who predict a massive religious defection from Obama and the Democrats would do well to remember.

SOURCE

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The 'Fairness' Fraud

Thomas Sowell

During a recent Fox News Channel debate about the Obama administration's tax policies, Democrat Bob Beckel raised the issue of "fairness."

He pointed out that a child born to a poor woman in the Bronx enters the world with far worse prospects than a child born to an affluent couple in Connecticut.

No one can deny that. The relevant question, however, is: How does allowing politicians to take more money in taxes from successful people, to squander in ways that will improve their own reelection prospects, make anything more "fair" for others?

Even if additional tax revenue all went to poor single mothers -- which it will not -- the multiple problems of children raised by poor single mothers would not be cured by throwing money at them. Indeed, the skyrocketing of unwed motherhood began when government welfare programs began throwing money at teenage girls who got pregnant.

Children born and raised without fathers are a major problem to society and to themselves. There is nothing "fair" about increasing the number of such children.

A more fundamental problem with the "fairness" issue raised by Beckel and many others is the slippery vagueness of the word "fair." To ask whether life is fair -- either here and now, or at any time or place around the world, over the past several thousand years -- is to ask a question whose answer is obvious. Life has seldom been within shouting distance of fair, in the sense of even approximately equal prospects of success.

Countries whose politicians have been able to squander ever larger amounts of a nation's resources have not only failed to make the world more fair, the concentration of more resources and power in these politicians' hands has led to results that were often counterproductive at best, and bloodily catastrophic at worst.

More fundamentally, the question whether life is fair is very different from the question whether a given society's rules are fair. Society's rules can be fair in the sense of using the same standards of rewards and punishments for everyone. But that barely scratches the surface of making prospects or outcomes the same.

People raised in different homes, neighborhoods and cultures are going to behave differently -- and those differences have consequences. The multiculturalist dogma may say that all cultures are equal, or equally deserving of respect, but treating cultures as sacrosanct freezes people into the circumstances into which they happened to be born, much like a caste system.

While talk about "fairness" may provide a fig leaf to cover politicians' naked attempts to grab more and more of the nation's resources to spend, there is no assurance that raising tax rates on "the rich" will result in any more tax revenue for the government. High tax rates have too often simply caused wealthy people to put their money into tax-free securities or to send it overseas.

Four years ago, TV interviewer Charles Gibson pointed out to candidate Barack Obama that raising capital gains tax rates had on a number of occasions led to less capital gains tax revenue being collected -- and, conversely, lowering the capital gains tax rates had on other occasions increased the amount of capital gains revenue collected by the government.

Obama readily admitted that. But he said that "fairness" justified a higher tax rate on "the rich." Yet how does a higher tax rate on paper, without a real increase in the amount of taxes actually collected, promote fairness?

However, raising tax rates on "the rich" pays off politically, even if the government loses revenues when the rich put their money into tax shelters.

High tax rates in the upper income brackets allow politicians to win votes with class warfare rhetoric, painting their opponents as defenders of the rich. Meanwhile, the same politicians can win donations from the rich by creating tax loopholes that can keep the rich from actually paying those higher tax rates -- or perhaps any taxes at all.

What is worse than class warfare is phony class warfare. Slippery talk about "fairness" is at the heart of this fraud by politicians seeking to squander more of the nation's resources.

SOURCE

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Newest Government Magic Trick: Disability Fraud Holds Down Unemployment Rate

Looking for another reason for an artificially low unemployment rate? Consider disability fraud, people claiming disabilities they do not have such as mental illness. Prior to the great recession 33% of applicants claimed mental illness. The number is 43% now.

There was fraud before, of course. There is even more fraud now. Please consider: Jobless disability claims soar to record $200B as of January

Standing too many months on the unemployment line is driving Americans crazy — literally — and it’s costing taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.

With their unemployment-insurance checks running out, some of the country’s long-term jobless are scrambling to fill the gap by filing claims for mental illness and other disabilities with Social Security — a surge that hobbles taxpayers and making the employment rate look healthier than it should as these people drop out of the job statistics.

As of January, the federal government was mailing out disability checks to more than 10.5 million individuals, including 2 million to spouses and children of disabled workers, at a cost of record $200 billion a year, recent research from JPMorgan Chase shows.

The sputtering economy has fueled those ranks. Around 5.3 percent of the population between the ages of 25 and 64 is currently collecting federal disability payments, a jump from 4.5 percent since the economy slid into a recession.

Mental-illness claims, in particular, are surging. During the recent economic boom, only 33 percent of applicants were claiming mental illness, but that figure has jumped to 43 percent, says Rutledge, citing preliminary results from his latest research.

His research also shows a growing number of men, particularly older, former white-collar workers, instead of the typical blue-collar ones, are applying.

The big concern about the swelling ranks is that once people get on disability, they’re unlikely to give it up and go back to work.

What's the Number?

The above article says there were 10.5 million individuals receiving disability checks. A quick check of Fed data shows there are 27.5 million Civilian Noninstitutional Population - With a Disability, 16 years and over. Unfortunately the data only goes back to mid-2008. I would like to see the pattern before the recession began.

We can see a brief recovery for a year following the end of the recession. However, since mid-2010 the number of people with disabilities has risen by 1.5 million.

All of them dropped out of the labor force and are no longer counted as unemployed.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Is the Obama administration trying to expand federal collective bargaining?: "Expanded collective bargaining at any level of government would be bad news for taxpayers, as it is the mechanism government employee unions use to gain for themselves compensation and benefits -- and ironclad job security -- well beyond those prevalent in the private sector for similar work. This is a bad enough problem at the state and local level."

Voter ID laws are growing; so are challenges: "Thirty-one states have voter identification laws, including eight -- in Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin -- that were enacted or toughened last year. Of the 31 laws, 27 are expected to be in effect for the general election this year, says Meagan Dorsch, spokeswoman for the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), a bipartisan research group. One has been blocked by federal action; three have later effective dates."

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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22 February, 2012

A very weak recovery

It is not dissected below but it seems likely that most of the growth in employment we have seen is the product, directly or indirectly, of the boom in the oil and gas industry -- mainly due to innovations such as fracking. And those innovations made headway only because they sneaked up relatively fast -- so fast that Obama and his EPA did not have enough time to ban them

As the most widely reported rate of unemployment (U-3) has fallen in recent months, people with a political agenda served by painting a rosy picture of the recovery have made considerable noise about this decrease. Their political opponents have responded that one reason for the decline is that the labor force has fallen as more people have given up looking for work, some of them going into retirement sooner than they would have if the labor market had been more robust.

The best way to avoid the parsing and cherry-picking that plague such debates is to look not at unemployment, but at employment. After all, it’s employment that contributes to the production of goods and services and generates earnings for the job holders. Employment is less subject to interpretive ambiguity than unemployment is.

The most recently reported data on private nonfarm employment, for January 2012, show that employment has indeed continued its recovery. Since reaching its current-recession trough about two years ago, it has increased by about 3 million persons. Before starting a celebration, however, we should recognize that private nonfarm employment is still about 5 million persons less than it was at its pre-recession peak in 2008.



Moreover, such private employment is currently more than a million persons less than it was in December 2000, more than eleven years ago, on the eve of the dot-com bust. So, at this point, we have suffered more than the proverbial “lost decade” in the private labor market—the one in which employees are hired to produce goods and services that consumers and investors have demonstrated they actually value (or for which producers are convinced that such demand will be forthcoming).

To be sure, labor productivity has increased during this period, yet the likelihood is slight that sustained economic growth can take place in the future without long-term growth in private employment. A very large recession-related loss of private employment remains to be recouped, however, before we can even begin to think about the long-term growth of employment. The situation has improved somewhat in the past two years, no doubt, yet the labor market has a long way to go—it has about 5/8 of its recent loss to make up—merely to get back to its pre-recession peak.

SOURCE

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Why “Progressives” and not “Liberals”?

Derek Hunter

I’ve been contacted by many readers asking why I use the word “progressive” instead of “liberal.” I figured I’d write a little bit about why this week…

The Change

Remember when Democrats used to call themselves liberals? Then conservatives showed the world what liberals really were, and no one wanted to call themselves that anymore.

Now, they call themselves progressives again – as they did in the early 20th century until their racist/fascist agenda was rejected and they went into hiding under the word liberal. (To you progressives outraged by this truth, read Jonah Goldberg’s masterful book Liberal Fascism and open your eyes to your eugenics-loving, racist roots.)

Their name has changed, but their objectives have not. They want an all-powerful federal government with the individual subjected to its will and whims.

Naturally, they support such a thing only when there is a progressive in charge and will scream bloody murder when a non-progressive dare exercise power of any sort. For an example of this, see the Bush years.

Remember the Bush years … when the president went to Congress and got approval for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq? Ever wonder, then, where the anti-war movement went, and why, after Obama’s surge in Afghanistan and bombing of Libya, there wasn’t a massive rally on the National Mall?

Did those fervent anti-war protesters suddenly decided to “give war a chance”? And where is former MSNBC staple Cindy Sheehan now? Or Code Pink? When was the last time you saw them on TV? We’re still at war; only nobody is protesting it anymore.

That’s because it never was about war. It was about damaging a political opponent. Their guy is running things now. And he’s in trouble.

After failing miserably to have any positive impact on the economy – and spending trillions to do it – the 2010 election happened and Republicans swept the House. The Tea Party exists, and it is spreading the word about the virtues of smaller government and warning about overspending. The only things that terrify progressives more than those ideas are black conservatives and women carrying babies until they’re born.

How Far Will They Go?

One thing progressives won’t do is allow anything, and I mean ANYTHING, to stand in the way of their agenda.

Be it the grandmother who loved and raised President Barack Obama after his degenerate mother abandoned him only to be reduced to a racist, a “typical white person” when it became politically advantageous to distract from Jeremiah Wright … or the entire feminist movement when Bill Clinton was charged with sexual harassment (and assault … and rape), nothing is sacred beyond the agenda.

Add to that list the Occupy Wall Street rape victims.

On Monday’s Countdown on Current TV, former MSNBC talking head Keith Olbermann and Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas joked about the numerous, documented charges of sexual assault and rape at various “Occupy Wall Street” encampments around the country, denying they’d happened. Twitter exploded with outrage.

There was a time when “the seriousness of the charge” was all that mattered when it came to sexual assault/harassment, but that was when conservatives (Clarence Thomas) were the ones being charged. Since progressives make their living through hypocrisy, that standard went out the window under President Clinton and was changed to “drag a $100 bill through a trailer park” and see what you get.

Soon after dismissing rape of “Occupiers” by other “Occupiers,” Olbermann replied to a tweet from Washington Times columnist Henry D’Andrea’s tweet demanding a retraction and apology with, “No Occupy rapes, no cover-up, no apology, no retraction, and credibility for your Moonie-owned “newspaper.”

Setting aside the unprovoked religious bigotry from the “tolerant” Olbermann, that’s a flat-out denial that there were any rapes of Occupy women. That’s Keith saying the many, many women who filed rape and/or sexual assault charges with the police are lying. Here’s the bus, Occupy ladies, get ready to slide under it.

Probably realizing he’d stepped in it, Olbermann, who holds the Orwellian title of “Chief News Officer” at Current, then went on to accuse Andrew Breitbart of concocting the charges. When presented with a detailed list of criminal activity at “Occupy” camps, Olbermann changed his tune again to, “Looking at the (Breitbart) ‘Occupy Assault List’ I notice VICTIMS were in Occupy, not the assailants. Why are you blaming the victims?”

This, of course, is a flat-out lie. Olbermann knows it, but he doesn’t care. Those women and men who were raped and/or sexually assaulted at “Occupy” camps, those victimized by “Occupiers” and those now, stand in the way of the progressive agenda. As such, they were told by Keith to shut up and “take one for the team.”

Olbermann than went on several Twitter tirades against Breitbart in the hope of distracting from his own stupidity. He knows the rules. He knows there’s a bus out there with his name on it should enough progressives decide he hurts the cause more than he helps it.

Breitbart has the truth on his side, but truth is of little use to Olbermann and his fellow progressives. And neither are rape victims.

Keith continues to obsess over Andrew Breitbart like he was Rebecca Lobo, desperate to avoid that bus. He’s willing to do whatever he must to avoid the fate he willfully imposed on those women who did nothing beyond showing up to a protest progressives told them was good and pure. This is how progressives work.

You Are Being Lied To

I’d call progressives’ history of lies and distortions fascist tactics and remind everyone of how progressives in this country loved and were fascists in the 1930s. But there’s no need (again, see Jonah’s book). Not because they’re not, but because we all know the sun rises in the east.

That paragraph would not have been necessary at all if we had an honest media and education system. We don’t because that famous “liberal bias” everyone knows and loves is, at its core, a progressive bias. (For the most complete takedown of how the Progressive Industrial Complex works, please watch this video. Then share it on Facebook, Twitter and everywhere you can. People need to be shown how lies are spread so they can learn to spot them.)

Progressives in education, the media, unions and politics always will walk in lockstep with each other, destroying any and all who stand in their way (even their own), until they reach their desired goal. It’s not that they’re incapable of learning the mistakes of history, they’re counting on them. What else explains the president’s rush to spend this country into Greece? A desire to save the people who’ve always wanted to see Greece but couldn’t afford the trip?

The political Left destroyed the greatness of Europe and it wants to take down the United States next.

If liberals are allowed to rebrand themselves as progressives, shedding the baggage and animosity “liberal” has so rightly earned, liberty is more threatened. I still use the word liberal every now and then. I use them interchangeably. They are, after all, the same thing. But people need to be aware of that. Polls have shown “liberal” is unpopular, but people don’t feel the same way toward “progressive.” That has to be changed.

Every time leftists, regardless of what they call themselves, are exposed for what they really are, Americans reject them. Sometimes slower than others, but always. That’s why Barack Obama ran on “Hope and Change,” not “I’ll waste trillions and break us while slipping payoffs to my donors, raping your liberty…” etc., etc.

People are busy. They don’t have time to follow politics the way those of us who make our living doing it can. Nor should they. If we had an honest media, no one would have to. If we had an honest education system, no one would have to. If we had an honest government that adhered to the Constitution… You get the idea.

So that’s just a small snippet of why I use the word “progressive” instead of “liberal.” And why I think it’s important that you start too.

Also, don’t forget progressives are not just of one political party. You can’t pick them out by the stench of Zuccotti Park emanating off them like stink-lines in a comic strip. In 2008, John McCain couldn’t tell the world enough that he was a progressive. His idiot daughter likes to do the same thing. It’s a philosophy, not a party.

SOURCE

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How is the FDA Really Doing?

I read with interest—and mounting skepticism—Patricia Dimond’s Insight & Intelligence™ piece about FDA, “FDA New Drug Approvals in 2011 Outpace Recent Past,” on GEN’s website. Some of its assertions and assumptions lacked essential context and disclosures.

Consider, for example, the headline, “FDA New Drug Approvals in 2011 Outpace Recent Past.” Although it’s true that the FDA’s 35 approvals are better than the 21 last year, a single data point doesn’t a trend make, so it’s useful to look at approvals during recent five-year intervals. From 2007–2011, the FDA approved 123 new drugs; from 2002–2006, 129 drugs; and 1997–2001, 178 drugs.

With that historical context, maybe the concept of outpacing isn’t such a good choice for the headline.

Partly on the basis of the single 2011 data point and a flawed report by an advocacy and lobbying group called the Friends of Cancer Research, Dr. Dimond concludes that “FDA did a pretty good job despite the carping from the pharma industry, financial community, and some patient advocacy groups,” endorsing Friends of Cancer Research’s conclusion that there is a need “for strong financial and public support of the FDA.”

To evaluate the strength of this news/advocacy piece, it’s useful to examine the Friends of Cancer Research study, which was published last year in Health Affairs. It found that between 2003 and 2010 the FDA approved 32 new cancer drugs versus 26 by the European Medicines Agency.

The FDA supposedly both approved more cancer drugs and did so more quickly: FDA approval averaged 182 days, while the EMA averaged 350 days. According to Ellen Sigal, chairman and founder of Friends of Cancer Research, FDA’s regulatory delays and intransigence toward industry are nothing more than an urban legend.

The facts argue otherwise. The only urban legend in evidence appears to be the conclusions of the study itself. Several things are disturbing about the methodology and the possible sources of bias or conflict of interest on the part of the authors that were not mentioned either as a disclaimer in the article or in the media (including Dr. Dimond’s) coverage of it.

First, the timing and location (for example, Europe vs. the U.S.) of drug approvals depends in large part on where and when drug companies decide to submit their applications for approval, how aggressive they are, and whether the drug has been previously approved elsewhere.

The quest for approvals is not a race from the same starting gate. Of the 25 drugs in the study that were approved in both the U.S. and Europe, just two were submitted to European regulators first—one by a mere 11 days, the other by a single day. By contrast, most applications were submitted to the FDA several months or in some cases two or three years earlier.

Second, not a single media report mentioned that the FDA often uses various tricks to “stop the clock” or even delay the start of the clock by “refusing to file” an application for marketing approval that it has received. Thus, the agency’s “review times” often have little correlation to the calendar. The Health Affairs article itself cites as one of its methodological limitations that it accessed only “official review times.”

The results would have been more meaningful if the authors had reported the actual number of calendar days from the date of regulators’ initial receipt of the application until the date of approval. Moreover, the FDA’s user fee authority requires the agency to demonstrate that it meets strictly defined approval timelines, creating a potent incentive to “game” the official review times.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Health insurance vs. getting care: "When Washington came up with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, it forgot one key component: The 'care' part. This spring, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments about the constitutionality of the law's individual mandate requiring people to be insured. The court will decide whether the government can compel people to become consumers against their will. While this is an important debate, what truly concerns those of us in the medical profession is how the healthcare reform act could ultimately leave you and your loved ones with insurance, but with no access to quality care. There is no doubt that healthcare is not affordable, but this misguided law will not result in better services."

Taxmageddon comes just after the election: "On December 31, shortly after the November election, tax rates will rise across the board in what congressional aides call 'Taxmageddon,' notes The Washington Post. Not only will the Bush tax cuts come to an end, but new taxes will kick in to pay for Obamacare’s rising costs."

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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21 February, 2012

JOHN 8:58 does not necessarily mean what it seems

"Jesus said unto them, "truly I say to you, before Abraham was, I am". (RSV).

This scripture is routinely compared to Exodus 3:14, where we read of Yahweh: "God said unto Moses, "I AM WHO I AM". And he said "Say this to the people of Israel, "I AM has sent me to you"". (RSV).

Just a few notes: The Exodus statement was made in response to a request from Moses for God to identify himself. And the reply (understandably?) "I am who I am" is simply impatient. I believe that I myself have at times said "I am who I am" in response to certain challenges. And the second part, "I am has sent me", just carries on the impatience of God with Moses's request for identification. But God gives in to Moses in the next verse and identifies himself as "Yahweh", the traditional god of the Hebrews. So while the theologians have made much of this passage, it is hardly the claim to uniqueness that they often assert. It just shows that the Hebrew god was a rather human figure who got impatient with people not knowing who he was -- and who handed out carved stone tablets and various other things.

Moving on to John 8:58 and the expression "I am" there: The Greek expression Jesus used here is "Ego eimi" -- which is the first person singular form of the verb "to be" in Greek. Its meaning is not however as straightforward in Greek as it is in its English counterpart. It is quite imprecise and can be translated in a number of ways. Even in that particular passage, translators differ on their rendering of it. Some authorities suggest "I have been" but the suggestion I like best is "I am he". That translation fits the text best, it seems to me. He was, after all, answering the enquiry, "Have you seen Abraham?". And in other passages of the NT (e.g. John 14:9) "eimi" is routinely translated as "have been".

So Jesus was certainly claiming to be an ancient being but the statements in Exodus and John are clearly not comparable. And in fact the case and tense structures of Hebrew and Greek are very different so any exact comparability would in any event be fanciful.

What Jesus actually said in his native Aramaic, we can only guess of course. We have only John's report in Greek.

For what it is worth, John would have been well aware of the ancient and widely used translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek -- The Septuagint -- and the Septuagint renders Exodus 3:14 as “EGO EIMI HO OHN,” meaning “I am the being” or "I am the one", so again comparability between the two texts is lost. If John had seen Jesus's Aramaic words as a reference to Exodus 3:14, he would presumably have translated them into Greek in the same way that the ancient Jewish translators behind the Septuagint did.

That John in fact chose a Greek expression that is capable of at least two different meaings is however well in keeping with his Gnostic tendencies. Gnosticism (the pretence of secret knowledge) was around long before Christ and it did eventually infect Christianity. There were various gnostic Christian sects from the second century on. John, however, does appear to have written quite late in the first century so may perhaps be regarded as the first of the Christian Gnostics. The book of Revelations, in particular, reads very much like a Gnostic text, with its constant use of symbolism.

So John took advantage of the various uses of "eimi" to make one of his Gnostic utterances. Compare John 1:1, where his clever use of an anarthrous predicate also leads most Greekless people into thinking he is saying more than he is. He was obviously a very competent Greek stylist.

So John was not being deceitful in using the the words he did. He was just being vague -- perhaps with the aim of saying that REAL Christians would be able to untangle the intended meaning, which is a very Gnostic thing to do. And at the time that was probably no difficulty. But with the impossibility of exactly translating all Greek tenses into languages with different verb structures, misunderstandings have certainly developed.

As someone who has often battled with translating German into English (which are after all two closely related languages) I am confident in saying in fact that ALL translations are only approximations. I comment on that at greater length here. On some occasions you do have to study the original texts to get an accurate sense of the passage.

I can't resist adding a few more comments about the Septuagint. The Torah section of it (including Exodus) is quite ancient and the oldest surviving manuscripts of the OT are in fact mostly of the Septuagint. And there are quite a few places where the Septuagint and the Masoretic (Hebrew) text differ in meaning, though the differences are not usually greatly important.

It used to be automatic among Bible translators to prefer the Masoretic renderings and dismiss the Septuagint as "freely" translated. A widely held view among textual scholars these days, however, holds that the Septuagint was based on a pre-Masoretic version of the Hebrew text and that its renderings are therefore at least as likely to represent the lost original texts as are the Masoretic renderings. In which case the less enigmatic Septuagint rendering of Exodus 3:14 might reasonably be preferred. So YHWH might originally have been recorded as saying not "I am who I am" but rather something like “I am the being” or "I am the one".

Note finally that the apostle Paul normally quoted from the Septuagint in his epistles. How's that for a headspinner?

I would think that in the circumstances a really serious Christian Bible student (are there any left?) would be heading out to buy himself a copy of the Septuagint with an accompanying English translation. I do myself own such a volume but it is quite old so I doubt that it is still in print anywhere. For what it is worth, however, it was published by Samuel Bagster and Sons of London in 1879. Bagster had a most comprehensive range of Bible study aids but with the decline of Biblical scholarship they have now gone out of business. There is however a translation only here that sounds useful. The most "official" translation of the Septuagint at the moment is here but I don't like the assumptions underlying it at all at all.

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Cultural decay



Panem et circenses

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Why America Keeps Getting More Conservative

I think that the short answer is: Obama. But some other reasons are explored below. Note that self-identified conservatives tend to have less education. Given the anti-factual Leftist brainwashing that pervades the educational system, that figures. The lesser your education, the better is your grip on reality to some degree

Another (related) thing to note that is that working class people are overwhelmingly conservative. The Democrats still sometimes pretend that they are the party of the little guy and the worker but that is straight out false. They've got it ass-about. They are the party of the minorities and the smug

Even with the president’s approval rating showing signs of life and the Republicans busily bashing themselves over the head — “one is a practicing polygamist and he’s not even the Mormon,” retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recently quipped about her party’s two frontrunners — America continues to track right, according to polling data released by the Gallup Organization last week.

Americans at this political moment are significantly more likely to identify as conservative than as liberal: conservatives outnumber liberals by nearly two to one. Forty percent identify as conservative, 36 percent as moderate, and 21 percent liberal.

There are four states where conservatives make up more than half the population: Mississippi, Utah, Wyoming, and Alabama. Conservatives make up more than 40 percent in 20 more states. Liberals now outnumber conservatives in just one state, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia.

Last March, I took an in-depth look at the factors that might be associated with America’s increasingly conservative ideological cast; I update that analysis here with Gallup’s year-end data. The ongoing economic crisis only appears to have deepened conservatism's hold. America is becoming a more conservative nation, at least at the state level.

My MPI colleague Charlotta Mellander ran a series of correlations on a range of political, economic, demographic and other factors. The associations we found, I hasten to add, are just that — associations; correlation does not show causation. Nonetheless, they reflect the deep cleavages of income, education, and class that divide America.

As before, conservative states are considerably more religious than liberal-leaning states. The correlation between conservative political affiliation and religion (the share of state population for which religion is an important part of daily life) has grown stronger, increasing from .63 to .70.

The correlation between religion and the increase in conservatism over the past year is also considerable. As American states become more religious, they also become more conservative.

Conservative states are also less educated than liberal ones. The correlation between conservative affiliation and the percent of adults who are college graduates) is also substantially higher than before (-.76 vs. -.53), as is the correlation between human capital and the increase in conservatism (-.79).

States with more conservatives are less diverse. Conservative political affiliation is highly negatively correlated with the percent of the population that are immigrants (–.56), or gay and lesbian ( -.60). There is no correlation to race or ethnicity, however, whether measured as percent white, percent black, or percent Hispanic.

Class continues to play a substantial role. Conservative political affiliation is strongly positively correlated with the percentage of a state's workforce in blue-collar occupations (.73), and highly negatively correlated with the proportion of the workforce engaged in knowledge-based professional and creative work (-.61). Both are also associated with the tilt toward conservatism in the past year.

States with more conservatives are considerably less affluent than those with more liberals. Conservative political affiliation is highly negatively correlated with state income levels (-.73) and even more so with average hourly earnings (- .77). This is in line with the findings of Andrew Gelman's Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, which finds that while rich voters favor Republicans, rich states favor Democrats.

That said, conservatives across America appear to be split along class and income lines when it comes to the issue of whether government should provide help for the poor. According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, more than half (57 percent) of lower-income Republicans (those with family incomes of less than $30,000) said that government does not do enough for the poor, while less than one in five (18 percent) said it does too much. Richer Republicans (those with incomes of $75,000 or more), perhaps not surprisingly, overwhelmingly think government does too much.

The ongoing economic crisis only appears to have deepened America's conservative drift - a trend which is most pronounced in its least well off, least educated, most blue collar, most economically hard-hit states.

SOURCE

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Over-regulated America

The home of laissez-faire is being suffocated by excessive and badly written regulation --comment from Britain

AMERICANS love to laugh at ridiculous regulations. A Florida law requires vending-machine labels to urge the public to file a report if the label is not there. The Federal Railroad Administration insists that all trains must be painted with an “F” at the front, so you can tell which end is which. Bureaucratic busybodies in Bethesda, Maryland, have shut down children’s lemonade stands because the enterprising young moppets did not have trading licences. The list goes hilariously on.

But red tape in America is no laughing matter. The problem is not the rules that are self-evidently absurd. It is the ones that sound reasonable on their own but impose a huge burden collectively. America is meant to be the home of laissez-faire. Unlike Europeans, whose lives have long been circumscribed by meddling governments and diktats from Brussels, Americans are supposed to be free to choose, for better or for worse. Yet for some time America has been straying from this ideal.

Consider the Dodd-Frank law of 2010. Its aim was noble: to prevent another financial crisis. Its strategy was sensible, too: improve transparency, stop banks from taking excessive risks, prevent abusive financial practices and end “too big to fail” by authorising regulators to seize any big, tottering financial firm and wind it down. This newspaper supported these goals at the time, and we still do. But Dodd-Frank is far too complex, and becoming more so. At 848 pages, it is 23 times longer than Glass-Steagall, the reform that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929. Worse, every other page demands that regulators fill in further detail. Some of these clarifications are hundreds of pages long. Just one bit, the “Volcker rule”, which aims to curb risky proprietary trading by banks, includes 383 questions that break down into 1,420 subquestions.

Hardly anyone has actually read Dodd-Frank, besides the Chinese government and our correspondent in New York (see article). Those who have struggle to make sense of it, not least because so much detail has yet to be filled in: of the 400 rules it mandates, only 93 have been finalised. So financial firms in America must prepare to comply with a law that is partly unintelligible and partly unknowable.

Dodd-Frank is part of a wider trend. Governments of both parties keep adding stacks of rules, few of which are ever rescinded. Republicans write rules to thwart terrorists, which make flying in America an ordeal and prompt legions of brainy migrants to move to Canada instead. Democrats write rules to expand the welfare state. Barack Obama’s health-care reform of 2010 had many virtues, especially its attempt to make health insurance universal. But it does little to reduce the system’s staggering and increasing complexity. Every hour spent treating a patient in America creates at least 30 minutes of paperwork, and often a whole hour. Next year the number of federally mandated categories of illness and injury for which hospitals may claim reimbursement will rise from 18,000 to 140,000. There are nine codes relating to injuries caused by parrots, and three relating to burns from flaming water-skis.

Two forces make American laws too complex. One is hubris. Many lawmakers seem to believe that they can lay down rules to govern every eventuality. Examples range from the merely annoying (eg, a proposed code for nurseries in Colorado that specifies how many crayons each box must contain) to the delusional (eg, the conceit of Dodd-Frank that you can anticipate and ban every nasty trick financiers will dream up in the future). Far from preventing abuses, complexity creates loopholes that the shrewd can abuse with impunity.

The other force that makes American laws complex is lobbying. The government’s drive to micromanage so many activities creates a huge incentive for interest groups to push for special favours. When a bill is hundreds of pages long, it is not hard for congressmen to slip in clauses that benefit their chums and campaign donors. The health-care bill included tons of favours for the pushy. Congress’s last, failed attempt to regulate greenhouse gases was even worse.

Complexity costs money. Sarbanes-Oxley, a law aimed at preventing Enron-style frauds, has made it so difficult to list shares on an American stockmarket that firms increasingly look elsewhere or stay private. America’s share of initial public offerings fell from 67% in 2002 (when Sarbox passed) to 16% last year, despite some benign tweaks to the law. A study for the Small Business Administration, a government body, found that regulations in general add $10,585 in costs per employee. It’s a wonder the jobless rate isn’t even higher than it is.

A plea for simplicity

Democrats pay lip service to the need to slim the rulebook—Mr Obama’s regulations tsar is supposed to ensure that new rules are cost-effective. But the administration has a bias towards overstating benefits and underestimating costs. Republicans bluster that they will repeal Obamacare and Dodd-Frank and abolish whole government agencies, but give only a sketchy idea of what should replace them. [Anything?]

America needs a smarter approach to regulation. First, all important rules should be subjected to cost-benefit analysis by an independent watchdog. The results should be made public before the rule is enacted. All big regulations should also come with sunset clauses, so that they expire after, say, ten years unless Congress explicitly re-authorises them.

More important, rules need to be much simpler. When regulators try to write an all-purpose instruction manual, the truly important dos and don’ts are lost in an ocean of verbiage. Far better to lay down broad goals and prescribe only what is strictly necessary to achieve them. Legislators should pass simple rules, and leave regulators to enforce them.

Would this hand too much power to unelected bureaucrats? Not if they are made more accountable. Unreasonable judgments should be subject to swift appeal. Regulators who make bad decisions should be easily sackable. None of this will resolve the inevitable difficulties of regulating a complex modern society. But it would mitigate a real danger: that regulation may crush the life out of America’s economy.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Another crooked Kennedy?: "The Kennedy family's return to power rests on the shoulders of a 31-year-old lawyer and former Peace Corps volunteer who has never campaigned for public office. Joseph Kennedy III announced Thursday that he is running for Congress, in the Massachusetts district currently represented by retiring Democratic Rep. Barney Frank. In doing so, the grandson of the late Robert F. Kennedy is vying to carry the family mantle back to Washington after the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy in 2009 left a void."

Social Security default: "For the Congressional Budget Office to predict disaster for Social Security in the year 2020 is a startling admission. These people are paid to believe that the trust fund exists, so if they are predicting that the trust fund will be depleted that soon the situation must be pretty dire indeed."

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc. He notes a British confirmation of Putnam's well-known American finding -- that people are happiest when living in ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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20 February, 2012

Dishonorable Dishonesty at the Top

Obama's strange and deceitful definition of "fair"

You have probably heard by now the disastrous performance by new White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew on the Sunday morning talk shows last weekend.

When it was noted on CNN's “State of the Union” that the Democrat-controlled Senate has not passed a budget for 1,019 days now, almost three years, in violation of federal law, Lew said, "You can't pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes, and you can't get 60 votes without bipartisan support. So unless Republicans are willing to work with Democrats in the Senate, [Majority Leader] Harry Reid is not going to be able to get a budget passed." Later that day, on NBC's “Meet the Press,” Lew repeated in response to the same question, "One of the things about the United States Senate that I think the American people have realized is that it takes 60, not 50, votes to pass something."

The problem is not only that it takes no more than 51 votes to pass a budget resolution under Senate rules. Indeed, it only takes a simple majority of the Senators present. The problem is that Jack Lew has served twice before as Director of OMB, so there is no doubt that he knows this.

I have discussed many times before President Obama's Marxist Saul Alinsky tactic of Calculated Deception. That is President Obama's practice of taking advantage of what he is sure the average person doesn't know, and won't be told by the Democrat Party-controlled media, to mislead the people about the truth.

Jack Lew's dishonesty on last Sunday's talk shows is a perfect example of this. In fact, it is dishonest and misleading to the point of being dishonorable. That is why Jack Lew must now resign for lying to the American people, the same way the Democrats insisted that President Nixon must resign for lying to the American people.

I bring this up here because it is a perfect illustration of the dishonorable dishonesty throughout President Obama's 2013 budget released on Monday, and what the President says and has said to the American people about his budget policies.

When President Obama was asking for our votes in 2008, he told us his budget policy would involve a "net spending cut." In fact, he said precisely that during a nationally televised presidential debate with John McCain. In 2008, federal spending totaled $2.983 trillion. But federal spending for 2012 in the budget the President just released on Monday is projected to total $3.795 trillion, an increase of over 27 percent during his first term alone, up another $193 billion from the last year. In the budget the President released on Monday, spending was projected to soar by 2022 to $5.820 trillion, the highest spending in world history. Over the next 10 years, federal spending, with all of President Obama's blather about spending cuts, will total $47 trillion... under the President's own budget!

Does President Obama understand the meaning of the words "net spending cut?" Or was he deceiving the American people in 2008 when he used those words?

Even this Pacific Ocean of red ink is based on the assumption of exploding tax increases over the next 10 years. The budget assumes that federal income tax revenues will double by 2020, federal corporate tax revenues will double by 2017, and federal payroll taxes will double by 2022.

That is because already enacted under current law for 2013 are increases in the top tax rates for virtually every major federal tax. In that year, the tax increases of Obamacare go into effect, and the Bush tax cuts expire, which Obama refuses to renew for the nation's small businesses, job creators, and investors. That is the English translation of individuals making over $200,000 a year, and couples making over $250,000 per year.

As a result, with the Bush tax cuts simply expiring, the top two income tax rates will go up by nearly 20 percent, the capital gains tax rate will soar by nearly 60 percent, the tax on dividends will nearly triple, the death tax rate will rise by nearly a third, and the Medicare payroll tax will explode by 62 percent for these targeted taxpayers.

Obama says in his budget message that these tax increases are necessary because "everyone must shoulder their fair share," and "we need an economy where everyone shoulders their fair share to put our fiscal house in order." The taxpayers targeted for these tax increases are the top 3 percent of income earners. But as the Wall Street Journal noted yesterday, those top 3 percent pay more in federal income taxes than the bottom 97 percent combined! So if that is not their fair share, what would that fair share be, Comrade Obama?

