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30 November, 2012

Is Harvard a Jewish plot? And does it matter?

Jewish Harvard graduate Ron Unz says yes to both questions. He has just written a VERY long article examining bias in Ivy League admissions which would persuade me to change my surname to Goldberg if I wanted admission there.

All sociologists have the unenviable task of extracting viable generalizations from very imperfect data and Unz is a champion in those black arts. I have disputed such generalizations from him in the past but the evidence he marshalls on this occasion is pretty massive. When evidence from multiple sources converges on one conclusion, it elicits at least provisional assent.

My heading above does of course caricature what Unz finds but not by much. What he finds is that admissions to the Ivies in recent years have been grotesquely skewed in favour of Jews and grotesquely skewed to the disadvantage of Asians, with non-Hispanic, non-Jewish whites also unfairly treated.

And Unz's criterion for fairness is hard to criticize. He looks to pre-university educational attainment. High achievement up to the end of high school suddenly fails people trying to get into Harvard, Princeton or Yale. And if your surname is Goldberg you don't even have to be a high achiever at High School level.

I myself read Unz's findings with considerable disquiet but despite my background in social science statistics, I can't see any fault in his overall conclusions -- provided he represents his sources accurately. He does sometimes cherry-pick and I am not familiar with the datasets he uses. But as far as I can see, he meticulously covers all the bases, which is why his article is so long. There are by now many comments about his article online and I have not so far seen one that rebuts his statistics. Most criticisms put up theoretical points that Unz has already covered. It is a long article and I guess that the critics could not be bothered to read it all.

So what the heck is going on? Unz initially points to the overwhelmingly (Leftist) Jewish administration of the Ivies, which does have some plausibility. But he then puts forward something I had never guessed at and which will surely surprise most others: Admissions officers at the Ivies tend to be poorly-paid dumb bunnies, much dumber than the student body they select. Their poor academic background is sometimes quite startling. At Britain's leading universities (Oxford and Cambridge) it is the opposite. Selection is by the academics who will be doing the teaching.

So Unz concludes, and I am inclined to agree, that simple fear of being seen as antisemitic (particularly seeing that their bosses are Jewish) is often the factor that makes admissions officers transfer "Goldberg" applications to the "accept" basket without much scrutiny.

And this bias in favor of Jews does of course put a big squeeze on other ethnicities, particularly Asians and other whites. Even considering that, however, Unz marshalls strong evidence for a systematic bias against Asians, a bias that looks very much like a deliberate quota. A student body that should be around 40% Asian if selected by prior attainment is in fact only around 16% Asian.

It's pretty clear Leftist racism. But Leftists have never ceased being race-obsessed so the only mystery is how the people responsible for it justify it in their own minds. Asians are "gooks", apparently. They don't look remotely like a Goldberg.

So does it all matter? Unz argues that it is in fact vital. Some quotes:

In the last generation or two, the funnel of opportunity in American society has drastically narrowed, with a greater and greater proportion of our financial, media, business, and political elites being drawn from a relatively small number of our leading universities, together with their professional schools. The rise of a Henry Ford, from farm boy mechanic to world business tycoon, seems virtually impossible today, as even America’s most successful college dropouts such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg often turn out to be extremely well-connected former Harvard students. Indeed, the early success of Facebook was largely due to the powerful imprimatur it enjoyed from its exclusive availability first only at Harvard and later restricted to just the Ivy League....

Power corrupts and an extreme concentration of power even more so, especially when that concentration of power is endlessly praised and glorified by the major media and the prominent intellectuals which together constitute such an important element of that power. But as time goes by and more and more Americans notice that they are poorer and more indebted than they have ever been before, the blandishments of such propaganda machinery will eventually lose effectiveness, much as did the similar propaganda organs of the decaying Soviet state. Kahlenberg quotes Pat Moynihan as noting that the stagnant American earnings between 1970 and 1985 represented “the longest stretch of ‘flat’ income in the history of the European settlement of North America.”120 The only difference today is that this period of economic stagnation has now extended nearly three times as long, and has also been combined with numerous social, moral, and foreign policy disasters.

Over the last few decades America’s ruling elites have been produced largely as a consequence of the particular selection methods adopted by our top national universities in the late 1960s. Leaving aside the question of whether these methods have been fair or have instead been based on corruption and ethnic favoritism, the elites they have produced have clearly done a very poor job of leading our country, and we must change the methods used to select them. Conservative William F. Buckley, Jr. once famously quipped that he would rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 names listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard. So perhaps an important step in solving our national problems would be to apply a similar method to selecting the vast majority of Harvard’s students.

As the quote shows, Unz favours a partially random solution to the undoubted problem that the Ivies now pose. My own solution would be less drastic. I would favour revival of the rule that all students who receive a perfect SAT score should be automatically admitted -- and any leftover places after that could be allocated any wacky way the university liked.

Under that rule, it would be amusing to see the faces of all the Leftist Jewish administrators when they looked out their windows and saw a sea of Asian faces in the grounds. Again, I would be interested to hear how they justified their racism

Being a people who have themselves suffered greatly from irrational bias, it is particularly saddening to see Jews practicing it. Yet more evidence that Leftism rots the mind, I guess -- JR

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A generation of debtors

Debt, debt everywhere in Obama's America. And a particular nightmare for young people

Consumer Credit default: Student Loans

We have already discussed the student loan bubble, and its popping previously, most extensively in this article. Today, we get the Q3 consumer credit breakdown update courtesy of the NY Fed's quarterly credit breakdown. And it is quite ghastly. As of September 30, Federal (not total, just Federal) rose to a gargantuan $956 billion, an increase of $42 billion in the quarter - the biggest quarterly update since 2006.

But this is no surprise to anyone who read our latest piece on the topic. What also shouldn't be a surprise, at least to our readers who read about it here first, but what will stun the general public are the two charts below, the first of which shows the amount of 90+ day student loan delinquencies, and the second shows the amount of newly delinquent 30+ day student loan balances. The charts speak for themselves.

This is how the Fed described this "anomaly":

"Outstanding student loan debt now stands at $956 billion, an increase of $42 billion since last quarter. However, of the $42 billion, $23 billion is new debt while the remaining $19 billion is attributed to previously defaulted student loans that have been updated on credit reports this quarter. As a result, the percent of student loan balances 90+ days delinquent increased to 11 percent this quarter."

oh and this from footnote 2:

"As explained in a Liberty Street Economics blog post, these delinquency rates for student loans are likely to understate actual delinquency rates because almost half of these loans are currently in deferment, in grace periods or in forbearance and therefore temporarily not in the repayment cycle. This implies that among loans in the repayment cycle delinquency rates are roughly twice as high."

We'll let readers calculate on their own what a surge in 90+ day delinquency from 9% to 11% (or as footnote 2 explains: 22%) in one quarter on $1 trillion in student debt means. For those confused, read all about it in this September article: "The Next Subprime Crisis Is Here: Over $120 Billion In Federal Student Loans In Default" which predicted just this.

And so it's official: Pop goes the student loan bubble, as just confirmed by the Fed.

Luckily student debt is dischargeable in bankruptcy. Oh wait. It isn't.

SOURCE

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Gene that may have helped make people smart ID'd

Leftists act as if genetics didn't matter but there is a torrent of findings showing that they do

Researchers have found a gene that they say helps explain how humans evolved from apes.

Called miR941, it seems to have played a crucial role in brain development and may shed light on how we learned to use tools and language, the scientists say. They add that it's the first time a new gene, carried only by people and not by apes, has been shown to have a specific function in the body.

"This new molecule sprang from nowhere at a time when our species was undergoing dramatic changes: living longer, walking upright, learning how to use tools and how to communicate," said Martin Taylor of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, who led the study. "We're now hopeful that we will find more new genes that help show what makes us human."

The gene has been found to be highly active in two areas of the brain that control our decision making and language abilities. The study suggests it could have a role in the advanced brain functions that make us human.

A team at the university compared the human genome to 11 other species of mammals, including chimpanzees, gorillas, mouse and rat, to find the differences between them. The results, published in the journal Nature Communications, indicate the gene is unique to humans. The researchers say it emerged between six and one million years ago, after the human lineage had branched off from apes.