President Obama is playing you with the most dishonest Big Lie in American political history with this central campaign theme that the rich don't pay their fair share of income taxes, and the middle class and working people are left to pay all of them instead. The truth is more nearly the opposite, with the rich paying nearly all of the income taxes.

The foundation of this calculated deception is the multiple taxation of capital in our tax system. The earnings from capital investment are taxed not once, but multiple times. First, by the corporate income tax, then again by the individual income tax through the tax on dividends, then if you sell the capital investment, through the capital gains tax, then when you die, by the death tax. Consequently, the 15 percent capital gains tax rate is not the only tax that Warren Buffett actually effectively pays on his investment income. This is how the rich end up paying such a large share of the income tax burden.

But Obama figures that enough of you and your friends and neighbors won't know that, and the Democrat-controlled media won't tell them. So he figures he can get away with looting the rich, as his Marxist ideology demands.

All of these Obama tax rate increases are on top of virtually the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world, at nearly 40 percent counting state income taxes, which leaves American companies uncompetitive in the global economy. Even Communist China maintains a 25 percent corporate rate. In the predominantly socialist EU, the average corporate rate is even lower. In formerly socialist Canada, the corporate rate today is 16.5 percent, falling to 15 percent next year.

If President Obama's extremist left-wing rhetoric is not corrected, and he sells the nation his phony picture of reality, it is working people and the middle class that will suffer the most. That is because if we try to shift even more of the tax burden onto the nation's job creators and investors, it is working people and the middle class that will lose jobs, wages, and incomes. That is why America is suffering a capital strike, with no real, long overdue recovery, extended unemployment to rival the Depression, declining real wages and incomes, and more Americans in poverty than at any time in American history.

In fact, if President Obama's comprehensive tax rate increases are not averted, the result will be revenues falling far short of projections, or even declining further, and deficits and debt increasing even more, rather than declining as Obama wrongly projects. For over 40 years now, and possibly more, every time the capital gains tax rate has been increased, revenues have declined. Every time it has been cut, revenues have increased.

The Decline and Fall of America

Finally, the above-discussed levels of federal spending, deficits, and debt include sharp reductions in future federal defense spending. There are sharp savings from withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. The President cuts missile defense, and fails to modernize our aging, outdated nuclear deterrent, while our top rivals China and Russia do. The U.S. Navy is cut back to the levels before World War I. Troops, ships, and planes are reduced, and modernizations are put on the shelf.

Yet, even with these draconian defense reductions, America still suffers the above-discussed continued explosion of federal spending, deficits and debt. The President not only fails to propose any serious entitlement reform, he scorns serious reform proposals, while our national defenses are threatened. The President's new defense strategy drops the longstanding American defense doctrine of maintaining the ability to fight two major conflicts, or two and half, at the same time. We are now only to maintain the forces to fight one major conflict. That means as soon as we are drawn into any such conflict, we are vulnerable to attack from another enemy, in fact inviting it. While Reagan gave us peace through strength, Obama is on the road to war through weakness.

More HERE

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Taxing Medical Progress to Death

Michelle Malkin

Two years ago this month, as public debate over Obamacare raged, former President Bill Clinton rushed to the hospital because of a heart condition. He immediately underwent a procedure to place two stents in one of his coronary arteries. It was a timely reminder about the dangers of stifling private-sector medical innovation.

No one listened. Stents don't grow on trees. They were not created, developed, marketed or sold by government bureaucrats and lawmakers. One of the nation's top stent manufacturers, Boston Scientific, warned at the time that Obamacare's punitive medical device tax would lead to worker losses and research cuts. The 2.3 percent excise tax, the company said, "would be very damaging to Boston Scientific, and the medical device industry as a whole. In a nutshell, it would raise costs and lead to significant job losses. It does not address the quality of care but the political scorecard of savings."

Two years later, Bill Clinton's doing just peachy. But many medical device manufacturers are suffering, and many more are preparing for the worst as the White House gears up to collect on an estimated $20 billion from the lifesaving industry. In typical Obama-transparent fashion, the Internal Revenue Service quietly released a complex thicket of medical device tax implementation rules in a Friday document dump earlier this month. Barring congressional intervention, the medical device tax will go into full effect in 2013.

Cook Medical, which manufactures products for everything from endovascular therapy, critical care medicine and general surgery, to diagnostic and interventional procedures, to bioengineered tissue replacement and regeneration, gastroenterology and endoscopy procedures, urology, and obstetrics and gynecology, has called for the levy's repeal. Cook Group chairman Stephen Ferguson noted the tax burden amounted to a whopping 55 percent of its profits.

"For a company like ours, which pays 35 percent of our net earnings in federal corporate taxes and another 4 to 5 percent in state and local corporate taxes, the excise tax translates to another payment that will consume 15 percent more of our earnings," he estimated. "This creates tremendous pressure for us to move manufacturing to Europe and other parts of the world."

According to the trade publication Mass Device, the company has already canceled plans to build a new factory in the U.S. because of the Obamacare tax burden.

Stryker, a maker of artificial hips and knees based in Kalamazoo, Mich., announced in November that it would slash 5 percent of its global workforce (an estimated 1,000 workers) this coming year to reduce costs related to Obamacare's taxes and mandates.

Covidien, a N.Y.-based surgical supplies manufacturer, recently announced layoffs of 200 American workers and plans to move some of its plant work to Mexico and Costa Rica, in part because of the coming tax hit.

Mass.-based Zoll Medical Corp., which makes defibrillators and employs some 1,800 workers in the U.S. and around the world, says the medical device tax will cost the company between $5 million and $10 million a year. Its profit in 2009 was $9.5 million.

"Running our company at close to break even would not be a sustainable position for us," CEO Richard Packer said in a public statement, "so we will be forced to look at alternatives."

Those "alternatives" include cutting payroll, cutting R and D and passing on the costs to patients, of course. Industry estimates put the tax-induced job losses at 43,000. So far, the number-crunchers at 1600 Pennsylvania are mum on the number of potential jobs -- and lives -- destroyed by the medical innovation death tax.

In fact, the Obama administration's response so far has been a flippant shrug. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, whose only manufacturing claims to fame are faulty tax returns and near-double-digit unemployment figures, brushed off concerns this week about the medical device tax. Obamacare's expanded access to health care, he argues blithely, will create more consumers for their products. "On balance, it is a good package for people in the health care business," he told Bloomberg News.

Fewer jobs. Fewer entrepreneurs. Fewer medical advances. Only with a gallon of self-delusion does the Obamacare medical tax medicine amount to anything other than economic and medical malpractice.

SOURCE

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Will Presbyterians Repudiate their Church leadership’s Hate for Israel and Jews?

The disconnect between the views of the leadership of mainline Protestant churches on the Middle East and those of the rank-and-file members of their congregations has been growing in recent decades. Activists and leading clergy of liberal Protestant denominations have embraced the Palestinian cause while most of those who attend their churches are, like most Americans, warm supporters of Israel. But in the case of at least one of these churches — the Presbyterian Church USA — the gap between those who speak in the name of these institutions and those whom they claim to represent has grown to the point where communal relations are at the brink of a breakdown. Institutions connected with the Presbyterians have become a font of anti-Israel invective that has crossed the line into outright anti-Semitism.

In the course of promoting their anti-Israel policies, church leaders have engaged in rhetoric that seeks not only to delegitimize the state of Israel but also the Jewish community. The actions and statements of the church’s Israel Palestine Mission Network (IPMN-PCUSA) have been so egregious that the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the umbrella network of Jewish community relations groups, has been forced to go public with their complaints in hopes that ordinary Presbyterians will do something about the epidemic of hate speech springing from church activists.

Even a partial list of offensive statements made by Presbyterian activists on Israel and the Jews ought to send a chill down the spines of church members who may be unaware of what is going on:

At an opening program of the IPMN-PCUSA annual conference, the Rev. Craig Hunter said “greed and injustice is a cancer at the very core of Zionism.” In a 2010 letter to church delegates, the IPMN-PCUSA falsely accused the Jewish community of intimidating Presbyterians by sending a letter-bomb to the church’s headquarters and setting fire to a church. IPMN-PCUSA tweeted an article proclaiming “Jewish power + Jewish hubris = moral catastrophe of epic proportions.” IPMN-PCUSA also has supported virulently anti-Israel resolutions including those equating Israel with apartheid and has been a vocal supporter of the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanction movement. …

The IPMN-PCUSA Facebook page includes a cartoon of President Obama wearing weighty Jewish star earrings to suggest Jewish control of the American leaders, a common theme on the site. The IPMN-PCUSA has posted articles that accuse Jews of controlling Hollywood, the media, and American politics – and blaming Israel for the American housing and economic crisis. IPMN-PCUSA’s communications chair also posted her opposition to a two-state solution and the existence of a Jewish state, something which she terms “anachronistic.” The same IPMN leader, Noushin Framke, clicked “like” on the Obama cartoon with the Jewish stars and another post that Hamas should keep Israeli Gilad Shalit hostage until Palestinians are granted a right of return.

The idea that a mainstream American church would engage in this sort of abuse of Jews and the Jewish state is shameful. Moreover, this is not about church activists engaging in legitimate criticism of Israeli policies. By participating in a propaganda war against Zionism and the existence of Israel and its right of self-defense, these Presbyterian activists have crossed the line that separates criticism from delegitimization. Anyone who would deny Jews the same rights of self-determination and self-defense they would never think of questioning when it comes to any other country is engaging in bigotry. The church’s activities have nothing to do with the promotion of peace and everything to do with scapegoating Israel and the Jews.

While this has nothing to do with the beliefs, let alone the actions of the overwhelming majority of American Presbyterians, it goes without saying the responsibility for policing these institutions belongs to church members. Because Jewish community relations professionals have failed to get the church hierarchy to act on this question up until now, it is up to the rank-and-file to speak out against this behavior and see that it ends. Those Presbyterians who say they wish to live in fellowship with their Jewish neighbors are obligated to ensure their church does not engage in anti-Semitism or support an economic war on the Jewish state. On this point, there can be no middle ground. The church must repudiate these extremists who have appropriated their good name to promote a hateful cause.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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19 February, 2012

Are We Coming Apart?

John C. Goodman makes some interesting points below about social decay in America but offers little by way of explanation for it. Yet I think the explanation is fairly obvious and arises directly from his comparison between the upper and lower echelons of American society. I think he is describing the gradual effects of increasing government welfare provision. A generation has now grown up with little fear of poverty and for those at the bottom of the social hierarchy what they can get from working is little improvement over what they can get by not working. And that undermines everything, self-respect included.

For the upper echelons, however, work is MUCH more remunerative than a life on welfare so they do what is needed to realize their potential. They care more about their lives, about making good decisions and about the future. It seems to me that all the differences described below can be accounted for in that way. Welfare has sapped the vitality and ethics of a large slice of the American population

We are experiencing an ever widening cultural divide, according to Charles Murray.

Upper-middle class professional types may pretend that they are cultural relativists, accepting of whatever lifestyle their fellow human beings happen to choose. In reality, they live by old fashioned puritan values, however. They get married and stay married. They work hard and work long hours.

Not so for the blue collar, never-got-beyond-high-school class, however. A shocking number aren't even working at all. Many are not getting married in the first place. Of those that get married, the divorce and separation rates are soaring.

What about happiness and well-being? About 65% of the upper middle class professional types say they are in happy marriages. That number has been dropping steadily for the past 40 years for the working class types; and today it stands at 25%!

Murray, by the way, is the author of Losing Ground, the book generally credited with sparking welfare reform in the United States, and The Bell Curve, the book that generated a national debate on the role of IQ in our society. When he speaks, people on both the right and the left tend to listen. His latest book, Coming Apart, is another block buster.

Just so you don't think what Murray is describing is all about race or about immigrants, the entire analysis in it is focused on non-Hispanic whites. Within the white population a cultural cataclysm is underway. One part of that population (about 20% of the total) is firmly attached to traditional values. The other part (about 30% of the total) is undergoing cultural disintegration.

In 1960, these two groups of people lived similar lives. Today, they are headed in opposite directions.

Take divorce. Between 1960 and 1980, Murray shows that working class whites' divorce/separation rate rose from about 5% to about 15%. Over the next 20 years it more than doubled again, rising from 15% to 35%. The professional class also saw an increase in the divorce rate rise between 1960 and 1980: from about 1% to about 7.5% between 1960 and 1980. But it then completely leveled off: the professional class divorce/separation rate has been flat for the last thirty years. The same pattern holds for children growing up in broken homes. There has been a steady increase for the working class and a low plateau for the professional class.

What about work? In 1968, only 3% of prime age males with no more than a high school education were "out of the labor force." By 2008, that figure climbed to 12% — almost one in eight. Meanwhile, little has changed among males with a college education.

Part-time work is another indicator of the decline of industriousness among the working class. Among prime age males with no more than a high school education, the fraction working fewer than 40 hours a week doubled — from 10% in 1968 to 20% in 2008. Among the college graduates, the rise was much smaller: from 9% to 12%.

Writing in The New York Times the other day, David Brooks noted that the key ingredient in the cultural disintegration of working class life style is the role of men:

Tens of millions of men have marred life chances because schools are bad at educating boys, because they are not enmeshed in the long-term relationships that instill good habits and because insecure men do stupid and self-destructive things.

Over the past 40 years, women's wages have risen sharply but, as Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project point out, median incomes of men have dropped 28 percent and male labor force participation rates are down 16 percent. Next time somebody talks to you about wage stagnation, have them break it down by sex. It's not only globalization and technological change causing this stagnation. It's the deterioration of the moral and social landscape, especially for men.

Religious beliefs are changing too. Secularism rose 11 percentage points (from 29% to 40%) for the upper middle class, but rose 21 percentage points (from 38% to 59%) for the working class.

What about cause and effect? It should be obvious that culture affects economic outcomes, but some on the left think it's the other way around. Here's an amazing statement by Paul Krugman writing in The New York Times:

Traditional values aren't as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe — and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America's working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.

As usual, Krugman has it completely wrong. When Charles Murray was in Dallas the other day I suggested to him that culture is like the economists' notion of a "public good." We all benefit from it, even if we personally do nothing to create it, nurture it, or defend it. But if the institutions that sustain a culture are weak and eroding, then the culture itself will disappear and everyone will be affected by that change.

What is happening in working class America is the disintegration of the American way of life.

SOURCE

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When JFK betrayed true heroes who believed in him

Many widows living in south Florida feel differently about Kennedy’s magnetism. You'll often find these ladies, with itchy noses and red-rimmed eyes, ambling amidst the long rows of white crosses at the Cuban Memorial in Miami. It's a mini-Arlington, in honor of Castro's murder victims and those who fell trying to free Cuba from the Stalinism he imposed with his Soviet overlords while the “Leader of the Free World” seemed oddly distracted.

Some of these ladies will be kneeling, others walking slowly, looking for a name. You remember a similar scene from the opening frames of Saving Private Ryan. Many clutch rosaries. Many of the ladies will be pressing their faces into the breast of a relative who drove them there, a relative who wraps his arms around her spastically heaving shoulders.

Try as he might not to cry himself, he usually finds that the sobs wracking his mother, grandmother, sister or aunt are contagious. Yet he's often too young to remember the face of his martyred uncle or cousin - the name they just recognized on the white cross. “Killed in Action, Bay of Pigs April 18th 1961.”

Another woman will go home after placing flowers under her father's cross - a father she never knew. "Killed in action, Bay of Pigs, April 18th, 1961" also reads his cross. She was two at the time.

"Where are the PLANES?" her father’s commander yelled into his radio from the blood-soaked beachhead. "Send planes or we can’t last!” he yelled while Soviet Howitzers decimated his horribly outnumbered men, Soviet tanks closed-in, and his casualties piled up. Meanwhile “The Leader of the Free World” seemed oddly distracted.

“We must support anti-Castro fighters,” these ladies had heard (candidate) Kennedy implore short months earlier during his debates with Richard Nixon. “So far these freedom fighters have received no help from our government,” (candidate) Kennedy complained.

Short weeks before the debates CIA chief Allen Dulles (on Ike's orders) had briefed Kennedy about Cuban invasion plans. And since the plans were secret, Kennedy knew Nixon couldn't rebut. And indeed, Vice President Nixon (the invasion’s main booster, in fact) bit his tongue. He could easily have stomped Kennedy on it. But to some candidates national security trumps debating points.

“We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty!” these ladies heard from Kennedy mere minutes after he was elected “Leader of the Free World.”

Four months later, 1,500 of those very Cuban freedom-fighters that "we must support" were slugging it out 90 miles from U.S. shores against 31,000 Soviet-armed troops, squadrons of Stalin tanks and Castro’s entire air force. The beachhead is now known as the Bay of Pigs.

"We will NOT be evacuated!" yelled the commander of these ladies’ dads and husbands into his radio. "We came here to fight!" He was responding to the enraged and heartsick CIA man who - upon realizing the magnitude of the betrayal from “The Leader of the Free World.’--was offering to evacuate the Cuban freedom-fighters from the doomed beachhead. “We don’t want evacuation!” roared San Roman back into his radio. “Send planes! Send ammo! We came here to FIGHT!”

The pleas made it to Navy Chief Admiral Arleigh Burke in Washington, D.C., who conveyed them in person to his commander-in-chief. "Two planes, Mr. President!" Admiral Burke sputtered into his commander-in-chief's face. The fighting admiral was livid, pleading for permission to allow just two of his jets to blaze off a U.S. carrier just offshore from the beachhead and support the desperately embattled freedom-fighters.

"Burke, we can't get involved in this," replied Kennedy, who’d just emerged in a white tux from an elegant ball where he’d twirled a smiling Jackie around the dance-floor, to the coos, claps and twitters of the enchanted crowd.

"WE put those Cuban boys there, Mr. President!" the fighting admiral exploded. "By God, we ARE involved!"' But Admiral Burke could not budge The Leader of the Free World from betraying his pledge to the freedom-fighters desperately battling Soviet Imperialism 90 miles from U.S. shores.

The freedom-fighters were expending their last bullets as Lynch again offered to evacuate them. But San Roman again responded: “No!--This ends here!”, his response was barely audible over the deafening blasts from the storm of Soviet artillery.

"Can't continue," crackled the final message from San Roman a day later. For three days his force of mostly volunteer civilians had battled savagely against a Soviet-trained-and-led force 10 times theirs’ size, inflicting casualties of 20 to 1. To this day their feat of arms amazes professional military men. “They fought magnificently—and they were NOT defeated!” stressed their trainer Marine Col. Jack Hawkins, a multi-decorated veteran of Bataan, Iwo Jima and Inchon. “They simply ran out of ammunition after being abandoned by their sponsor the U.S. Government.”

Morale will do that to a fighting force. And there's no morale booster like watching Soviet proxies Fidel Castro and Che Guevara ravage your homeland and families, believe me.

Ammo finally ran out. "Russian tanks overrunning my position," reported San Roman on his radio... "destroying my equipment.” Finally the radio went dead.

"Tears filled my eyes," writes CIA man Grayston Lynch, a multi-decorated WWII and Korea vet who trained and befriended the Cuban freedom-fighters—and took their final message. "I broke down completely,” writes the Silver Star-winner who carried scars from Omaha Beach, Bastogne and Korea’s Heartbreak Ridge. “For the first time in my 37 years I was ashamed of my country.”

SOURCE

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Orwellian Doublespeak Dominates Economic Policy

While taking in my morning helping of news and commentary, I was struck by a certain similarity in every article touching on economic policy. It wasn't just the trampling of the Constitution, the abandonment of rational accounting principles, or the futility of the search for logic behind the proposals coming out of Washington that was so disturbing. There is nothing new about such sad developments. We long ago began to adapt to life without these bygone bulwarks against chaos.

It was the progressive destruction of the English language that prompted coffee to come out of my nose. Without a common understanding of precisely what words mean, rational discourse becomes futile. We might as well babble gibberish at each other as we fall back to settling our differences swinging clubs.

For example, what does "unemployment" mean? How can the official unemployment rate go down when millions of discouraged job seekers stop looking for work and the nation's labor participation rate takes the biggest plunge in history? Easy; simply stop counting people who drop out of the labor market. Numerous articles have pointed this out, but even sophisticated investors don't seem to be paying attention. When newspaper headlines proclaim, "Unemployment Down!" the stock market goes up. Smart stock buyers tell you that they know better but are betting on the trading behavior of people who don't. How's that for baking institutionalized ignorance into the market?

Can you buy "insurance" to protect yourself from predictable, repetitive events like paying your cable TV bill? No? So exactly how did we get into this big brouhaha about who has to pay for "insurance" coverage to gain "access" to birth control pills? (I looked up "access." It didn't say "free stuff.")

If compound obfuscation is your fancy, try "unemployment insurance." It's the only kind of "insurance" where your benefits can go up even when you are out of work and not paying any premiums. And if you stop looking for work as soon as you finish collecting benefits, you are no longer unemployed. Brilliant!

What does "inflation" mean? I know what I have to spend when I go to the grocery store and stop at the gas pump. Yet the official inflation rate excludes food and energy. How can the assurances of government officials be so contrary to our everyday experiences? Grouch Marx explained it. "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"

The star word of this silly season is "fair." The top 10% of tax filers pay 70% of all income taxes while the bottom half collectively pay almost no income tax. Yet we are in a huge debate about increasing taxes on those already paying the most in order to decrease taxes on those already paying the least. And it's all in the name of "fairness." That was a pretty neat trick. Think how different the debate would sound if instead of "fair" we used the words "stick ‘em up!"

While we're at it, do you know what your "tax rate" is? The most recent IRS data show that the top 1% of taxpayers fork 24% of their adjusted gross income over to Uncle Sam in income taxes. The next 1-5% cohort pays 16.4%, the next 5-10% pays 11.4%, the next 10-25% pays 8.2%, the next 25-50% pays 5.6%, and the bottom 50% pay a barely measurable 1.85%. In a progressive tax system, when you make more money you not only pay more taxes, you pay taxes at a higher average rate. Our current tax system may be impossibly complex, corrupt, and inefficient but it delivers exactly that result. So how did we end up in a shouting match about "millionaires and billionaires," enjoying a lower "tax rate" than secretaries when it's just not true? Better ask Obama's favorite billionaire. Maybe Warren Buffett can explain how someone that makes $200,000 a year is a millionaire.

It gets better. Giving money to your friends and political donors to finance hare brained speculative schemes is called an "investment." How can that be? I don't know, ask the Energy Department. But rest assured, fair taxpayer, your money is as safe as the General Motors stock the White House bought on your behalf. Perhaps they salted away your shares in the Social Security "lockbox."

God forbid we should invest our Social Security "accounts" in the stock market, which can go down, when we can entrust our "savings" to Congress, who has stolen them altogether. And speaking of speakers, is Congress "in session?" Better not ask the Speaker of the House.

Don't you love all those "budget cut" announcements? When we cut the budget in my household, spending goes down. Only in Washington can a "budget cut" lead to higher spending. You have to look at the numbers to learn that what they are really doing is marginally decreasing the acceleration in the growth of spending. As a geek, I know a second derivative when I see one. Apparently, members of the press never took math.

Train your eye to spot these language debaucheries, and send me your favorites. They have become so widespread that it makes you nostalgic for the days when we used to argue about what "is" is, or what carnal acts count as "sex" when the Commander in Chief claims he didn't have any. At least back then it was all good fun, speculating on the latest adventures of the presidential trouser trout as we watched our 401(k)s grow as fast as Pinocchio's nose.

Today, it's not so much fun. In fact, it's getting ugly. It will get uglier still if we don't get back to speaking plain English to each other.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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18 February, 2012

Are We Coming Apart?

John C. Goodman makes some interesting points below about social decay in America but offers little by way of explanation for it. Yet I think the explanation is fairly obvious and arises directly from his comparison between the upper and lower echelons of American society. I think he is describing the gradual effects of increasing government welfare provision. A generation has now grown up with little fear of poverty and for those at the bottom of the social hierarchy what they can get from working is little improvement over what they can get by not working. And that undermines everything, self-respect included.

For the upper echelons, however, work is MUCH more remunerative than a life on welfare so they do what is needed to realize their potential. They care more about their lives, about making good decisions and about the future. It seems to me that all the differences described below can be accounted for in that way. Welfare has sapped the vitality and ethics of a large slice of the American population

We are experiencing an ever widening cultural divide, according to Charles Murray.

Upper-middle class professional types may pretend that they are cultural relativists, accepting of whatever lifestyle their fellow human beings happen to choose. In reality, they live by old fashioned puritan values, however. They get married and stay married. They work hard and work long hours.

Not so for the blue collar, never-got-beyond-high-school class, however. A shocking number aren't even working at all. Many are not getting married in the first place. Of those that get married, the divorce and separation rates are soaring.

What about happiness and well-being? About 65% of the upper middle class professional types say they are in happy marriages. That number has been dropping steadily for the past 40 years for the working class types; and today it stands at 25%!

Murray, by the way, is the author of Losing Ground, the book generally credited with sparking welfare reform in the United States, and The Bell Curve, the book that generated a national debate on the role of IQ in our society. When he speaks, people on both the right and the left tend to listen. His latest book, Coming Apart, is another block buster.

Just so you don't think what Murray is describing is all about race or about immigrants, the entire analysis in it is focused on non-Hispanic whites. Within the white population a cultural cataclysm is underway. One part of that population (about 20% of the total) is firmly attached to traditional values. The other part (about 30% of the total) is undergoing cultural disintegration.

In 1960, these two groups of people lived similar lives. Today, they are headed in opposite directions.

Take divorce. Between 1960 and 1980, Murray shows that working class whites' divorce/separation rate rose from about 5% to about 15%. Over the next 20 years it more than doubled again, rising from 15% to 35%. The professional class also saw an increase in the divorce rate rise between 1960 and 1980: from about 1% to about 7.5% between 1960 and 1980. But it then completely leveled off: the professional class divorce/separation rate has been flat for the last thirty years. The same pattern holds for children growing up in broken homes. There has been a steady increase for the working class and a low plateau for the professional class.

What about work? In 1968, only 3% of prime age males with no more than a high school education were "out of the labor force." By 2008, that figure climbed to 12% — almost one in eight. Meanwhile, little has changed among males with a college education.

Part-time work is another indicator of the decline of industriousness among the working class. Among prime age males with no more than a high school education, the fraction working fewer than 40 hours a week doubled — from 10% in 1968 to 20% in 2008. Among the college graduates, the rise was much smaller: from 9% to 12%.

Writing in The New York Times the other day, David Brooks noted that the key ingredient in the cultural disintegration of working class life style is the role of men:

Tens of millions of men have marred life chances because schools are bad at educating boys, because they are not enmeshed in the long-term relationships that instill good habits and because insecure men do stupid and self-destructive things.

Over the past 40 years, women's wages have risen sharply but, as Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project point out, median incomes of men have dropped 28 percent and male labor force participation rates are down 16 percent. Next time somebody talks to you about wage stagnation, have them break it down by sex. It's not only globalization and technological change causing this stagnation. It's the deterioration of the moral and social landscape, especially for men.

Religious beliefs are changing too. Secularism rose 11 percentage points (from 29% to 40%) for the upper middle class, but rose 21 percentage points (from 38% to 59%) for the working class.

What about cause and effect? It should be obvious that culture affects economic outcomes, but some on the left think it's the other way around. Here's an amazing statement by Paul Krugman writing in The New York Times:

Traditional values aren't as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe — and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America's working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.

As usual, Krugman has it completely wrong. When Charles Murray was in Dallas the other day I suggested to him that culture is like the economists' notion of a "public good." We all benefit from it, even if we personally do nothing to create it, nurture it, or defend it. But if the institutions that sustain a culture are weak and eroding, then the culture itself will disappear and everyone will be affected by that change.

What is happening in working class America is the disintegration of the American way of life.

SOURCE

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When JFK betrayed true heroes who believed in him

Many widows living in south Florida feel differently about Kennedy’s magnetism. You'll often find these ladies, with itchy noses and red-rimmed eyes, ambling amidst the long rows of white crosses at the Cuban Memorial in Miami. It's a mini-Arlington, in honor of Castro's murder victims and those who fell trying to free Cuba from the Stalinism he imposed with his Soviet overlords while the “Leader of the Free World” seemed oddly distracted.

Some of these ladies will be kneeling, others walking slowly, looking for a name. You remember a similar scene from the opening frames of Saving Private Ryan. Many clutch rosaries. Many of the ladies will be pressing their faces into the breast of a relative who drove them there, a relative who wraps his arms around her spastically heaving shoulders.

Try as he might not to cry himself, he usually finds that the sobs wracking his mother, grandmother, sister or aunt are contagious. Yet he's often too young to remember the face of his martyred uncle or cousin - the name they just recognized on the white cross. “Killed in Action, Bay of Pigs April 18th 1961.”

Another woman will go home after placing flowers under her father's cross - a father she never knew. "Killed in action, Bay of Pigs, April 18th, 1961" also reads his cross. She was two at the time.

"Where are the PLANES?" her father’s commander yelled into his radio from the blood-soaked beachhead. "Send planes or we can’t last!” he yelled while Soviet Howitzers decimated his horribly outnumbered men, Soviet tanks closed-in, and his casualties piled up. Meanwhile “The Leader of the Free World” seemed oddly distracted.

“We must support anti-Castro fighters,” these ladies had heard (candidate) Kennedy implore short months earlier during his debates with Richard Nixon. “So far these freedom fighters have received no help from our government,” (candidate) Kennedy complained.

Short weeks before the debates CIA chief Allen Dulles (on Ike's orders) had briefed Kennedy about Cuban invasion plans. And since the plans were secret, Kennedy knew Nixon couldn't rebut. And indeed, Vice President Nixon (the invasion’s main booster, in fact) bit his tongue. He could easily have stomped Kennedy on it. But to some candidates national security trumps debating points.

“We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty!” these ladies heard from Kennedy mere minutes after he was elected “Leader of the Free World.”

Four months later, 1,500 of those very Cuban freedom-fighters that "we must support" were slugging it out 90 miles from U.S. shores against 31,000 Soviet-armed troops, squadrons of Stalin tanks and Castro’s entire air force. The beachhead is now known as the Bay of Pigs.

"We will NOT be evacuated!" yelled the commander of these ladies’ dads and husbands into his radio. "We came here to fight!" He was responding to the enraged and heartsick CIA man who - upon realizing the magnitude of the betrayal from “The Leader of the Free World.’--was offering to evacuate the Cuban freedom-fighters from the doomed beachhead. “We don’t want evacuation!” roared San Roman back into his radio. “Send planes! Send ammo! We came here to FIGHT!”

The pleas made it to Navy Chief Admiral Arleigh Burke in Washington, D.C., who conveyed them in person to his commander-in-chief. "Two planes, Mr. President!" Admiral Burke sputtered into his commander-in-chief's face. The fighting admiral was livid, pleading for permission to allow just two of his jets to blaze off a U.S. carrier just offshore from the beachhead and support the desperately embattled freedom-fighters.

"Burke, we can't get involved in this," replied Kennedy, who’d just emerged in a white tux from an elegant ball where he’d twirled a smiling Jackie around the dance-floor, to the coos, claps and twitters of the enchanted crowd.

"WE put those Cuban boys there, Mr. President!" the fighting admiral exploded. "By God, we ARE involved!"' But Admiral Burke could not budge The Leader of the Free World from betraying his pledge to the freedom-fighters desperately battling Soviet Imperialism 90 miles from U.S. shores.

The freedom-fighters were expending their last bullets as Lynch again offered to evacuate them. But San Roman again responded: “No!--This ends here!”, his response was barely audible over the deafening blasts from the storm of Soviet artillery.

"Can't continue," crackled the final message from San Roman a day later. For three days his force of mostly volunteer civilians had battled savagely against a Soviet-trained-and-led force 10 times theirs’ size, inflicting casualties of 20 to 1. To this day their feat of arms amazes professional military men. “They fought magnificently—and they were NOT defeated!” stressed their trainer Marine Col. Jack Hawkins, a multi-decorated veteran of Bataan, Iwo Jima and Inchon. “They simply ran out of ammunition after being abandoned by their sponsor the U.S. Government.”

Morale will do that to a fighting force. And there's no morale booster like watching Soviet proxies Fidel Castro and Che Guevara ravage your homeland and families, believe me.

Ammo finally ran out. "Russian tanks overrunning my position," reported San Roman on his radio... "destroying my equipment.” Finally the radio went dead.

"Tears filled my eyes," writes CIA man Grayston Lynch, a multi-decorated WWII and Korea vet who trained and befriended the Cuban freedom-fighters—and took their final message. "I broke down completely,” writes the Silver Star-winner who carried scars from Omaha Beach, Bastogne and Korea’s Heartbreak Ridge. “For the first time in my 37 years I was ashamed of my country.”

SOURCE

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Orwellian Doublespeak Dominates Economic Policy

While taking in my morning helping of news and commentary, I was struck by a certain similarity in every article touching on economic policy. It wasn't just the trampling of the Constitution, the abandonment of rational accounting principles, or the futility of the search for logic behind the proposals coming out of Washington that was so disturbing. There is nothing new about such sad developments. We long ago began to adapt to life without these bygone bulwarks against chaos.

It was the progressive destruction of the English language that prompted coffee to come out of my nose. Without a common understanding of precisely what words mean, rational discourse becomes futile. We might as well babble gibberish at each other as we fall back to settling our differences swinging clubs.

For example, what does "unemployment" mean? How can the official unemployment rate go down when millions of discouraged job seekers stop looking for work and the nation's labor participation rate takes the biggest plunge in history? Easy; simply stop counting people who drop out of the labor market. Numerous articles have pointed this out, but even sophisticated investors don't seem to be paying attention. When newspaper headlines proclaim, "Unemployment Down!" the stock market goes up. Smart stock buyers tell you that they know better but are betting on the trading behavior of people who don't. How's that for baking institutionalized ignorance into the market?

Can you buy "insurance" to protect yourself from predictable, repetitive events like paying your cable TV bill? No? So exactly how did we get into this big brouhaha about who has to pay for "insurance" coverage to gain "access" to birth control pills? (I looked up "access." It didn't say "free stuff.")

If compound obfuscation is your fancy, try "unemployment insurance." It's the only kind of "insurance" where your benefits can go up even when you are out of work and not paying any premiums. And if you stop looking for work as soon as you finish collecting benefits, you are no longer unemployed. Brilliant!

What does "inflation" mean? I know what I have to spend when I go to the grocery store and stop at the gas pump. Yet the official inflation rate excludes food and energy. How can the assurances of government officials be so contrary to our everyday experiences? Grouch Marx explained it. "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"

The star word of this silly season is "fair." The top 10% of tax filers pay 70% of all income taxes while the bottom half collectively pay almost no income tax. Yet we are in a huge debate about increasing taxes on those already paying the most in order to decrease taxes on those already paying the least. And it's all in the name of "fairness." That was a pretty neat trick. Think how different the debate would sound if instead of "fair" we used the words "stick ‘em up!"

While we're at it, do you know what your "tax rate" is? The most recent IRS data show that the top 1% of taxpayers fork 24% of their adjusted gross income over to Uncle Sam in income taxes. The next 1-5% cohort pays 16.4%, the next 5-10% pays 11.4%, the next 10-25% pays 8.2%, the next 25-50% pays 5.6%, and the bottom 50% pay a barely measurable 1.85%. In a progressive tax system, when you make more money you not only pay more taxes, you pay taxes at a higher average rate. Our current tax system may be impossibly complex, corrupt, and inefficient but it delivers exactly that result. So how did we end up in a shouting match about "millionaires and billionaires," enjoying a lower "tax rate" than secretaries when it's just not true? Better ask Obama's favorite billionaire. Maybe Warren Buffett can explain how someone that makes $200,000 a year is a millionaire.