Most differences between species occur as a result of changes to existing genes, or the duplication and deletion of genes. But scientists say this gene emerged fully functional out of noncoding genetic material, previously termed "junk DNA," in a startlingly short time in evolutionary terms.

SOURCE

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The Power of High Places: Academia and Media are Hives of the Left That Sway the Culture

The second book of Kings in the Old Testament is a usefully depressing history on national decline. It starts with fire coming down from heaven to convince a king, and Elijah ascending to heaven via chariots of fire. It ends with the former king of Judah taken into captivity and dependent on the ruler of Babylon, who condescends to give him an allowance.

Not all kings were part of the descent. Jehoash, Amaziah, and Azariah, for example, all “did what was right in the eyes of the Lord,” except for one thing: “The high places were not removed; the people still sacrificed and made offerings on the high places” (2 Kings 12:2-3, 14:3-4, 15:3-4). Many who gave lip service to Yahweh hedged their bets by visiting a “high place” (in Hebrew, bamah) that was usually but not always on a hill or mountain.

A bamah, in short, was a cultural security blanket: High places could make people feel like far-seeing gods possessing gnostic wisdom.

Question: What are the high places in our culture? Answer: Academia and media. See how people donate to their alma maters even when professors teach doctrines that label the contributors as little more than criminals. See how millions reverently give to PBS and NPR, and how ABC, CBS, and NBC still have the power to insinuate liberal messages. See how hundreds of thousands read the Sunday New York Times and email its sermons.

I saw the power of the high places not only teaching at The University of Texas for two decades, but through my failure to convince one king to attack them. During the 1990s, when I very occasionally advised Texas Gov. George W. Bush, we talked about how academically totalitarian UT was becoming. He sympathized but said he was not strong enough to take it on. Unions, sure. Later, al Qaeda, sure. Bamah, no.

Our academic high places are hives of the left. The Daily Princetonian says 155 members of Princeton University’s faculty or staff donated to Barack Obama, and only two (one visiting lecturer in engineering, one janitor) to Mitt Romney. I’ve seen similar stats from other schools. When taxpayers and parents pay tens of thousands of dollars to require students to listen to leftist propaganda from generally persuasive individuals, should we be surprised that young people vote left?

Our media high places cover up misdeeds. For six weeks this fall CBS concealed information it had that showed President Obama confused at best and, more probably, lying concerning the Libya attack that killed four Americans. Had CBS released that footage after the second presidential debate, the course of the campaign could have changed.

More basically, though, the media problem is not what’s omitted but what’s been presented for decades as the new normal: marriage as dull and readily breakable, singleness as sexy and independent. This propaganda-fueled drive toward singleness hurts millions of individuals who learn the downside of no one to depend on. It also has a political kick, as the increasing number of never-married and divorced women depend more on government and vote overwhelmingly for more of it.

What’s next? Democrats’ pro-abortion rhetoric this year was not forward but backward to the time of Judah’s King Ahaz, who “did not do what was right in the eyes of the Lord.... He even burned his son as an offering, according to the despicable practices of the nations.” The good news is that after Ahaz came Hezekiah, who “removed the high places and broke the pillars” (2 Kings 16:2-4, 18:3-4).

Ronald Reagan and the Bushes did not remove the high places. We need a Hezekiah, but we need more: America is not ancient Israel, and the president does not have the power to remove high places. We fall for the blandishments of big media and academia because we are ready to fall: If we concentrate solely on their sin we won’t come to grip with ours.

This all means that breaking bamah pillars is the work of every generation, but providential technology —online courses and publications— is opening wide a door in our day for Christian education and Christian publications..

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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29 November, 2012

What Is The Real Difference Between High-Income Earners and Low-Income Earners

Not as much as you would think, believe it or not.

Everyone is talking about 'taxing the rich!', 'redistributing the wealth!' and 'income inequality!' as if it is something from a fairy tale or something. If you didn't know better, you would think you were reading history from the French Revolution ('Off with their heads!) or the writings of Leon Trosky and the others who brought 'income-equality' (as in 'low' income for everyone but the rulers) in Soviet Russia for almost a century.

Let's take a very close look at the reality of the situation on the ground in real terms, how about it?

Does everyone know what a FICA tax is? I have been lecturing at various universities over the past couple of years and hardly any student knows what a payroll or FICA tax is.

The FICA tax is the 'Federal Income Contributions Act' which is about as deliberate of a misnomer and deceptive advertising as ever was one. Since when did paying taxes ever become known as a 'contribution' anyway?

The thought here is that since you receive a benefit down the road, if you live long enough, you are making a 'contribution' to your future retirement needs. As we have seen in many previous posts, you are making no such 'contribution' to any such trust fund because:

A) They are all broke today

B) You are paying current benefits for current retirees, nothing more, nothing less

C) The only way you will get what you think your future SS and Medicare benefits should be is if your children and grandchildren pay far higher taxes than you do today

D) If you are under the age of 50, you can fully expect and count on receiving far, far less than you will ever 'contribute' in FICA taxes in SS and Medicare benefits when you retire. Just the time-value of money and the lack of truly invested principal in any form guarantees that you will be underwater in terms of the benefits you will ever receive from either major entitlement program.

Anyway, with regards to the current debate over 'income-equality', let's take a close look at the real post-tax difference between a high-income self-employed individual and a person making $60,000 per year to support a family of four.

Let's assume the high-income person, as defined by the President, OMB, CBO and the Census Bureau makes $180,000 per year in a two-income family. One spouse is in business for himself as an insurance agent and the other spouse is an independent researcher at a local university.

After family deductions and mortgage interest and charitable deductions, the net taxable income falls to $150,000.

So far, so good it seems for the higher-income family, huh?

Right off the top, this high income family can expect to pay $23,550 in payroll taxes since it is 15.7% of your earned income for self-employed people. All non-deductible from any other taxes they may pay.

Add to that approximately another $17,000 of federal income taxes and their take-home income is down to about $110,000.

State taxes will claim another $10,000 so now they are down to $100,000. Local and property taxes, depending the number of cars they own, for example, could claim another couple of thousand or so.

So the higher-income self-employed couple is down to around $95,000 of disposable income when all is said and done after sales taxes and every other tax is added in each year.

Over $55,000 in taxes paid at some level or roughly what the average American household makes in income each year. Paid for by 1 couple. Not bad. It is far better than anyone in the middle-or-lower income categories, right?

But by how much? And does the difference justify all of the polemics and class warfare we see out there coming from President Obama and the political left?

Consider a couple making $60,000 as employees at two companies, both making exactly $30,000/year in salary. For one thing, they immediately only have to pay half as much in FICA taxes as the self-employed couple because that is the law. The reason is that the corporations they work for have to pay a matching percentage from the employer side to get to the 15.7% rate for FICA taxes.

Let's assume their mortgage interest and charitable contributions amount to $10,000/year. Now they are down to $50,000 in income to spend.

That would mean that this couple has about $3850 total withheld from their paychecks during the year. They may not fall low enough to not pay any federal income taxes each year but they are not far from it. Let's say they pay $1250 in state taxes to get to a round $45,000 of disposable income for the year.

So with all of the discussion about rich versus poor, big versus small, fat cats versus the small guy, in many cases we are talking about a difference of $50,000 in income per year for American citizens. Or about the income earned by an average American household, once again.

$50,000 is a lot of money, don't get us wrong. We would rather have $50,000 more to spend on education, vacations, clothes and cars than not have it, to be sure.

But we are not talking about the routine disparity in income in America as being $1 million+ or $10 billion+ per year amongst perhaps 98% of all American families. The whole debate is driven by perceptions not reality.

Not all the rich people in America live or act like the Kardashian family on cable. (Thank God!)

Plus, we could tax the rich people out the wazoo and guess what would happen?

* They would find legal tax shelters and pay the same next year as this year.

* They would move to the Cayman Islands or somewhere that doesn't tax them as much and declare legal residence there. We would not balance our federal budget. Not even come close.

* Or they would just quit investing in more business in America and just retire and enjoy life.

None of us should want any wealthy person to pull up stakes and just sit back and 'enjoy life'! We want them to keep working their tails off and taking risks right and left with their money! We should all be begging and encouraging them to make more investments so we can all get a job working at their new business!

We want them to be like those talented, somewhat crazy football coaches who win a national title at one school, retire to 'spend more time with the family' (which they never do) and then take the next job to lead another team to the national championship. Or the Super Bowl.