It gets better. Giving money to your friends and political donors to finance hare brained speculative schemes is called an "investment." How can that be? I don't know, ask the Energy Department. But rest assured, fair taxpayer, your money is as safe as the General Motors stock the White House bought on your behalf. Perhaps they salted away your shares in the Social Security "lockbox."

God forbid we should invest our Social Security "accounts" in the stock market, which can go down, when we can entrust our "savings" to Congress, who has stolen them altogether. And speaking of speakers, is Congress "in session?" Better not ask the Speaker of the House.

Don't you love all those "budget cut" announcements? When we cut the budget in my household, spending goes down. Only in Washington can a "budget cut" lead to higher spending. You have to look at the numbers to learn that what they are really doing is marginally decreasing the acceleration in the growth of spending. As a geek, I know a second derivative when I see one. Apparently, members of the press never took math.

Train your eye to spot these language debaucheries, and send me your favorites. They have become so widespread that it makes you nostalgic for the days when we used to argue about what "is" is, or what carnal acts count as "sex" when the Commander in Chief claims he didn't have any. At least back then it was all good fun, speculating on the latest adventures of the presidential trouser trout as we watched our 401(k)s grow as fast as Pinocchio's nose.

Today, it's not so much fun. In fact, it's getting ugly. It will get uglier still if we don't get back to speaking plain English to each other.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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17 February, 2012

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa

As my scripture blog shows, the version of Christianity that has always impressed me most is the one I find in the New Testament. I have always been vaguely offended by the pagan accretions that have been tacked onto the original gospel: The Doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of the immortal soul, the cross, Sun-day worship, Christmas, Easter etc.

But I think I was wrong. With the exception of the Trinity, those pagan accretions were deliberately adopted because they already had a power over the hearts of men. So they strengthened the religion and helped it to survive as a vehicle for the original teachings. Perhaps without those pagan accretions the original Gospel might have been lost. As it is the original first century documents (of the New Testament) have survived and are still there for us to read and accept or not as our hearts and minds guide us.

So the grand buildings, the splendid vestments, the ecclesiastical processions, the "bells and smells" of Catholicism and Anglicanism are probably something to be thankful for, far away though they be from the original Christian congegations of the apostolic era.

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Who Won World War II?

Jacob G. Hornberger speaks some awkward truths

I’m always intrigued by those in the pro-interventionist crowd who trot out World War II to justify U.S. imperialist interventionism in the Middle East and the rest of the world. They always act as if the United States won World War II and also saved the Jews from the Holocaust. Nothing could be so ridiculous.

With respect to the European Jews, virtually all of them were dead by the end of the war. World War II did not save them from the Holocaust.

Equally important, the United States did not enter the war to save the Jews from the Holocaust. It entered the war because Germany declared war on the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

If the Japanese had not attacked and had Germany not declared war on the United States, it’s not at all clear that the United States would have ever entered the war. Recognizing that World War I had entailed a total waste of American lives and resources, most Americans were steadfastly opposed to entering another foreign war in Europe.

They ostensibly included Franklin Roosevelt, who told Americans during his 1940 presidential campaign, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again; your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars."

Of course, most people now concede that Roosevelt was lying and, in fact, was doing everything he could to thwart the will of the American people by provoking both the Germans and the Japanese into attacking first, thereby trapping Americans into entering the war.

We also shouldn’t forget about the U.S. government’s attitude toward Jews, including those living in Germany and Poland. Roosevelt’s government didn’t like them any more than the Hitler regime did. Indeed, when Hitler offered to let the Jews leave Germany alive, Roosevelt wouldn’t let them come to the United States. Immigration quotas was the excuse he used.

For that matter, don’t forget how Roosevelt’s government treated German Jews in the infamous “Voyage of the Damned,” when U.S. officials refused to permit Jewish refugees from Germany to disembark at Miami Harbor, knowing that the German ship captain would likely be relegated to returning them to Nazi Germany.

No, the sad truth is that U.S. entry into World War II did not save the Jews from the Holocaust, nor was that ever a goal of the U.S. government.

“But, Jacob, we beat the Nazis. Doesn’t that mean that we won World War II?”

Not exactly. You see, it turns on the meaning of the pronoun “we.” By “we” the interventionists mean “Great Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union.”

But if you break down that pronoun into its individual parts, you immediately notice a problem. Great Britain, France, and the United States didn’t win the war. The Soviet Union did.

Let’s think back to who declared war on whom. When Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, not the other way around. Why did they do that? Their announced goal was to free the Polish people from Nazi tyranny.

Why didn’t they also declare war on the Soviet Union, given that it too had invaded Poland? Good question! The interventionists never have an answer to that one.

So, what was the result at the end of World War II? Were the Polish people freed from Nazi tyranny? Well, yes, and interventionists love to point that out. But there is a problem here. While “we” celebrated our victory over the Nazis for the next several decades, the Poles didn’t.

Why not? Because they remained under the control of the Soviet Union for the next several decades! Remember: the Soviet Union is part of the “we” when interventionists exclaim that “we” won the war.

What’s wrong with remaining under the control of the Soviet Union? you ask. Well, the Soviet Union was governed by a communist regime, one that was as brutal as the Nazi regime. Thus, while U.S. interventionists convinced themselves that communist domination was somehow better than Nazi domination, the Poles knew that there wasn’t any difference at all.

So, World War II gave us Soviet communist control over Eastern Europe and East Germany along with an ever-burgeoning warfare state here at home, and interventionists continue to maintain that “we” won World War II. Oh, I almost forgot to mention that the post-war era also brought us to the brink of nuclear annihilation against our old World War II partner and ally, the Soviet Union, with whom “we” won World War II.

The interventionists say that if the United States hadn’t entered World War II, Germany would have invaded and conquered the United States. Oh? Are they referring to the nation that couldn’t even successfully cross the English Channel to invade and conquer England?

Moreover, there isn’t one iota of evidence that Hitler even desired to cross the ocean to invade and occupy the United States. Hitler’s intentions were always to move east — against the Soviet Union — yes, against the nation that would ultimately turn out to be the Cold War enemy of the United States — after serving as World War II partner and ally.

Moreover, if the United States could survive a world in which the Soviet Union controlled East Germany and Eastern Europe, why couldn’t it have done the same with a world in which Nazi Germany controlled Germany and Eastern Europe?

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the U.S. victory over Japan, while succeeding in causing Japanese forces to leave China, also ended up with China in the hands of Mao and the Chinese communists, a situation that remains to this day. I suppose though that U.S. interventionists would say that that’s not necessarily a bad thing given that the Chinese communist regime loaned the U.S. government the money to invade Iraq and Afghanistan.

Who won World War II? The communists did

SOURCE

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Pets, vets and regulated healthcare

Libertarians frequently point out that, despite the claims of critics, the U.S. health care system is far from what a free-market health care system might look like. Aside from the obvious large role played by programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, which account for almost 50 percent of health care spending in the United States, various other government interventions have led, largely unintentionally, to the crazy, complex employment-related system we have.

One of the most problematic features of the system is the predominance of third-party payments in which negotiations over prices and services take place between provider and insurance company rather than between provider and patient. When most Americans go to the doctor or hospital, no one tells them how much things are going to cost. Those messy details are between the insurance company (or the government) and the provider. Patients are therefore unable to make informed decisions about whether certain procedures are worth it, nor are they able to shop around to find the necessary services at a better price. Since they pay only a small fraction of the bill, most people don’t much care. This third-party payment very much diminishes the competitiveness of the health care system, driving up costs and alienating patients.

Detailed Cost Estimates

By contrast, consider veterinary medicine. My dog required extensive vet care recently, and in several ways our experience is relevant to the debate over human health care. At both our local vet clinic and an animal hospital in a larger city, we were presented detailed estimates of the services to be provided, including low- and high-end estimates of the total cost. In both cases we were able to discuss what the providers would be doing and why, as well as the costs of other options. Had we been unhappy with what we heard, we could have very easily gone elsewhere. Not surprisingly, the quality of care at both facilities appears to have been excellent. That’s what competition does.

It’s also worth noting that on the supply side of the market, the vet industry is much less hampered by regulations and monopoly than is human medicine. The number of MDs is controlled by the American Medical Association, which keeps the supply low and ensures monopoly profits for doctors. Regulations on what nurses and others can do compared to doctors also prevent competition and keep prices higher than they would be otherwise. Veterinary medicine faces fewer regulations and barriers, which keeps the supply of vets larger and offers pet owners many more options at more competitive prices. In fact the final bill at the animal hospital came in around 10 percent lower than the low-end estimate. I’m not sure the final cost of a human hospital stay in the United States has ever come in below estimate!

Dogs without a Country

As it turns out, the story is even more interesting. The animal hospital in question is in Ottawa, Ontario. For all the contrasts between U.S. and Canadian human health care, vet care is pretty similar. If you’ve ever crossed the border into Canada for health care (the traffic usually runs south) or needed care when abroad, you know how complicated dealing with different government regulations can be. Not if you’re a dog. Our records were transferred by email. Despite the two countries’ different approaches to human health care, the less-regulated vet system works well enough for both to adopt it. (Vet fees are subject to some regulation in Ontario.)

All this goes to show that the artificial political boundaries human beings draw virtually disappear when it comes to nonhuman beings that are not subject to citizenship rules.

Finally, it’s worth noting that while my wife and I had to have our passports at the ready to show the border guards in both countries, all we needed for the dog was a certificate of up-to-date rabies shots.

My recent experience with veterinary medicine provides even more evidence that a truly free market in health care can work and work well. When people say the U.S. health care system is going to the dogs, my new response is: I wish.

SOURCE

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Once again a moronic Democrat shows he is unable to think in anything but racial terms

Another day, another classless, insubstantive, race-based attack by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

This time, the Nevada Democrat targeted Marco Rubio, questioning the Florida Republican's choice to block Mari Carmen Aponte, President Obama's nominee for ambassador to El Salvador. Apparently, Reid believes Rubio is 'betraying' the Hispanic community by opposing her nomination.

“In Nevada, this woman [Aponte] is seen by the Puerto Rican community, the Hispanic community, as really somebody who is an up-and-rising star. … I just think it’s a mistake for someone who is supposedly representing Hispanic issues to do what [Rubio] has done[.]"

Oh, so now he's Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Hispanics)?

Not according to his office.

BuzzFeed asked Rubio spokesman Alex Conant what he made of the implication that Rubio "is supposedly representing Hispanic issues."

"Senator Rubio represents Florida," he replied.

Heh.

However, it seems Reid's office has a bad case of foot-in-mouth disease today. When asked for futher comment on the statement, the Senator's spokesman doubled down on failure: 

In an email, Reid spokesman Jose Parra didn't back down: “From supporting Arizona’s law legalizing the racial profiling of Latinos, to opposing the DREAM Act, to attacking Justice Sonia Sotomayor and voting against Ambassador Aponte twice, Sen. Rubio’s record speaks for itself.”

Graceless, shameful, and unbefitting of someone of Reid's "supposed" stature. If statesmanship should die, Harry Reid will have killed it.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

NJ: Assembly approves homosexual "marriage" -- Christie will veto: "The New Jersey Assembly passed legislation legalizing same-sex marriage on Thursday, sending the bill to Republican Governor Chris Christie, a possible vice-presidential candidate who has promised to veto the measure."

More Leftist hysteria: "Taliban" ultrasounds: "JOY BEHAR: There’s a couple of bills pending in Virginia. One of them is that women will be required to undergo sonograms, ultrasound when they are about to have an abortion and the other one is that if a heartbeat isn’t detected, then they will get a trans-vaginal ultrasound which is basically going into the vagina and very intrusive. Now, there is no — as far as I can tell there is no other Procedure including MRIs and cancer treatments that are mandated. This is- would be a mandated treatment for girls who are pregnant to see the child, the infant, the fetus. It’s like, what are we? What is this, the Taliban now? What are we, in Afghanistan? Where are we exactly in this country?"

AZ: Supreme Court lets Medicaid cuts stand: "The Arizona Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to review an appeal challenging cuts to the state's Medicaid program, letting stand an enrollment freeze that has locked thousands of poor residents out of government-paid health insurance. An estimated 100,000 childless adults will lose Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System coverage this fiscal year. The state has turned away an untold number since a lower-court judge allowed the cap to take effect in July."

OK: Anti-abortion “personhood” bill clears senate: "Oklahoma lawmakers edged closer toward trying to outlaw abortion on Wednesday by approving 'personhood' legislation that gives individual rights to an embryo from the moment of conception. The Republican-controlled state Senate voted 34-8 to pass the 'Personhood Act' which defines the word person under state law to include unborn children from the moment of conception. The measure now goes to the state House where pro-life Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than a 2-1 margin."

Gaza: Israeli Air Force strikes “terror activity sites”: "Israel's Air Force struck what the military called two 'terror activity sites' in the Gaza Strip. The attacks early Thursday morning were in response to four rockets fired on southern Israel Wednesday night, according to a statement from the Israel Defense Forces spokesman. ... The targets were a Hamas training center in eastern Gaza and an Islamic Jihad training center in central Gaza, the Palestinian Ma'an news service reported."

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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16 February, 2012

Rep. Maxine Waters Unhinged: Republican Congressmen Boehner and Cantor Are ‘Demons!’

Rather reminiscent of Obama's old pastor -- the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of "Amerikkka" fame. Sanity is very fragile among Leftists



Rep. Maxine Waters delivered a fiery speech to delegates at the California Democratic State Convention this past weekend, calling House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor “demons” whom she doesn’t want to see “in our hall, on our screens.”

“I saw pictures of Boehner and Cantor on our screens,” the California Democrat said in remarks posted online. “Don’t ever let me see again in life those Republicans in our hall, on our screens, talking about anything. These are demons.” Waters made the comments amid a charge to convention-goers to campaign hard during the 2012 election season.

She continued: “These are legislators who are destroying this country rather than bringing us together, creating jobs, making sure we have a good tax policy, bringing our jobs from back offshore, incentivizing those who keep the jobs here. They are bringing down this country, destroying this country because again they’d rather do whatever they can to destroy this president rather than for the good of this country.”

Waters‘ office did not immediately respond to The Blaze’s request for comment about her remarks, including her rhetoric calling Boehner and Cantor “demons.”

SOURCE

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The destructive Legacy of the prewar "Progressives" is still with us

Thomas Sowell

"Often wrong but never in doubt" is a phrase that summarizes much of what was done by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the two giants of the Progressive era, a century ago.

Their legacy is very much alive today, both in their mindset -- including government picking winners and losers in the economy and interventionism in foreign countries -- as well as specific institutions created during the Progressive era, such as the income tax and the Federal Reserve System.

Like so many Progressives today, Theodore Roosevelt felt no need to study economics before intervening in the economy. He said of "economic issues" that "I am not deeply interested in them, my problems are moral problems." For example, he found it "unfair" that railroads charged different rates to different shippers, reaching the moral conclusion that these rates were discriminatory and should be forbidden "in every shape and form."

It never seemed to occur to TR that there could be valid economic reasons for the railroads to charge the Standard Oil Company lower rates for shipping their oil. At a time when others shipped their oil in barrels, Standard Oil shipped theirs in tank cars -- which required a lot less work by the railroads than loading and unloading the same amount of oil in barrels.

Theodore Roosevelt was also morally offended by the fact that Standard Oil created "enormous fortunes" for its owners "at the expense of business rivals." How a business can offer consumers lower prices without taking customers away from businesses that charge higher prices is a mystery still unsolved to the present day, when the very same arguments are used against Wal-Mart.

The same preoccupation with being "fair" to high-cost producers who were losing customers to low-cost producers has turned anti-trust law on its head, for generations after the Progressive era. Although anti-trust laws and policies have been rationalized as ways of keeping monopolies from raising prices to consumers, the actual thrust of anti-trust activity has more often been against businesses that charged lower prices than their competitors.

Theodore Roosevelt's anti-trust attacks on low-price businesses in his time were echoed in later "fail trade" laws, and in attacks against "unfair" competition by the Federal Trade Commission, another agency spawned in the Progressive era.

Woodrow Wilson's Progressivism was very much in the same mindset. Government intervention in the economy was justified on grounds that "society is the senior partner in all business."

The rhetorical transformation of government into "society" is a verbal sleight-of-hand trick that endures to this day. So is the notion that money earned in the form of profits requires politicians' benediction to be legitimate, while money earned under other names apparently does not.

Thus Woodrow Wilson declared: "If private profits are to be legitimized, private fortunes made honorable, these great forces which play upon the modern field must, both individually and collectively, be accommodated to a common purpose."

And just who will decide what this common purpose is and how it is to be achieved? "Politics," according to Wilson, "has to deal with and harmonize" these various forces.

In other words, the government -- politicians, bureaucrats and judges -- are to intervene, second-guess and pick winners and losers, in a complex economic process of which they are often uninformed, if not misinformed, and a process in which they pay no price for being wrong, regardless of how high a price will be paid by the economy.

If this headstrong, busybody approach seems familiar because it is similar to what is happening today, that is because it is based on fundamentally the same vision, the same presumptions of superior wisdom, and the same kind of lofty rhetoric we hear today about "fairness." Wilson even used the phrase "social justice."

Woodrow Wilson also won a Nobel Prize for peace, like the current president -- and it was just as undeserved. Wilson's "war to end wars" in fact set the stage for an even bigger, bloodier and more devastating Second World War.

But, then as now, those with noble-sounding rhetoric are seldom judged by what consequences actually follow.

SOURCE

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Never Trust Government Numbers

John Stossel

President Obama said in his State of the Union speech, "We've already agreed to more than $2 trillion in cuts and savings."

That was reassuring.

The new budget he released this week promises $4 trillion in "deficit reduction" -- about half in tax increases and half in spending cuts. But like most politicians, Obama misleads.

Cato Institute economist Dan Mitchell cut through the fog to get at the truth of the $2 trillion "cut."

"We have a budget of, what, almost $4 trillion? So if we're doing $2 trillion of cuts," Mitchell said, "we're cutting government in half. That sounds wonderful."

But what the president was talking about is not even a cut. The politicians just agreed that over the next 10 years, instead of increasing spending by $9.48 trillion, they'd increase it by "just" $7.3 trillion. Calling that a "cut" is nonsense.

Mitchell gave an analogy: "What if I came to you and said, 'I've been on a diet for the last month, and I've gained 10 pounds. Isn't that great?' You would say: 'Wait, what are you talking about? That's insane.' And I said: 'I was going to gain 15 pounds. I've only gained 10 pounds, therefore my diet is successful.'"

Democrats use this deceit when they want more social spending. Republicans use it for military spending.

And the press buys it. The Washington Post has been writing about "draconian cuts."

"The politicians know this game," Mitchell said. "The special interests know this game. Everyone gets a bigger budget every year. ... And we wind up, sooner or later, being Greece."

We are definitely on the road to bankruptcy.

"We have maybe 10, 15 years' advanced notice. And what's frustrating is that we're not taking advantage of that, even as we see these other countries collapsing into social chaos and disarray."

Mitchell points out that the politicians don't even have to make actual cuts to save the future. If they just slowed the growth of government to about 2 percent per year, the U.S. economy could grow out of this mess. But the politicians won't do even that.

"Being from the Cato Institute, I actually do want to cut spending. But if all we're trying to do is balance the budget over 10 years, which is sort of the minimal thing that politicians keep saying we should do, if we simply limit the growth of spending to 2 percent a year, which is about the projected rate of inflation, we'll have a balanced budget in 2022. ... But instead, the politicians say, 'Oh, we'll have draconian and savage budget cuts.' ... They don't want to put government on a diet, even if that diet allows spending to grow 2 percent a year."

They also continually mislead us about what their schemes will cost.

President Bush said the war in Iraq would cost $50 billion to $60 billion. It cost $800 billion. When Medicare Part A was created, the government said it would cost $9 billion in 1990. It cost $67 billion. They said the hiring of TSA airport security screeners would cost $100 million. Then they spent $700 million. Yet the media report the estimates as if they are realistic. Again and again, politicians get away with underestimating the cost of their programs.

Often the cost goes up because people change their behavior to get free stuff. A program meant to help the needy costs a certain amount. The next year, it costs more, because now more of the needy know about the program and more social workers know how to tap it. The next year, the non-needy feel like suckers if they don't get the handout, and they figure out a way to game the system.

Then, Mitchell point out, "what do politicians do the next year? They expand the program to buy more votes. And the year after that, they add a new benefit. That's what's happened with Medicare. It's not just that they got the fundamental estimates wrong. They did. But every new generation of politicians figures out some new expansion, some new benefit."

And so we're on the road to Greece.

Bottom line: Don't trust the politicians' numbers.

SOURCE

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Liberals are the True Aggressors in Culture Wars

Jonah Goldberg

If you're not with us, you're against us. President Bush popularized this expression after 9/11 to describe his foreign policy doctrine: Countries couldn't support or indulge terrorists and be our friends at the same time. But his detractors quickly turned it into a fairly paranoid vision of domestic political life, as if Bush had been talking about domestic opponents and dissenters.

The irony is that few worldviews better describe the general liberal orientation to public policy and the culture war. The left often complains about the culture war as if it's a war they don't want to fight. They insist they just want to follow "sound science" or "what works" when it comes to public policy, but those crazy knuckle-dragging right-wingers constantly want to talk about gays and abortion and other hot-button issues.

It's all a farce. Liberals are the aggressors in the culture war (and not always for the worse, as the civil rights movement demonstrates). What they object to isn't so much the government imposing its values on people -- heck, they love that. They see nothing wrong with imposing their views about diet, exercise, sex, race and the environment on Americans. What outrages them is resistance, or even non-compliance with their agenda. "Why are you making such a scene?" progressives complain. "Just do what we want and there will be no fuss."

Consider President Obama's decision to require most religious institutions -- including Catholic hospitals, schools, etc. -- to pay for contraception, sterilizations and the "morning after" pill. When "ObamaCare" was still being debated, the White House had all but promised Catholic leaders that it would find a compromise to spare the church from the untenable position of paying for services that directly violate their faith. Now that ObamaCare is the law, the administration says the church, like everyone else, must fall in line.

Or consider the still-raging controversy over the Susan G. Komen For the Cure's entirely reasonable -- albeit very poorly handled -- decision to withdraw its funding of Planned Parenthood, America's largest abortion provider. The Komen foundation is singularly dedicated to raising research money for, and awareness about, breast cancer. It's the folks with those pink ribbons. The organization decided to withdraw its comparatively meager funding in part because Planned Parenthood doesn't offer mammograms. (Planned Parenthood's president, Cecile Richards, was caught misleading people on this very point last spring.)

Other factors included the fact that Planned Parenthood is under investigation by Congress and the obvious but unstated fact that the organization is wildly controversial. It's this last point that infuriates the left. Pro-choice activists and their allies believe that Planned Parenthood should not be controversial, nor should abortion be up for discussion, either. If you have a problem with either it is because you are an ideologue, an extremist or a zealot opposed to the interests of womankind. And any attempt to suggest that abortion should offend the consciences of mainstream Americans, never mind such a revered organization as Komen, is simply unacceptable.

It's clearly not about the money. Komen's $600,000 in donations amount to less than .01 percent of Planned Parenthood's budget (as opposed to the nearly half that comes from taxpayers). It's about making it very clear: Resistance is not just futile, but dangerous.

That was evident almost immediately. Komen's website was hacked, its Wikipedia page filled with smears. Various allegedly objective news outlets rallied to Planned Parenthood's defense as if the behemoth abortion provider was a victim of the tiny little breast cancer foundation.

Komen apologized and seemed to offer a reversal of its policy. This "just goes to show you, when women speak out, women win," responded House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

This, of course, is ridiculous propaganda. Women are not a monolithic political bloc and were not unanimously opposed to Komen's decision. Indeed, roughly half of women are pro-life and, you can be sure, Komen will lose donations from women and men who do not want to see their donations going to abortion providers. But for a certain type of upper-class liberal woman, it simply must be asserted, if not believed, that there is only one acceptable definition of a woman's perspective when it comes to issues such as abortion.

You can understand why Komen wants to get out of the culture war crossfire. It just wants to spend its finite resources on the race for a cure. But that's not good enough. The real motive behind this backlash is to make it very clear: You must choose a side -- ours. And once you choose our side, you can never change your mind without severe consequences. And what is true of liberal politics is also true of liberal public policy. As the Obama administration has made clear to the Catholic Church, there is no neutrality, no safe harbor from liberalism's moral vision. You're either with us, or against us -- which means we shall be against you.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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15 February, 2012

Obama may be the most destructive tax increaser in history

The punitive double taxation of company profits (once in the hands of the company and then again in the hands of the dividend recipient) has a hugely distorting effect on any economy. So much so that a LEFTIST government in Australia abolished it long ago.

A major effect of it in the USA is to divert investment away from companies and into risky small businesses. As a way of avoiding the tax, many small businesses operate as sole traders instead of as companies. But small businesses go broke at an enormous rate, thus destroying lots of capital and lots of jobs.

The only bright side of the U.S. system is that dividends are taxed at a low rate -- 15% -- so many people are prepared to wear that as a penalty for putting their money into companies. But Obama now wants to take that away and hike the dividend tax rate to 43%. That will kill a lot of company investment and hence a lot of job creation. Americans must not let this moronic idea pass

“President Obama released his FY 2013 budget this morning. By his own numbers, his budget raises net taxes over the next decade by $1.56 trillion (Table S-9, page 225). As a percentage of the economy, tax revenues would rise all the way to 20.1% of GDP in 2022, far higher than the historical tax revenue average of 18.3% of GDP (Table S-1, page 205).”

One and a half TRILLION dollar increase in tax years.

That is $1,5 Trillion taken from your family and businesses and given to government. You can then add another TRILLION for the increases costs of businesses, for their taxes, which will be passed on to the consumer

“The dividends rate will raise from 15% today to 43.4% next year. The Obama budget proposes taxing dividends for investors making more than $250,000 per year at ordinary income tax rates, which will rise to a top rate of 39.6% under the budget. In addition, the Obamacare surtax on investors will combine to nearly triple the tax rate on dividends in just one year.”

This is a killer for investments and buying power. This budget is a job and economy killer. Obama may get his wish, he will transform this nation–from a prosperous one to a Third World County.

SOURCE

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Obama’s Cost-Neutral Contraception Lie

The story over the Obama administration’s non-compromise compromise on contraception shows few signs of cooling off. The U.S. Catholic bishops have given it the cold shoulder, though the Senate’s two foremost RINOs, Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, have said they back the White House’s new proposal.

A less-examined issue is the rationale that the White House gave for its non-compromise compromise. Supposedly, religious organizations wouldn’t have to pay for providing contraception coverage to their employees. Rather, the insurance companies would pay for providing the employees with such coverage. The administration says this wouldn’t cost the insurers a dime:

"Covering contraception is cost-neutral for insurance companies since it saves money by keeping women healthy and preventing spending on other health services."

On a conference call on Friday, an administration official said, “Let me be clear, we have lots of evidence and we’ll be trying to provide some of that evidence today in an issue brief why we think this is net cost neutral. So there should be no extra charge for contraception. ... We’ll be getting you that evidence we don’t think there is an issue of (insurance companies’) co-mingling of funds because we don’t think there is an extra premium associated with this service.”

I have yet to receive that issue brief. I’ve contacted a few of the other reporters on that call and they didn’t receive it either.

Perhaps that’s because there is no evidence that a mandate on insurance companies to provide contraception is cost-neutral. A search of PubMed turns up nothing.

Tory Bunce, policy director at the conservative Council for Affordable Health Insurance, told IBD, “In our research, we’ve looked at the cost of mandates on the state level. We’ve asked our members to price these mandates in their actual policies. What we’ve been told from the actuaries is that the contraceptive mandate costs 1%-3% of premiums.”

Mark Litow, an actuary at Milliman, explained in an email:

"Prior modelling of several preventive mandates such as cervical cancer and screening suggests there is a balance regarding preventive mandates. That is, if testing is limited to high-risk individuals (i.e., women at high risk of cervical cancer whether due to family history or other factors), then savings due to catching the problem early has the potential to equal or outweigh the costs of the additional tests in total. But testing large groups of people was found to likely create more cost than savings, in the case of cervical cancer, by a substantial margin. Given the scope of the mandate with contraceptives ... the likelihood is that the contraceptive mandate in reality will cost substantially more than any savings created."

In short, the Obama administration never had any evidence that providing contraception would be cost-neutral for insurance companies, since there isn’t any.

But it just doesn’t seem all that remarkable anymore that the Obama administration is willing to engage in such a brazen lie.

SOURCE

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MSNBC’s Martin Bashir Compares Santorum to Mass Murdering Communist Joseph Stalin‏

Where is the outcry? Try comparing Obama to Stalin, then see what happens

MSNBC host Martin Bashir isn’t one to shy away from issuing far-flung comparisons. This time, however, the unabashedly liberal newscaster may have gone several steps over the line. Bashir, in his “Clear the Air” segment, compared GOP contender Rick Santorum to mass-murdering, Communist dictator Joseph Stalin.

During one of his typical ravings, the MSNBC anchor connected the former Pennsylvania senator to George Orwell’s Big Brother from 1984. This was merely the icing on a cake, however, as Bashir saved his harshest comparison for last: ”If you listen carefully to Rick Santorum, he sounds more like Stalin than Pope Innocent III.”

To provide a backdrop for his slander, Bashir played a clip of Santorum where he then contrasted, “…When we last saw the Republican front-runner Rick Santorum speaking before a crowd yesterday, all we could think of was George Orwell’s novel 1984 about a society dominated by the most extreme form of totalitarianism.” Before showing a clip of the movie version of 1984, he added, “See if you can spot the similarities.”

RICK SANTORUM: -The loud voices that support the Republican Party and the conservative cause!

BIG BROTHER (from 1984): One week from now, in this very square, we shall have a demonstration of our resolve.

BASHIR: The similarities with George Orwell’s novel and that movie are not just superficial. No, Rick Santorum holds some pretty stern views on a number of important issues and he regularly sounds like a theocrat. For example, he has asserted that the right to privacy does not exist and has equated same sex relationships with bestiality.

BIG BROTHER: Brothers and sisters, the endless catalogue of bestial atrocities that will inevitably ensue from this appalling act, must, can, and will be terminated.

BASHIR: Mr. Santorum has pledged to repeal all federal funding for contraception and says individual states should be allowed to outlaw any kind of birth control.

BIG BROTHER: The forces of darkness and the treasonable maggots who collaborate with them, must, can and will be wiped from the face of the Earth!

BASHIR: In reviewing his book It Takes a Family, one writer said “Mr. Santorum has one of the finest minds of the 13th century.” But I’m not so sure. If you listen carefully to Rick Santorum, he sounds more like Stalin than Pope Innocent III.

SOURCE

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The New York Times Supports Project Veritas – Sort Of

When conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe and his colleagues at Project Veritas released their bombshell video showing election workers in New Hampshire giving out ballots in the names of dead voters, conservatives nodded knowingly and Democrats started talking about throwing the whistleblowers in jail.

Now it turns out that The New York Times and the Pew Center on the States (neither of which are exactly bastions of conservative thinking) both support O’Keefe in his conclusion that “U.S. voter registration rolls are in disarray” as the Times put it.

A recent Pew study found that there are about 1.8 million dead people listed as active voters. Some 2.8 million people have active registrations in more than one state. One in eight active registrations is invalid or inaccurate.

Of course, neither The New York Times nor the Pew Center was willing to go so far as to say straight-up that Democrats have long-supported weakening voter ID laws, but the story did quote a law professor and political scientist at Columbia, who said, “it is now pretty clear that Democrats want to enact measures that make voter registration easier, and Republicans fear that would be an invitation to fraud.”

That The New York Times would print such a statement demonstrates that the problem must truly be verging on crisis.

Conservatives in the New Hampshire legislature were close to addressing this problem in their state until Democratic Governor John Lynch vetoed a voter ID bill passed by the Republican legislature. Lynch claimed that there was no evidence that vote fraud could or was being perpetrated in New Hampshire -- but O’Keefe and his intrepid band of investigators proved that to be false, and set Democrats sifting through the law books looking for something to charge them with.

While neither The New York Times article nor the Pew study mentions James O’Keefe or Project Veritas by name, it should be taken as proof positive that their New Hampshire ballot security project was right on the principles and right on the facts.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Europe’s first Vega rocket blasts off successfully: "Europe's first Vega rocket blasted off from French Guiana on Monday in a successful inaugural flight aimed at giving Europe a vehicle for scientific satellite missions. The rocket took off from the European Space Agency's (ESA) launch site in Kourou, French Guiana, on the northeast coast of South America at 7.00 a.m. (1000 GMT), with nine scientific satellites on board."

NASA eyes plan for deep-space outpost near the moon: "NASA is pressing forward on assessing the value of a 'human-tended waypoint' near the far side of the moon -- one that would embrace international partnerships as well as commercial and academic participation, SPACE.com has learned. According to a Feb. 3 memo from William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations, a team is being formed to develop a cohesive plan for exploring a spot in space known as the Earth-moon libration point 2 (EML-2)."

Liberal judge robbed By knife wielder: "The Supreme Court has confirmed that Justice Stephen Breyer, his wife and several family friends were the victims of a knife-wielding robber at the Breyer vacation home on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean. Neither the justice nor any of his family or friends were injured. But reports indicate that the criminal made off with nearly $1,000 in cash. On Twitter, somebody asked me the big money question: "So if conservatives are just liberals who have been mugged, does that mean we can now kiss Obamacare goodbye?"

The abusive TSA again: "A female passenger has claimed she was forced to undergo repeated body scans after an airport employee complimented her figure. Married mother Ellen Terrell said she was stopped by airport staff at Dallas Airport in the US during a trip with her husband. Mrs Terrell, from Texas, alleges she was told to go through the machines three times after a female airport employee asked her if she played tennis. When she replied that she didn’t the employee allegedly said: “You just have such a cute figure”. Mrs Terrell told news website CBS 11 that she felt sexually exploited and was “totally exposed” for the benefit of male staff who watch the scanned images - which give a detailed image of the naked body - in a back room."

Even great passenger trains can no longer compete: "Iconic Australian rail icon the Indian Pacific is under threat and will slash services to stay afloat. The world-famous train linking Western Australia with the eastern states via the Nullarbor Plain is battling competition from low-cost airlines and the cruise ship market, amid slumping tourism and a high Australian dollar. GSR has been forced to cut back services on the Indian Pacific, which runs between Perth and Sydney via Adelaide, dropping back to one service a week from March 28 two months earlier than it usually scales back for the low season. The Ghan, linking Darwin and Adelaide via Alice Springs, will from April 4 also only operate one service a week. The Indian Pacific, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2010, and The Ghan are regularly mentioned in lists of the world's great rail journeys."

Iranian terrorist blows off his own legs: "A wounded Iranian fleeing an unintended explosion at a house threw a grenade at Bangkok police that instead blew off one of his legs in a series of blasts on Tuesday that Israel's defence minister called an "attempted terrorist attack" by Iran. The violence came a day after Israel blamed Tehran for targeting its diplomats with bombs in India and Georgia. Police who had been called to the scene tried to apprehend Moradi, who hurled a grenade at them, "but somehow it bounced back" and blew off his leg, Pansiri said. Photos of the wounded Moradi showed him covered in soot, lying on a sidewalk strewn with broken glass in front of a primary and secondary school. Hospital officials said Moradi's right leg was severed below the knee, while his left leg was severely injured."