That is what great business people and entrepreneurs do. They were put here on earth not to just make money for themselves but to provide jobs and help create wealth for the rest of us!

Sometimes they will fail. But we would still get paid salary and benefits out of their capital (and the money they can borrow from banks that you and I can't) until the business failed. And then, we should hope they would try again.

That is where we think this current debate over 'income-disparity' is so messed up. We want everyone to have the chance to work for themselves or someone else and move up the income ladder, not drag everyone above them down to our level.

We want wealthy people to keep investing in business in America. We want them to become the next Apple. If someone had gone to work at Apple just 10 years ago and had stock benefits in their compensation that included about $10,000 in value then, they would have over $660,000 in their nest egg today, give or take a few thousand dollars on any given day.

Now, let's stop all this class warfare and figure out ways to stop spending so much money on everything, balance our budgets and let this great American money-making, job-creating machine get back to work putting us back to work as well.

SOURCE

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The West Fights Back

W. Kristol

There are some facts so obvious that only a liberal could deny them. One of them is that, from Benghazi to Be’er Sheva, the West is under attack.

By the West I mean those nations—wherever on the globe they are—that hold aloft and carry the torch of liberal civilization, that seek to build on the achievements of modern liberalism and the older traditions of Athens and Jerusalem. The United States stands at the head of the West, having had leadership thrust upon us several decades ago—at about the same time the state of Israel came into existence after the collapse of Western civilization in Europe.

The West was saved, primarily by Britain and the United States, and its revival after the war was somehow exemplified by the founding of the state of Israel, which, as the philosopher Leo Strauss put it in 1956, “is a Western country, which educates its many immigrants from the East in the ways of the West: Israel is the only country which as a country is an outpost of the West in the East.”

To be an outpost is to be under the threat of attack. To be a leader is to be subject to attack. And so Israel and the United States bear the brunt of the attacks on Western civilization.

George W. Bush was ridiculed by the left, and criticized by some on the right, for speaking of the Global War on Terror. The left hated the notion of a global war of any sort, and the right disliked the imprecision of “terror.” But the term “war on terror” has always struck me as good enough for government work.

For what the West stands against is terror—whether the terror of modern secular totalitarianism or the terror of an older, and now revitalized, religious fanaticism. From the Great Terrors of Stalin and Hitler to the attacks on New York and Tel Aviv, and on Madrid, Bali, and Mumbai, terrorists of all stripes know who their enemies are. They attack across the world and kill Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike—but they grasp that the centers of resistance, the nations that stand most squarely in their path, are the United States and Israel.

And so these two very different nations—Christian and Jewish, large and small, new world and old (though the new world nation is older than its newly reborn old world counterpart)—find themselves allied. More than allied: They find themselves joined at the hip in a brotherhood that is more than a diplomatic or political or military alliance. Everyone senses that the ties are deeper than those of mere allies. Israelis know that if the United States fails, so shall Israel. Americans sense, in the words of Eric Hoffer, “as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us.”

I write this on the eve of Thanksgiving, the most Old Testament, the most Hebraic, of our national holidays. On Thanksgiving we don’t celebrate our rights or our achievements, or honor our soldiers or great men. Rather, we thank the Almighty for our blessings here in America. We might also thank Him for restoring the homeland of the Jewish people, as Israelis might thank Him for the existence, side by side with Israel, of a loyal and steadfast America.

SOURCE

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Did Rush Limbaugh Cause a Suicide?

According to syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts, no, not directly, but Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, etc. polluted the rhetorical waters in which Henry Hamilton swam.

Hamilton, 64, of Key West, FL, was found dead two days after the election with empty prescription bottles by his side, one for an anti-anxiety medication and the other for a drug to treat schizophrenia. The tanning salon owner had reportedly been stressed about his business and, according to a witness, remarked that if Obama were re-elected, “I’m not going to be around.” Supposedly written on his will was “[expletive] Obama.”

Aside from the heart-wrenching tragedy of any suicide, one is left to wonder why this story didn’t make a greater impact nationally. Apparently the media was too busy gloating to indulge in their favorite dessert: rich, decadent liberal outrage. Still, Pitts took up any slack, blaming the aforementioned, along with Cal Thomas, Ted Nugent and Donald Trump for nudging Hamilton over the edge with their “nonstop litany of half-truths, untruths and fear-mongering.” According to Pitts, they are zealots who believe the “garbage” they say.

Just countering Pitts’ drama-queen hysterics continues the overheated cycle — we’re not likely changing many minds here, rather we’re continuing the tit-for-tat, surface-level narrative that makes rational, informed discourse all but impossible. But at the same time, we on the right must not surrender our passions in the name of “civility” or forgo the truth for the sake of “changing the tone.” Rule of thumb: whenever anyone complains about the negative tone in politics, they usually mean that conservatives are exercising their First Amendment rights again.

Of course, it will never dawn on anyone that the anti-business, you-didn’t-build-that rhetoric of this administration might drive someone to despair. Oh, no, couldn’t happen. Someone who has never held a single day of elective office must bear the blame before the president or America’s reigning party that actually enacts policy.

To those who claim that conservatives are overreacting to the election and need to get over it, consider the vow of Barack Obama (yes, the same Obama who was nurtured by the soothing, dispassionate oratory of Jeremiah “God damn America” Wright) to fundamentally “transform” the United States of America. That’s his word, not Rush Limbaugh’s, not Sean Hannity’s.

Would I be contributing to the national suicide rate if I asked if maybe Obama wasn’t over-reaching just a little? Even if you write that one-off as standard pre-election hype, consider ads that ran in swing states claiming “Mitt Romney: Not one of us.” Nice. Just a sample of the unifying, civil dialogue emanating from the left.

Not one of us. What is he, a Martian?

Instead of countering the supposed half-truths and untruths of prominent conservatives, Pitts avoids the heavy-lifting and just writes them off as bad people. According to PItts, we on the right think our fellow Americans are “idiots.” No, we don’t, and that is the very point of conservatism. We consider our fellow citizens far better equipped to handle their own affairs than Washington bureaucrats far removed from their day-to-day lives, which is why we find the election outcome so disappointing.

Conservatives tend to view their fellow citizens individually, while liberals see them collectively. The death of Henry Hamilton, by all accounts a productive member of society and a fellow human being, elicits sadness, regardless of party affiliation or choice of political commentary. The fact that this American citizen died an apparently troubled man makes his passing all the more poignant. Period. He was one of us.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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28 November, 2012

Jensen and Flynn

Thomas Sowell

Anyone who has followed the decades-long controversies over the role of genes in IQ scores will recognize the names of the two leading advocates of opposite conclusions on that subject-- Professor Arthur R. Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley and Professor James R. Flynn, an American expatriate at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

What is so unusual in the academic world of today is that Professor Flynn's latest book, "Are We Getting Smarter?" is dedicated to Arthur Jensen, whose integrity he praises, even as he opposes his conclusions. That is what scholarship and science are supposed to be like, but so seldom are.

Professor Jensen, who died recently, is best known for reopening the age-old controversy about heredity versus environment with his 1969 article titled, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"

His answer-- long since lost in the storms of controversy that followed-- was that scholastic achievement could be much improved by different teaching methods, but that these different teaching methods were not likely to change I.Q. scores much.

Jensen argued for educational reforms, saying that "scholastic performance-- the acquisition of the basic skills-- can be boosted much more, at least in the early years, than can the IQ" and that, among "the disadvantaged," there are "high school students who have failed to learn basic skills which they could easily have learned many years earlier" if taught in different ways.

But, regardless of what Arthur Jensen actually said, too many in the media, and even in academia, heard what they wanted to hear. He was lumped in with earlier writers who had promoted racial inferiority doctrines that depicted some races as being unable to rise above the level of "hewers of wood and drawers of water."

These earlier writers from the Progressive era were saying, in effect, that there was a ceiling to the mental potential of some races, while Jensen argued that there was no ceiling but, by his reading of the evidence, a difference in average IQ, influenced by genes.

When I first read Arthur Jensen's landmark article, back in 1969, I was struck by his careful and painstaking analysis of a wide range of complex data. It impressed me but did not convince me. What it did was cause me to dig up more data on my own.

A few years later, I headed a research project that, among other things, collected tens of thousands of past and present IQ scores from a wide range of racial and ethnic groups at schools across the United States. Despite serious limitations in these data, due to constraints of time and circumstances, these data nevertheless threw some additional light on the subject.

A feature article of mine in the Sunday New York Times Magazine of March 27, 1977 pointed out that any number of white groups, here and overseas, had at some point in time had IQs similar to, and in some cases lower than, the IQs of black Americans. During the First World War, for example, white soldiers from some Southern states scored lower on army mental tests than black soldiers from some Northern states.

Professor Jensen read this article and came over to Stanford University to meet with me and discuss the data. That is what a scholar should do when challenged. But the opposite approach was shown by Professor Kenneth B. Clark, who earlier had sought to dissuade me from doing IQ research. He said it would "dignify" Jensen's work, which Clark wanted ignored or discredited instead.

Unfortunately, Professor Clark's ideological approach became far more common in academia, so much so that Jensen's attempts to speak on campuses around the country provoked dangerous disruptions, instead of reasoned arguments.

Years later, Professor James R. Flynn created the biggest challenge to the hereditary theory of intelligence, when he showed that whole nations had risen to much higher results on IQ tests in just one or two generations. Genes don't change that fast.

Professor Flynn told me that he would never have done his research, except that it was provoked by Jensen's research. That is just one of the reasons for having a free marketplace of ideas, instead of turning academic campuses into fortresses of politically correct intolerance.

SOURCE

Sowell's comments are those of an unusually decent man but his argument is unpersuasive. You can to this day find some whites who are dumber than some blacks but it is the groups OVERALL (and preferably across time) that are of greatest interest and the overall black/white gap has been consistent as far back as it has been measured. But there are exceptions to every rule and some blacks are very bright. Sowell is one of them.

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Yes, slash farm subsidies - but don't stop there

by Jeff Jacoby

As a candidate for the US Senate, Elizabeth Warren showed a livelier interest in raising federal revenues than in cutting government spending. But about one spending target the senator-elect has been admirably blunt. When asked to name some items in the federal budget she'd like to see slashed, the first program she cites is one of the most indefensible: agriculture subsidies.

To be sure, it's easier to oppose welfare for agribusiness when you represent Massachusetts, which ranks 44th among the 50 states in federal farm payments, and where only 7.7 percent of local farms collect subsidies. But that doesn't alter the fact that farm subsidies are egregiously bad policy in every way, and Warren will deserve hearty bipartisan applause if she leads a serious effort to eliminate them.

According to the Environmental Working Group, agriculture subsidies have robbed taxpayers of more than $275 billion over the past six years. Like most corporate welfare, farm programs redistribute wealth upward. In congressional testimony last June, Cato Institute analysts Chris Edwards and Tad DeHaven pointed out that the average income of farm households was $84,400 in 2010, or 25 percent higher than the average income earned by all US households that year. Moreover, the great majority of American farms (62 percent) collect no subsidies at all. Nearly 75 percent of government payments go to just 10 percent of all farm businesses.

For years critics have pointed out glaring problems with the government's farm program: The tens of millions of dollars paid annually to recipients who are millionaires. The more than $1.1 billion disbursed to people who were dead - in many cases, dead for years. The damage inflicted on the environment, and on farmers in poor nations.

Then there are the lavish "farm" subsidies shelled out to owners of land not used for farming at all. In some communities, ABC News reported in 2008, real-estate agents were using the prospect of agriculture payments as a lure to entice home buyers. "Do you have to farm . to receive it?" one woman was shown asking a realtor during a home showing. "No, no, no, no," the agent assures her. "It's like a little bonus that you don't really have to do anything to get."

US agriculture doesn't require tax dollars to flourish. The proof was on your Thanksgiving table - and in the grocery where you stocked up before the feast. Most varieties of food grown in America aren't subsidized, as ABC's reported noted. There's no apple subsidy, no banana subsidy, no subsidy for carrots or lemons or lettuce. Yet walk into any supermarket and you can find all of them in abundance.

The case against farm subsidies is clear and compelling. Most Americans rightly oppose them, and Warren rightly calls for ending them. Granted, that wouldn't make more than a small dent in the $1 trillion annual deficits Washington has been running. But it would make a good start. And wiping out all the other corporate welfare in the federal budget - the equally indefensible subsidies for high-speech rail and alternative energy, for automakers and broadband networks, for small business and mortgage lending, for export promotion and shipbuilding - would make an even better one.

Yet earnest talk about cutting the budget never seems to lead to earnest budget-cutting. Every subsidy has its vocal defenders, every taxpayer has his favorite subsidies, and no matter how much evidence piles up to the contrary, Americans continue to believe that government spending is essentially virtuous. No political truth seems harder to bear in mind than this one: Every dollar the government gives to X is a dollar the government must take from Y. Yet no political truth is more ironclad.

We are beguiled by what political scientist James Payne calls the "philanthropic illusion" -- the idea that the government has money to bestow on needy people and worthy causes. It doesn't. Washington is not a source of wealth, and its subsidies are not largesse.

It is heartening that Massachusetts' senator-elect can brush aside the philanthropic illusion when it comes to crop supports. Here's hoping she comes to see that what is true of Washington's farm programs is true of every budget item: Government can only help some by hurting others.

SOURCE

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More on Swedish healthcare

While Sweden has long taken pride in its public healthcare system, lengthening queues and at times inconsistent care have prompted many Swedes to opt for private healthcare with many gaining the benefit through insurance policies offered by employers, currently responsible for 80 percent of healthcare insurance market.

The idea behind private health insurance is simple enough: those put off by the idea of heading to publicly funded clinics and hospitals can purchase a policy through an insurance company and instead enjoy speedy medical attention with private doctors.

Of course, the option doesn't come cheap. While the public system will set a patient back no more than 350 kronor per visit ($52), regardless of the procedure, and this fee is capped at a total of 900 kronor annually, insurance policies can run into thousands of kronor, depending on how much or how little is covered.

"We've got several different premiums to choose from, but the standard one costs about 4,000 kronor per year," says Andersson.

Despite the cost, as many as 500,000 Swedes [out of 8 million] are now estimated to be using private healthcare insurance, up from 100,000 only ten years ago, according to a recent report from daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN).

And a flawed public system is often cited as the cause of the rapid expansion. "It's a question of people not being satisfied with the accessibility of today's public healthcare," explains Andersson.

Long queues are one of the main complaints for consumers of Sweden's public healthcare services, with patients sometimes forced to wait as much as fifteen times longer for treatment compared to private options.

Insurance company IF, for example, offers insurance policies which guarantee specialist care within two days, while patients can wait at least a month to see a specialist in the public system.

Long wait times have been a long-standing problem with the Swedish healthcare system and one that the government has attempted to address. The Healthcare Guarantee (V+rdgaranti), a reform implemented in 2007, was supposed to ensure patients can visit a doctor and receive treatment within specific time frames.

Despite much fanfare at the time, the reform's results have been limited, according to Andersson. "The Healthcare Guarantee isn't a guarantee," he explains.

"If you don't receive care within the promised time, there are no sanctions, and you don't get any compensation."

As a result, private healthcare remains in demand, despite some objections that the development results in a two-track system in which wealthy, employed patients receive better, faster care.

But with more and more Swedes opting for private healthcare, Andersson is hopeful that Swedish healthcare can evolve into a system where public healthcare is capable of offering good care for all, and private insurance becomes an extra option for those who wish to invest more.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

SCOTUS revives challenge to Obama health law: "The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday revived a challenge to President Barack Obama's healthcare reforms, allowing a Christian college to pursue litigation raising First Amendment objections to a law that the court mostly upheld in June. Liberty University, based in Lynchburg, Virginia, had challenged both the individual mandate, which required all people to obtain insurance by 2014 or pay a penalty, and a separate mandate requiring large employers to provide coverage for workers."