British money-printing hits the elderly: "More than one million pensioners have been consigned to a life of poverty because of the Bank of England’s strategy of pumping money into the economy. Every day, 1,500 people are forced to take a retirement income which has been lowered because of the policy called Quantitative Easing, or QE. While the wider economy may recover, this lower income is permanent, damaging a pensioner’s wealth for ever. To add to this, thousands of pensioners who rely on income from savings, and are already burdened with record low interest rates, have seen their returns eaten away by rises in the cost of living caused by QE. It means their nest eggs are now worth £41 billion less than before QE began. This toxic combination of high inflation and low interest rates means many elderly people are now down to their last few thousand pounds after a life spent saving."

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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14 February, 2012

The GOP Can Add 10 Million Jobs and $15 Trillion to US Economy without Spending a Dime

There are many contrasts that the GOP can use to go after Obama on the economy. None present such a black and white contrast as the dispute about the black, tar-sands crude that Canada would like to ship through the US to refineries on the Gulf via the Keystone XL pipeline. The dispute isn't about the environment, is about creating 10 million U.S. jobs.

The State Department gave preliminary approval to build the Keystone pipeline late last summer, saying that it posed no significant environmental risks. But like a lot of things with this administration, it was a case of the left hand not knowing what the left-wing was doing.

Instead of allowing the project to go through, along with the hundreds of thousands of jobs it would create, Obama sided with whack-job environmentalists who raised bogus fears that oil spills could pollute the aquifer that lies underneath its path.

Ok, he only apparently sided with them. He actually did what Obama likes to do best when pandering to… whomever. He bravely told the rest of us that for right now he wouldn’t approve the pipeline, but he might change his mind. Oh, and if we try to rush him to make a decision, we’ll all be very, very sorry.

So Canada’s prime minister has decided to look for a new partner for their oil.

“Harper’s second official trip to the Middle Kingdom comes at an important juncture in Canada-China relations,” writes Canada’s National Post “and will help dictate the Conservative government’s economic and foreign policy with the Asian superpower for years to come. The prime minister is courting China as a customer for Canadian natural resources — insisting it’s in Canada’s national interest to send oil and gas to Asia — and looking to sew stronger economic ties with the world’s fastest-growing economy.”

Never will an Obama administration be accused of shepherding the “world’s fastest-growing economy.”

You wanna grow debt quickly? Sure they are your guys. But on the economy?

Turn to the much more reliable capitalists in Communist China. That’s at least the message from Stephen Harper.

The pipeline could ultimately supply about a million barrels of Canadian oil to the US per day and 400,000 US jobs, most of them almost immediately.

But instead, the president, who has been railing against Congress for not passing another expensive jobs bill, and talks about income equality like it’s the most pressing issue of the day, just killed 400,000 American jobs that would battle income inequality in the most productive sense by providing ordinary Americans with the opportunity to earn some income.

And despite everything the Obama administration has done to slow down domestic development of oil and gas resources, the oil and gas sector is one of the fastest growing jobs markets in a very anemic job market. While other sectors are shedding jobs, oil and gas is hot.

“The use of new drilling techniques to tap oil and gas in shale rocks far underground helped add 158,000 new oil and gas jobs over the past five years,” writes the Wall Street Journal “and economists think that it has created even more jobs in companies supplying the energy industry and in the broader services industry.”

“This is probably the biggest stimulus we have going,” Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research told the WSJ.

According to the Journal “$145 billion will be spent drilling and completing wells this year, up from $13 billion in 2000.”

While it’s estimated that Canada may have as much as 2 trillion barrels of oil in reserves, “the U.S. Geological Survey estimates the [US] has 4.3 trillion barrels of in-place oil shale resources centered in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, said Helen Hankins, Colorado director for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management” according to the Associated Press.

4.3 trillion barrels is 16 times the reserves of Saudi Arabia, or enough oil to supply the US for 600 years.

As I have pointed out all along, the Keystone issue isn’t about the safety of a pipeline. Obama and enviro-whacko friends know that if they allow Canadian tar sands oil to be developed via the Keystone pipeline, that the US will also start to develop their own tar-sands and shale oil. The US contains well over 600 years of known reserves and that would allow the US to be a net exporter of oil. If that happens, the green economy ruse that the left has sponsored, already reeling from bankruptcies and cronyism, would collapse. It would show that there is no shortage of oil and “green” energy can not compete with fossil fuels.

The only thing left then for those bitter climate clingers would be the shoddy science of Global Something-or-Another.

Oil from tar sands, reports the BBC on the Keystone decision, “is so plentiful that full-scale development would seriously delay the transition to low-carbon alternative fuels,” which is the holy grail of the left. And along the way, the U.S. would create at least 10 million new U.S. jobs, keeping around $500 billion per year here at home. Over twenty years that would be an additional $12.5 trillion in GDP even at a modest 2 percent growth rate. At 4 percent the numbers are closer to $15.5 trillion.

Full scale development of tar sands can only be stopped by taxing oil out of existence, like was tried with cap and trade. Cape and trade was never about trying to cool the earth. It was about giving "green" technologies a competitive advantage over fossil fuels that free markets won't concede.

Building out the infrastructure to drill and transport that oil just from the Rocky Mountains in the US could supply literally millions of jobs for American workers, while supplying literally millions of barrels of oil per day, repairing our energy security for the next century. But moist importantly it would repair our economy.

I mean we went to war to protect the supply of oil coming from Libya for Europe.

Couldn’t the GOP at least first go to work making sure Keystone provides work for Americans? That’s an issue to go to war over.

SOURCE

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What Women Want

Katie Kieffer writes well below but I want to add one extra point: Fathers can be tremendously important to daughters. Only a minority of daughters are lucky enough to be a "Daddy's girl" but it is one of the most beautiful of all human relationships when it occurs: Two people who adore one-another and show it. It gives the girl extra strength and confidence in her worth throughout her subsequent life. It also gives her a powerful model for the "right" man for her.

The lady in my life was a Daddy's girl and I am sure she would not be able to put up with me except that I am like her father in many ways. Things that might bother others she knows to be benign -- JR

Forget chocolate, diamonds and flowers. Women want fathers.

Not every woman has a brother. Not every woman finds or wants a husband (today just 51 percent of all adults 18 and over are married compared to 72 percent in 1960). However, I think every woman needs and desires a male role model in her life.

Pink ribbons are plastered on everything from yogurt containers to NFL uniforms. And numerous “find the cure” organizations appear to be staying in business longer than necessary because they squander their funds on non-research projects (think abortions at Planned Parenthood), leaving women on their own to find the cure to breast cancer.

Not every woman gets breast cancer (a horrible condition and certainly worthy of honest research funding.) Fathers, in contrast, are important to the health and development of all women. So, I think that one of the best things we can do for women as a whole is encourage men to be good fathers and father figures.

Ideally a “father figure” is a woman’s biological father, but not always. A friend, adoptive father, uncle, husband, grandpa or a brother can become a male role model for a woman when her biological father dies or otherwise ducks out of her life.

Some biological fathers abandon their daughters; they get a woman pregnant and then leave her to change the baby’s diapers (after kindly offering to pay for an abortion, of course.) Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs initially fell into this category: He got his on-and-off girlfriend pregnant and refused to be an active father for the first ten years of her life. Jobs eventually assumed his proper role as a father and he deeply regretted his early behavior.

Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson: “I wish I had handled it differently. I could not see myself as a father then, so I didn’t face up to it. But when the test results showed she was my daughter, it’s not true that I doubted it. I agreed to support her until she was eighteen and give some money to Chrisann [his ex-girlfriend] as well. I found a house in Palo Alto and fixed it up and let them live there rent-free. Her mother found her great schools which I paid for. I tried to do the right thing. But if I could do it over, I would do a better job.”

When Jobs married his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, he brought his daughter into his own home and took her on a special father-daughter trip to Japan as he eventually did with all three of his and Powell’s children.

Jobs understood that his first daughter was still scarred by his behavior early in her life, even at his death, although they did reconcile. He told his biographer that the reason he wanted the biography was not to explain his entrepreneurial story with Apple: “I wanted my kids to know me. I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”

Jobs’ father abandoned him and gave him up for adoption. Because of this, Jobs struggled with a feeling of abandonment his entire life. Jobs ‘used to play [John Lennon’s song Mother] often,’ Isaacson writes. ‘The refrain includes the haunting chant “Mama don’t go, Daddy come home.”’ The behavior of his father probably played a huge role in Jobs’ behavior toward his own first daughter.

Fathers who only have sons are just as important: When men raise good sons, they do their sons’ future girlfriends, wives and grandchildren a huge favor. Fathers have the power to prevent or encourage bad behavior: When a young man cheats on his wife, it’s often because he saw his father cheat on his mother, confirms a 2011 study from the Charles University in Prague.

Likewise, when a young father is addicted to porn, it’s usually because his own father was a porn buff. In all, Jobs fathered three girls and one boy. He wasn’t a perfect father, but he genuinely thought about the message his actions sent to his children. Isaacson tells how, early on, Jobs insisted on a policy against porn apps for the iPhone. Jobs quipped: “Folks who want porn can buy an Android.”

Jobs’ decision to censor porn apps at his own tech company upset the editor of tech blog Valleywag, Ryan Tate. One evening, he poured himself a stinger cocktail and emailed Jobs: “I don’t want ‘freedom from porn.’ Porn is just fine! And I think my wife would agree.”

Jobs fired his own email back: “You might care more about porn when you have kids. It’s not about freedom, it’s about Apple trying to do the right thing for its users. By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others’ work and belittle their motivations?”

By sticking to his guns, Jobs impressed Tate, who later wrote: “Jobs not only built and then rebuilt his company around some very strong opinions about digital life, but he’s willing to defend them in public. Vigorously. Bluntly. At two in the morning on a weekend.”

A girl’s father shapes who she eventually finds herself attracted to. A girl whose father spoils her and stymies her with excessive attention will end up being irresponsible and incompetent. On the flip side, research shows that a girl whose father abandons her when she is young will prematurely reach sexual maturity and end up feeling both abandoned and sexually insecure. This insecurity could lead her to attach herself to smooth-talking bumpkins who use her and lose her.

I think the most influential man in every woman’s life is her father. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Be a father figure to your daughter—or a woman who needs one. You will change the world.

SOURCE

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Why the Individual Mandate Equals Socialized Medicine

What Peter Ferrara talks about below is already a disastrous reality in Britain. See EYE ON BRITAIN

Here is why the individual mandate inevitably leads to full-blown socialized medicine, as it has with Obamacare: When the government mandates that you have to buy health insurance, then it has to specify what health insurance is required to satisfy the mandate. This means politics is involved in deciding what must be included and covered by that insurance.

And once politics is involved, that means you can't leave anything out, as that would be takenas an offense and a slight to both the consumers and the providers of the excluded service. Mental health benefits and counseling, drug rehab, maternity benefits (even for men and seniors), abortion -- everything must be covered. We will see that when the final regulations are issued for Obamacare by the Supreme Dictator, Kathleen Sebelius (who looks and acts the part of a villain from an Ayn Rand novel). We are already seeing that the mandated services must include sterilization and "morning after" pills, which even Catholic institutions will have to pay for in regard to their own employees.

That means the mandated health insurance will inevitably be extremely expensive, as we are just starting to see with Obamacare. To make such a mandated expense politically palatable, the government must provide extensive welfare subsidies well into the middle class and beyond, again as we see with Obamacare. The biggest expense there is not the explosion of Medicaid, as bad as that is. It is the entirely new entitlement program providing benefits (subsidies) for the purchase of the mandated insurance for families making up to $88,000 a year to start, indexed to grow to over $100,000 in the near future.

But there is still another shoe to drop. As the costs to the government, taxpayers, and others for this mandated health insurance skyrocket, the government will decide it must step in to control costs. That means more than just price controls on health insurance, which can't repeal the mathematics of needing enough revenue to pay for the covered benefits. It means the government deciding what health care will be paid for and for whom, and what will not. In other words, rationing. After all, if the government is ultimately paying, then just being careful stewards of public funds means the government must ultimately decide what health care gets paid for, and what doesn't. This reasoning is how the public comes to accept such health care rationing in the countries with socialized medicine.

And so starting with the individual mandate, we inevitably get to full blown socialized medicine, with the government and swarms of new bureaucracies to control health insurance and health care, including Sarah Palin's death panel. This is why even the Heritage Foundation finally realized its error years ago, and has now turned around to oppose the individual mandate, even filing Supreme Court briefs against it.

And this is why all the leading conservative health care experts have so vociferously opposed the Obamacare individual mandate, from John Goodman, to Betsy McCaughey, to Grace Marie Turner, to Sally Pipes, to myself.

More HERE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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13 February, 2012

Catholic bishops to Obama: Good try but no cigar

When it comes to mandatory contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act, the nation's Catholic bishops won't budge an inch.

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, initially said he would study President Obama's newest variation of the requirement. That didn't last long. Now, it's no sale unless the mandate is lifted from any person of faith who objects to facilitating contraception coverage for employees.

The bishops' position is essentially unchanged from what they said in August through their general counsel Anthony Picarello when they blasted the requirement that private insurance plans cover contraception, calling the mandate "unprecedented in federal law and more radical than any state contraceptive mandate."

They criticized the narrow "religious employer" exception to the mandate, explaining that it provides "no protection at all for individuals or insurers with a moral or religious objection to contraceptives or sterilization," instead covering only "a very small subset of religious employers."

The bishops called the plan "nationwide government coercion of religious people and groups to sell, broker or purchase 'services' to which they have a moral or religious objection." They said the plan represents "an unprecedented attack on religious liberty."

More HERE

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A second look at 'The Third Jihad'

by Jeff Jacoby

DID THE New York City Police Department use "terrible judgment," as Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, when it showed a documentary about Islamist extremists -- The Third Jihad -- to more than 1,400 officers undergoing counterterrorism training?

You might think so if you took your cues from a New York Times editorial calling the documentary a "hate-filled film about Muslims," or from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which declared that it "defiled our faith and misrepresented everything we stood for."

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser fervently disagrees. Jasser is a former US Navy officer and a past president of the Arizona Medical Association. He is also an observant Muslim, a Wisconsin-reared son of Syrian immigrants deeply grateful for the freedom and tolerance his parents found in America. Ever since 9/11, he has been fighting the Islamist extremists whose goal is to destroy that freedom and tolerance.

"As a devout Muslim I saw it as my responsibility to expose the radicals," Jasser says in The Third Jihad, which he narrated. "I resented that they were exploiting the religion I love."

After al-Qaeda's murder of 3,000 Americans, Jasser recalls in the film, "I had expected to see Muslims in America taking to the streets and protesting against [Osama] bin Laden. Instead, in the years that followed, we saw many Muslim leaders standing up to defend or support the radicals." So he launched the American Islamic Forum for Democracy to defend American values, promote the separation of mosque and state, and expose the Islamist agenda behind certain influential Muslim organizations.

The best-known of those organizations, CAIR, describes itself as a civil-rights group. In reality it is anything but. Its founders were linked to the terror group Hamas and several of its officials have been convicted or deported on terrorism-related charges. In the Holy Land Foundation terror-funding trial, as former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and former CIA Director Jim Woolsey recounted recently, CAIR was designated by the Justice Department as an unindicted co-conspirator. The Third Jihad shows news footage of CAIR's national legislative director refusing a reporter's request to condemn Hamas and Hezbollah. That is par for the course -- CAIR wouldn't even condemn bin Laden until more than two months after 9/11 -- and helps explain why the FBI severed its ties to CAIR.

Far from being an indiscriminate attack on Islam or Muslims, The Third Jihad consistently distinguishes between Islam's peaceful, moderate mainstream and the totalitarian jihadists who seek a global Islamic theocracy. The documentary's opening lines are unambiguous: "This is not a film about Islam. It is about the threat of radical Islam. Only a small percentage of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims are radical."

But where those radicals hold sway, liberty and pluralism are endangered. "Have you ever stopped to think about what would happen if the Islamists won and their version of Sharia law was put into place?" Jasser asks. The 72-minute film depicts the chilling consequences: Subjugation of religious minorities. Abuse of women. "Honor" killings. Anti-gay brutality. Stifling of free speech. Support for terrorism.

Bin Laden may be dead and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed behind bars, but a key message of the film is that jihadists pursue their goal of a West dominated by radical Islam with undiminished fervor. "On my website we talk about the Islamic state of North America by 2050," says Imam Abdul Musa, a prominent Islamist interviewed for The Third Jihad.

Demonstrators outside New York's city hall protest the showing of 'The Third Jihad' to NYPD officers. Yet the city's only Muslim councilman, who defended the film as 'factually accurate and important,' refused to attend the protest.

Radical groups like CAIR use the calumny of anti-Muslim bigotry to defame those who warn of Islamist militancy. Fear of being smeared has intimidated too many politicians and journalists, which is why the Zuhdi Jassers of the world -- devoted Muslims who are pro-American, pro-democracy, and anti-Islamist -- are inestimable allies in the war against the jihadists.

Happily, he is not fighting alone. During the recent furor over the film, New York City Councilman Robert Jackson, a Muslim, refused to toe the CAIR line. "I initially thought from reading about it that it cast a negative image on all Muslims," he said. "In my opinion it does not. It focuses on the extreme Muslims that are trying to hurt other people." Similarly, the American Islamic Leadership Coalition issued a strong statement defending The Third Jihad as "factually accurate and important."

You needn't take their word for it. Watch the film for yourself at TheThirdJihad.com, and gain crucial insight into one of the central struggles of our time: the war of ideas within Islam.

SOURCE

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Sarah Palin Rocks CPAC Crowd

Last time Sarah Palin was in Washington D.C. she was riding on the back of a Harley Davidson motorcycle with the Rolling Thunder. Saturday evening, Palin addressed thousands of CPAC attendants to close out a busy weekend jam packed full of conservative ideas. She was welcomed to the stage by a standing crowd of activists and raucous applause.

"To me the conservative movement has never been stronger or smarter,” Palin said. “We’ve been waving a bold banner that shouts ‘Don’t Tread on Me.’”

Although she touched on topics ranging from energy policy, the economy, unemployment, foreign policy, pro-life issues, troops overseas and the GOP presidential primary race, she kept the focus on President Obama’s failures during his time in Washington D.C. She pointed out that during his State of the Union Address, Obama hardly mentioned unemployment or out of control entitlement spending.

“We want your administration to end,” she said. “We believe real recovery can’t get underway until government gets out of the way.”

Palin said Obama has a skewed view of America as a politician from Chicago now tucked away in Washington, scratching the backs of his friends through “capitalism of connections” while Americans outside of the beltway suffer. Congressmen become “plutocrats,” she said, adding that they don’t just benefit off the of the government themselves, but spread the wealth around to their friends too. Palin charged that crony capitalism is at the root of American’s economic problems.

“This [Washington D.C.] is the playground for the government rich and they’re hoping that you work really really hard to keep her going.” She said. “Life around here is really good materially, our permanent political class is content. They are immune from the realities the rest of us face.”

She painted Washington D.C. as a wetland, rather than a swamp, and said it’s time to drain the corruption in order to regain a strong American economy, making it clear government spending will not create jobs.

“They [government] don’t mine, they don’t drill, they don’t harvest, they produce nothing,” she said. “The President wants to raise taxes so he can redistribute wealth. We want to cut taxes to create more wealth.”

She credited the tea party for being outside of the status quo in Washington and praised them for be being willing go to Congress and fight for small government ideas.

SOURCE

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9/11 "Truther" called out

Daily Caller editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson’s Monday interview with radio host Scott Ledger has been burning up Twitter. The hour-long conversation about the “Truther” movement pitted Ledger, a believer in conspiracy theories about 9/11, against Carlson, a no-nonsense journalist who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. “I deal in facts,” Carlson told Ledger, “and you don’t have any.”

Truthers, he said, “tend to give off this feeling of, like, great frustration. Like ‘I see the truth, no one else gets this. Everyone should see this but I’m the only one who does.’ … It makes me sad that otherwise smart people could fall for nonsense like that.”

“I’m not defending the U.S. government,” Carlson explained. “I’ve lived in Washington for 27 years. My dad worked for the U.S. government. I hate the U.S. government in a lot of ways. … I’m merely saying a single thing, which is there is no evidence that the U.S. government, its employees, Americans of any kind had anything to do with 9/11 other than responding to it.”

“Nineteen hijackers did this,” he said, “al Qaida has taken credit for it, Osama bin Laden has said ‘I did this,’ [and] we have a pretty clear understanding of where the money came from. We know a lot about this, right?”

Pressed by a conspiracy-minded Ledger to account for the claims of assorted self-described experts and self-anointed eyewitnesses, Carlson won the day.

“What do you make of the fact that a number — close to ten different people — received messages or calls from the airplanes, from the hijacked airplanes that flew into the Pentagon, and the Trade Center buildings, and into Shanksville, Penn., from passengers saying ‘we’ve been hijacked by Arab men’?

“Is that all made up? Were those people part of the conspiracy too? What do you make of that?”

More HERE

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The News: Children Behaving Badly

By Rich Kozlovich

Some months back I read a commentary about the official lies promoted by the Soviet government that was a complete reversal of historical fact. The commentator bemoaned the fact that this has continued into current times and that so many of the youth had been so indoctrinated by these lies they were incapable of understanding the truth. He went on to say

“At the same time we continually hear official lies in Russian daily life, reminiscent of the lies in the Soviet Union during Stalinism and in the post-Stalin period,”….“The truth can hardly stand up to the total impact of so many lies. A young man once said to me of the Prague Spring: ‘That was when the Czechs attacked us.’ …“Brought up on lies, a society cannot mature or take on responsibility. It is an adolescent society, with all the characteristics of adolescence—needing a leader and his imitators, being aggressive and quick to take offence, simultaneously lying and trusting.”

Almst forty years ago I had an acquaintance who had been in the Czech army when the Soviet Union sent its tanks in to crush the Prague Spring. The only reason he wasn’t there at the time was because he was on leave and had traveled to visit relatives in the U.S.A. So when the Soviets came into Czechoslovakia he never went back. He knew “everything” including the “fact” that Hitler and Stalin never signed a non-aggression pact. He confidently and smugly laughed saying, “you don’t really believe such a thing do you?” As if Stalin could ever commit such a heinous act. Here was a guy defending the very oppressors he was fleeing. Why? Because he had been indoctrinated since the end of WWII into believing Stalin was a great man. Indoctrination from a very young age can make someone as foolish as ideology can make smart people stupid.

Does this sound insane? Remember, even today there are revisionists who claim that Stalin didn’t really kill all those people; and if he did kill them; he did it to stop the really insane communists from killing more. And this is after all the monstrous facts have been made public. Why do people continue to believe things that actually defy all factual history and the evidence of their own eyes? Ideology! It is true that ideology makes smart people dumb!

As I watch the world, read the news and watch as little of it as I can on TV, I have concluded that the lefties may be right about IQ. Lefties are always trying to publish studies that show that leftists have a higher IQ than conservatives. Well…..I’m not so sure they aren’t right. Why? Because in order to bring reality into line with what they believe requires an enormous level of mental ability and logical gymnastics that must be mentally and emotionally exhausting in order to make the insane things they say and do seem right. Conservatives only have to concern themselves with what is right and what is wrong based on what they see; as in one and one is two. Try making it three or four or fifty without sounding insane. At this only the left can excel; making insanity seem rational to the casual observer.

I watched O’Reilly this week - I can’t take too much of O’Reilly because I think he’s a phony - and he had Monica Crowley and Alan Colmes on. Colmes did the five things that are common among the leftists. He wouldn’t stop talking, he interrupted, he talked over everyone, he subtly changed the subject and spewed out logical fallacies by the minute.

Changing the subject is one of fallacies they use constantly in order to prevent a response to their already insane views. If you doubt me watch Geraldo when he is on and Bob Beckel on The Five. They won’t shut up and they won’t let others have their say without zings that have nothing to do with the subject at hand. At least Geraldo is charming....Beckel is.....well.....Beckel. This is a common problem. They’re talking when they should be listening. They remind me of unruly children, and like all unruly children a good slap would do them a world of good.

It really is true….…“Brought up on lies, a society cannot mature or take on responsibility. It is an adolescent society, with all the characteristics of adolescence—needing a leader and his imitators, being aggressive and quick to take offence, simultaneously lying and trusting.”

That is the left. That is what we see on the news. Children behaving badly! That must be why the Main Stream Media identify so readily with the youthful losers in the Occupy Wall Street movement versus the rest of the country that readily identifies with the adults in the Tea Party Movement.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

The elderly hit hardest by Obama's funny money system: "As I have noted previously, the Fed’s policy of acting to hold interest rates well below free-market rates in recent years has had the effect of greatly diminishing the earnings of people who rely on interest income. Such people include especially many retirees who do not wish to hold risky assets with substantial variability of earnings. In the past, many retired people have held the bulk of their wealth in the form of bank certificates of deposit, bonds, and bond-heavy mutual funds, hoping that their incomes would be secure and predictable when they were no longer working. The Fed’s actions in recent years have taken a heavy toll on such people’s earnings." [And you aint seen nothing yet]

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

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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12 February, 2012

The real changes. Hope was not enough



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A Job Too Good to Be True

Imagine a job where you earn an above-average salary. Enjoy plenty of paid leave and enviable health benefits. Get to retire at age 56 with a generous pension. Sound good?

For far too many Americans, the “imagine a job” part is taxing enough. Add the other features, and it sounds like a fantasy.

But it isn’t. There’s a large group of workers for whom the description above is real: federal workers. And as a new report from the Congressional Budget Office shows, they’re making significantly more than their private-sector counterparts.

The CBO examined workers with otherwise similar characteristics and found that “for workers at all education levels, the cost of total compensation averaged about $52 per hour worked for federal employees, compared with about $45 per hour worked for employees in the private sector.” That’s a tidy little raise, especially in a struggling economy.

The real key is benefits. If you look at straight salary, the CBO says federal workers do only slightly better than their private-sector counterparts. But federal workers enjoy gold-plated benefits worth 48 percent more than what they would receive outside of government. They also get nearly automatic seniority-based pay raises.

Sounds like the phrase “good enough for government work” doesn’t apply to compensation. Then it’s more like “never good enough,” apparently.

Even better (or worse, if you’re taxpayers footing the bill), federal workers enjoy a remarkable level of job security. “Since the recession began, federal employment (not including the Postal Service) has risen by 230,000, or 12 percent,” writes Heritage Foundation Senior Policy Analyst James Sherk. “Federal employees are almost never fired for poor performance.” Many Americans in the private sector only wish they could say the same.

It’s not just pay at the federal level that’s at issue. The issue has become heated where state employees are concerned as well. Legislatures and governors in capitals around the country are faced with growing deficits and a rising tide of red ink. So over the last few years, they’ve attempted to curb the growth of government pay.

Of course, this means opposing unions that fight tooth and nail to keep their inflated salaries moving in only one direction: up. This has proved to be quite a headache for governors such as Wisconsin’s Scott Walker. He’s been treated like Public Enemy No. 1 for trying to take even modest steps to address the pay issue and bring the state’s books into balance.

More HERE

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The Price of Obama's Fairness

President Obama is big on fairness. “Fair” or some variant thereof was mentioned eight times in his State of the Union speech, more than “health care” (twice), his signature legislative accomplishment, or “spending” (three times), the nation’s most pressing problem.

Mr. Obama claims, in fact, that the issue of fairness is the “defining issue of our time.” The president gives us a stark, if fallacious, choice:

“No challenge is more urgent. No debate is more important. We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by. Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”

Mr. Obama then laid out his prescription for creating this “fair” society - more government. New bureaucracies (a “trade enforcement unit”), more training programs, more infrastructure stimulus spending, more regulations on the financial and energy sectors and, of course, more taxes: “[W]e need to change our tax code so that people like me, and an awful lot of members of Congress, pay our fair share of taxes,” the president righteously intoned. Of course, the top 10 percent of earners already pay 70 percent of federal income taxes, a sum many people might conclude is “more than their fair share,” but never mind.

This effort to impose fairness on society by all-knowing, all-caring government functionaries has been tried many times. It never ends well, and comedian Louis C.K. tells a story that illustrates why. As Louis tells the story in one of his stand-up specials (I paraphrase here from memory), his daughter once accidentally broke one of her toys and then demanded that Louis break her sibling’s toy “to make it fair.”

Wow. From the mouths of babes, a perfect example of how the impulse to “fairness” - seemingly so benign in theory - in practice often leads to disaster.

Nature is not fair. It dispenses talent, intellect and luck unequally among the people of the world. As a result, some will always end up with more than others. When government sets out to impose “fairness” on society, it is therefore faced with a dilemma. It is impossible to make some people smarter, luckier and more talented. It is equally impossible to stop those blessings from being bestowed in the first place. The only recourse for government, then, is to destroy or confiscate the material rewards that so often accrue as a consequence of such qualities. Fairness to all, then, is really punishment for many.

This is the reason political systems that have as their explicit charter the imposition of fairness often descend into totalitarianism - total government power is the only way to enforce total equality. In such a state, misery and material want will be the norm; everyone will be equally unhappy, like Louis C.K.’s two children, each with a broken toy.

We should keep all of this in mind when we hear politicians like Mr. Obama lament the “inequality” in our society, and we should always look askance at their solutions to this alleged problem. We should remember that material equality does not necessarily mean prosperity or stability. As Charles Lane noted recently in The Washington Post: “Western Europe’s recent history suggests that flat income distribution accompanies flat economic growth. Which European country recorded the biggest decrease in inequality between 1985 and 2008? That would be Greece.”

And we all know how well that's working out.

SOURCE

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Freedom From Religion

Oliver North

"We don't need you, so shut up!" That's the message the Obama administration has sent loud and clear to America's Roman Catholics. And it's a message now being sent to U.S. military chaplains -- to the detriment of our armed forces.

During World War II, the War Department and the Department of the Navy urged -- the operative word is "urged," not "ordered," mind you -- U.S. military chaplains to encourage soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardsmen and Marines that God was on our side in the global battle against fascists, Nazis and the godless heathens running rampant across Asia and the Pacific. The hymns "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" were sung with fervor at chapel services regardless of denomination.

The U.S. military I entered in 1961 still had tens of thousands of men and women familiar with such experience. My regimental chaplain in Vietnam, Cmdr. Jake Laboon, a Jesuit priest, was a decorated U.S. Navy combat veteran of World War II. He routinely administered last rites to grievously wounded -- and often dying -- Marines and sailors without regard to a denominational preference on their dog tags. It's a good thing he was there when I was wounded, because, as others related to me later, he was the one who told the surgeons to "take this one next" while I was unconscious on a triage litter at a field hospital. If he hadn't been there, I might not be here.

All this helps to explain my bias. As a general matter, I like chaplains who do their duty to God and man. I especially admire men like Jake Laboon. And I don't like the way the Obama administration is treating them. This week's order to muzzle what chaplains can say is yet another O-Team salvo aimed at "de-Christianizing" -- and ultimately destroying -- the U.S. military.

The opening shot was fired when President Barack Obama declared in his January 2010 State of the Union address that he would "repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are." (Emphasis added.) The "law" to which the president referred was "don't ask, don't tell," which wasn't a law at all; it was an administrative policy implemented by the Clinton administration. The actual governing law -- Section 654 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code -- states, "There is no constitutional right to serve in the armed forces." The president ran roughshod over the law of the land in a political payoff to a preferred constituency.

The Defense of Marriage Act was next. Though the bill was argued, debated, passed by both houses of Congress, and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder unilaterally declared the law unconstitutional in February 2011.

Holder was courteous enough to send Congress a letter explaining our legislature's irrelevance in the matter. He stated, "The President and I have concluded that ... Section 3 of DOMA is unconstitutional." Since then, Obama has said, "Where Congress is not willing to act, we're going to go ahead and do it ourselves." Efficiency is one of the great advantages of dictatorships.

Dispensing with DOMA paved the way for the Pentagon to greenlight same-sex "marriages" presided over by military chaplains -- on or off base -- in states that recognize such "unions." Now the O-Team has mandated that the Roman Catholic Church violate its own teachings on birth control and abortion.

The Obama administration's edict requiring employers -- including the Catholic Church -- to offer "health" coverage that includes sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs and contraception ignited a firestorm. Roman Catholic bishops protested loudly and in unison that the action was a violation of the First Amendment. In churches across the country, letters from the bishops were read to congregations, explaining the directive as unjust and unconstitutional because it forces Catholic institutions to violate their faith or pay staggering fines.

The O-Team shrugged off the dissent until Archbishop Timothy Broglio -- who leads the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA -- issued a pastoral letter denouncing the Obamacare directive because "the Administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation's first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty." The letter, sent to Catholic military chaplains, instructed them to read it to their congregations on the weekend of Jan. 28-29. In his missive, Broglio declared that the new rule "is a blow to a freedom that you have fought to defend and for which you have seen your buddies fall in battle."

Apparently, the archbishop's assertion that "we cannot -- we will not -- comply with this unjust law" was too much for the Army chief of chaplains. He ordered that the letter not be read in military chapels or field services because Broglio had not "coordinated" with his office. Army Secretary John McHugh subsequently admitted that such censorship was "a mistake."

"Mistake"? It wasn't a mistake if McHugh and the rest of the administration's objective is eliminating Christianity from the United States armed forces and wrecking the finest military the world ever has seen. We'll know for sure what the goal really is when the commander in chief orders chaplains to violate their religious beliefs and perform same-sex "marriages" or just get out. And then our men and women serving in uniform will finally have freedom from religion.

SOURCE

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The moral high ground

Newt Gingrich knows the lingo. He makes conservative audiences roar with approval when he compares the efficiency of FedEx and MasterCard to the post office and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He never loses an opportunity to attack the press for its moral preening. Conservatives adore this table turning. Nothing makes them angrier than to be derided as heartless by people who define virtue by their willingness to give away other people's money.

Rick Perry quickly lost his own conservative luster when he used the word "heartless" about his Republican rivals.

Want to see how conservatives behave? Rent and watch "The Blind Side." The family that adopted Michael Oher, a homeless black teenager, was conservative and Christian. Think that's an anomaly? Glance at the families of Republican office seekers. John and Cindy McCain adopted a sickly child from Pakistan. Jon and Mary Kaye Huntsman have two adopted daughters, one from China and one from India. Michele and Marcus Bachmann have five biological children and fostered 23 teenagers -- many with eating disorders and other challenges. Wander into any church or synagogue on the weekend and you will find more of a "rainbow coalition" than at a New York Times editorial conference.

Self-described conservatives, as Arthur C. Brooks demonstrated so cogently in his book "Who Really Cares," donate more to charity than do self-identified liberals. Perhaps that's because conservatives are wealthier? No. Liberals on average earn 6 percent more than conservatives. Yet conservatives donate about 30 percent more. Conservatives also volunteer more of their time -- and their blood. Brooks writes: "If liberals and moderates gave blood at the same rate as conservatives, the blood supply of the United States would jump about 45 percent." Of the 25 states that had higher than average charitable giving, 24 went for George W. Bush over John Kerry in 2004.

Liberals define virtue not by one's personal behavior but by one's political positions. Thus, Bill Clinton could, without risking the ire of liberals, behave like a caveman with women who actually came into his orbit because he supported unrestricted abortion for those who didn't. Similarly, Tim Geithner gets a pass on failing to pay his own taxes because he favors raising taxes on "the rich."

Rick Santorum understands these fault lines viscerally. Mitt Romney lives and thinks like a conservative, but he's not a good polemical conservative. One aspect of his stump speech that falls particularly flat with Republican primary voters is when he describes President Obama as a "good man" who "just doesn't get it."