TX: Man pulls gun on line cutting shopper: "Black Friday got off to a rowdy start at a San Antonio mall where police say one shopper pulled a gun on another who punched him in the face while they were waiting in line at a Sears store. Police Sgt. Rob Carey tells the San Antonio Express-News a man rushed into the store when it opened Thursday night to get to the front of a line, started arguing with people and tried cutting in front of them. One man who got punched pulled a gun and that scattered shoppers, including the impatient line-cutter who took cover behind a refrigerator. Then he fled"

Cold cash Jefferson off to jail at last: "The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear the appeal of former Louisiana congressman William Jefferson, who had challenged his 2009 conviction on multiple charges of bribery and money laundering. ... A federal jury had found Jefferson guilty of soliciting bribes, money laundering and participation in a racketeering scheme. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison but remained free while pursuing an appeal."

How to spot a sociopath: "Sociopaths are masters at influence and deception. Very little of what they say actually checks out in terms of facts or reality, but they're extremely skillful at making the things they say sound believable, even if they're just making them up out of thin air. Here, I'm going to present quotes and videos of some legendary sociopaths who convinced everyday people to participate in mass suicides. And then I'm going to demonstrate how and why similar sociopaths are operating right now ... today."

The morass that is Obamacare: "Another physician told me, two weeks ago, about the nightmare that is the compliance requirement for Electronic Medical Records, where 'one size is required to fit all,' and the same questions must be asked of every patient, and those results MUST be reported to the Federal government. Do you smoke? MUST be reported to the Feds. Have you ever used marijuana? MUST be reported to the Feds. Ever suffered from depression? MUST be reported to the Feds. Are you pregnant? If you are a 17-year-old female, this MUST be reported by the doctor to the Feds, even though s/he is not allowed to report it to your parents."

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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27 November, 2012

Israel as a scapegoat: Another target for Leftist hatreds

Brendan O'Neill is pretty right in the excerpt below but he misses the larger context: The Left have always hated Jews. It goes at least as far back as Karl Marx, who hated Jews even though he was himself one! Leftist Jews who hate Jewry are still with us, of course. Hate swamps reason. Marx in fact hated just about everyone and so do Leftists today. O'Neill writes from Britain and antisemitism is particularly virulent among the British intelligentsia. See the links in the sidebar at EYE ON BRITAIN

Among people who consider themselves liberal and progressive, who cleave to fashionable ideas about fairness, social justice and having an ‘international community’ to oversee global problems, who might be described as the cultural elite, hostility towards Israel is intense, bordering on hysterical. Israeli military action riles this political set far more than the military action of any other nation on Earth, including America and Britain. Where America and Britain’s numerous military excursions, particularly in Iraq, are described by this political set as ‘mistakes’ or as ‘counterproductive’, in that they apparently generate more terrorism than they defeat, Israel’s militarism is described in the most heated language imaginable: as ‘murderous’, a kind of ‘bloodletting’, even Nazi-like. Israel’s militarism never fails to generate large protests in European capitals, from Rome to Berlin to London, at which gatherings of Islamists, leftists and respectable academics wave placards denouncing Israeli apartheid, murder, barbarism, and so on.

The double standard inherent in this shrill, ahistorical response to Israeli militarism is clear if one contrasts it with the response to something like the Obama administration’s bombings in Pakistan. In many ways, Obama has already done to rural parts of Pakistan what Israel is currently doing to Gaza – that is, he has launched bombing raids against militants which have inevitably killed or injured large numbers of innocents, too. Where Israel has said to have killed 130 in Gaza over the past week – some of them Hamas militants but many of them not – Obama’s drone attacks in Pakistan in recent years have killed many more: an estimated 2,600, in fact, only around 13 per cent of whom were militants. This means that around 2,200 ordinary Pakistanis have been killed in bomb attacks okayed by Obama. Yet far from Obama’s drone attacks generating public protests, or being described as ‘murderous’ and ‘Nazi-esque’ by respectable, caring newspapers, Obama remains a hero of the very same set that sees red whenever Israel fires a missile or a gun.

The best way to understand this extraordinary and shameless double standard that Europe’s cultural elite in particular applies to Israel is as a consequence of how these people view Israel: not simply as another country that does questionable military things, like America or Britain or France, but rather as a remnant, or a reminder, of an era that every right-minded, progressive person defines him or herself against – the era of colonialism and of nationalism. Israel has effectively been turned into a conduit for Western colonial guilt, for Western self-disgust with the crimes committed by our nations in history. Israel, through its use of rather old-fashioned, sometimes belligerent language about pacifying those people who allegedly threaten its values or existence, has come to be treated as the embodiment of those colonial values that every decent Western politician now explicitly eschews and every serious academic writes scabrous revisionist histories about. Uniquely among nations that pursue military objectives, Israel is frequently said to be driven by ‘an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology’ and is said to be led by ‘colonialists’, ‘racists’ and even ‘fascists’.

It is important to note how much this transformation of Israel into a whipping boy for the sins of colonialism is a project initiated by the elites rather than by radicals. Anti-Israel posturing and protesting dresses itself up in radical garb, with Israel-hating street protesters frequently claiming a lineage with anti-imperialist movements of the past. But in truth, the demonisation of Israel as the embodiment of ideologies from the past – particularly colonialism and racism – is led by elite elements. The United Nations in particular has played a key role in projecting on to Israel the sins of colonialism. The UN’s jumped-up Human Rights Council has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than it has against all other states combined. In 1975, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, which explicitly ‘determined that Zionism is a form of racism’ and condemned Israel for its adherence to doctrines of ‘racial differentiation or superiority’ and for its ‘colonialism’ (2). It is this frequent intergovernmental denouncement of Israeli behaviour and colonialism which informs radical protesting against Israel. Indeed, today’s shrill agitators against Israel, those left-wingers and liberals who make up today’s Israel-hating respectable classes, will often cite UN resolutions as a justification for their disproportionate fury with Israeli militarism. Such protesters are better understood, not as a genuinely independent or radical movement against militarism, but rather as a spin-off from international elites’ cynical, self-serving transformation of Israel into the embodiment of ugly outdated colonial values.

This means there is a great irony to anti-Israel sentiment in the West today: it depicts itself as anti-colonialist, sometimes even as anti-imperialist, but it actually helps to rehabilitate Western and particularly UN authority in global affairs in a new way. The transformation of Israel into a kind of scapegoat for the crimes of colonialism is itself a neo-colonial act, driven as it is by the needs of Western and other powers to assert their post-colonial diplomatic and military authority over so-called deviant states, like those that exist in the Middle East. Indeed, radical protesters’ description of Israel as a ‘rogue state’, as ‘the real rogue state in the Middle East’, as a ‘state of insanity’, speaks to their instinct to fashion a foreign territory that both they and their leaders might reprimand and punish. Anti-Israel activists and thinkers frequently call on ‘Our Leaders’ to enforce sanctions against Israel or to criminalise it with the tag ‘rogue state’ or even to intervene in it, militarily if necessary, to put a stop to its ‘barbarism’ and ‘bloodletting’. This reveals that modern, fashionable anti-colonialism, the reckoning with past colonial crimes, is underpinned by its own brand of colonial-style moral superiority and disgust with disobedient foreigners, in this case Israelis.

A key trend in Western public life today, particularly among those who define themselves as progressive, is to feel and proclaim alienation from the past, to express a profound discomfort with the things and events that brought about the modern, industrial world. From re-appraising the Enlightenment to handwringing over the Industrial Revolution to churning out texts on how horrendous exploration and colonialism proved to be, it is now de rigueur for Western intellectuals and activists to be consumed by a kind of self-disgust that dresses itself up as a radical stance. It is in this context that intense anti-Israel sentiment emerges, where, in George Gilder’s words, Israel comes to be hated for its ‘virtues’, primarily for the perception that it is a stubbornly old-fashioned outpost of ‘freedom and capitalism’.

More HERE

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Demonizing others is essential to the Left

Lincoln Brown

Listening to Debbie Wasserman-Shultz, and reading the latest headlines that say that the president’s new constituency form does not have a place for whites or for men, I have to ask myself, what does the Democratic Party have against old, white men? Joe Biden is an old white man. Harry Reid is an old white man; Barney Frank is an old white man. Michael Moore is a white man and a darn rich one, at that.

In fact as a young liberal, nearly all of many the liberals I knew growing up were white. I have to confess I am a middle-aged white man, who still has trouble thinking of myself as middle aged. I don’t burn crosses, or abuse women. I don’t hate Hispanics or blacks or Arabs. But somehow, people like Debbie Wasserman-Shultz seem keen to paint people like me as misogynistic racists. And all of the protesting I might do to the contrary would not change that. I could talk myself hoarse about how non-racist I am, but my cries would fall upon deaf ears.

I’m not going to fall back on the old saw “Some of my best friends are black (or Hispanic). Some of my friends over the years have been black, and my best friend in high school was in fact, a native of Mexico.

I have done charity work for my community, served a mission to stop human trafficking, and yes I am a conservative, but have always been kind to every liberal I have ever interviewed, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan and U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios. I’ll admit that when I started out, I was just as angry as any guy on the AM dial, but I learned listening can be more important than speaking, and a loud voice does not always make one’s case. Maybe it’s because I’ve mellowed with age, maybe it was getting re-baptized and accepting Christ that made me view things in a different light. But I evolved. The political party of my birth has seemed to move in the opposite direction.

As a conservative, my issue has never been with race, but with policy. My desire for America has not been to see the poor stay poor while I get rich. I work in radio for crying out loud, I’ll never be rich. Rather, it is the idea that if people earn their own money and are responsible for their own homes and build their own lives and they have the pride of having ownership and stewardship of those things.

I’ve read the Koran. In fact, I own a copy.

I don’t care who or what one worships, or even if one does worship, but I believe that those who chose to do so should be left in peace.

I didn’t agree with Occupy Wall Street, but I would go to the mat to allow them to protest. Because I believe that the First Amendment is first for a reason. People have the right to assemble and speak out, even those who don’t agree with me.

Yes, I think if you own a business, you are entitled to make a profit. In my direct experience, the “rich” people I have met, and for that matter the people who aren’t rich are extremely generous with their money and their time. I see it every day on the streets of the little town in which I live.

Sadly, Debbie Wasserman-Shultz, Marsha Fudge, or any Democrat around would not take sixty seconds to look at who I am or where I came from, what I actually think, and for that matter, they would not do the same for you, either. You are either one of them and hence a friend, or not one of them and hence an enemy.

It is a different scenario, but it is the same story and it has been going on for years. It has been reflected in every power-oriented regime in history and in fiction. To consolidate power, and rally people to your cause, you must create someone to hate. There must be “The Other”. The Other that wants to kill you, The Other that wants to enslave you, The Other that must be isolated and ultimately dealt with in some definitive manner if society is to move forward. To isolate and defeat The Other, his character flaws must be exaggerated, and if necessary manufactured. The Other must be vilified, caricatured, lampooned and turned into a monster. Unfortunately one of the most effective ways to unify a nation is to create a common enemy, and strip then him of any vestige of humanity.

Are we seeing such a thing now? History will tell, but history seems to move pretty fast these days. And if we are dividing up the nation, those who are siding with the majority should take note: when you side with people who only crave power that becomes your lot in life. You must side with them forever, even if they day comes that you do not agree with them.

I’ve told this story before but it bears re-telling. When the Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia, they eventually ran out of enemies to lock up, and began arresting seemingly loyal party members out of paranoia and a need to maintain a grip on the country. People with power will do many things to hold on to that power, and if you step out of line, then suddenly, you may become The Other.

Take care that in your zeal you do not become the thing you claim to despise. You may be one complaint away from becoming one of us.

SOURCE

Lincoln Brown (above) might also have mentioned that after the Russian revolution Lenin executed most of the old Bolsheviks. Hate can turn on the haters

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Not Enough Dead Jews

In the aftermath of Israel’s latest conflict with Hamas terrorists, it seems that the Jewish state’s greatest failing was that it did not suffer enough casualties to satisfy its critics. And so, once again, the world is railing against “Israeli aggression” and casting its sympathies with those who seek to slaughter its civilians, and this despite the outrageous statements of the Islamic radicals hell-bent on destroying Israel.

On Thursday, November 23rd, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said, “Israel screamed with pain from what the resistance did to it. I thank everyone who provided us with arms and money, especially Iran.” Yes, to make Israel scream with pain is something virtuous.

Shortly after the bomb blast in Tel Aviv that wounded 22 Israelis, Hamas-run Al-Aqsa TV aired a report showing footage of the bloody scene and commenting: “These are scenes of the casualties. God willing, we will soon see black body bags. I pray to God the exalted we will see body bags in a short while. . . . Right now in these moments, the mosques in the Gaza Strip, their minarets are loudly sounding cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ and cries of joy, and the residents of the Gaza Strip are bowing down to Allah for this offering [or, gift]. The morale of the Gaza residents is in the sky right now, and is rising just as the rockets of the resistance.”

This is in keeping with Articles 6 and 8 of the Hamas charter which read (in part): “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it … The Islamic Resistance Movement…strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine … Allah is our goal, the Prophet our model, the Qur’an our Constitution, Jihad our path and death for the cause of Allah our most sublime belief.” (The last sentence is the motto of Hamas.)

Danny Ayalon, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister, noted “that Hamas's charter includes the aspiration that ‘The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews)’.” In contrast, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pointed out that, “For us, every time there are civilian casualties, that’s an operational failure. For them, every time there are civilian casualties, that’s an operational success.”

In fact, an Israeli soldier cannot leave base without having in his or her possession the Israel Defense Forces Code of Ethics, including values like these: “The IDF serviceman will, above all, preserve human life, in the recognition of its supreme value and will place himself or others at risk solely to the extent required to carry out his mission.

“The sanctity of life in the eyes of the IDF servicemen will find expression in all of their actions, in deliberate and meticulous planning, in safe and intelligent training and in proper execution of their mission. In evaluating the risk to self and others, they will use the appropriate standards and will exercise constant care to limit injury to life to the extent required to accomplish the mission.”

Yet so much of the world still sees Israel as the evil aggressor, and when a caller to Geraldo Rivera’s KABC radio show observed that, “there's absolutely no moral equivalency between a free democratic nation trying to protect its citizens and a terrorist organization that's trying to sow conflict by firing rockets at innocent civilians from amongst highly populated residential, civilian areas,” Rivera replied, “No moral equivalency? Yeah, yeah, I get that too, I get that too, except that's not the way the world sees it. You know, that's just not the way the world sees it. And there is, you got 116 dead Palestinians and three dead Israelis. I mean, that’s a, where's the equivalence there either?”

If only there were more dead Jews!

In keeping with this perverse mentality, on November 20th, in an interview with Gil Hoffman of the Jerusalem Post, BBC World News presenter Mishal Hussein asked, “OK, you say that Israelis have been running for their lives ..erm…from rockets from Gaza, so tell me then; until this current confrontation, how many Israelis have been killed by these rockets from Gaza this year?”

Similarly, BBC correspondent Kevin Connolly claimed that on the Israeli side, “there is anxiety . . . there is fear,” whereas he claimed that the people of Gaza (in the words of one woman) are “surrounded by death.” Connolly also noted that, “I think we have to be clear about this, that there is an asymmetry in the casualty figures . . . and there is a colossal asymmetry in military hardware deployed here as well.”

How dare Israel defend itself so forcefully. And how dare its new Iron Dome defense system work so well in intercepting more than 400 Hamas rockets, including new long range missiles supplied by Iran. If only more Jews had been killed!

Even before Israel began its attack on Hamas last week, the student senate at the University of California Irvine (UCI) passed a resolution by a vote of 16-0, accusing Israel of “human rights abuse and institutionalized structural violence against the Palestinian people.” But terrorist groups like Hamas are apparently guilty of no such thing.

If only their rockets and missiles were more accurate. If only more Israelis died. Then Israel wouldn’t be quite so evil in the eyes of the world.

SOURCE

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

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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26 November, 2012

Socialized medicine in Sweden

Free medical care for all! What a wonderful socialist dream!

It's a dream that never works. Whenever it is attempted it leads to heavily rationed care at generally low standards. The GOP now seems inclined to give up the fight against Obamacare so America too will soon be getting its version of socialized medicine.

EVERY DAY I put up reports of the woeful way people are treated in Britain under socialized medicine and roughly a couple of days a week I put up similar reports from Australia. (See EYE ON BRITAIN and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

But what about Sweden? What about the socialist paradise? Surely it works there! It doesn't. I haven't got the time to blog regularly about the Swedish situation but below are three recent reports from Sweden that should steel the resolve of American conservatives not to give up the fight against Obamacare.