It isn't that conservatives think Obama is personally evil (well, OK, some do), but they don't want their candidate to concede the moral high ground. That really rankles. Romney fell into that trap by conceding that he would raise the minimum wage after his gaffe about the "very poor." No! Everyone knows that the minimum wage increases youth unemployment. The answer to the problems of the very poor (at least those not mentally or physically disabled), as Romney has elsewhere emphasized, is to unshackle the private sector to create jobs and to remove the government incentives to idleness (such as 99 weeks of unemployment benefits).

The Heritage Foundation has just released its annual Index of Dependence on Government. Since 2008, the number of Americans dependent on state subsidies has grown 23 percent, to the point where 1 in 5 Americans is now dependent on the government. That's the highest rate in history.

The 20 percent of Americans who depend on government receive an average of $32,748 in benefits, which is more than the disposable income of the average American. Fifty-three percent of all American infants are now enrolled in the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program. Fifty-three percent!

The greatest enlargement in dependency in American history may strike President Obama and his liberal supporters as a moral triumph -- but for most conservatives it represents both an injustice and a fiscal calamity. It's an injustice both to those who pay for it (the minority who still pay income taxes) and to many of those enveloped in state subsidies. Dependence breeds intractable poverty and low self-esteem.

Someone needs to ask Obama how an increasingly impoverished nation, limping along on food stamps and housing subsidies, is going to pay for the existing beneficiaries, along with 77 million baby boomers set to retire in the next 25 years. A president who has impaired the vibrancy of the private sector so badly has long since forfeited the moral high ground.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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11 February, 2012

"Der Schwed" -- yesterday and today

During the 30 years war of the 17th century Gustav Adolf den store (Gustavus Adophus) led his Swedish troops to many great victories in Europe. Without him the Protestant cause may well have lost out to the Catholic South. His armies were at the time simply referred to as "Der Schwed" (the Swede), though they would have referred to themselves as the "Svea".

So we see that the Swedish martial spirit did not die out with the Vikings of the 11th century (Swedish Vikings mostly sailed up rivers into what we now know as Russia. It was left to the Norwegians and Danes to harass Britain and Western Europe).

And, strange as it seems in the light of their constant peacnikery of the 20th century, that spirit is still alive today. For good reasons the proximity of Russia gives everybody at the Eastern end of the Baltic the heebie-jeebies. Going by their invariant and very successful form since the 11th century, we would expect the English to deal with such a peril by forming alliances with other countries. Not so the Swedes. They cherish their independence. And they can realistically do that because of confidence in their military. They have been prepared to fight Russia alone if need be. The Finns did it under Mannerheim in the early stages of WWII so they have a successful example to go by. But the Swedish military has to be independent too -- so we come to the Swedish defence industries.

With a population about the same size as Israel, it is amazing what the Swedish defence industries have produced. The famous Bofors gun was used for antiaircraft defence by BOTH sides in WWII and is still in use today. And Bofors are not sitting on their laurels. I could go on to talk about Swedish military aircraft and submarines but I think that for the moment I will just say a few words about Bofors.

Aside from nuclear weapoins, the most fearsome thing about the old Soviet Union was their vast fleet of tanks. And Bofors produced an answer to that in the form of the BILL1, a fearsome antitank missile. Bofors turned out tens of thousands of them, quite enough to wipe out the entire Soviet tank fleet with a bit of luck. It is a guided missile that flies just a bit ABOVE the tank and fires a shaped charge down onto the turret of the tank at just the right time -- the turret being a tank's weakest point. That must be a considerable challenge to the missile's controller but the Swedes must be confident that trained operators can pull it off. Below is a video of it in action:



(Note: Some mischievous person has been circulating the above video together with a claim that it shows an Israeli missile using white phosphorous to destroy a Syrian tank. Israel has been much criticized for its limited use of white phosporous in Gaza but insists that it only used phosphorous in accordance with the laws of war. Using it in an anti-tank weapon would heap criticism on Israel so the false claim attached to the above video is malicious)

And to keep up with advances in tank technology Bofors have produced a BILL2 missile that is even more capable than BILL1. (The "B" stands for Bofors)

It seems sad that such an apparently effective weapon is not held in the arsenals of Western countries but Swedish neutrality forbids it. Only a few other "neutral" countries such as Austria and Brazil have it. So Sweden has had to bear all the costs of developing and deploying the weapon by itself -- a considerable challenge. Most armament manufacturers are keen to sell their stuff to all and sundry -- to help defray the development costs.

And even if Sweden did decide to sell BILL2 more widely, it might not get much uptake. I remember when I was in the Australian Army during the Vietnam war, we deployed the prime Swedish antitank weapon of the day, the Carl Gustav. But as soon as we entered the Vietnam war, the Swedes stopped supplying ammo for it! Tanks featured little in the Vietnam war so it was not a great setback but it was a salutary lesson in being careful about the source of supply of your weaponry. The Swedes have no worries on that score.

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Obama throws a bone to Catholics

The typical Leftist belief that money grows on trees at work again. Does he really think that health insurers will be able to provide cover without charging for it? The companies will still charge Catholic organizations the same as before, even if contraception is not written down in the agreement between the organizations concerned. Catholics will still be paying for contraception as before. But I guess Left-leaning Catholics will see it as a real concession

The White House today announced a compromise for religious groups lambasting a recent mandate requiring health insurers to cover contraception as a preventive service. The federal government will now be extending an exemption of the mandate to religious organizations — including faith-based hospitals.

Under the new policy announced today, women will have free preventive care that includes contraceptive services no matter where she works. The policy also ensures that if a woman works for religious employers with objections to providing contraceptive services as part of its health plan, the religious employer will not be required to provide contraception coverage but her insurance company will be required to offer contraceptive care free of charge.

The new policy ensures women can get contraception without paying a co-pay and addresses important concerns raised by religious groups by ensuring that objecting religious employers will not have to provide contraceptive coverage or refer women to organizations that provide contraception."

More HERE

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BOOK REVIEW: for The Reptile with a Conscience by Nathan Cofnas. Paperback. pp. 523. Available from The Ulster Institute for Social Research. Review by J.J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

One of Einstein's more famous sayings is: "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong". That single experiment would now appear to have been done so is Einstein now old hat? Far from it. Just as Einstein's relativity subsumed Newton's mechanics, so the next generation of physics will have to cope with the observations that came from Einstein's work.

A failure that Einstein himself acknowledged was his failure to devise a "unified field theory". Einsten was of course Jewish so it is interesting that another brilliant Jewish writer, Nathan Cofnas, HAS attempted a "unified field theory". But this theory is not about physics. It is about ideology. Nathan has presented us with a theory that accounts for both religion and politics as being from the same rootstock.

And I can even tell you very simply what that theory is. Nathan points something out that seems obvious when you hear it but nobody previously seems to have thought of it. He takes Adam Smith's famous theory of markets -- the invisible hand -- and points out that religious people also see an invisible hand in the world about them: The hand of God.

You don't have to think about that for long, however, to start saying "Yes but ...". And that is why Nathan has written his book. He presents his theory in a much more subtle and careful way than my crude generalization above and proceeds to answer all the "Yes buts ..". He fleshes out how he believes both conservative thinking and Judeo/Christian thinking arise.

But this is not a book for scholars, philosophers and ideologues only. It does something that anybody interested in modern politics needs badly: It gives an systematic answer to the old Leftist retort to all facts and arguments that they dislike: "There's no such thing as right and wrong, anyway". The crazy thing about that assertion of course is that the same Leftists who say that will say in almost the same breath that racism or anything done by George W Bush is wrong. They contradict their own assertion almost as soon as they make it. So it is not only conservatives but Leftists too who need to get their minds clear on what is right/wrong and where that right/wrong comes from. And Nathan helps us greatly with that.

But WHY do Leftist deny right and wrong when it suits them? Doing so makes all their OWN doctrines, policies and beliefs look like empty vapour. It's a strange thing to do. So: The reason they do it is because most analytical philosophers say the same thing. And as John Maynard Keynes once said: "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”.

Analytical philosophers say: "If there is this objective property of "rightness", how do we detect it and where is it? Do we lift up a stone somewhere and find it there? And that challenge has proved hard to answer. Just what IS rightness and how do we know it is right?

In recent times, however, an answer to that has begun to emerge: We know some things are right because we have rightness instincts. Rightness IS located somewhere. It is located in our long evolution as social beings. It is somewhere in our primitive "reptilian" brain. But the "Yes, buts ..." come thick and fast to that proposition, as it is obvious that our higher brain (where "conscience" is located) has a role too and can make some things seem right to one person that another person sees as wrong. So how do we sort THAT mess out? Nathan goes through it systematically for us and leaves even atheists like me confident that there IS such a thing as a real right and wrong.

Nathan's book will not be the final answer on all the questions it addresses but, like Einstein's theory of relativity, future discussions in the field will have to take account of his arguments if they are to be well-informed.

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An aggressive mutiny of black GIs in WWII

White Australian troops had to rein them in. It may be part of the reason why the U.S. army to this day rarely deploys black troops in frontline infantry positions

BLACK US troops mutinied in Townsville [Australia] in 1942 and turned machineguns on their officers, in a secret chapter of the war in the Pacific that has come to light through the papers of the late US president Lyndon B. Johnson.

The scandal was hushed up for nearly 70 years after being described in a report given to and apparently kept by Johnson as "one of the biggest stories of the war which can't be written, shouldn't be written".

The subject of rumour and speculation for decades in the north Queensland city, it has now emerged that the mutiny was probably reported at the time to the White House by Johnson, then a young and ambitious US congressman, after he visited Australia in June 1942 on a fact-finding mission for president Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The report Johnson took back to Washington, written for him by US journalist Robert Sherrod, tells how 600 African-American GIs seized their base and went on the rampage, trying to kill their white officers. Some terrorised local civilians.

Armed Australian troops were sent in at the height of the emergency on the US base. George Gnezdiloff, then a 20-year-old private in the north Queensland-raised 51st battalion, was told to block Ross River Road with his bren gun carrier. Other soldiers were issued with a password, Bucks, as they deployed to bottle up the Americans.

Gnezdiloff and his crew were ordered to shoot the mutineers on sight. "We had ammo, the lot," the now 90-year-old recalled yesterday from his home in Proserpine, 300km south of Townsville. "We weren't mucking around, I can tell you."

More HERE

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The Media’s Shameful, Inexcusable Distortion Of The Supreme Court’s Citizens United Decision

by Dan Abrams

One of the beauties of the transfer of power from major media operations to individuals, bloggers and tweeters is that they — we — can all serve as a sort of fact-checking peanut gallery. So it’s hard to imagine that, in this day and age, the mainstream media could repeatedly misstate the holding of one of the most significant Supreme Court decisions without being roundly excoriated. Not a matter of opinion or a partisan viewpoint, but, simply parroting a mistake or lie about the holding in that crucial ruling.

I have followed the Court’s Citizens United decision particularly closely because my dad, Floyd Abrams, was one of the lawyers who argued it (for free, incidentally) in the Supreme Court, on behalf of Senator Mitch McConnell. Their challenge was to a part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that barred corporations and unions from engaging in what they argued was classic political speech — producing and showing a movie on television that criticized a candidate for President and spending money for ads that support or denounce that candidate. They prevailed in a divided 5-4 ruling. Subsequently, and not surprisingly, the ruling became one of the most controversial opinions of our day, with many on the left denouncing the ruling as a fundamental threat to our democracy....

There are two media myths and inventions that are most commonly cited.

Myth 1: The Court invalidated disclosure requirements in political advertising, thereby allowing donors to remain anonymous.

Wrong. The Court ruled just the opposite and upheld, by an 8-1 vote, the McCain-Feingold requirement of identifying donors.

Myth 2: That the Court’s ruling in Citizens United opened the door to wealthy individuals like Sheldon Adelson to pour millions of dollars into PACs.

Wrong again. The Citizens United ruling had NOTHING to do with the ability of individuals to spend their money to support candidates. That had been decided back in 1976, when the Supreme Court decided that the First Amendment protected the right of individuals to make unlimited independent expenditures supporting or opposing candidates for federal office. In Citizens United, the Court ruled that corporations and unions were entitled to the same rights. It wasn’t that long ago, after all, that the Swift Boat ads, legally paid for by individuals, soiled John Kerry during the 2004 campaign.

But reading the New York Times, Washington Post and watching MSNBC in particular, it is hardly surprising that the public would be confused. On January 9, in a front-page piece on the influence of Newt Gingrich supporter Sheldon Adelson, the Times inaccurately reported that Adelson’s $5 million donation to a pro-Gingrich SuperPAC “underscores” how the Citizens United case, “has made it possible for a wealthy individual to influence an election.” On January 14th, a column by Gail Collins asserted that, “all these billionaires would not be so worrisome if the Supreme Court had not totally unleashed their donation-making power in the Citizens United case.” The opinion, in fact, did nothing of the sort. I don’t know if it’s sad or just troubling that the Times issued two corrections on the earlier piece, including the year Citizens United was decided, but none on its repeated and major error about the ruling itself.

The Washington Post has done no better. On January 11th, Dana Milbank, writing of Adelson’s $5 million donation to a pro-Gingrich SuperPAC, asserted that it was, “the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision which made such unlimited contributions possible.” And on February 5th, E.J. Dionne Jr. blamed Citizens United for permitting, “the brute force of millionaires and billionaires … to have their way.” The Post published a letter from Floyd Abrams today highlighting the error, but without a formal correction.

It seems this faulty analysis has worn off on MSNBC host Chris Matthews as well, since he, too, regularly misreports the case’s ruling. “Under this new court ruling, Citizens United, your opponent can run a terrible campaign and relentlessly destroy your reputation without putting your fingerprints on the ad,” Matthews said. “You don’t have to say, ‘I’m Mitt Romney and I paid for this ad.’ So now in Iowa, where the people don’t like negative campaigning, you can run the bombing campaign or destroy your opponent without having your face or voice associated with it. That’s what Newt wasn’t aware of. It’s his fault that conservatives like them have gone along with these court decisions, that have allowed big contributors, wealthy people to put unlimited amounts of money into negative campaigns without putting the name of their favorite candidate in the ad.”

This is a double dose of wrong, since the disclosure requirement in the law was upheld and the case had nothing to do with individuals. One might forgive Al Jazeera for getting it wrong and it’s not unusual to see partisan advocates misstate a ruling like this to further a political agenda, but the mainstream American media should have no excuse....

You may disagree with the opinion, you may think that expanding the ability of corporations to fund campaign messaging is a true danger, or just, as I do, that outside money is a major concern for our democratic system. But that doesn’t change the fact that the political chattering set ought to be far more concerned and outraged by the indolence, indifference or just bias, that has led to the widespread misinformation by the media about what the court actually considered and ultimately ruled.

More HERE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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10 February, 2012

Communist News Network dismisses Jewish journalists in Israel

We just received the names of four journalists fired:

* Moshe Cohen, editor, dismissed Jan. 30, 10 years of tenure at CNN.

* Izi Landberg, producer, nearly 25 years with CNN, dismissed Jan. 30.

* Avi Kaner cameraman, dismissed Jan. 30, 10 years with CNN.

* Michal Zippori, desk producer, situation ongoing

The media scandal that has reached us comes from an absolutely reliable source.

It is likely to provoke a wave of shock and indignation in the North American media, and it certainly will not calm the controversy over the biased and pro-Palestinian coverage of conflict by the news channel.

We learned that the Israeli offices of CNN are downsizing to cope with income losses, including advertising.

What goes beyond good management is that CNN dismissed four journalists Israeli Jews (out of a total of eight), and retained only Arab journalists. Where, until now, CNN sent reporters -- always a Jew and Arab journalist -- to cover information in pairs, henceforth, there will be only an Arab journalist. The local editor of the chain is in fact also Arabic.

In a conflict where information is central to shaping public opinion and the decisions of diplomats, and where Arab journalists can publish what they need without risking their lives when they travel to Gaza, Jerusalem and the region of Judea and Samaria, the decision to dismiss his CNN Jewish journalists is of particular concern because the public is very far from imagining that it can receive unskewed information from CNN.

SOURCE. (Translated)

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Obamacare vs the Catholic Bishops

I recently completed a very short interview on Vatican Radio to discuss the current battle between the Obama administration and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. It didn’t permit me to say more than that the Obama administration is making a political mistake, so I’d like to say a bit more about the serious consequences that will likely result and how we ended up with this Church-State conundrum in the first place.

As Dr. Donald Condit has already explained, the Obama administration seems to be making a political calculation that this controversy will blow over before the November’s presidential election because the conscience exemption for providing and paying for abortion, sterilization and contraception will not take effect until later next year. But the miscalculation was predictable and is now evident, with not only Catholics, but Orthodox, Evangelical, Jewish and other religious leaders taking a stand. Unless the administration relents or the Obamacare law is ruled unconstitutional, Catholic hospitals and other institutions will be faced with a choice between not providing insurance coverage to their employees and thereby be fined by the government, or pay for the provision of services that they believe are morally evil.

A journalist friend in Rome just raised an alternative reading of the story to me on the street. What if Obama is actually making a principled argument that abortion, sterilization and contraception services are a fundamental aspect of women’s health that cannot and should not be denied to anyone, regardless of their own religious or individual convictions? Perhaps the White House believes, as most progressives do, that these stodgy, uptight opponents will eventually, inevitably, be overcome and we will one day wonder what all the fuss about. If so, the administration is doing much more than thinking about the next election; it’s redefining what the word “health” means to include measures that violently take away life from the most innocent and vulnerable persons, regardless of who pays for the services. This makes it much more than a religious freedom or a conscience issue and a matter of simple justice.

More generally, the whole Obamacare mess is a result of employer-provided health insurance. We would all be better off if our health insurance was decoupled from our employment, and we were free to purchase our own insurance according to our needs and wants. It is a result of state intervention in the economy, namely wage-and-price controls, that led to employers offering health insurance as a non-wage benefit to entice desired employees to their companies. Now we have the government mandating that all employers must provide comprehensive coverage to all their employees. What was once a prudential individual decision has become a government-mandated “right” that trumps the employer-employee, the doctor-patient, and perhaps even the priest-penitent relationship. Some progress.

There is some tragic irony to all this. We should not forget that many religious leaders have long-supported increasing the role of the state in health care and the economy at-large, perhaps thinking that conscience clauses would protect their institutions against any undue interference. Well, they were wrong; what the state giveth, the state taketh away. If you invite the state to “assist” more and more of your activities, it will eventually start telling you how to do things. Encouraging the Democratic Party’s efforts from Harry Truman on to socialize the health care system of the United States is likely to have dire consequences for Catholic and other religious-based social service providers. Economic ignorance among religious leaders comes at a very high cost to their own good works.

SOURCE

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Parfumier on Trial Today in Paris for "Racism"

For years now, we've watched an increasingly totalitarian Europe arise in the courtrooms of infamous speech trials in Holland, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, France, England and elsewhere as dictatorial government authorities use the courts to maintain their political power against political rivals and freethinkers who dare call out the dishonesty and deceptions of the State. With the speech trial today of a fabled and elderly parfumier in Paris (described below), however, we see a strain of totalitarianism that is qualitatively different but equally sinister.

When parfumier Jean-Paul Guerlain (picture above) told an TV interviewer in 2010 that in order to create the popular perfume Samsara ("blends notes of ylang-ylang, jasmine, sandalwood, and tonka bean") "for once, [he] started working like a negro," he threatened no government power structure, he called out no deception. He made a banal comment, simply not worth parsing although it's hard to resist noting that he chose the simile to convey something he is obviously proud of -- a sustained and apparently arduous effort to create something beaitiful.

But that is utterly and completely beside the point: The French state here is more and more inserting itself into the regulation of its citizens' minds, not in an overt attempt to maintain political power (Wilders, Dewinter), not to destroy facts and principles that threaten its fabrications (Sabaditsch-Wolff, Hedegaard, Robinson), but rather, in the evil tradition of Communism's relentless social engineers, to rewire all thought processes down to the most trivial. It is the totalitarian effort to create the New Man.

The Australian reports:

THE creator of some of the world's best-loved perfumes will go on trial in Paris today accused of racism for using the word "negre" on television in a case that campaigners say illustrates the spread of prejudice in France.

Jean-Paul Guerlain, the inventor of such fragrances as Parure and Nahema, is being prosecuted for comments that he made during an interview on France 2, the state-owned television channel, in 2010.

Asked how he created Samsara, another of his perfumes, he said: "For once, I started working like a negro. I don't know if negroes have always worked like that, but still..."

The remark sparked furious protests outside Guerlain's boutique in the Champs Elysees in Paris and calls for a boycott of the company's products.

"He provoked the indignation of anti-racist associations," said Faycal Megherbi, a legal adviser for the Movement Against Racism and Friendship Between Peoples. "The slave trade went on for centuries and his words were very wounding."

The doggerel of the New Order: Sticks and stones may break my bones and words are very wounding.

The maximum sentence for making a public insult of a racist nature is six months in prison and a fine of $A23,000.

Mr Guerlain, 73, whose great-great-grandfather created the perfume house in 1828, has apologised for his remark, "which in no way reflects my true beliefs, but which was a slip of the tongue". He denies that the comment constitutes an offence and is expected to be present in court....

Race relations in France were already under strain after Claude Gueant, the Interior Minister, suggested on Saturday that European civilisation was superior to those of Muslim countries. Mr Gueant's claim that "not all civilisations are of equal value" has dominated the presidential campaign this week.

Serge Letchimy, a Socialist MP, accused him of promoting Nazi ideology, prompting ministers to leave the government bench in the French parliament and demand an apology.

But critics say that Mr Guerlain's comments suggest a colonial attitude in the French subconscious.

SOURCE

Since he was in effect saying that blacks are hard workers -- something not often heard these days -- it is hard to see where the slur lies. I guess you cannot safely say ANYTHING about blacks. I have commented on this case before

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"Massive Anti-Bullying Law and Bullying Initiatives Were Based on Misleading Publicity"

by Hans Bader

“It launched a hundred ‘anti-bullying’ initiatives at all levels of government, but much of what you think you know about” the Tyler Clementi case “is probably wrong,” notes legal commentator Walter Olson at Overlawyered, the world’s oldest law blog. Andrew Sullivan discusses this as well, linking to Ian Parker’s article in The New Yorker.

We wrote earlier about how the current panic over bullying is leading to attacks on free speech, political debate, and free association in the schools; political pandering; dishonest stretching of existing federal laws by federal officials; and violations of basic principles of federalism.

Reason’s Jacob Sullum writes about New Jersey’s massively-long “Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights,” enacted after Clementi’s suicide at New Jersey’s Rutgers University, and how it infringes on free speech and imposes illegal unfunded mandates. When New Jersey passed this incredibly complicated anti-bullying law, which contains 18 pages of “required components,” that gave a huge boost to a burgeoning “anti-bullying” industry that seeks to define bullying as broadly as possible (to include things like “eye-rolling,” or always associating with the same group of friends) in order to create demand for its services. Hundreds of New Jersey schools “snapped up a $1,295 package put together by a consulting firm that includes a 100-page manual.”

Rod Dreher sees a lesson from the Clementi case about jumping to conclusions:

I too thought that Clementi had been outed after Ravi filmed him having sex. As Parker shows, Clementi was not closeted, and he wasn’t filmed having sex. And yes, Dharun Ravi [who is being prosecuted for hate crimes over the filming that allegedly caused Clementi's suicide] is an ass. But he is not facing criminal trial for being an ass. This is what moral panic does. . .It is hard for me to be fair [to the defendant] in these particular cases, but it is necessary to fight against my own instincts in this case and in every case. You too.

The Obama administration’s StopBullying.gov website defines bullying incredibly broadly in ways that conflict with freedom of speech and common sense. It defines “teasing” as a form of “bullying,” and “rude” or “hurtful” “text messages” as “cyberbullying.” Since “creating web sites” that “make fun of others” also is deemed “cyberbullying,” conservative websites that poke fun at the president are presumably guilty of cyberbullying under this strange definition. (Law professors like UCLA’s Eugene Volokh have criticized bills by liberal lawmakers like Congresswoman Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) that would ban some criticism of politicians as cyberbullying.)

Anti-bullying regulations can backfire and have bad consequences for child development. As a school official noted after passage of New Jersey’s sweeping anti-bullying law, “The anti-bullying law also may not be appropriate for our youngest students, such as kindergartners who are just learning how to socialize with their peers. Previously, name-calling or shoving on the playground could be handled on the spot as a teachable moment, with the teacher reinforcing the appropriate behavior. That’s no longer the case. Now it has to be documented, reviewed and resolved by everyone from the teacher to the anti-bullying specialist, principal, superintendent and local board of education.

SOURCE (See the original for links)

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ELSEWHERE

Welcome to the O.D.D. People Club: "Oppositional Defiance Disorder. A wonderful new disease. Now, if you oppose eauthority figures for philosophical reasons, and will not compromise your standards, you are mentally ill. If you oppose certain government programs, such as TSA sexual assaults in airports, the USA Patriot's Act, TARP, HARP, or Obamacare, you are mentally ill. If you support a full return of your 2nd Amendment rights, you are mentally ill. If Janet Reno considers you a possible terrorist threat (such as a member of the NRA, a returning Iraq War vet, pro life supporter, Libertarian, TEA Party member, or have a 'Don't Tread On Me' bumper sticker), it's because you are mentally ill. "

Liberal tax fantasies punctured: "Some liberals have the unrealistic fantasy that by increasing taxes on the top one percent of the population, the government can finance a radically expanded welfare state for the bottom 99 percent. (Never mind that even if we confiscated the entire annual income of the top one percent, it wouldn’t begin to cover the record, trillion-dollar federal budget deficit.) They assume that somewhere in Europe, there is a country that does just that, without harming its economy. Alas, there is no such country, anymore than unicorns exist."

Spain: Leftist judge convicted of wiretapping: "Spain's Supreme Court has found the country's best-known judge, Baltasar Garzon, guilty of authorising illegal recordings of lawyers' conversations. He has been banned from the legal profession for 11 years. The court said he could not appeal against the ruling. Mr Garzon is best known for helping to secure the arrest of the former Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet in London."

US officials: Israel teams with Communist group to kill Iran’s nuclear scientists: "Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service, U.S. officials tell NBC News, confirming charges leveled by Iran’s leaders. he group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, has long been designated as a terrorist group by the United States, accused of killing American servicemen and contractors in the 1970s and supporting the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran before breaking with the Iranian mullahs in 1980."

GA: NRC approves first new US nuclear reactors since 1978: "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the nation's first nuclear power plant in a generation on Thursday, clearing the way for Atlanta-based Southern Co. to build two reactors at its Plant Vogtle site near Augusta. The commission approved a license on a 4-1 vote over the objections of environmentalists and the NRC's own chairman, Gregory Jaczko. It's the first approval since 1978, the year before the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania."

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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9 February, 2012

Being Single Is a Luxury

Bryan Caplan

I'm baffled by people who blame declining marriage rates on poverty. Why? Because being single is more expensive than being married. Picture two singles living separately. If they marry, they sharply cut their total housing costs. They cut the total cost of furniture, appliances, fuel, and health insurance. Even groceries get cheaper: think CostCo.

These savings are especially blatant when your income is low. Even the official poverty line acknowledges them. The Poverty Threshold for a household with one adult is $11,139; the Poverty Threshold for a household with two adults is $14,218. When two individuals at the poverty line maintain separate households, they're effectively spending 2*$11,139-$14,218=$8,060 a year to stay single.

But wait, there's more. Marriage doesn't just cut expenses. It raises couples' income. In the NLSY, married men earn about 40% more than comparable single men; married women earn about 10% less than comparable single women. From a couples' point of view, that's a big net bonus. And much of this bonus seems to be causal.

If you're rich, admittedly, you have to consider the marriage tax. But weighed against all the financial benefits of marriage, it's usually only modest drawback.

Yes, you can capture some these benefits simply by cohabitating. But hardly all. And cohabitation is far less stable than marriage. Long-term joint investments - like buying a house - are a lot more likely to blow up in your face. And while there may be some male cohabitation premium, it's smaller than the marriage premium.

If being single is so expensive, why are the poor far less likely to get married and stay married? I'm sure you could come up with a stilted neoclassical explanation. But this is yet another case where behavioral economics and personality psychology have a better story. Namely: Some people are extremely impulsive and short-sighted. If you're one of them, you tend to mess up your life in every way. You don't invest in your career, and you don't invest in your relationships. You take advantage of your boss and co-workers, and you take advantage of your romantic partners. You refuse to swallow your pride - to admit that the best job and the best spouse you can get, though far from ideal, are much better than nothing. Your behavior feels good at the time. But in the long-run people see you for what you are, and you end up poor and alone.

SOURCE (See the original for links)

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Dishonorable Mentions

Like the writer below, the age of semi-literacy into which modern "education" has thrust us does rather give me the horrors. You have to think clearly to write well and that ability is disappearing. I see semi-literacy as a sign of degraded education generally. And the more degraded education is, the more susceptible people are to empty Leftist asssertions. -- JR

Last month, this column gave out awards for the ten greatest linguistic monstrosities of 2011. It was not required that the winners be born in that year — only that they had been prominently, glossily, and grossly overused in it.

I thought I'd made my decisions wisely, but evidently I was wrong. Word Watch has an intelligent and discerning audience, and there was a great outcry against my choices.

No one asserted that the ten expressions were innocent and charming victims of Cox's vindictive spleen. After all, who could defend “dead on arrival” (used for every piece of legislation one doesn’t like), “icon” (used for everything except religious pictures), or “epic” (used for everything whatever)? The objection in each case was to my omission of other candidates, expressions just as worthy of hatred and fear as the ones I mentioned.

There was merit — much merit — in the protests I received. It is therefore my duty, and my pleasure, to publicize some of the strongest additional candidates for inclusion among the Most Gruesome Expressions of the Year Just Past. Again, there’s no requirement that a contender should have originated in 2011. The distinguishing characteristic is disgusting overuse.

I’ll arrange this new set of linguistic freaks under four headings.

1. The labor theory of value

When the January Word Watch was published, an anonymous correspondent wrote immediately to ask, “What about the awful term ‘worker,’ which apparently we've all now become?” To which a reader named Rusty replied, “I would add 'working families' to the list.”

They're both right. The labor theory of value continues to spawn all kinds of smarmy words. The current use of “worker” (which I'm always tempted to pronounce as "woikuh," in the old Daily Woikuh style) is one of the most insidious items in our political vocabulary. It has no meaning of its own; it’s just a code for other things. Stupid other things.

My anonymous reader was getting at that when he noticed that we are all "workers" now. Yet because the word is used only to signify good things, certain parties are necessarily, though illogically, excluded. When President Obama uses the term, he plainly doesn’t mean “everyone who works.” He doesn’t mean people who work on “Wall Street” (however many thousands of those people he also has working in his own administration). He doesn’t mean employers. He doesn’t mean doctors, lawyers, or Indian chiefs. He means something like “manual or subordinate laborers.” He means the people whom he frequently pictures as “living from paycheck to paycheck.”

I don't know any Indian chiefs who live from paycheck to paycheck, but maybe that's because I don't know any Indian chiefs. I do know plenty of doctors and lawyers who live that way, just as I know plenty of people who work with their hands but have no problem meeting their mortgages. So Obama's moral or financial distinction between workers and — what? non-workers? — isn't worth a damn. Let me tell you, my doctor does a lot of work when he has to deal with me.

The core reference of this coded language of work is “union labor.” That type of labor is, understandably, a central concern of Obama's administration, since unions were crucial to making him president. Yet from the intellectual point of view (and Obama is supposed to be an intellectual), it’s too bad that he and his friends want to wipe the literal meaning of "work" completely off the map. If the unionized denizens of the DMV do “work,” and lifesaving medicos do not, then what happens to the concept of, well, work? What happens to "effort expended for a productive purpose"? It vanishes, that’s what.

I haven’t mentioned the odor of self-righteousness that now attaches to “worker,” the word. All so-called workers, such as our friends at the DMV, are assumed to be more deserving, more useful — in short, better than everyone else. This is simply, directly, and stupidly offensive. It’s worse when the reference spreads to people who don’t even pretend to work, as in “working families.” Now the two-year-old child of the DMV desk-holder is included among the Woikuhs of duh Woiurld, and the medical scientist remains in the outer darkness.

2. The awesomeness of awesomeness

Willard Brickey wrote to say, “Maybe you've mentioned it before, but ‘awesome’ is a word abused so often that it's practically impossible to use it in its original, legitimate sense.”

True. The current plague of “awesome” resulted from some mutation in the brains of skateboarders and other such people. For more than two decades, “awesome” has been employed as a universal adjective, the anointed successor to such words as “cool” and “incredible.” At first it was boards, waves, and dudes that were awesome; but soon it was everything — caps, tatts, high ‘n’ tights — that was in any way associated with maleness. (“Awesome” is a male-coded word.)

This disease had ugly precedents at the other end of the social spectrum from gamers and thrashers. Historically, “awesome” has been most strongly associated with religion. But at some point in the 20th century, people, even religious people, stopped being interested in traditional religious language. They were no longer sure what “awe” might mean, and they didn’t care. They recognized that the word itself must have some power, since it appeared in prayers and stuff like that, but they were confused by the “some” that often got attached to it. Unwilling to resort to a dictionary, they assumed that “awesome,” the adjective, was some kind of general intensifier that could be used on anything.

Here’s an example — with a fairly long preamble.

Virtually all Christian songs that are widely known today were introduced before the mid-twentieth century. One reason is that around that time — the time when the Baby Boom first went to school — many otherwise verbal people stopped being interested in traditional literary language. They suddenly didn’t know what “hither” meant, let alone “thither” — or “sustain,” “solace,” “deplore,” or “chide.” They stopped having enough language to write enduring songs. They stopped understanding songs that had been universally popular only a few years before. They couldn’t understand what the hymn writer meant when he said, in the moving last stanza of a song that used to be standard in Christian congregations:

God be with you till we meet again:
Keep love’s banner floating o’er you,
Smite death’s threatening wave before you;
God be with you till we meet again.

What, they wondered, could "smite" possibly mean? And how does a banner "float"? So songs like that began to vanish.

“Amazing Grace” is a Christian song that everyone still “knows.” It was written in the 18th century and popularized by its use in a movie (The Onion Field) in 1979. Despite its present popularity, which is generally based on a serious misunderstanding of its meaning, no one could write that kind of song today. It has too many of those, like, weird old expressions in it. It even refers to “snares.”

The only other universally recognized Christian song that was popularized after the mid-20th century is “How Great Thou Art.” To my ears, this song is the pale, bewildered ghost of a great tradition. One proof is that it begins in this way:

O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder,
Consider all the worlds thy hands have made . . .
Then sings my soul, my savior, God, to thee.
How great thou art! How great thou art!

When I hear those lines, my own soul says, “How dumb this is! How dumb this is!” Awesome doesn’t belong in there. The singer means that God is “awesome.” Fine. But what he says is that his own “wonder” is “awesome.” Which is dumb.

But why the hell shouldn’t he say it? Can’t awesome be applied to everything?

O Lord my God, it can be. But when you hear that anything-goes awesome, you are hearing the “ave atque vale” of our linguistic heritage. If you don’t know what “ave atque vale” means, go look it up. That will be an awesome experience for you.

Snobbish? I don’t care. Would you rather know something, or not know it?

[I think that "How great thou art" is one of the greatest hymns ever written but that use of "awesome" has always made me cringe. It is obviously a mistake for "awestruck" -- JR]

3. We hear he is a whiz of a wiz, if ever a wiz there was

Let’s proceed from the falsely sublime to the truly ridiculous. One reader insisted that I must have been paid not to mention the scandalous misuse of “General” and other honorifics. I wasn’t, unfortunately — but here’s what she meant.