America's health system right now is not perfect but if you want to find out how bad it can become, just do nothing. Reports from Sweden follow. They are eerily similar to what we hear from Britain and Australia -- JR:

Child's appendix bursts after 20 hour ER wait

A nine-year-old boy with appendicitis was made to wait more than 20 hours for surgery at the emergency ward of a Stockholm-area children's hospital before his appendix finally burst.

William arrived at Astrid Lindgren Children's Hospital in Stockholm last Thursday after suffering stomach pains for days. He was immediately diagnosed with appendicitis, but then nothing happened.

After having his operation repeatedly pushed back by doctors, William's desperate parents were told by the chief surgeon that an operation would only be possible if it was carried out "the old-fashioned way", rather than using a procedure which resulted in less scarring.

"There was only one overnight operating room to handle all of Stockholm's children," William's father told DN. "I'm convinced that if we hadn't demanded to speak with the chief surgeon we would have had to wait yet another night."

But by the time doctors operated on the nine-year-old, his appendix had already burst, resulting in an extended hospital stay, two weeks of missed school, and no ice hockey for young William until after Christmas. "If they had operated sooner, I'd be home now," the nine-year-old told the paper.

Employees at the hospital acknowledged that patient safety is in jeopardy. "Tough budget cuts, staff shortages, and recruitment difficulties have unfortunately put more pressure on surgeries and meant that children and parents have had to wait longer as a result," a hospital employee told DN.

SOURCE

Man left with rotting leg after hospital 'loses' him

A 21-year-old Swedish man fears that he will be unable to walk unaided again after Linköping University Hospital lost track of him, leading to a delay in the treatment of a routine foot fracture.

John Bruhne broke his foot while skateboarding and was told by the hospital that he would be home within a couple of days. Six weeks and eight operations later Bruhne was however still in hospital, according to a report by Sveriges Television Östnytt.

The extended hospital stay was made necessary after staff at the hospital lost track of him as he was moved across several wards.

The subsequent delay in his treatment meant that the muscles surrounding the broken bone began to wither and rot.

Once the hospital had finally located him, Bruhne underwent an emergency operation and three muscles were removed from his bone. He has since undergone a further seven operations to address the injury and ensuing complications.

The 21-year-old expressed concern that he would be unable to make a full recovery from his injury. "Perhaps I will never be able to walk again. then I think about the sports. That I will never be able to play football or inner-bandy," he said to SVT. "It is awful that this type of thing has to happen just to save money."

The incident has been reported to the National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) in accordance with Sweden's Lex-Maria laws, the informal name for regulations governing the reporting of injuries and incidents in the healthcare system.

SOURCE

Swede forced to fake stroke to get x-ray for brain tumor

A Swedish man has reported his local hospital after being forced to fake stroke symptoms to finally get an x-ray, following years of debilitating headaches and high blood pressure.

“I have filed a report so that this won’t happen to others,” Mats Johannesson told The Local.

Johannesson, who is in his forties and was working as a truck driver, fell ill some five years ago. After seeking medical help from his local clinic in Mellerud he was referred to the nearest hospital, the Norra Älvsborgs lasarett, but was sent home again with some painkillers.

“I asked for an x-ray but they didn’t think there was enough reason to carry one out,” Johannsesson said.

This continued on and off for the next five years. By last summer, Johannesson had gone to hospital by ambulance 47 times. Every time he was sent back by taxi – and without the x-ray he asked for. “I have lived with this for so long now,” Johannesson said.

On the May 20th this year, Johannesson collapsed again but was sent home once more without an x-ray. When it happened again on July 19th Johannesson was determined not to be brushed off. “I thought to myself ‘ I am going to get a scan this time’,” Johannesson told The Local.

When the doctor came to check him over, Johannesson therefore pretended to have had a stroke, making himself go limp on the left side of his body . When the attending physician asked him to touch his nose with his fingertips, he missed on purpose.

“And then they got worried and I was taken for an emergency x-ray straight away,” Johannesson said.

When they had performed the scan the doctor told him that there was no haemorrhage but that they had detected a tumour in his brain. He is now getting anti-retroviral drugs and is set to be admitted to hospital in two weeks.

Johannesson has now reported the hospital to the National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen). The hospital is also conducting an internal investigation and mulling reporting itself in accordance with Lex Maria regulations on reporting instances of patient harm in the Swedish healthcare system.

“I am frankly furious with what has happened. I could have been spared all these years’ suffering. When I was put on the drugs the symptoms disappeared over night,” Johannesson told The Local.

SOURCE

Note: Strictly speaking, Swedish healthcare is not wholly socialized. There is some choice of hospital. But most Swedes end up relying on the local government hospital, as we see above. Obamacare will not be fully socialized either in that many people will retain private insurance. But those who rely on Obamacare will have experiences such as the above

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Failures of Intelligence

Mark Steyn

I blow hot and cold on the Petraeus sex scandal. Initially, it seemed the best shot at getting a largely uninterested public to take notice of the national humiliation and subsequent cover-up over the deaths of American diplomats and the sacking of our consulate in Benghazi.

On the other hand, everyone involved in this sorry excuse for a sex scandal seems to have been too busy e-mailing each other to have had any sex. The FBI was initially reported to have printed out 20,000–30,000 pages of e-mails and other communications between General Allen, U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and Jill Kelley of Tampa, one-half of a pair of identical twins dressed like understudies for the CentCom mess-hall production of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Thirty thousand pages! The complete works of Shakespeare come to about three and a half thousand pages, but American officials can’t even have a sex scandal without getting bogged down in the paperwork.

For the cost of running those FBI documents off the photocopier, you could fly some broad to the Bahamas and have a real sex scandal. Instead, we’ll “investigate” it for a year or three, as we’re doing with Benghazi itself. At her press conference the other day, soon-to-be Secretary of State Susan Rice explained that she would be misspeaking if she were to explain why she misspoke about Benghazi until something called the “Accountability Review Board” has finished “conducting investigations” into “all aspects” of the investigations being conducted, which should be completed by roughly midway through Joe Biden’s second term.

Pending that “definitive accounting,” one or two aspects stand out. Paula Broadwell had access to General Petraeus because she was supposedly writing his biography. As it turns out, she can’t write, so her publisher was obliged to hire a ghostwriter from the Washington Post. Some years ago, at a low point in my career, I was asked to ghostwrite a book for a supermodel. That’s usually the type of “writer” who requires a ghost: models, singers, athletes, celebrities. When a first-time biographer requires a ghostwriter, that person is not a biographer but something else. Yet she had classified documents at her home — and yes, as the president suggested, they’re probably not that classified, not the real top-secret stuff. But in a speech at the University of Denver Mrs. Broadwell appeared to reveal accidentally that she is privy to operational knowledge of illegal CIA interrogation chambers in Benghazi.

Now let us move from General Petraeus’s mistress to General Allen’s non-mistress, Tampa socialite and identical twin Jill Kelley. Mrs. Kelley had clearance for all parts of the MacDill Air Base and was given some kind of commemorative certificate as “honorary ambassador” to CentCom, on the basis of which, in a recent 9-1-1 call, she claimed the right to “diplomatic protection.” Yeah, that’s what Chris Stevens thought in Benghazi. As appears to be well known, the Kelleys have financial problems and their luxury home faces foreclosure. For a while they ran a charity, the Doctor Kelley Cancer Foundation, which makes terminal cancer patients’ final wishes come true. In 2007, they took in $157,284 in donations, and ran up expenses of $81,927 on dining, entertainment, and travel. So, if you’ve got cancer and your dying wish is for Jill Kelley to party, this is the charity for you.

In other words, neither of these women pass the smell test. Which is a problem insofar as Petraeus, as CIA director, is supposed to be head of the national smell test, and General Allen, as Petraeus’s successor in Kabul, is supposed to be head of the smell test in Afghanistan. In the Gaza “peace agreement” signed last week, they flew in Hillary Clinton to give the impression that she had something to do with it, whereas in reality she was entirely peripheral to the deal. But Jill Kelley is apparently essential to anything that matters in CentCom: When Pastor Terry Jones was threatening to burn a Koran, General Allen asked Mrs. Kelley to mediate. When radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge was threatening to “deep-fat fry” a Koran, General Allen recommended the mayor of Tampa ask Mrs. Kelley to intervene.