The Attorney General of the United States is not a military officer. Neither is the Surgeon General of the United States. They are not generals. They never lead troops into battle. They are attorneys or surgeons ingeneral service to the nation. Yet when Eric Holder, the current Attorney General, came before Congress to testify about his role in the gunrunning operation known as Fast and Furious, he was repeatedly asked such questions as, “You’re not suggesting, are you, General Holder, that it wasn’t your responsibility to have known about this problem?” The questioning congressmen didn’t understand what Holder’s title meant — any more than congressmen, commentators, and other potentates understand that the Surgeon General should not be addressed as General or appear in the Ruritarian, supposedly military, uniforms in which, beginning with the Reagan administration, they have obtruded themselves on the public attention.

Worries about the Attorney General turned my reader’s attention to worries about political titles ingeneral, and their persistence in particular. “When,” she wondered, “do people stop being this or that which they have been in the past?”

Good question. Receiving it, I had fond memories of R.W. Bradford, founder of Liberty, who often lodged the same complaint.

At the House committee hearing called to investigate Jon Corzine’s behavior as head of the IMF investment outfit, Corzine revealed that he had no idea what had become of $1.2 billion invested with him. That was startling enough; almost as startling to me was the fact that Corzine sat behind a committee-provided sign that read, in big black letters, “The Honorable Jon S. Corzine.” Corzine is “honorable” because he used to be a senator and a state governor. Used to be (thank God).

The poet Wordsworth wrote insightfully of spiritual states that do not cease — that “having been, must ever be.” Apparently it’s the same with Corzine’s “honor.” No matter what happens, he keeps his titles, and even his moral additives, forever. He even keeps his middle initial, as if there were some other Jon Corzine, equally involved in both scandals and congressional investigations, who might otherwise be confused with him.

For God’s sake, isn’t there any statute of limitations for these political functionaries? When Gertrude Smith retires from the DMV, even she (one of the “woiking class”) isn’t addressed as Counter Clerk Smith for the rest of her life. So why is Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, solemnly addressed as “Speaker Gingrich,” 13 years after he stopped being speaker? Is he likely to be mistaken for some other Gingrich, currently running for president?

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

The horrors of getting approval for an ice cream parlour in San Francisco: "The tragedy of the anti-commons is a useful concept for understanding a prevalent type of government failure in both poor and rich countries–excessive permit and licensing requirements. A pervasive multiple licensing system can create an impenetrable conjunctive permission line that even the most energetic cannot overcome. To start a business, to build, to hire, to sell, you need first to convince bureaucrat A and B and C and D and so on. The longer the conjunctive line, the less frequently entrepreneurs enter the market with new products and services. The transaction costs for dealing with each bureaucrat are very high, as is the likelihood that any single one will say no. The upshot is an impoverished society."

Economics lessons for President Obama: "President Obama keeps telling us that our taxes are too low. Really? But how can that be when all the formerly communist ex-Soviet republics now have lower tax rates than America. Do they know something that we don’t? Obama keeps telling us that we must tax the rich at higher rates, just like our friends in Europe. But there’s a big problem. The tax and spend European system is broken. Not just broken, but broke."

UK: “No negotiations” on Falklands: "Britain on Wednesday dismissed a complaint from Argentina about the 'militarization of the South Atlantic' as tensions rise regarding the Falkland Islands, over which the two countries fought a war 30 years ago. 'The people of the Falkland Islands are British out of choice,' the British Foreign Office said in a statement. 'They are free to determine their own future, and there will be no negotiations with Argentina on sovereignty unless the Islanders wish it.'"

WA: House approves homosexual marriage bill: "Washington’s same-sex marriage bill is on its way to Gov. Chris Gregoire for signing in the next few days. The Democrat-controlled state House voted 55 to 43 this afternoon to approve Senate Bill 6239. ... Republican efforts to attach a referendum clause to the bill died on a 47-to-51 vote. Opponents including the evangelical Faith and Freedom Network have pledged to mount a referendum or initiative to repeal the law, and one activist has already filed Initiative 1192 to limit marriages by law to one man and one woman."

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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8 February, 2012

IQ, conservatism and racism

On 22nd January I commented on claims by two Canadian psychologists to the effect that conservatives and racists have low IQs. One look at the study told me that it was brainless so I just reproduced the journal abstract and pointed out two of the things that made it brainless. I didn't see any point in a detailed look at the paper.

The study has however become much celebrated in Green/Left quarters, with the ineffable Monbiot in the vanguard. Monbiot's entry into the discussion has however energized a few ripostes from conservatives, with the most amusing point being that after Leftists telling us for decades that IQ scores are meaningless they suddenly have done an 180 degree turn and treat them as highly meaningful!

I thought I might add something to what I regard as the two best conservative responses to the original article. The first is in The Telegraph and makes a number of good points, all of which are worth reading.

I want to say more about just one of them: The point that IQ was measured during childhood (10 or 11 years of age) and that such measures are unreliable. That is however a matter of degree and of purpose. They are accurate enough to be a useful guide to who will benefit from a selective (more demanding) education, for instance.

An interesting aspect of scores at that age, however, is what I call the chimpanzee effect. In brief, this effect is that dummies mature faster so a relatively high score in childhood can lead to a relatively low score in adulthood. So it is quite possible that the high scorers in the data used by the Canadian authors became relatively low scorers later on. So if the high scorers in that body of data were later found to be liberals, it is quite possible that the same people were dummies in later life! So the data could be said to show the opposite of what the authors claim. The data could be said to suggest that it was the liberals who were the dummies.

That is all just speculation, however, The truth is that the data are incapable of telling us which way around it went at all.

That little point is really just a bit of fun, however. The second article by statistician Briggs is by far the most pointed. Briggs had a strong enough stomach to read the whole article. And when he did, he basically found that the authors had misrepresented their results. The correlations with IQ were in fact negligible. They were statistically significant but statistical significance is only a correction for small sample size and the sample sizes in the data used by the Canadians were large.

So statistical significance is irrelevant. It is other forms of significance we have to look at. Let me put it this way: What the Canadians found was (roughly) that out of 100 high IQ people, 51 would be liberals and 49 would be conservatives. Such a near-even split means of course that IQ is essentially irrelevant to ideology, or is not a socially or scientifically significant predictor of ideology.

Now we come to "racism". The correlations between conservatism and racism were more substantial. Briggs rightly detects the flaw in that. The correlation is between WHAT THE AUTHORS SAY is conservatism and racism and there is no external validation of either measure. So all I want to do is draw attention to something I set out long ago: That even eminent Leftist psychologists have NO IDEA what conservatism is. A much noted paper in the field even identified Stalin, Khrushchev and Castro as conservatives! Can you get any madder than that? So it is no wonder that when they use their questionnaires to predict how people will vote, they find that "conservatives" AS IDENTIFIED BY THEM are just as likely to vote Democrat as Republican (for instance). How clueless can you get? What is going on of course is that Leftist psychologists swallow hook line and sinker of Leftist propaganda about conservatives. They believe that conservatives really are as Leftist propaganda describes them. It would appear that they never bother to talk to any actual conservatives to find out what they really think.

By contrast, I am a conservative so a questionnaire that I devised based on a thorough knowledge of what conservatism actually is, did what the Leftist questionnaires could not: Provided a substantial prediction of vote. See here. So once again the arrogance and ignorance of the Left has led them to a false understanding of reality and scientific work that is futile and useless. The work by the two Canadian authors certainly tells us NOTHING about the correlations with conservatism. I have written more extensively elsewhere about the relationship between conservatism and IQ.

For reference, the Canadian study is: "Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact" by Gordon Hodson and Michael A. Busseri

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The Breivik salute



I did not immediately comment on this because I thought it would be obvious to everyone -- but apparently not. When Breivik last faced court over his massacre he gave a salute as he came into the courtroom. His lawyer, Geir Lippestad, said was 'some kind of Right-wing extremist greeting.'

It was not, of course. It was a COMMUNIST salute. The Communist salute is a clenched-fist salute while the Fascist salute is with an open hand.

What the significance is we can only speculate. While it is true that he mostly read and cited conservative sources in the buildup to his actions, that was rather inevitable given his dissatisfaction with Muslims. Only conservatives have the guts to call a spade a spade where Muslims are concerned. Breivik's other ideas could perfectly well be Leftist.

And his desire to restore traditional Norwegian society is in keeping with that idea. Norway is a very Leftist place and it was only their failure to deal with the Muslim problem that caused the Social Democrats to lose votes in the last election. We may note, for example, that a doctor was recently denied employment at a Norwegian hospital because he did not believe in the Theory of Evolution. See here. Pretty extreme.

That it was Leftists whom Breivik killed makes no odds. Rival Leftist groupings have a long history of killing one-another. The ice-pick in the head that Trotsky got from Stalin is a case in point.

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If You Got A 'Free' Colonoscopy, Thank Bill Dunphy - He Helped Pay For It

Under ObamaCare, Medicare and private insurers are supposed to eliminate the co-pays for preventive care such as colonoscopies. Politicians and ObamaCare crusaders refer to this as “free preventive care.” Those in the real world call it “shifting the cost to someone else.”

That someone else is Bill Dunphy: Bill Dunphy thought his colonoscopy would be free. His insurance company told him it would be covered 100%, with no co-payment from him and no charge against his deductible. The nation’s two-year-old health law requires most insurance plans to cover all costs for preventive care, including colon cancer screening. So Dunphy had the procedure in April. Then the bill arrived: $1,100.

Dunphy, a 61-year-old Phoenix small-business owner, angrily paid it out of his own pocket because of what some prevention advocates call a loophole. His doctor removed two noncancerous polyps during the colonoscopy. So while Dunphy was sedated, his preventive screening turned into a diagnostic procedure. That allowed his insurance company to bill him.

Now that insurers can no longer charge co-pays for colonoscopies, they have to find a way to make up the cost. They could raise premiums, although that risks losing customers. Far better to require folks like Dunphy whose preventive procedure morphs into a diagnostic one to pay the whole bill. That’s $1,100 the insurance company won’t have to pay. And if the average co-pay for a colonoscopy is $50, Dunphy helped pay for the “free” colonoscopy for 22 patients whose colons were squeaky clean. In short, the sick are helping to pay for the healthy.

Last year IBD noted that Medicare Advantage was dealing with “free” preventive services by charging co-pays on chemotherapy drugs and radiation treatment for cancer patients. We dubbed this “reducing costs on the back end.” That is, to stay in business insurance companies will impose cost-sharing or deny care when patients are sickest and in most need of the protection that insurance is supposed to provide.

We also noted who are the prime beneficiaries of reducing costs on the back end:

This may not fit the needs of patients very well, but it suits the needs of politicians quite well. After all, politicians want to maximize their political survival. They can please voters by giving them lots of “free” stuff, and the more voters you can so please, the better. Lots of voters want free preventive care, so politicians find it worthwhile to force insurers to give it to them. Far fewer voters, however, will develop a serious illness, so protecting them is not nearly as useful for politicians who wish to get re-elected.

The truly insidious thing about it is that politicians will be able to blame others for the problems they have created. They will get on their high horse and excoriate the heartless and cruel insurers like Independence Blue Cross. Politicians excel at obfuscation, making it difficult, as Thomas Sowell says, to trace their fingerprints back to the murder weapon.

SOURCE

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Economic Chaos Ahead

Let's think about the kind of mess that we're in. Federal 2010 Medicare and Medicaid expenditures totaled $800 billion. The projected annual growth of both programs is about 7 percent. Social Security expenditures are more than $700 billion a year. According to the 2009 Social Security and Medicare trustees reports, by 2030, 49 percent of federal revenues will go for Social Security and Medicare payments. The unfunded liability of both programs is already $106 trillion.
But not to worry. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it's possible to sustain today's level of federal spending and even achieve a balanced budget. All that Congress would have to do is raise the lowest income tax bracket of 10 percent to 25 percent and the middle tax bracket of 25 percent to 66 percent and raise the 35 percent tax bracket to 92 percent. That's a static vision that assumes that people will have no response and they'll work just as hard and send more money to Washington. If Congress did legislate such tax increases, it would be the economic equivalent of committing national hara-kiri.

Professor Daniel Klein, editor of Econ Journal Watch, and Professor Tyler Cowen, general director of the Mercatus Center, both based at George Mason University, organized a symposium to promote a better understanding of the U.S. debt crisis. The symposium's title, "U.S. Sovereign Debt Crisis: Tipping-Point Scenarios and Crash Dynamics" (http://econjwatch.org), is a strong hint about the seriousness of our nation's plight.

Professor Cowen introduced the symposium pointing out that in 2011, the major crisis was in the eurozone, where Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland dealt with the risk of default. The survival of the eurozone is now seriously doubted. Cowen added: "When it comes to a sovereign debt crisis, it is no longer possible to say 'it can't happen here.' Right now, we are borrowing about 40 cents of every dollar the federal government spends, and the imbalance has no end in sight."

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, associate professor of economics at San Jose State University, says that a default on Treasury securities appears inevitable. He says that the short-run consequences for the economy will be painful but that the long-run consequences, both political and economic, could be beneficial. That's because an economic collapse is the only way we will come to our senses. That's a tragic statement about the foresight of the American people.

Participant Garrett Jones, associate professor of economics at George Mason University, is a bit more optimistic, seeing default as being less likely. But he argues that "default is still possible, and the GOP offers a uniquely American path to default: an unwillingness to raise taxes."

Dr. Arnold Kling is a member of the Financial Market Working Group at the Mercatus Center and tells us that the "U.S. government has made a set of promises that it cannot keep." He says that the "promises that are most important to change are Social Security and Medicare."

Joseph J. Minarik is senior vice president and director of research at the Committee for Economic Development. He argues that a "U.S. financial meltdown today is eminently avoidable. The wealthiest nation on earth, despite a painful economic slowdown, maintains the wherewithal to pay its bills. The open question is whether it maintains the will and the wisdom."

Peter J. Wallison holds the Arthur F. Burns chair in financial policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He agrees with Kling that "the most likely source of a U.S. sovereign debt crisis ... is a failure of the U.S. political system to address the growth of the major entitlement programs -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid."

My translation of the symposium's conclusions is that it is by no means preordained that our nation must suffer the same decline as have other great nations of the past -- England, France, Spain, Portugal and the Ottoman and Roman empires. All evidence suggests that we will suffer a similar decline because, as Professor Cowen says, "the American electorate has dug in against both major tax increases and major spending cuts."

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Let us hope that the euro and the EU do collapse: "Now yes, agreed, I am known for my euroscepticism, both of the very EU system and of the currency, thinking them both thoroughly bad ideas from start to finish. But I'd like to point out that there are those not as entirely crankish as I am on the subject who think that the toppling of one or both wouldn't be so bad: could even be desirable."

South Carolina sues DoJ over blocked voter ID law: "The U.S. Justice Department was wrong to block South Carolina from requiring voters to show government-issued photo identification to vote, the state's top prosecutor argued in a lawsuit filed Tuesday. ... The Justice Department in December rejected South Carolina's law requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls, saying tens of thousands of the state's minorities might not be able to cast ballots under the new law because they don't have the right photo ID."

CA: 9th Circus rules in favor of homosexual marriage: "A federal appeals panel in San Francisco ruled Tuesday that California’s Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, a decision that could lead to the Supreme Court’s consideration of the controversial social issue. By a 2 to 1 vote, the panel overturned the proposition, which was approved by 52 percent of the state’s voters in 2008 and amended the state’s Constitution to limit marriage to a man and a woman." [No surprise. This was always going to go to SCOTUS]

Battle for reform starts in Wisconsin: "If a national symbol exists for the movement to rein in the power of public employee unions, it is Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker. He pushed aggressive measures to curb the power and influence of government unions and now faces a union-funded recall campaign, which, if successful will empower unions and expand their power in Wisconsin and throughout the country, including in California."

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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7 February, 2012

Eloquence in Defense of Liberty

Mike Adams

On January 27, 2012, the 6th Circuit issued a landmark opinion in Ward v. Wilbanks. It is the biggest federal court victory for campus First Amendment rights since my own victory before the 4th Circuit last April. What is striking about the Ward opinion is the thread of common sense running through every aspect of its analysis. Even more striking is the eloquence of the 6th Circuit as it defends fundamental religious freedom against a full-frontal assault from the LGBT community.

Julea Ward was one of many counseling students being coerced into affirming homosexuality by a state-run institution. She did not seek to force homosexuals to change their conduct through religious-based corrective therapy. She simply sought to refer homosexual clients to other counselors when those clients demanded affirmation of their conduct. Eastern Michigan University sought to force Julea into a cruel trilemma by accepting one of the following options:

1. Lie to clients by telling them she approved of their conduct, or

2. Abandon her religious beliefs regarding sexuality, or

3. Leave the counseling profession altogether.

Julea’s preference was pretty simple: refer homosexual (and some heterosexual) clients to others more willing to affirm their conduct. For this she was expelled from the counseling program. Then the trial court granted summary judgment preventing Julea from having her day in court.

Julea Ward appealed to the 6th Circuit and won a unanimous reversal. The judges concluded that a reasonable jury could have found that Ward’s professors ejected her from the counseling program because of their own personal hostility toward her speech and faith, rather than a policy against referrals. In other words, that was simply a pretext to punish her for her beliefs.

The 6th Circuit judges wondered out loud just what Julea Ward did wrong. She was willing to work with all clients and to respect the school’s affirmation directives in the process. That is precisely why she asked to refer gay and lesbian clients (and some heterosexual clients) – but only if the conversation required her to affirm their sexual practices. After noting her compliance with the rule, the 6th Circuit raised interesting hypothetical questions. For example, would the ban on discrimination against clients based on their religion require a Muslim counselor to tell a Jewish client that his religious beliefs are correct? Would it require an atheist counselor to tell a person of faith that there is a God?

After suggesting that the answer to both of those hypotheticals would be “no,” the 6th Circuit delivered a line certain to irreparably damage the self-esteem of the Eastern Michigan diversity crowd: “Tolerance is a two-way street. Otherwise, the rule mandates orthodoxy, not anti-discrimination.” In other words, the 6th Circuit accused the institution of promoting intolerance – the very thing it said it was committed to eradicating. Ouch.

The 6th Circuit also noted that many of the faculty members’ statements to Ward raise a similar concern about religious discrimination. They noted that a reasonable jury could find that the university dismissed Ward from its counseling program because of her faith-based speech, not because of any legitimate professional or educational objective. They added, “A university cannot compel a student to alter or violate her belief systems based on a phantom policy as the price for obtaining a degree.” Government taxation and regulation of religious beliefs is a serious accusation. Now, the issue will go to a jury.

One interesting aspect of the case is that the university did not even argue that its actions could withstand strict scrutiny. The 6th Circuit agreed adding “Whatever interest the university served by expelling Ward, it falls short of compelling. Allowing a referral would be in the best interest of Ward (who could counsel someone she is better able to assist) and the client (who would receive treatment from a counselor better suited to discuss his relationship issues).”

This is all just plain common sense. Everyone was fine except for a handful of professors with too much time on their hands and too little tolerance for the idea that someone, somewhere, somehow did not share their claimed commitment to moral relativism. Or course, Julea Ward’s professors really do not believe in moral relativism. They believe they are morally superior to Julea and have the authority to levy taxes on her “inferior” belief system.

For years, homosexuals have opposed the idea that they are sick, in need of change, and somehow capable of being cured by the counseling profession. Today, homosexuals promote the idea that Christians are sick, in need of change, and somehow capable of being cured by the counseling profession. Fortunately, the 6th Circuit is Warding off their sanctimonious hypocrisy and narrow-minded assault on intellectual diversity.

SOURCE

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Government by Ignoramuses

Abetted by a media that is not much better

The country’s problems, although very serious, aren’t that tough to solve. For anyone with a heartbeat and a healthy does of realism, our biggest problem is government intervention.

This crisis has been brought on by federal intervention in various markets that inject liquidity into too few places that give a sustainable, positive return on investment. Let’s look at three areas where federal dollars dominate: college education; real estate and healthcare.

In college education, the federal government is the only player left. Last year, for the first time ever, student loan obligations exceeded credit card obligations. This year, according to both Heritage and USA Today student borrowing is expected to top $1 trillion.

“Tuition and fees continue to shoot through the roof, now exceeding $17,000 per year, rising on average 8.3 percent at public universities this year,” writes Heritage. “[C]ollege costs have increased 439 percent since 1985, despite a 475 percent increase in federal subsidies such as Pell Grants. In other words, more federal funding hasn’t decreased the cost of attending college.”

In fact, the college inflation rate probably has much to do with the amount of federal aid available to colleges. Colleges, like every other business, raise prices when more money for their products is available.

The cost of a college education is rising so fast that students can’t pay off loans, even with subsidized interest rates from the government. “A recent study by the Institute for Higher Education Policy found that for every borrower who defaults,” writes the New York Times, “at least two more fall behind in payments. The study found that only 37 percent of borrowers who started repaying their student loans in 2005 were able to pay them back fully and on time.”

The government’s solution to the problem of too much money in education is throwing more taxpayer dollars at colleges and universities.

Same is true for real estate. After three decades of subsidizing home ownership in the United States, the federal government helped fuel real estate prices to speculative levels and encouraged the least able to repay to borrow money with government guarantees.

4th quarter foreclosures rates rose again at the end of 2011. “Foreclosure starts…increased this quarter,” write the Mortgage Bankers Association, “the first increase in a year after declining for three straight quarters, and is now back up to the levels of the first quarter of 2011. This is largely driven by loans leaving the loss mitigation process and the ending of state remediation programs and foreclosure moratoria.”

In other words, now that the government has stopped interceding in the private contracts between mortgage holders and home owners, foreclosures are resuming the natural course that they could have taken five years ago. But instead the government has intervened and kept the real estate market and home owners sickly, affecting the whole economy.

According to the FDIC, “The government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the government mortgage insurance program Ginnie Mae together account for more than 95 percent of total MBS [mortgage-backed security] issuance since 2008.”

That hasn’t stopped Obama from proposing the Federal Housing Authority absorb bigger losses or pressuring private banks to make home loans easier to get in continuation of the failed policies of the past. These are the same banks that the federal government is suing for making loans to people who couldn’t afford to repay them.

Remember too big to fail? There are more toxic assets concentrated in fewer and fewer places, most held by the federal government, guaranteed by you and me. And these policies were deliberately crafted by the Obama administration.

The story for healthcare is much the same. The largest customer, insurer and payer for healthcare is the federal government.

And government money, combined with demographics have fueled rising costs for healthcare. “The new numbers are consistent with a trend that from August 2000 to August 2010 has seen healthcare inflation rise 48% while overall Consumer Price Index has risen 26% for the same period, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show,” writes HealthLeaders Media.

Again, Obama’s idea of reform is having the government be the only player in healthcare. You know? Because that worked so well for real estate and student loans.

But the most maddening part in the tale is that financial journalists won’t cover the story. Instead of writing about the deleterious effects of federal involvement in healthcare, real estate, student loans, energy and every other area of our economy that is suffering, they often pose as cheerleaders for the administration.

Covering the latest cooked books from Bureau of Labor Statistic regarding unemployment, Don Lee of the LA Times glosses over the fact that real unemployment is at 11.3 percent rather than 8.3 percent the administration claims. Instead he chooses to take issue with Newt Gingrich’s claim that if people hadn’t dropped out of the labor pool that the “unemployment rate would now be 12% or 13%.”

Well, yeah says Lee. Buuuuuut, “while Gingrich has a point that the latest jobless rate understates the pain among workers, the unemployment figure still wouldn't be as high as he says it would be if workers hadn't dropped out. Rather, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, estimates the unemployment rate today would be 11.3% if the labor force had grown at a ‘normal’ rate since the end of 2007.”

Sure. Gingrich has a point, but his over-estimation of unemployment by seven-tenths of one percent is somehow more dishonest than the administration’s undercounting of unemployment by three full points. You have to go to journalism school to be that intellectually bankrupt?

Those idiot Republicans. Would it really kill Lee to admit that conservatives are r-r-r-r-right on this issue? Probably not. But it would kill something more important to him- his world view.

In fairness to journalists like Lee, they are hobbled by their post-modern desire to live in a world that conforms to their vision rather than having their vision conform to the realities of the world. It’s not their fault. They are just that dumb.

SOURCE

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The Smallest Workforce Since Carter

The recent labor reports certainly have some encouraging news. New jobs in January estimated at 243,000 and a decline in unemployment to 8.3 percent suggests that the economy might be headed in the right direction. But, another key indicator that doesn’t get the attention of the jobs number or the unemployment rate shows that all is definitely not well.

As the following graph courtesy of the Labor Department demonstrates, the Labor Participation Rate (LPR) continues to decline. The LPR measures the number of people employed or looking for work compared to the total of age eligible population. As the graph indicates, the LPR has been on decline since the recession began, and it made another significant move downward to just 63.7 percent in January. That is the lowest since Carter era recession year of 1981.

The declining LPR is a clear indication that more Americans continue to give up on even finding employment as the failed economic policies of Barack Obama infect the market place with anxiety and uncertainty. A higher LPR indicates more people bringing home a paycheck and greater economic output. Until there is a sustained turnaround in the LPR, any talk of “recovery” is premature.



Source (See the original for links)

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The steady decline of Pakistan

For 65 years Pakistanis have been conducting one of modern history’s great experiments: Can a nation conceived as Islamic be free and democratic-- the vision of Pakistan’s founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah? Or will Pakistan’s identity be defined by “forces that want us to live in fear—fear of external and internal enemies."

The words quoted above were spoken by Husain Haqqani to the Wall Street Journal’s Mira Sethi. Until November, Haqqani was Pakistan's ambassador to Washington where he was a popular figure, a proud Pakistani patriot and a liberal-democratic Muslim intellectual tirelessly making the case that Pakistan should be seen as an important ally deserving of respect, moral support and material assistance.

Haqqani is now back in Pakistan – a guest in the home of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and, as Sethi phrases it, the “de facto prisoner of the Pakistani generals whose ire he has provoked.” Beyond the doors of Gilani’s Islamabad residence, Haqqani fears, assassins await.

This is not just about one man: If Pakistan has become a nation that can’t tolerate a Husain Haqqani, Pakistan has become an intolerant nation, a nation in danger of becoming what Haqqani’s wife, parliamentarian Farahnaz Ispahani, has called a “militarized Islamist state.” Certainly, it would be time to stop regarding Pakistan as a friend of the United States.

When I was last in Pakistan, two years ago, on a visit sponsored by the State Department, the U.S. Congress had just approved – thanks in large measure to Haqqani’s efforts – a $7.5 billion aid package. To my shock, this elicited little gratitude and much grumbling. Why? Because American envoys were to ensure that American taxpayer dollars would be spent to alleviate poverty and fight terrorists -- not for other purposes. People were angry with Haqqani for having accepted such “conditionality.”

I recall the U.S. ambassador getting grilled on a Pakistani television program and sounding apologetic. I told anyone who asked – and some who didn’t --- that aid is not an entitlement; that we Americans have every right to specify how our money should be spent; that Haqqani was correct not to complain about such commonsensical restrictions; and that if other Pakistanis disagree they can tear up our checks. No hard feelings....

During my last visit, however, Pakistan was different. Over the course of a single week, four terrorist attacks were carried out -- one of them targeting the Pakistani equivalent of the Pentagon where Taliban insurgents, armed with automatic weapons, grenades, and rocket launchers, fought for 22 hours. I expected such violence to outrage Pakistanis – to make them implacable foes of terrorism and the ideologies that drive it. But that was not necessarily the case.

A too-common view: The Taliban that attacks Pakistanis should be condemned but the Taliban that attacks Americans may be condoned. America, after all, had wronged Afghanistan by abandoning it after the Soviet defeat, and then had wronged it a second time by returning. The self-contradiction in these indictments generally went unrecognized.

More HERE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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6 February, 2012

Deep dishonor in America's Leftist academe

The Humanities faculty at Durham's Duke University have demonstrated bigoted anti-white attitudes that are perfectly mainstream among such faculty at American universities. An amazing total of 88 of them signed the now notorious condemnation of the innocent Duke lacrosse players before the players had even appeared in court, let alone been convicted. Their hatred of American society immediately blasted away the centuries of wisdom which said "innocent until proven guilty". And the wisdom of that maxim was shown when the players were found NOT guilty.

So what is still going on at Duke can reasonably be extrapolated to at least the Humanities departments of America's universities and colleges. And that is not pretty.

One of the Lacrosse players who was NOT accused by the pathetic Crystal Gail Mangum was nonetheless caught up in the blast and suspended by the university at roughly the same time as the other players. He is now suing. As you can read here, Ryan McFadyen is arguably the person who behaved with greatest honor in the whole affair. He certainly behaved with greater honor than prosecutor Nifong or Durham police -- who tried to suborn him into giving false evidence. There is another glimpse of his character here.

And when McFadyen refused to be intimidated into giving false evidence, Nifong and the police must have realized that he had put them into a dangerous position. Fabricating evidence is a crime with severe penalties. So they immediately went all-out to blacken his name. And that blackening still shows up today in that he has become something of a hate figure to many.

So he is now suing over that defamation and the illegal and improper behaviour of all concerned in the matter.

The trial has however produced some document disclosures that reveal the full depth of the moral depravity of senior Duke U officials. The documents contain bombshell emails from Duke President Brodhead and others suggesting that Duke's primary concern was to protect its PR, even if that meant sacrificing innocent students.

In documents submitted February 3 by Plaintiffs' lawyers, President Brodhead is quoted in an email sent very early in the case to other Duke staff:

“Friends: a difficult question is, how can we support our lacrosse players at a devastatingly hard time without seeming to lend aid and comfort to their version of the story? We can’t do anything to side with them, or even, if they are exonerated, to imply that they behaved with honor. The central admin can't, nor can Athletics.”

And Joe Alleva, then of the Duke Athletic Dept., also testified during his deposition on January 20, 2012, that he made positive and truthful statements about Plaintiffs and their teammates’ character at the University’s press conference on March 28, 2006.

Mr. Alleva testified that he was “crucified” immediately afterwards for making those statements by President Brodhead himself and in front of the Crisis Management Team, all of whom knew how “off-message” Mr. Alleva’s truthful, positive statements about plaintiffs were.

Alleva was the one who later told Duke lacrosse coach Pressler that "it's not about the truth" any longer; that the case was about the interest groups and the integrity (reputation) of the university. (Hence the title of coach Pressler's book, "It's not about the truth").

Or as Robert K. Steel (then chairman of Duke's Board of Trustees) said in explaining why Duke would not be defending its falsely-accused students: "Sometimes people have to suffer for the good of the organization". More details here

You would think that all the exposure of their moral depravity might have created some caution among Duke faculty about race-related matters. It does not appear to have done so. Just a few days ago I ran a large excerpt (scroll down) from an article which summarized the Arcidiacono affair. I will simply refer readers to there for a treatment of that little explosion of rage and hate. See HERE for the full article. Having their warped view of America threatened is intolerable to Duke's Leftist Mafia.

No Leftist will admit it of course but I cannot see why Duke should be regarded as atypical. I don't think there is anything especially poisonous in the air at North Carolina. I think we have seen coming to the surface at Duke what is smouldering away beneath the surface at most of America's universities and colleges. They are true heirs of Stalin and the ghastly Soviet Union. They are a nest of vipers.

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Nasty Leftists and Wikipedia

I have received the following email from a reader:

You might be interested to hear that I corrected the Right Wing entry on Wikipedia which said that the Right are essentially Fascists.

It was an object lesson (for me) in the sheer nastiness of the Left. I found it very easy to undermine their arguments -- their hatred outruns their knowledge by some distance -- but one person in particular who calls himself THE FOUR DEUCES waged a Wikipedia campaign against me, in alliance with others, deleting my comments, trying to get me banned, saying I was a "sock puppet", deleting any change on the grounds that it was not discussed, that I was using marginal or discredited sources, and so forth, indeed any trick in the book he could think of to have me deleted.

To the credit of Wikipedia his every attempt failed, but I saw close up what I can only describe as the psychopathology of the Left.

Anyway, I mention this because in the Talkpages on the Right-Wing entry somebody the other day was saying that the Right are racists, and I linked to your paper about the Left and Racism.

This was immediately attacked by The Four Deuces who said you were a discredited source, and that it was irrelevant, and to support his case he linked to a paper in which the writers said you were an anti-Semitic Nazi.

It was a stupid paper of course, but I was interested to see that the dispute in question, about the Authoritarian Personality, had a Wikipedia page, from which The Four Deuces had deleted every single reference to your work.

Now you may be right, you may be wrong, but the sheer totalitarian nature of their mentality is a real eye opener for me. Nobody was allowed to hear of your work. It confirmed (to me) what you have been saying about the Left for some time. Totalitarian. Nasty.

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More poisonous Leftism in academe: If you are accused of racism you must not defend yourself

To do so is "Retaliation" and that is an offense itself, apparently. It's a private university mentioned below so no first Amendment protection. A defamation action could succeed, though.

by lawyer HANS BADER

Keeping quiet can seal your fate if you are a professor facing a campus kangaroo court after being wrongly accused of racial or sexual “harassment” based on your classroom speech. Civil-liberties advocates, like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, rely heavily on adverse publicity to save wrongly accused professors from being disciplined and fired by campus disciplinary bodies. They put to good use Justice Brandeis’s insight that publicity deters wrongdoing and helps cure social evils. As Brandeis once noted, “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”

But as the plight of Lawrence Connell at Widener University School of Law illustrates, if an accused professor speaks up, resulting in possible adverse publicity for his accusers, he increasingly risks being punished for “retaliation” against them, even when harassment charge is baseless. Connell was convicted of “retaliation” because he and his lawyer denounced meritless racial harassment charges against him over his classroom teaching. Retaliation charges have become a growing threat to academic freedom, fueled by court rulings that provide murky and conflicting guidance as to what speech can constitute illegal “retaliation.”

Professor Connell was charged with racial harassment and removed from Widener’s campus because he discussed hypothetical crimes in his criminal law class, including the imaginary killing of the law school dean, Linda Ammons, who happens to be black. (He was also accused of harassment because he “expressed his philosophical concerns about the fairness and utility of hate crime” laws.)

But Connell did not select the dean for use in these hypotheticals because of her race, nor was there any evidence that he had a racist motive for doing so. (Comments are not “racial harassment” unless they target a victim based on her race, and are severe and pervasive, according to Caver v. City of Trenton, a ruling by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over Widener.) Far from being a racist, Connell had spent 15 years successfully working to save the life of a black man who had been sentenced to die after he was convicted of murder by an all-white jury.

Leading law professors filed affidavits in support of Connell pointing out that discussing hypothetical crimes against law deans was standard practice for law professors who teach criminal law. George Washington University’s Orin Kerr noted that ”one of the common ways that law professors keep students mildly entertained in class is by posing hypotheticals involving their professors and the Dean. . . . students just love it. If you teach first-year criminal law,” “that means you spend a lot of time imagining your colleagues meeting horrible fates.” In Bauer v. Sampson, a court ruled that depicting a college official’s imaginary death was protected by the First Amendment.

After Professor Connell was exonerated by a committee of law professors, the charges against him were resubmitted, in Kafkaesque fashion, to a disciplinary panel including Dean Ammons herself, another Widener administrator, and a professor hand-picked by Ammons.

While even this new panel was forced to concede the obvious — that Connell had not committed racial harassment – it found him guilty of two acts of “retaliation”: the first was an e-mail protesting his innocence after he was suspended and banned from campus, and the second was his lawyer’s public statement that he was preparing to sue over the unfounded allegations. The e-mail called the accusations against him “preposterous” and said that they were made by “two unnamed students from my Criminal Law class of spring 2010″ who “falsely” quoted and took “out of context” his classroom “remarks.” The panel deemed the email to be illegal retaliation, even though the e-mail did not even name the accusers, because the e-mail supposedly had the “foreseeable effect of identifying the complainants.” (The e-mail led to students speculating about who the complainants were, and a complainant suspected that others “believed that she was one of the complaining students.”) Connell was then suspended for a year without pay. As a condition of reinstatement, he must undergo psychiatric treatment, and be deemed sufficiently “cured” before he is allowed to return to his classroom.

Much more here (See the original for links)

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Capitalism, Corporatism, and the Freed Market


Benito Mussolini. His system has triumphed

When a front-running presidential contender tells the country that thanks to Barack Obama, “[w]e are only inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy,” one is left scratching one’s head. How refreshing it is, then, to hear a prominent establishment economist – a Nobel laureate yet — tell it straight:

The managerial state has assumed responsibility for looking after everything from the incomes of the middle class to the profitability of large corporations to industrial advancement. This system . . . is . . . an economic order that harks back to Bismarck in the late nineteenth century and Mussolini in the twentieth: corporatism.

Columbia University Professor Edmund S. Phelps, who won the 2006 Nobel Prize in economics, and his coauthor, Saifedean Ammous, assistant professor of economics at the Lebanese American University, write that the U.S. economy ceased to be a free market some time ago, yet the free market is blamed for the economic crisis. (The real question is whether the American economy was ever really free.)

Phelps and Ammous condemn corporatism unequivocally.

In various ways, corporatism chokes off the dynamism that makes for engaging work, faster economic growth, and greater opportunity and inclusiveness. It maintains lethargic, wasteful, unproductive, and well-connected firms at the expense of dynamic newcomers and outsiders, and favors declared goals such as industrialization, economic development, and national greatness over individuals’ economic freedom and responsibility. Today, airlines, auto manufacturers, agricultural companies, media, investment banks, hedge funds, and much more has [sic] at some point been deemed too important to weather the free market on its own, receiving a helping hand from government in the name of the “public good.”

State-Chosen Goals

It’s great that their list includes the corporate state’s declaration of goals. Too many people are willing to accept government-set goals (such as energy independence) so long as the “private sector” is induced to achieve them. Regardless of how the goals are achieved, if government sets them, that’s statism.

The cost of corporatism is high, and Phelps and Ammous provide a partial list:

dysfunctional corporations that survive despite their gross inability to serve their customers; sclerotic economies with slow output growth, a dearth of engaging work, scant opportunities for young people; governments bankrupted by their efforts to palliate these problems; and increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of those connected enough to be on the right side of the corporatist deal.

Again, kudos to them for noting the increasing concentration of wealth. The corporate state, after all, is a form of exploitation, the victims of which are workers and consumers, who would have been better off (absolutely and comparatively) without anticompetitive privileges for the well-connected and government-induced recessions.

The authors are optimistic that time will work against the corporate state. Young people coming of age in the Internet’s decentralized and wide-open market of ideas and merchandise can’t be expected to show enthusiasm for a system that protects entrenched corporations from the forces of competition. Moreover “the legitimacy of corporatism is eroding along with the fiscal health of governments that have relied on it. If politicians cannot repeal corporatism, it will bury itself in debt and default….”

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

DC: Police suppress Occupy: "U.S. police officers cleared tents from an 'Occupy' protest site in downtown Washington on Sunday, but demonstrators said even without the camp they would continue to fight for economic equality and other issues. ... The police crackdown in Washington comes after police moved to disband other Occupy sites in Texas, Florida, and North Carolina."

The permanence of e-books: "Hands up, all those who can still read a 5 1/4" floppy disk. I've got a boxful of those disks with old documents and programs on them -- and fortunately, I can still read them, until my last remaining floppy drives wear out. How about an 80-column punched card? Or recall a few years back when NASA couldn't read some of their old data from space missions, because the tape drives that could read the ancient tapes were no longer made. Hard drives fail; CD-Rs and DVD-Rs have a limited shelf life; so too do memory cards. Computer scientists have now been bitten by this often enough that it's an active area of research: digital curation." [I keep an old DOS-based computer up and running]

Hate-filled academics at Britain's Oxford university: "Baroness Thatcher is at the centre of a new row at Oxford University after plans to name a building after Britain's first female Prime Minister were revealed. Some academics are hoping to snub one of the university's most illustrious alumnae again - more than 25 years after protests there led to her being denied an honorary degree. Thatcher became the first Oxford educated Prime Minister since the Second World War to be refused an honorary degree from the University in 1985 following student protests amidst cuts to education. And now 17 years on a new revolt could halt plans to name a new facility after her."

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

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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5 February, 2012

A REVEALING EPISODE OF LEFTIST VICIOUSNESS AND HATE

Leftists are just not nice people. The continuities with Stalin are very visible. Given the power that Stalin had, the American Left would clearly behave as he did. Three commentaries below

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The Liberal Enforcers

Komen couldn’t be permitted to get away with disrespecting Big Abortion

By Mark Steyn

As Senator Obama said during the 2008 campaign, words matter. Modern “liberalism” is strikingly illiberal; the high priests of “tolerance” are increasingly intolerant of even the mildest dissent; and those who profess to “celebrate diversity” coerce ever more ruthlessly a narrow homogeneity. Thus, the Obama administration’s insistence that Catholic institutions must be compelled to provide free contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients. This has less to do with any utilitarian benefit a condomless janitor at a Catholic school might derive from Obamacare, and more to do with the liberal muscle of Big Tolerance enforcing one-size-fits-all diversity.

The bigger the Big Government, the smaller everything else: In Sweden, expressing a moral objection to homosexuality is illegal, even on religious grounds, even in church, and a pastor minded to cite the more robust verses of Leviticus would risk four years in jail. In Canada, the courts rule that Catholic schools must allow gay students to take their same-sex dates to the prom. The secular state’s Bureau of Compliance is merciless to apostates to a degree even your fire-breathing imams might marvel at.

Consider the current travails of the Susan G. Komen Foundation. This is the group responsible for introducing the pink “awareness raising” ribbon for breast cancer — as emblematic a symbol of America’s descent into postmodernism as anything. It has spawned a thousand other colored “awareness raising” ribbons: My current favorite is the periwinkle ribbon for acid reflux. We have had phenomenal breakthroughs in hues of awareness-raising ribbons, and for this the Susan G. Komen Foundation deserves due credit.

Until the other day, Komen were also generous patrons of Planned Parenthood, the “women’s health” organization. The foundation then decided it preferred to focus on organizations that are “providing the lifesaving mammogram.” Planned Parenthood does not provide mammograms, despite its president, Cecile Richards, testifying to the contrary before Congress last year. Rather, Planned Parenthood provides abortions; it’s the biggest abortion provider in the United States. For the breast-cancer bigwigs to wish to target their grants more relevantly is surely understandable.

But not if you’re a liberal enforcer. Senator Barbara Boxer, with characteristic understatement, compared the Komen Foundation’s Nancy Brinker to Joe McCarthy: “I’m reminded of the McCarthy era, where somebody said: ‘Oh,’ a congressman stands up, a senator, ‘I’m investigating this organization and therefore people should stop funding them.’” But Komen is not a congressman or a senator or any other part of the government, only a private organization. And therefore it is free to give its money to whomever it wishes, isn’t it?

Dream on. Liberals take the same view as the proprietors of the Dar al-Islam: Once they hold this land, they hold it forever. Notwithstanding that those who give to the foundation are specifically giving to support breast-cancer research, Komen could not be permitted to get away with disrespecting Big Abortion. We don’t want to return to the bad old days of the back alley, when a poor vulnerable person who made the mistake of stepping out of line had to be forced into the shadows and have the realities explained to them with a tire iron. Now Big Liberalism’s enforcers do it on the front pages with the panjandrums of tolerance and diversity cheering them all the way.

In the wake of Komen’s decision, the Yale School of Public Health told the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff that its invitation to Nancy Brinker to be its commencement speaker was now “under careful review.” Because God forbid anybody doing a master’s program at an Ivy League institution should be exposed to anyone not in full 100 percent compliance with liberal orthodoxy. The American Association of University Women announced it would no longer sponsor teams for Komen’s “Race for the Cure.” Sure, Komen has raised $2 billion for the cure, but better we never cure breast cancer than let a single errant Injun wander off the abortion reservation. Terry O’Neill of the National Organization for Women said Komen “is no longer an organization whose mission is to advance women’s health.” You preach it, sister. I mean, doesn’t the very idea of an organization obsessively focused on breasts sound suspiciously patriarchal?

By Friday morning lockstep liberalism had done its job. All that was missing was James Carville to declare, “Drag a hundred-dollar bill through an oncology clinic awareness-raising free mammogram session, you never know what you’ll find.” After 72 hours being fitted for the liberals’ cement overcoat and an honored place as the cornerstone of the Planned Parenthood Monument to Women’s Choice, Komen attempted to chisel free and back into the good graces of the tolerant: As Nancy Brinker’s statement groveled, “We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives.”

The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto was unimpressed by the liberal protection racket (Nice little charity you’ve got there; be a shame if anything were to happen to it). As Taranto pointed out, in a real-life protection racket, the victim never pays voluntarily: “The threat is present from the get-go.” By contrast, Komen’s first donations to Big Abortion were made voluntarily. A prudent observer would conclude that the best way to avoid being crowbarred by Cecile Richards is never to get mixed up with her organization in the first place.

It’s not like she needs the money. Komen’s 2010 donation of $580,000 is less than Ms. Richards’s salary and benefits. Planned Parenthood commandos hacked into the Komen website and changed its slogan from “Help us get 26.2 or 13.1 miles closer to a world without breast cancer” to “Help us run over poor women on our way to the bank.” But, if you’re that eager to run over poor women on the way to the bank, I’d recommend a gig with Planned Parenthood: The average salary of the top eight executives is $270,000, which makes them officially part of what the Obama administration calls “the 1 percent.” In America today, few activities are as profitable as a “non-profit.” Planned Parenthood receives almost half a billion dollars — or about 50 percent of its revenues — in taxpayer funding.

A billion dollars seems a lot, even for 322,000 abortions a year. But it enables Planned Parenthood to function as a political heavyweight. Ms. Richards’s business is an upscale progressives’ ideological protection racket, for whom the “poor women”’s abortion mill is a mere pretext. The Komen Foundation will not be the last to learn that you can “race for the cure,” but you can’t hide. Celebrate conformity — or else.

SOURCE

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Big Sister Is Watching You

Totalitarian feminism and the smearing of Susan G. Komen

By JAMES TARANTO

The smear campaign against the breast cancer charity Susan G. Komen for the Cure appears to have had its desired effect, although this may turn out to be a case in which appearances are deceiving. LifeNews.com, an antiabortion site, quotes the statement by Komen founder Nancy Brinker:

We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.
But Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, parses the statement for LifeNews and finds it actually reflects no change in policy: "We have known and have reported that they are continuing five grants [to Planned Parenthood] through 2012. This is a reference to that. The second clause about eligibility is certainly true. Any group can apply for anything. It does not mean they are going to get anything."

Of course, it also doesn't mean they're not going to get anything. The Daily Caller reports that Komen's donations doubled in the two days after the Planned Parenthood assault began, presumably because lots of people wanted to support its apolitical work against breast cancer but did not want to give money to a group that was subsidizing a group that both performs and advocates for abortion.

If that describes you, you might consider following the advice of our friend Susan Carusi: Give to a local breast cancer support group, "which provides counseling and assistance to women diagnosed with breast cancer. At least this way you know exactly what the money is being spent on."

While our sympathies are with Komen in this whole kerfuffle, we must say that the group has displayed an appalling naiveté in its approach to the matter. It's reminiscent of the last big controversy the group was involved in, which we wrote about in 2009. In that instance, Komen hosted a conference in Alexandria, Egypt, for "international advocates." Komen was sandbagged when Israeli doctors who'd been invited to the event received disinvitations from the Egyptian health minister. The Egyptians backpedaled, but by then it was too late for the Israelis to attend.

In breaking ties with Planned Parenthood, Komen made the same mistake: It failed to understand it was dealing with intolerant fanatics. Planned Parenthood's attitude toward abortion opponents is not unlike that of Egyptian officials in the old regime toward Israelis.

Further, Komen offered a rationale for its decision--a new policy denying grants to groups under governmental investigation--that seemed disingenuous and provided a point of attack for Planned Parenthood and its allies. "I'm reminded of the McCarthy era, where somebody said: 'Oh,' a congressman stands up, a senator, 'I'm investigating this organization and therefore people should stop funding them,' " Politico quotes Sen. Barbara Boxer as saying on MSNBC.

In truth, Komen was under no obligation to fund Planned Parenthood. Its decision not to do so was not punitive and did not even appear to be. The episode is reminiscent of George Orwell far more than Joe McCarthy. Komen's actual aim was to extricate itself from the divisive national battle over abortion by severing its connection with a leading combatant.

The conservative Media Research Center notes that CNN "aired a pretty one-sided piece including statements from Planned Parenthood's president Cecile Richards, evidence supporting her claims of right-wing 'bullying,' and even vitriolic Facebook posts decrying the de-funding." No supporter of Komen's position or critic of Planned Parenthood was included. Even more appalling than that lack of balance, though, was CNN's echoing the charge of "right-wing 'bullying,' " while the network was participating in Planned Parenthood's effort to bully Komen.

The Ministry of Information--sorry, the New York Times--editorializes:

"With its roster of corporate sponsors and the pink ribbons that lend a halo to almost any kind of product you can think of, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation has a longstanding reputation as a staunch protector of women's health. That reputation suffered a grievous, perhaps mortal, wound this week from the news that Komen, the world's largest breast cancer organization, decided to betray that mission. It threw itself into the middle of one of America's nastiest political battles, on the side of hard-right forces working to demonize Planned Parenthood and undermine women's health and freedom."

The truth is that Komen blundered into a political battle by supporting Planned Parenthood in the first place and was attempting to back out of it quietly.

The Times's view exemplifies feminism's gradual transformation into a totalitarian ideology. Totalitarianism politicizes everything, so that neutrality is betrayal--in this case, neutrality on abortion is portrayed as opposition to "women's health." As we wrote last year, this is also why purportedly pro-choice feminists can hate Sarah Palin and her daughter for choosing not to abort their children.

Komen would have been better off approaching the matter straightforwardly, by announcing that it wished to opt out of the abortion debate and would not support groups that take a position on either side of the issue, including Planned Parenthood. This would not have averted the smear campaign that followed, for Planned Parenthood and its supporters have internalized the notion that abortion is health, and are determined that everyone else internalize it too. But an honest position would have been easier to defend. No one would have been able to dent Komen's integrity.

SOURCE

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Race for the Smear

A cancer charity gets a brutal lesson in abortion politics

'Politics have no place in health care," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a statement Thursday. That pronouncement may strike New Yorkers, who've spent a decade complying with Mr. Bloomberg's nanny-state mandates on smoking and trans-fats, as ironic. Most recently, his administration has come under fire for using fake photos of diabetic amputees in subway ads about the dangers of sweetened beverages.

But Mr. Bloomberg was referring to the one area of "health care" that he believes should be left to individual choice: abortion. He announced a personal donation of $250,000 to Planned Parenthood, America's leading abortion provider, in response to a breast cancer charity's decision not to renew its six-figure grants to the group.

Dallas-based Susan G. Komen for the Cure had given Planned Parenthood $580,000 in 2010 and $680,000 in 2011 to provide initial breast cancer screenings, and referrals for mammograms, biopsies and treatment, in 19 of its clinics. Komen attributed its decision not to re-up to its adoption of a policy barring grants to organizations under investigation by any branch of the government. A House subcommittee is looking into whether Planned Parenthood has violated the law by spending government money on abortions.

Planned Parenthood's supporters say the probe is politically motivated. As it is a Congressional investigation, that is a trivial truth. We suspect, in any case, that the investigation was a pretext—that Komen, whose mission is apolitical, dumped Planned Parenthood because it wished to escape involvement with abortion politics. After all, its ubiquitous pink ribbons and "Race for the Cure" marketing invite donations to cure cancer, not to support abortion providers.

Planned Parenthood is not about to let anyone escape without exacting retribution. With the help of allies in politics, the media and other advocacy groups, this week it undertook a vicious campaign against Komen that explicitly urged corporate donors to cut off the charity if it didn't relent. Individual Komen board members have been publicly attacked, as if trying to stay neutral in abortion politics is a crime against women.

Yesterday Komen responded by seeming to back down. "We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants," Komen founder Nancy Brinker said in a statement.

It's unclear whether Planned Parenthood has actually brought Komen to heel. Austin Ruse of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute argues that the wording of Ms. Brinker's latest statement reflects no actual change in policy. Komen never planned to revoke existing grants, and eligibility to apply for a grant does not necessarily mean eligibility to receive one. He advises that potential donors to Komen wait and see.

Apart from the brutal lesson in the intolerance of abortion advocates, the larger principle at stake is the right of a charity to donate to whomever it likes, for whatever reason it likes. Mr. Bloomberg is free to do whatever he wants with his money. But it is to his great discredit that he would join a campaign to smear Komen for exercising exactly the same right.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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4 February, 2012

Jobless rate has fallen because of dropouts

The big drop in the unemployment rate in recent months to 8.3 percent from double-digit rates during the recession came at a fortunate time for President Obama, but economists say it as much because of young people dropping out of the labor market as it is the result of businesses adding jobs.

“A dip in the unemployment rate as we head into an election year has to be good news for President Obama,” said Claire Moore, a blogger at High Beam Business. “On the face of it, a lower unemployment rate sounds good,” but the recent declines reflect not only an uptick in job growth but also the exit of thousands of potential young workers from the labor force.

When people stop looking for work, they are no longer counted as part of the labor force or “unemployed.” Evidence suggests that many of the young dropouts, who proved to be instrumental in Mr. Obama’s election in 2008, are continuing their schooling to avoid the tough job market and to increase their skills and chances of eventually securing employment.

“People stop looking for work for various reasons, which might include taking an early retirement, going back to school, or deciding to be a full-time, stay-at-home parent,” Ms. Moore said.

The president isn’t going to make “political hay” when that causes a decline in unemployment, she said, because “if they all decided to start looking for work tomorrow, the jobless rate would skyrocket again.”

While a growing number of baby boomers are also stopping work as they retire, the exit from the workforce has been most the pronounced among teenagers and the so-called millennials, now in their 20s.

The percentage of workers ages 16 to 19 has dropped 4.3 percentage points to 34.2 percent since the end of the recession in 2010, while the share of people between 20 and 24 working has declined 1.6 percentage points to 71.7 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Participation in the workforce was on the decline among those groups even before the recession, but it accelerated when millions of jobs disappeared.

“This probably has to do with younger workers willfully opting out of the job search process, given today’s tough job market,” said Mark Vitner, an economist with Wells Fargo. “Young people tend to have less financial responsibilities, such as mortgages and food expenses,” than their parents, the baby boomers, who have continued to work at higher-than-usual rates, he said.

Several studies have found that the decline in work among young people closely mirrors a surge in college enrollments in recent years. Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys show that the greater a person’s education and training, the better their success at getting good jobs and higher pay.

More HERE

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Barack Obama's reckless and politically foolish war on religion

At the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington yesterday, President Barack Obama suggested that his desire to raise taxes on higher-income Americans was rooted in the Bible. 'For me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’s teaching that 'for unto to whom much is given, much shall be required',' he said.

Which prompted Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah (and a Mormon) to comment acidly: 'Someone needs to remind the President that there was only one person who walked on water and he did not occupy the Oval Office. I think most Americans would agree that the Gospels are concerned with weightier matters than effective tax rates.'

It was just the latest example of Obama's tin ear on matters religious. Remember, this is the man who was a member of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's church in Chicago, where sermons about 'God Damn America' and the US being responsible for 9/11 were preached but which remained, in Obama's eyes, a place that was not 'actually particularly controversial'.

Far more serious, however, than Obama's crude attempt to state that the rich should pay higher taxes because Jesus wanted them to (in addition to this being, in VP Joe Biden's view, a patriotic obligation) are his recent actions which amount to a declaration of war on the Roman Catholic church.

On January 20th, as much of the American political class was preoccupied with the impending GOP South Carolina primary, Obama's Department of Health and Human Services announced that it was a requirement for contraceptive services to be offered by insurance policies supported under the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.

While there were exceptions for places of worship, there was no conscience protections for church-run schools, hospitals and social service agencies. These organisations will be required by law to provide free contraception to employees, even thought that is in violation of church teachings.

The move has been condemned by figures on both the Left and Right. The liberal Washington Post columnist E.J.Dionne lit into Obama. So too did his colleague Michael Gerson, formerly President George W. Bush's chief speechwriter.

Obama's decision was that of a doctrinaire secular liberal trying to use government power to rein in religious freedom. It's not about freedom of the individual - contraceptive services are freely available elsewhere. As Melinda Henneburger puts it, it's about 'forcing nuns to dole out free diaphragms in violation of their religious freedom and the Constitution that guarantees it'.

Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York and president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, said: 'To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences and forgoing their healthcare is literally unconscionable.'

Why has Obama done this? Firstly, because at core he is a secular liberal. I always thought that he was in a tough position over Jeremiah Wright because in reality he hadn't gone to church much - and doubtless even when he was there he hadn't paid much attention to the sermons.

The reason he became involved in Wright's church was, in standard political fashion, to help him build a political base and put down roots in Chicago. To run for US President or even for the Senate it's a virtual prerequisite to an observant Christian or Jew - Obama was savvy enough to make sure he was no exception.

Obama knows that political power of religion. He has made lofty speeches about the role of faith in a democracy and his own personal faith. He went to Notre Dame University in 2009, where he cited the need to "honour the conscience of those who disagree with abortion".

The second, almost inescapable, reason for Obama decision, as Dionne puts it, to throw his Catholics allies "under the bus", is politics - or, more specifically, Obama's re-election.

It's about shoring up the Democratic base and energising liberal pro-Choice groups - and accepting that those in the middle on the issue will not vote for him. It's yet another indication that Obama believes that his path to re-election is a very narrow one - he's seeking to consolidate the support he already has rather than extending it.

A senior Democrat told Politico: 'Catholics who don’t believe in condoms aren’t going to vote for Barack Obama anyway. Let’s get real.' You don't get a ot more cynical than that.

The trouble is that Obama beat John McCain by nine points among Catholics in 2008 (largely because of Hispanic backing) but that lead over Republicans is much narrower already. Among white Catholics, Mitt Romney currently holds a 13-point lead and Obama's support among white churchgoers is declining steadily. Catholics make up more than a quarter of the electorate and are an important constituency in battleground states.

White House aides were buoyed today by news that 243,000 new American jobs were added in January and unemployment, dropping steadily for months, is now at 8.3 percent. No doubt Obama strategists calculate that the President's chances of re-election are edging upwards because of the improving economy.

But when Newt Gingrich talks of a 'war on the Catholic Church' and Mitt Romnney of an 'assault on religion' they are engaging not in excessive campaign rhetoric but in propagating a message that both resonates and that is based in truth.

Politically, as well as morally and constitutionally, Obama's move seem bone-headed. As Peggy Noonan writes today: 'President Obama just may have lost the election.'

SOURCE

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Barbara Boxer Welcomes You To ‘Magical Pharmaceutical Land’

Yesterday in the Huffington Post, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., taught us an important lesson: Health care can be free!

For example, she wrote, “When President Obama announced that because of health care reform, birth control would soon be available for free in new insurance plans, you would have expected universal approval.” She also wrote, “Finally, (Obama’s) decision will help working families by giving them access to free birth control.”

Now, some of you ignorant rubes may be saying, “Hey, wait a minute. Birth control isn’t free. Someone has to pay for it to be produced, packaged and then shipped to the store. In this context, ‘free’ only means that the consumer isn’t paying any money for it. But those costs still have to be paid, whether it is by taxpayers or people who will now pay higher insurance premiums.” Here’s what Sen. Boxer would say to you:

There is this magical place known as Pharmaceutical Land, where prescription drugs grow on trees and bushes. For years all the pharmaceuticals we wanted and needed were there for the picking.

But years ago evil pharmaceutical companies came in and put up fences around Pharmaceutical Land and put heavy locks on the gates. They paid off Republicans to guard Pharmaceutical Land. Now people had to pay money to get prescription drugs.

But thankfully, Barack Obama was elected President in 2008, and along with visionary senators like me, we passed a health care bill that starts to remove those locks and tear down those fences. The areas in which birth control pills are grown are now open to the public. They are free once more!

We haven’t gotten all of the locks and fences removed yet. There is still much work to be done. But if we can get the evil pharmaceutical companies and obstructionist Republicans out of the way, soon all areas of Pharmaceutical Land will be open to everyone, and prescription drugs will be as free as the air we breathe!

Now that you ignorant rubes have been re-educated, hopefully you won’t be bringing up any more silly nonsense about “costs” or “taxpayers.”

SOURCE

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Unionization rate approaching zero

Big Labor is Fighting UsBig Labor must be in full panic mode. They lost their first Rust Belt state to right-to-work laws yesterday in Indiana. And today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports dismal numbers for the rate of unionization.

How dismal? How about the rate is near zero.

As Mickey Kaus reports at The Daily Caller, “The most significant number in the recent Bureau of Labor Statistics release on unionization is probably this: Only 6.9 percent of private sector workers are in unions. That’s the same percent as last year. In the middle of the 20th century, it was 35%. … The number is significant because it suggests that labor’s much-publicized private sector organizing drives have failed.”

We constantly hear labor unions tell us that without them workers would be in a state of oppression. Well, as time continues to progress we are increasingly seeing that without labor unions “protecting” workers, things are seeming to get better for workers everywhere. Americans everywhere seem to be realizing this fact, if only the labor bosses would come around…

SOURCE

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Worse Than Death Panels

During the debate over ObamaCare, more than one critic charged that government panels would make life and death decisions affecting patient care.

Now it seems the Obama administration is contemplating something that is even scarier: doctors would be given immunity from malpractice lawsuits, but only if they practice medicine according to government guidelines. The pressure would be enormous. Have you ever met a doctor who wanted to be sued?

The original "death panel" charges were not entirely baseless. Former Senator Tom Daschle, who wrote the blueprint for health reform, advocated a "comparative effectiveness" agency that would decide which medical procedures were worthwhile and which ones were not. As a model, Dashiell pointed to the National Institute for Comparative Effectiveness (NICE) in Britain. How are patients faring under that regime? According to the World Health Organization, about 25,000 British patients die prematurely every year because they do not have access to cancer drugs that are routinely available in the United States and continental Europe.

There is no similar agency with comparable powers under ObamaCare. But there are many ways in which the same results can be achieved indirectly. For example, Medicare has announced it will start paying more to hospitals that follow a dozen procedures, including administering antibiotics prior to surgery and anticlotting medication to heart attack patients. It will pay less to hospitals that don’t comply. The same thing is about to happen to doctors. Those who comply on up to 194 different metrics — including adopting electronic medical records — will get higher fees. Those who resist will get lower ones.

These are examples of a much larger trend: Washington telling the medical community how to practice medicine. Even though a recent study finds little relationship between the inputs Medicare wants to pay for and such outputs as patient survival, and even though the latest pilot programs show that paying doctors and hospitals for performance doesn’t improve quality, we are about to usher in the era of big brother medical care.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Countering the assault on capitalism: "Capitalism has been the most successful institution in human history yet it has never gained the legitimacy it merits. As Milton Friedman stated: ‘Everywhere capitalism has been tried, it has succeeded. Everywhere socialism has been tried, it has failed. The lesson learned? We need more socialism!’"

It's dying! "The New York Times Company suffered a net loss of almost $40million in 2011, with its fourth quarter profits falling by 12.2 per cent compared to the same period in 2010. The company is grappling with sinking advertising revenue and a recent change in the top management after losing CEO Janet Robinson, who received a multimillion dollar severance package. They said it continued to add subscribers for its digital products in the fourth quarter. The company's loss was blamed on the terminal decline in print advertising. The problems plaguing newspaper companies are well known. Readers have ditched print for digital, causing circulation and advertising revenue to plummet."

Venerable A-10 Warthog Faces Extinction: "The venerable A-10 tank killer aircraft is taking a hit of its own as part of the Defense Department’s decision to eliminate six of the Air Force’s tactical air squadrons and one training squadron. Air National Guard squadrons will bear the brunt of the losses. Three of the five A-10 squadrons going away will be Guard units. Air Force leaders plan to eliminate one Reserve and one active duty squadron. The Air Force will also decommission one Guard F-16 squadron and one F-15 training squadron. Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman Adm. James Winnefeld confirmed the type of aircraft and duty status of each squadron during an editorial board meeting with Gannett Government Media reporters, said Lt. Col. Patrick Seiber, Winnefeld’s spokesman."

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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3 February, 2012

Jim Moran, Racist Pig

Michelle Malkin

Congressman Jim Moran is an old white Democrat from Virginia who thinks he can judge whether we minority conservatives are acting sufficiently non-white enough. Moran's an inveterate bully, a brawler, a crook and a bigot. And not one of his civility-preaching liberal colleagues has the courage to call him out.

Responding on cable news to GOP Rep. Allen West's blunt criticisms of President Obama this week, Moran derided the retired U.S. Army colonel, who is black, as "not representative of the African-American community." Moran then launched into the kind of tired race-traitor tirade I've heard from progressives of pallor for more than 20 years.

How dare we "people of color" stray from the left's ideological plantation? If we choose personal responsibility over entitlement, capitalism over statism or self-determination over identity politics, presumptuous white liberals appoint themselves spokespeople for our forefathers and deciders of our true destinies.

To wit: Lt. Col. West "just seems clueless now that he has climbed aboard ship," Moran fumed. "He's climbed this ladder of opportunity that was constructed by so many of his ancestors' sweat, sacrifice, blood, you know, they did everything they could for his generation to be successful. But now that he's climbed on board ship, instead of reaching down and steadying the ladder, he wants to push it off."

West, his father, his mother and his brother all dedicated their lives to military service; four consecutive generations of his family served in the U.S. armed forces. As a freshman congressman, West's message has been a compelling agenda of self-empowerment. For this, he is savaged by a House colleague as a racial saboteur?

But Moran was just warming up. Next, he contrasted conservative West with big-government savior Barack Obama, who he said acted in proper accordance with his ancestors "by reducing college tuition and training our workers, trying to get a decent job for everybody" and leaving a "constructive legacy."

Er, how's the savior's near double-digit unemployment, record food stamp enrollment, re-inflation of the housing and higher-education bubbles, and massive redistribution of wealth from the working class to the Wall Street bundler class working out for you?

Moran hailed Obama as "our Lion King" and compared his Republican detractors to the "hyenas in the background trying to cause trouble" for the White House. This bumbling chief of political correctness apparently is unaware that those hyenas in the Disney movie have been criticized for perpetuating negative stereotypes about blacks and Hispanics. Dog-whistle politics, anyone?

Do Moran's constituents in Virginia's 8th district support his incessant race-baiting? Last year, he accused Tea Party activists of racism for sweeping out entrenched Democrats in the November 2010 midterm elections. It "happened for the same reason the Civil War happened in the United States. It happened because the Southern states, the slaveholding states, didn't want to see a president who was opposed to slavery," he ranted to Arabic-language television network Alhurra. "(A) lot of people in the United States don't want to be governed by an African-American, particularly one who is liberal, who wants to spend money and who wants to reach out to include everyone in our society."

Yet, only two short years before, this hopelessly racist nation put Obama in the Oval Office with a landslide victory. Logic never was the demagogue's strong suit.

The aptly named Moran, an 11-term incumbent, continues to be rewarded by voters for his extravagant spending habits, self-dealing and diarrhea of the mouth. As I've reported previously:

-- While on the Alexandria (Va.) City Council, he was charged with casting a vote that helped a developer friend win a bid for a lucrative plot of public land. A special prosecutor concluded that Moran had violated the state's conflict-of-interest law. He sobbed as he pleaded no contest to a felony charge of vote-peddling. He received a year's probation for a reduced conflict-of-interest misdemeanor charge and was forced to resign.

-- In 1995, he had to be subdued by Capitol Hill police when he threw a punch at California Republican Rep. Randy Cunningham on the House floor. After the incident, Moran blamed "talk radio" for creating a hostile environment in Washington. That same year, he screamed "I'll break your nose" at Indiana Republican Rep. Dan Burton during a hearing.

-- In 2002, Moran revealed in financial disclosure statements that he accepted a $50,000 loan in January 2001 from an "old friend," billionaire America Online co-founder James Kimsey. The congressman claims to have paid the business mogul back at 15 percent interest over three months, and his spokesman emphasized the loan came with no accompanying quid pro quo.

-- Kimsey's gift came on the heels of Moran's disclosure that he had received another Big Business-tied loan: $25,000 from "old friend" Terry Lierman, a drug industry lobbyist representing Schering-Plough. After getting that unsecured loan at a lower-than-market interest rate, Moran co-sponsored a bill that would extend the patent on Schering-Plough's allergy medicine Claritin -- and prevent generic drug manufacturers from offering inexpensive alternatives.

Liberal busybodies are an annoyance. Liberal race-card abusers who lambaste patriotic minority conservatives to cover their own dirty deeds make my brown skin crawl.

SOURCE

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TSA agent accused of passenger theft

US police say a Transportation Security Administration agent stole $US5000 ($4690) in cash from a passenger's jacket as he was going through security at John F Kennedy International Airport, the latest in a string of thefts that has embarrassed the agency.

Alexandra Schmid took the cash from the jacket of a Bangladeshi passenger as it went along an X-ray conveyor belt about 8pm on Wednesday, said Al Della Fave, spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's police force.

"In viewing the surveillance video, we observed her removing the currency from the victim's jacket pocket," Della Fave said.
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The video showed Schmid wrapping the money in a plastic glove and taking it to a bathroom, he said.

The money hasn't been recovered, Della Fave said. Police are investigating whether Schmid gave it to another person in the bathroom.

The 31-year-old Schmid was arrested on a charge of grand larceny and suspended pending an investigation..

Schmid, who lived in Brooklyn, had worked for the TSA for four-and-a-half years, TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said.

"We do hold our officers to very high standards, and we have a zero tolerance policy for theft in the workplace," Farbstein said.

It's the latest in a series of recent theft allegations against TSA employees:

- Last month, an agent who worked searching checked luggage at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport was suspended after the owner of a stolen iPad used the tracking feature on the device to locate it at the agent's home. Police found seven other iPads there.

- Also in January, authorities charged an agent at Miami International Airport with swiping items and luggage and smuggling them out of the airport in a hidden pocket of his work jacket. He was arrested after one of the items, an iPad, was spotted for sale on Craigslist.

- Two other former TSA agents at JFK were sentenced on January 10 to six months in jail and five years' probation for stealing $US40,000 from a piece of luggage in January 2011. The agents, Coumar Persad and Davon Webb, had pleaded guilty to grand larceny, obstructing governmental administration and official misconduct.

- Last year, a TSA supervisor and one of his officers pleaded guilty in a scheme that lifted $US10,000 to $US30,000 from passengers' belongings at Newark Liberty International Airport. A federal judge sentenced the supervisor, Michael Arato, to two-and-a-half years in prison and his subordinate, Al Raimi, to six months of home confinement.

SOURCE

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The land of the regulated

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." He was probably correct, although it seems in today's increasingly intolerant society, a large number of people aren't too crazy about other people being entitled to opinions that are different from their own.

And maybe when Mr. Moynihan made that statement, facts were facts, and opinions were opinions, but the lines are kind of blurred today. Nowadays the difference between the two can be decided by a number of factors, often by which side of an issue a person is on. We are getting ready for an election this fall, and we are hearing a lot of claims, usually presented as facts, from all sides of the political spectrum.

In the past couple of weeks, I've read and heard stories claiming that our economy is getting better, and stories that our economy is getting worse. I've also heard that we have more jobs now than we had 3 years ago, along with a few stories claiming that we fewer jobs than we had 3 years ago. Often those stories involve explanations and qualifiers about the differences between then and now, and comparisons between private and public sector jobs.

It's not very often that one of those stories starts or ends with the phrase, "In our opinion".

Over in Indianapolis, our legislators have been spending a lot of time debating the so called "Right to Work" law. There certainly are a lot of different opinions on the law, with Republicans generally holding the opinion that it's a good law, Democrats holding the opinion that it's a bad law, and Libertarians holding the opinion that it's none of the governments business. I think that might be an example of the "opinions" Mr. Moynihan was speaking about.

But the Indiana Chamber of Commerce claimed personal income increased in Right to Work States, and the Economic Policy Institute claimed personal income decreased in Right to Work states. I'm pretty sure both of them considered their claim to be a fact. I'm also pretty sure one of them is mistaken.

I make my best effort not to be offended by other peoples' opinions, even though there are some real crazy ones out there. Admittedly, I would prefer that a lot of people keep some of the crazier ones to themselves, but as long as they don't try to force their opinions on me, I've always figured that we could work out a way to at least be civil to each other.

Unfortunately, mixing opinions and government doesn't usually work out that way. If a group of politicians and bureaucrats are of the opinion that businesses need to be subsidized with your tax dollars in order to improve the economy, you can pretty well bet that their opinion is going to become a law.

Over the years, our government has developed the opinion that it needs to be in control of every aspect of our lives. From how we distribute our income, to how we save for our retirement, to what we eat and drink. Who we marry, how big the windows are in our homes, even who cuts our hair.

Just to make a point, I've asked several people in the last few years to name 3 things that the government doesn't tax or regulate. Most people can't. And that's a fact.

SOURCE

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Reports Of Capitalism’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

Klaus Schwab, a German academic and founder of the World Economic Forum, recently proclaimed the death of capitalism as we know it — a curious critique coming from the head of an organization whose motto finds “entrepreneurship is in the global public interest.”

“Capitalism, in its current form, no longer fits the world around us,” Schwab declared at the most recent installment of his globalist gathering in Davois, Switzerland, adding that the world’s business and political leaders “have failed to learn the lessons from the financial crisis.”

The latter half of this observation is indisputable. The doctrine of chasing good money after bad has reached dangerous dimensions on both sides of the Atlantic — yet leaders continue to plow ahead with new deficit spending and fresh bailouts regardless.

But is refusing to acknowledge the increasingly-costly failure of this ever-escalating interventionism really an indictment of capitalism? It would be easy to condemn Schwab for conducting a botched autopsy on the capitalist economic model, but what he’s really done is more intellectually dishonest — he has misidentified the “victim.”

Capitalism is far from dead. As proof we need only examine the ongoing rise of the global black market — which employed 1.8 billion people (half of the world’s work force) and did $10 trillion worth of business in 2009. Within a decade, this “shadow economy” will employ two-thirds of the global work force and represent the largest economy on the planet.

More conventionally we ought to consider China — which has embraced free market reforms and seen its economy expand 16-fold over the last 30 years. In the last two decades this rising tide has lifted an estimated 440 million Chinese out of poverty.

Meanwhile in India — another country which has abandoned central planning — an estimated 230 million people have been lifted out of poverty over the last five years alone.

Not only is capitalism very much alive, as long as there is supply, demand and self-interest in the world it cannot be killed. But it can be severely constrained — as we are witnessing.

The fact that the European economy is unable to perpetually prop up an overextended banking system responsible for underwriting the unsustainable expansion of the continent’s sovereign governments is not an indictment of capitalism.

Instead it is an indictment of botched command economic planning and the unchecked expansion of the welfare state — which are conspiring to undermine the ability of the free market to create wealth.

Therein lies Schwab’s fundamental error — the economic system he’s attempting to pen an obituary for isn’t capitalism, its pseudo-socialism.

Rather than permitting the invisible hand of the marketplace to optimally apportion resources — thereby creating a naturally-ascending cycle of innovation, expansion, creative destruction and reinvention — sovereign leaders have chosen to put the doctrine of Keynesian intervention on steroids.

Rather than permitting the free flow of ideas, goods and services within the economy, these leaders create new taxes, new mandates and new activist bureaucracies — all while manipulating currencies and making speculative investments with public money.

On a more fundamental level these leaders have completely shredded the notion of equal opportunity — one of the basic building blocks of the capitalist system — and replaced it with a presumption of entitlement.

The promise of a “fair shake” has been replaced by the expectation of receiving one’s “fair share,” which of course is predicated on government’s desire to redistribute wealth evenly among the masses while simultaneously preserving a well-connected government-financial oligarchy.

So on the one hand we have corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and labor leaders manipulating the welfare state’s purse strings in an effort to expand the reach of the dependence economy.

On the other we have select corporations and global financial institutions eliminating their own risk through a variety of taxpayer-funded guarantees and bailout mechanisms — pocketing the winnings from good investments while passing the debt from bad investments onto the shoulders of already-overburdened taxpayers.

Again, that’s not capitalism, but pseudo-socialism — a system the world has already conclusively discredited.

If Schwab’s organization truly intends to foster entrepreneurship around the globe, then it must first correctly identify the forces that are working against it. Beyond that it must advance policies that seek to reinvigorate the free market as opposed to repressing it further.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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2 February, 2012

Obama and the Democrats are still playing the race card for all it is worth (1)

It's all they've got but it is very disruptive to race-relations

Walter E. Williams

There's been a heap of criticism placed upon President Barack Obama's domestic policies that have promoted government intrusion and prolonged our fiscal crisis and his foreign policies that have emboldened our enemies. Any criticism of Obama pales in comparison with what might be said about the American people who voted him in to the nation's highest office.

Obama's presidency represents the first time in our history that a person could have been elected to that office who had long-standing close associations with people who hate our nation. I'm speaking of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor for 20 years, who preached that blacks should sing not "God Bless America," but "God damn America." Then there's William Ayers, now professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago but formerly a member of the Weather Underground, an anti-U.S. group that bombed the Pentagon, U.S. Capitol and other government buildings. Although Ayers was never convicted of any crime, he told a New York Times reporter, in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attack, "I don't regret setting bombs. ... I feel we didn't do enough." Obama has served on a foundation board, appeared on panels, and even held campaign events in Ayers' home, joined by Ayers' former-fugitive wife, Bernardine Dohrn. Bill Ayers' close association with Obama is reflected by his admission that he helped write Obama's memoirs, "Dreams from My Father."

Many Americans thought that with Obama's presidency, we were moving to a "post-racial society." Little can be further from the truth. Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, in a National Review (1/18/2012) article titled "Obama's Racial Politics," says that Obama's message about race and his charges of racial bigotry are "usually coded and subtle." Criticizing Republicans, before a Mexican-American audience, Obama said that he ran for office because "America should be a place where you can always make it if you try -- a place where every child, no matter what they look like (or) where they come from, should have a chance to succeed." If you don't get it, "no matter what they look like" is code for nonwhite. Hanson says that Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, has "found race a convenient refuge from criticism -- most recently accusing his congressional auditors of racism, for their grilling him over government sales of firearms to Mexican cartel hitmen."

Obama's racial politics are aided and abetted by a dishonest news media. When Republican candidate Texas Gov. Rick Perry referred to "a big black cloud that hangs over America, that debt that is so monstrous," he was dishonestly accused of racism by MSNBC's Ed Schultz, who said, "That black cloud Perry is talking about is President Barack Obama." Schultz omitted the second half of Perry's quote. Chris Matthews referred to Perry's vision of federalism as "Bull Connor with a smile."

The media have help from black congressmen in stirring up racial dissent. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., said white presidents must be "pushed a great deal more" to address black unemployment than would a black president. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, said that argument over the debt ceiling is proof of racial animosity toward Obama. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., said that Republicans are trying to deny blacks the vote. Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., said the tea party wishes to lynch blacks and hang them from trees. Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said Perry's job creation in Texas is "one stage away from slavery."

All of this places a heavy burden on people who care about our nation. We must ensure that the 2012 elections are the most open and honest elections in U.S. history. Should Obama lose, I wouldn't put it past leftists, progressives, the news media and their race-hustling allies, as well as the president, to fan the fires of hate and dissension by charging that racists somehow stole the election, thereby giving support and excuses for the kind of violence and lawlessness that we've witnessed in flash mobs and Occupy Wall Street riots.

SOURCE

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Obama and the Democrats are still playing the race card for all it is worth (2)

It's all they've got but it is very disruptive to race-relations

Jonah Goldberg

In response to the face-off in Arizona between President Obama and Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer last week, Jackson said, "Even George Wallace did not put his finger in Dr. King's face." And it's true; he didn't. Similarly, not even Josef Stalin wrote two autobiographies the way Obama has. And even Genghis Khan didn't have a Swiss bank account the way Mitt Romney did.

Of course, Jackson's non sequitur is a single note in the cacophony of asininity surrounding the wildly overhyped confrontation between Obama and Brewer. An MSNBC host (and putative expert in matters racial) said the photo reminded her more than anything else of the iconic image of Elizabeth Eckford, the 15-year-old black girl who was harassed in 1957 by racists on her way to a desegregated school in Little Rock, Ark. And liberal talk radio host Stephanie Miller concurred that Brewer was "playing the fragile-white-woman-scared-of-black-man card." Al Sharpton, Bill Maher and Maureen Dowd sounded similar refrains.

Lost in all of this is the simple fact that the president instigated the confrontation. He was upset with how an earlier meeting with Brewer was characterized in her book, "Scorpions for Breakfast" (full disclosure: my wife collaborated on the book). She probably shouldn't have raised her finger, even if it was only to get a word in edgewise.

But good Lord, given the liberal overreaction to this incident, you'd think the governorship of Arizona outranked the presidency, or that Obama was a beleaguered civil rights activist sneaking into Arizona by cover of night, and not the president of the United States touching down in Air Force One.

Obama simply messed up a campaign swing by stepping on his message. But his most ardent supporters had to turn the incident into some sort of racial Gotterdammerung. Obama had it right later when he said it was all "not a big deal."

But this absurd controversy is surely a harbinger of greater inanities to come. As even some Democrats in Washington concede, Obama can't run on his record. That's why he's running against a "do-nothing Congress" and unfairness in the tax code. That's simply not exciting enough for his supporters, particularly given the fizzling of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

And nothing more excites the base of the Democratic Party -- or gets more free media -- than wildly implausible hysterics over racism, even when there's so little evidence to support the claim.

Take what appears to be the left's strongest claim: Newt Gingrich's blowout victory in South Carolina was a triumph for his racist "dog-whistle" political rhetoric on child labor and the huge rise in food stamp use under Obama.

"Dog-whistle politics" is a term imported from Britain that implies politicians use language with two frequencies, one for normal people and one for less savory constituencies. Dog-whistle messages are real. But dog-whistle spotting can be hard -- you're listening for things that, by definition, normal people cannot hear -- and prone to wild misinterpretation.

For instance, Gingrich has been talking about food stamps and child labor for a long time. During that time, he also worked harder than most GOP politicians to reach out to minority groups, even to Sharpton. Does he phrase things too provocatively? Absolutely. But he does that about everything from tax cuts to moon bases.

When Gingrich came down like a ton of bricks on Juan Williams in the South Carolina debate on the food stamp issue, liberals instinctively saw it as a racial transaction, pure and simple. And although I have no doubt that racists enjoyed seeing Gingrich belittle a black journalist, there's zero evidence that Republicans overall cheered for racist reasons. They've cheered Gingrich for attacking white moderators from every outlet, including Fox News.

And to the extent there are racial implications to what Gingrich proposes, they're no more racist than remarks made by prominent African Americans who see the culture of poverty perpetuating poverty.

But for reasons that say a lot more about the weaknesses of the first black president, liberals yearn to hear racism where it isn't to make this campaign into something more exciting than a referendum on Obama.

SOURCE

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Let Us Now Praise Private Equity

Every presidential candidate has to defend himself against accusations of wrongdoing — an affair, abuse of office, campaign-finance impropriety, and so forth. Mitt Romney finds himself in a predictable defensive crouch, too, but the allegation against him is extraordinary: He stands accused of doing his job too well.

As the founder and CEO of the private-equity firm Bain Capital, Romney was a turnaround artist. In that role, the GOP frontrunner says, he restored failing firms to health, usually with great success. He claims to have helped create thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars in new wealth.

Some of Romney’s Republican rivals, particularly Newt Gingrich, haven’t framed Romney’s record in such generous terms. They say Romney was a “vulture capitalist” who used financial chicanery to enrich himself and his cronies at the expense of helpless workers. President Obama and his allies will surely make the same case in the months to come. Indeed, a recent memo from Stephanie Cutter, the president’s deputy campaign manager, accuses Romney of having sought “profit at any cost,” and of believing in “an economy where the wealthy and powerful can rig the game at the expense of working Americans.” Romney’s verbal gaffes, including an ill-considered soundbite professing his love of “being able to fire people,” have made him vulnerable to more demonization still.

After his victory in New Hampshire’s primary, Romney fought back with unusually strong words. “President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial,” he said, adding that “we have seen some desperate Republicans join forces with him.” But Romney was only partly right. The plaintiffs against free enterprise are not just a handful of politicians, but a growing number of American voters who think corporate elites have jeopardized a social contract that once guaranteed, as Bill Clinton put it, that “if you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to have a decent life and a chance for your children to have a better one.”

There is some reason to believe that in the 21st century, that contract has expired. Over the last decade, job destruction has outpaced job creation in the private sector. Great American brands like GM and Chrysler went on life support, and others like Kodak died altogether. Today’s corporate success stories, meanwhile, are nimble, brainy start-ups rather than the glorious industrial giants of yesteryear. Consider Instagram, a cellphone-photo-sharing service with 10 million users and, as of late last year, six employees. Even a Silicon Valley behemoth like Facebook, currently valued at over $82 billion, has just 3,000 employees. Kodak had 19,000.

Companies like Instagram and Facebook will hire more — but they probably won’t hire those veterans of Kodak or GM, and they won’t flock to Rochester, N.Y., or Detroit, Mich., to chase after the Next Big Thing. We can blame economic abstractions, such as globalization or skill-biased technical change, for this upheaval of the American economy. Or we can blame those who have profited most conspicuously — the highest-earning 1 percent, and the man who now serves as their political stand-in: Mitt Romney.

Anxious American workers are right to worry about their futures. After the financial collapse, U.S. jobs were destroyed in a labor-market bonfire of a size not seen since the Great Depression. Hiring, job creation, and investment since then have been anemic. Though hiring seems to have picked up slightly, there are still between three and five out-of-work, job-seeking Americans for every opening. This ratio never went above three-to-one from 1951 to 2007, and it only rarely surpassed two-to-one.

The United States now has dangerously low employment, and as workers remain idle, they lose skills and become unhireable by those smaller, more technologically advanced corporations. So the backlash against job destruction, particularly as manifested in the cost-cutting efforts of Bain Capital, is predictable. This backlash, alas, will almost certainly not facilitate job creation. Indeed, if the government tries to make layoffs more difficult, large work forces will cost more to maintain, and the job shortage will stay dire.

The difficult truth that virtually no politician is prepared to acknowledge is that the road to job creation runs through job destruction. Yet it is a truth that workers and voters must understand — and Mitt Romney carries the almost impossible burden of explaining it. The controversy over Bain Capital won’t blow over. The only way forward is to show how his work at Bain contributed to growth, and how the excessive regulation and crony capitalism his fiercest critics advocate is a recipe for stagnation.

Much more HERE

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ELSEWHERE

“Single-payer” health care requires evermore patient patients: "No one denies that the U.S. healthcare system is badly broken, beginning with the introduction of employer-provided (3rd-party payer) health insurance as a work-around to World War II wage and price controls, and ever-higher premiums correlating with ever-expanding government involvement in the sector -- evidence that would seem to call for less government involvement, not more."

Who wants to be a businessperson? "Who in their right mind would want to be a businessperson these days? It’s always been tough creating and growing a business -- failure is more common than success but the potential for reward and the thrill of the chase still appeal to the energetic, the imaginative and the diligent. These days, though, the historically successful 'western' liberal business model is under attack from the bottom and the top."

NBC Ignores Burning of American Flag by Oakland Occupiers: "NBC whitewashed the anti-American activities of the violent Occupy protests in Oakland. The network dedicated only 34 seconds to covering the riot, but refused to mention the fact that Oakland protestors burned an American flag - despite the fact that both its sister networks, ABC and CBS, had done so. On Saturday, Jan. 28, nearly 400 Occupy Oakland protesters were arrested for their actions in a violent riot. Occupiers vandalized Oakland's historic City Hall and burned an American flag (which they stole from the City Hall). They were harshly criticized by the Democratic Oakland Mayor, Jean Quan, for their destructive actions. MRC TV obtained footage of the American flag being burned by Occupiers in Oakland while the Occupier shooting the video recited a mocking, anti-Semitic version of the Pledge of Allegiance. The major morning shows on the broadcast networks provided a sanitized version of these events."

Indiana becomes Rust Belt's first right-to-work state: "Indiana's controversial right-to-work bill became state law Wednesday. The state Senate voted 28-22 to pass the labor union bill as thousands of protesters packed Statehouse hallways shouting their disapproval. Gov. Mitch Daniels signed the bill shortly thereafter without ceremony, making Indiana the 23rd state in the nation with such a law. Under right-to-work laws, companies can no longer negotiate a contract with a union that requires non-members to pay fees for representation. The House earlier passed the measure 54-44. Daniels and other Republican supporters characterized the measure as needed for Indiana to attract jobs."

About those US jobs: "US politicians make a great show of concerning themselves with the level of unemployment. And so they bluster about the need for this new program or that new program -- in fact, about any new idea except for the one that will actually be effective. Namely, stop the meddling."

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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1 February, 2012

The great diabetes fraud

In their constant struggle to get control of what we eat, the food Fascists are always warning us that "obesity" will give us diabetes, which is a very nasty ailment indeed. But, as far as I can see, this is deliberate dishonesty. A well-known symptom of diabetes is insatiable eating ("polyphagia" in medical jargon). So it seems to me that it is diabetes that makes you "obese", not Obesity that gives you diabetes. There IS a correlation between the two things but the interpretation of that correlation uniformly gets it ass backwards. I set the argument out much more fully here.

Note also that the term "obesity" has now lost all meaning. It is little more than a swear word. The boy below was recently described by Britain's National Health Service as "obese"



SOURCE

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Duke University is at it again

Leftist uproar over a finding that black students at Duke disproportionately migrate away from more difficult (science and engineering) to easier (liberal arts) majors

When we last left Duke University and its home of Durham, North Carolina, the bogus story fueled by the leftwing politics that governs Duke and Durham that three lacrosse players from Duke had beaten and raped Crystal Mangum was being put to rest. True, there were lawsuits filed against both entities by former lacrosse players, but the fires that burned at Duke seemed to have been doused.

For a year while the false criminal case went on, Duke University truly was the Bonfire of the Vanities as students and representatives of the Ruling Party of Durham competed with each other to see who could make the most outrageous and untrue statements. Almost six years ago, I likened it to the Reichstag Fire, but since that time, I have concluded that in the make-believe world that is Duke and Durham (or Dukham, for short), the fires always are burning and there always is a new reason for the Right Kind of People of Dukham to be offended.

Six years ago, the lacrosse incident set Dukham ablaze (or, to be more accurate, the refusal of Dukham’s finest to do any independent thinking set Dukhanm ablaze). Today, it is the appearance of an unpublished paper that takes a hard look at some of the unforeseen consequences of Duke’s aggressive affirmative action policies.

Granted, the end of the criminal portion of the lacrosse case was disappointing to a large number of Dukham folks. The charges, after being investigated for the first time (disgraced DA Mike Nifong never did take the time to do an actual investigation even though he had three indictments), were dismissed by North Carolina’s Attorney General Roy Cooper, who said openly that the players were "innocent." Such a thing did not sit well with the leftist and racialist faculty members that had pontificated on the case, as well as the Usual Suspects of the local activist groups.

Much has happened since then. Mangum is in jail awaiting trial for allegedly murdering her boyfriend, Nifong remains disbarred and disgraced, and his sidekick Tracey Cline, who has served as Durham County’s DA since Nifong disappeared (Cline was to be second chair in the prosecution if it had gone to trial), has been suspended from her duties while she is investigated for alleged misconduct.

While the lawsuits creep along, an email from Duke’s dean of students, Sue Wasiolek, that surfaced during discovery, pointed out that right from the start, the lacrosse players "cooperated" with the police. Unfortunately, when Nifong used the local and national media to insist that the players were "putting up a wall of silence," no one from Duke University’s administration, including Wasiolek, tried to set the record straight. It is clear that the leadership at Duke knew the truth, but the fiction was so much more satisfactory to the locals, a significant portion of the university’s faculty and student body, and, of course, the New York Times, which fell headlong into the Nifong pit. The players were guilty and Dukham’s leaders were not going to let a little thing like the truth spoil a party put on by self-righteous activists.

As I said earlier, the bonfires might have simmered temporarily, but today, they are in full blaze as Duke University is enmeshed in another self-inflicted crisis. Once again we see many of the same people from the faculty and the administration beating their chests to atone for the university’s supposed racism and to point out to others that there are dastardly racists in their midst.

When word that an unpublished paper written by an economics professor, a sociology professor, and a graduate student might not paint the happiest picture of academic life at Duke, the Usual Suspects rose up to protest. The paper itself looked at what happens after students with lower SAT scores (including both those admitted via affirmative action and the "legacy" students) actually settle into academic life at the university.

While many of these students might start out majoring in natural sciences, economics, or engineering, they often change majors and migrate to the "softer" majors in liberal arts. The significant part of that migration, the paper noted, was that the "legacy admissions" and affirmative action students migrate in statistically-significant larger numbers than do the students that did not need any special dispensation to enter Duke.

The paper’s findings matched what other researchers already have noted regarding affirmative action and legacy students attending other highly-select universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. Many of these students arrive unprepared for the level of work they must do in the difficult majors in order to keep up with those students who can do the work, and this leads either to students dropping out or changing majors.

Not surprisingly, the faculty members in those areas of study such as Cultural Anthropology went ballistic over the paper, decrying it as "scholarly racism" (according to English and Law professor Karla Holloway, the same Karla Holloway who declared the lacrosse players to be rapists because "guilt is a social construct"). In fact, many of the same professors that rushed to judgment in the lacrosse case and created an atmosphere of hate and hysteria at Duke also are the out-front people here.

One of the worst offenders in the lacrosse crisis was professor Tim Tyson, who openly called for dismissal of all of the lacrosse players and repeated the lie that they were refusing to cooperate with the police. Tyson also led on-campus protests against them, rushing to judgment and then refusing to acknowledge after the players were exonerated that they actually were innocent. In other words, Tyson is one of those Duke faculty members who absolutely hates a large portion of the Duke student body along with most of the Adults who are on the faculty.

Tyson, as is his wont, openly attacked one of the authors, economics professor Peter Arcidiacono, in an article, alleging that Arcidiacono was a racist and worse. (Of course, Tyson’s article is filled with ad hominems and he refuses to address the real issues of the paper, preferring to wrap himself in the righteousness of his own worldview.)

Once again: Tyson does not challenge in any way the data that Arcidiacono, et al., presented, that black students at Duke disproportionately migrate away from more difficult (science and engineering) to easier (liberal arts) majors.

As in the lacrosse case, a large portion of Duke’s professors are permitted to launch baseless and public attacks on other students and faculty, all the while drawing large salaries and having to do little productive work while denouncing their employer and anyone else who pays for them to stomp about campus. In fact, it seems that their "work" is to claim that they are mistreated by Duke, which requires little out of them but spending a few hours a week on campus protesting that they should even be there at all.

More HERE

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No freedom to exercise your religion where Obama is concerned

A typical Leftist reaction to the First Amendment: Ignore it whenever convenient

At the end of Sunday mass at the church this writer attends in Washington, D.C., the pastor asked the congregation to remain for a few minutes. Then, on the instructions of Cardinal Archbishop Donald Wuerl, the pastor proceeded to read a letter.

In the letter, the Church denounced the Obama administration for ordering all Catholic schools, hospitals, and social services to provide, in their health insurance coverage for employes, free contraceptives, free sterilizations, and free “morning-after” pills.

Parishioners were urged to contact their representatives in Congress to bring about a reversal of President Obama’s new policy.

Now, not only is this a battle the Church must fight, it is a battle the Church can win if it has the moral stamina to say the course.

In forcing the Church to violate its own principles, Obama has committed an act of federal aggression, crossing the line between church and state to appease his ACLU and feminist allies, while humiliating the Catholic bishops. Should the Church submit, its moral authority in America would disappear.

Now, undeniably, the church milquetoast of past decades that refused to discipline pro-abortion Catholics allowed the impression to form that while the hierarchy may protest, eventually it will go along to get along with a Democratic Party that was once home to most Catholics.

Obama’s problem today is that not only is he forcing the Church to violate her conscience, he dissed the highest prelate in America.

In November, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, held what he describes as an “extraordinarily friendly” meeting with Obama at the White House. The president assured the archbishop of his respect for the Church, and the archbishop came away persuaded Obama would never force the Church to adopt any policy that would violate her principles.

Ten days ago, Obama sandbagged the archbishop. He informed Cardinal-designate Dolan by phone that, with the sole concession of the Church being given an extra year, to August 2013, to comply, the new policy, as set down by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, will be imposed. All social and educational institutions of the Catholic church will offer health insurance covering birth control, or face fines.

“In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” said Archbishop Dolan, who went on: “To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences and forgoing their health care is literally unconscionable. … This represents a challenge and a compromise of our religious liberty.”

Where do Obama and Sebelius get the power to do this? The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed into law on March 23, 2010, the colloquial name for which is “Obamacare.”

NARAL Pro-Choice America is celebrating the new policy. Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, calls it a “health care issue … based on what’s best for women’s health.” Others have argued that many Catholic women practice birth control.

But that Catholics choose to ignore doctrine does not justify the U.S. government imposing on Catholic institutions a policy that violates Catholic teaching.

Even Washington Post liberal E.J. Dionne, in a Jan. 30 column titled “Obama’s Breach of Faith,” charges that the president “threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus. … “Speaking as an American liberal who believes that religious pluralism imposes certain obligations on government … the Church’s leaders had a right to ask for broader relief from a contraception mandate that would require it to act against its own teachings.”

Why did Obama do it? Facing a close race for a second term, Obama chose not to antagonize his left. Yet he must have known that siding with them meant leaving Archbishop Dolan with egg all over his face. Obama, calculatedly, came down on the side of those he believes to be more crucial to his re-election.

This affront should tell the Catholic hierarchy, if they did not already know, where they stand in the party of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Kathleen Sebilius. And where they sit — in the back of the bus.

Yet if the bishops will look upon this crisis of conscience, this insult, as an opportunity, they can effect its reversal and recapture a measure of the moral authority they have lately lost. Not only should the bishops file suit in federal court against the president and Sebelius for violation of the constitutional principle of separation of church and state, they should inform the White House that no bishop will give an invocation at the Democratic Convention.

Then, they should inform the White House that in the last two weeks of the 2012 campaign, priests in every parish will read from the pulpit at Sunday mass a letter denouncing Obama as anti-Catholic for denying the Church its right to live according to its beliefs. If Obama loses the Catholic vote, he loses the election. The White House will come around, fast. Rely upon it.

SOURCE

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Obama's Flawed Case for Insourcing

American workers are losing jobs to machines, not to Chinese workers

President Barack Obama declared in his State of the Union address that the U.S. has a major opportunity to bring manufacturing back and fight unemployment. “Tonight, my message to business leaders is simple: Ask yourselves what you can do to bring jobs back to your country, and your country will do everything we can to help you succeed,” he thundered.

But all one can say to that is, “Good luck.” If that works, maybe he can spin gold from hay and pay off the national debt, too.

The president’s call wasn’t new. He has even invented a name for it: “insourcing.” And he’s been hectoring CEOs to make “Made In America” their prime goal, “not just because it’s increasingly the right thing to do for their bottom line, but also because it’s the right thing to do for their workers and for our communities and our country.”

But neither the president’s appeal to patriotism nor his economic case adds up.

The patriotic approach is not “the right thing to do,” because universalizing it would eviscerate its benefit. If American CEOs should make business decisions based on their nationality, then shouldn’t foreign CEOs as well?

If they did, it wouldn’t work out too well for America. Foreign-owned companies employ close to 5.5 million Americans and generate about $3.1 trillion in economic value. Does Obama want their CEOs to fold their businesses up and return home to do their patriotic duty?

Moreover, forcing American companies to produce goods more expensively at home rather than wherever it is most cost-effective will mean higher prices for American consumers. Where is the patriotism in sacrificing the interests of 300 million American consumers to protect the jobs of a few American workers?

But suppose that America’s great manufacturing rival, China, were to disappear tomorrow. Would that mean American workers would regain lost factory jobs? Not really.

The fact of the matter is that even though manufacturing employment has declined—America has lost roughly 6 million manufacturing jobs since the sector’s peak in the 1970s—manufacturing output has been going up. Indeed, total output today is 2.5 times its 1972 level in adjusted dollars. In 2010, America produced $1.8 trillion in goods (in 2005 dollars) — about $100 billion more than China, but with only about a tenth as many workers, thanks to automation and technological advances that have vastly increased American productivity. Goods that took 1,000 American workers to produce in 1950 now take 177.

The choice for American companies, then, is not between American workers and Chinese workers, but between American machines and Chinese workers. Given how much more American workers cost in wages and benefits, U.S. companies that relocate to America would have to develop even more labor-saving technologies or watch the market for their products simply disappear.

More HERE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party.


IN BRIEF:

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 Republicans are the gracious side of American politics. It is the Democrats who are the nasty party

The characteristic emotion of the Leftist is not envy. It's rage



"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


My (Gentile) opinion of antisemitism: The Jews are the best we've got so killing them is killing us.


I have always liked the story of Gideon (See Judges chapters 6 to 8) and it is surely no surprise that in the present age Israel is the Gideon of nations: Few in numbers but big in power and impact.


"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


Leftists think that utopia can be coerced into existence -- so no dishonesty or brutality is beyond them in pursuit of that "noble" goal


"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)


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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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


"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 and well-informed 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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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!

The above is good testimony to the accuracy of the basic conservative insight that almost anything in human life is too complex to be reduced to any simple rule and too complex to be reduced to any rule at all without allowance for important exceptions to the rule concerned


"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here. For roughly two centuries now, antisemitism has, throughout the Western world, been principally associated with Leftism (including the socialist Hitler) -- as it is to this day. See here.


Leftists call their hatred of Israel "Anti-Zionism" but Zionists are only a small minority in Israel


Some of the Leftist hatred of Israel is motivated by old-fashioned antisemitism (beliefs in Jewish "control" etc.) but most of it is just the regular Leftist hatred of success in others. And because the societies they inhabit do not give them the vast amount of recognition that their large but weak egos need, some of the most virulent haters of Israel and America live in those countries. So the hatred is the product of pathologically high self-esteem.


Eugenio Pacelli, a righteous Gentile, a true man of God and a brilliant Pope


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.


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.


"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


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.


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, 1931–2005: "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


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


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.


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


I imagine that few of my readers will understand it, but I am an unabashed monarchist. And, as someone who was born and bred in a monarchy and who still lives there (i.e. Australia), that gives me no conflicts at all. In theory, one's respect for the monarchy does not depend on who wears the crown but the impeccable behaviour of the present Queen does of course help perpetuate that respect. Aside from my huge respect for the Queen, however, my favourite member of the Royal family is the redheaded Prince Harry. The Royal family is of course a military family and Prince Harry is a great example of that. As one of the world's most privileged people, he could well be an idle layabout but instead he loves his life in the army. When his girlfriend Chelsy ditched him because he was so often away, Prince Harry said: "I love Chelsy but the army comes first". A perfect military man! I doubt that many women would understand or approve of his attitude but perhaps my own small army background powers my approval of that attitude.


I imagine that most Americans might find this rather mad -- but I believe that a constitutional Monarchy is the best form of government presently available. Can a libertarian be a Monarchist? I think so -- and prominent British libertarian Sean Gabb seems to think so too! Long live the Queen! (And note that Australia ranks well above the USA on the Index of Economic freedom. Heh!)


Throughout Europe there is an association between monarchism and conservatism. It is a little sad that American conservatives do not have access to that satisfaction. So even though Australia is much more distant from Europe (geographically) than the USA is, Australia is in some ways more of an outpost of Europe than America is! Mind you: Australia is not very atypical of its region. Australia lies just South of Asia -- and both Japan and Thailand have greatly respected monarchies. And the demise of the Cambodian monarchy was disastrous for Cambodia


Throughout the world today, possession of a U.S. or U.K. passport is greatly valued. I once shared that view. Developments in recent years have however made me profoundly grateful that I am a 5th generation Australian. My Australian passport is a door into a much less oppressive and much less messed-up place than either the USA or Britain


Some ancient wisdom for Leftists: "Be not righteous overmuch; neither make thyself over wise: Why shouldest thou die before thy time?" -- Ecclesiastes 7:16


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.


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."




R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason


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!


Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?


America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted.




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.


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?


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"


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


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.


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 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


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.


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.


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.


"Intellectual" = Leftist dreamer. I have more publications in the academic journals than almost all "public intellectuals" but I am never called an intellectual and nor would I want to be. Call me a scholar or an academic, however, and I will accept either as a just and earned appellation


My academic background

My full name is Dr. John Joseph RAY. I am a former university teacher aged 65 at the time of writing in 2009. I was born of Australian pioneer stock in 1943 at Innisfail in the State of Queensland in Australia. I trace my ancestry wholly to the British Isles. After an early education at Innisfail State Rural School and Cairns State High School, I taught myself for matriculation. I took my B.A. in Psychology from the University of Queensland in Brisbane. I then moved to Sydney (in New South Wales, Australia) and took my M.A. in psychology from the University of Sydney in 1969 and my Ph.D. from the School of Behavioural Sciences at Macquarie University in 1974. I first tutored in psychology at Macquarie University and then taught sociology at the University of NSW. My doctorate is in psychology but I taught mainly sociology in my 14 years as a university teacher. In High Schools I taught economics. I have taught in both traditional and "progressive" (low discipline) High Schools. Fuller biographical notes here


I completed the work for my Ph.D. at the end of 1970 but the degree was not awarded until 1974 -- due to some academic nastiness from Seymour Martin Lipset and Fred Emery. A conservative or libertarian who makes it through the academic maze has to be at least twice as good as the average conformist Leftist. Fortunately, I am a born academic.


Despite my great sympathy and respect for Christianity, I am the most complete atheist you could find. I don't even believe that the word "God" is meaningful. I am not at all original in that view, of course. Such views are particularly associated with the noted German philosopher Rudolf Carnap. Unlike Carnap, however, none of my wives have committed suicide


Very occasionally in my writings I make reference to the greats of analytical philosophy such as Carnap and Wittgenstein. As philosophy is a heavily Leftist discipline however, I have long awaited an attack from some philosopher accusing me of making coat-trailing references not backed by any real philosophical erudition. I suppose it is encouraging that no such attacks have eventuated but I thought that I should perhaps forestall them anyway -- by pointing out that in my younger days I did complete three full-year courses in analytical philosophy (at 3 different universities!) and that I have had papers on mainstream analytical philosophy topics published in academic journals


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


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"