The U.S. government is responsible for 43 percent of the planet’s military spending, and apparently all that gets you is that, when the feces hits the fan, the four-star brass start e-mailing Jill Kelley of Tampa. If only she’d been hosting a champagne reception at the Sigonella air base in southern Italy, maybe we could have parachuted her into Benghazi to defuse the situation. Jill is the woman Hillary can only dream of being — at the confluence of all the great geostrategic currents of the age. Why didn’t we fly Jill Kelley to broker the Gaza deal? Instead of a patsy peddling risible talking points like Susan Rice, why can’t we have Jill Kelley as secretary of state?

As far as I can tell, our enemies in Afghanistan don’t go in for Soviet-style honey traps. Which is just as well, considering the ease with which, say, a pretend biographer can wind up sitting next to the U.S. commander on his personal Gulfstream. In different ways, Director Petraeus’s judgment and Director Clapper’s obtuseness testify to the problems of America’s vast, sprawling, over-bureaucratized intelligence community. If Director Petraeus can’t see the obvious under his nose in his interventions in the Kelley twins’ various difficulties, why would you expect Director Clapper to have any greater grasp of what’s happening in Cairo or Damascus?

Having consolidated his grip in Egypt, Morsi is now looking beyond. His “peace deal” legitimizes the Muslim Brotherhood’s affiliate in Gaza, and increases the likelihood of the Brothers advancing to power in Syria and elsewhere. As on that night in Benghazi when the most lavishly funded military/intelligence operation on the planet watched for eight hours as a mob devoured America’s emissaries, America in a broader sense is a spectator in its own fate. As for Afghanistan, it seems a fitting comment on America’s longest unwon war that the last two U.S. commanders exit in a Benny Hill finale, trousers round their ankles, pursued to speeded-up chase music by bunny-boiling mistresses, stalker socialites, identical twins, and Bubba the Love Sponge.

SOURCE

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Eliminating corporate tax for U.S. firms will create American jobs

One idea policymakers might consider in the upcoming calendar year is the elimination of the corporate income tax for goods and services produced here in the U.S. Senator Rick Santorum touted a similar proposal on the campaign trail during the Republican presidential primary.

At 35 percent, the U.S. has the highest such tax rate in the developed world, more than even Japan. Combined with an ever-weakening dollar, high labor costs, and a regulatory environment that would make Soviet Russia blush, there is an enormous disincentive for new companies to ever set up shop here.

But, with the population growing as fast as it is, the private sector in particular, which employs 85 percent of workers, will need to expand robustly in order to get everyone back to work and the economy back on track. We cannot all work for the government.

So, it needs to become a whole lot cheaper to do business here. And until it does, there is little reason to expect the job market to improve dramatically as the U.S. fails to compete globally for capital.

U.S. exporters should be encouraged too to repatriate profits made overseas back into the country by restoring the foreign income tax credit. They should not be paying any taxes either on those profits.

Relative to individual income and payroll taxes that raise $2 trillion annually, the corporate tax does not raise that much revenue anyway — just $240 billion.

But if eliminating it for goods and services produced here — and halving it as Santorum suggested for all other firms — could help create just half of the jobs needed this decade, much of that revenue would eventually be made up for. The deficit would be reduced further by saving hundreds of billions from unemployment, food stamps, and other welfare programs.

Some will object to favorable treatment or incentives for domestic industries, label it protectionism, or warn of a trade war with overseas competitors. But would those not be the same arguments against a stronger dollar or rolling back restrictive domestic regulations that might make it cheaper to do business here? Those policies would be beneficial to many U.S.-based firms, too.

With any policy, there will always be winners and losers. In this case, the idea would be to create jobs here to accommodate a growing population, not to favor any particular industry’s bottom line.

Consider the alternative, which is to stay on the path we have laid out for ourselves as a nation the past many years.

A failure to create 40 million jobs this decade will mean millions more people becoming dependent on government benefits — essentially creating a permanent underclass. Making matters worse, already dire public finances would become even more swamped, as a dwindling base of taxpayers are expected to pay more of the bills.

At that stage, politicians will be tempted to raise taxes further to reduce the deficit — only even worse than is being called for today. All of which would place even further pressure on job creators, shift more capital overseas, and push more Americans into the ranks of the unemployed — a vicious cycle.

That is why the best social program is a job. The most urgent question facing the nation now is how best to create new ones here.

In the meantime, now is not the time to raise taxes on the job creators we do have during this month’s fiscal cliff negotiations. If anything, politicians need to find ways to make it less expensive to do business here so we all can get back to work. Assuming anyone’s listening, eliminating the corporate tax for U.S. businesses might be a good place to start.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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25 November, 2012

The death of simplicity

I sometimes think (but have no intention of acting on it or urging others to) that the world would be a better place if all architects were shot. In their desperation for "originality" and novelty, architects these days seem to specialize in designing structures that are ever more ugly and dysfunctional. A return to simpler, more traditional forms would work better, look better and cost a lot less.

But the desperation for originality is not confined to architects. It is society-wide. There is a society-wide fascination with the new. For many poor souls, it is prestigious to have the newest of everything.

But that novelty is almost always dysfunctional in at least one way: complexity. New things are usually more complex than the old. And that gets very tiring. Thomas Sowell gives some excellent examples in his comments about hotels below -- points that will undoubtedly be ignored by all hotels. His points clash with the ego needs of the hoteliers. They see prestige in having "the latest" of everything, regardless of how well "the latest" works.

I have lived long enough to have had a stream of electronic gadgets pass through my hands: radios, phones, TVs etc. And each generation of them gets harder to use. As Sowell found, the days of turning on a TV and using a simple rotary dial to find a station are long gone. When you buy a new TV there are all sorts of complex performances required before any stations are accessible -- and poring over a manual to see what is required is a must. And even after that ritual has been performed, changing stations can still be a puzzle for a while.

I don't suppose anybody uses VHS videotape recorders any more but they were a good example of the problem too. If you had a power outage, all your settings were lost and there were guys who made a good living going around after outages and resetting videorecorders for confused ladies.

I myself took revenge on this loss of simplicity by doing something very eccentric: I paid $300 for my kitchen radio (Illustration here). Why did I do that? I bought it because it was simple. On the front on it are only three controls: An on/off switch, a tuning dial and a volume knob. I could use it the moment I turned it on! Expensive though! -- JR

Few things can make you appreciate home like staying in a hotel. This includes not only low-budget, bare bones hotels but also sweepingly large and ornate luxury hotels. What many hotels seem to have in common are needless hassles.

Since most people who stay in hotels do so while traveling, and stay only a few days in a given hotel, you might think that those who run hotels would want to make it easy for someone who arrives a little tired (or a lot tired) from traveling to use the various devices they find in their hotel room. But you would be wrong. That thought never seems to have crossed their minds.

Recently, at a well-known luxury hotel in Los Angeles, I found that something as simple as turning on a television set can require a phone call to the front desk, and then waiting for the arrival of a technician. Then it took another phone call to get a list of which of the dozens of channels were for which networks.

Why the turning on of a television set should be anything other than obvious to a newly arrived hotel guest is apparently a question that never occurred to the people who ran this hotel. Nor did it apparently ever occur to them that someone just arriving from a journey might want to be able to relax, instead of having to cope with complications that the hotel could easily have avoided.

The next morning, in the shower, I found myself confronted with a dazzling array of knobs and levers, none of which provided any clue as to what they did. The lever rotated and four of the surrounding knobs both rotated and tilted forward and backward.

Apparently it was not considered sporting to come right out and tell you how to get hot water or cold water. That was something you could find out for yourself by being either scalded or chilled.

Being fancy and opaque seemed to be the guiding principle. Getting on the Internet required another phone call to the front desk. In fact, it required two phone calls, because I was first referred to the wrong technical support group.

It is easier to get on the Internet at almost any institution other than a hotel. And, at this particular hotel, you had to go through the whole procedure every day, instead of just signing up for Internet access for your entire stay when you checked in or logged on.

Being a luxury hotel, this one provided bathrobes. But I had my own bathrobe. At least I had it until the maids took it away when cleaning the room while I was out. Another phone call to the front desk.

Since my bathrobe was a white, terry-cloth robe and the hotel's robes were a light tan and made of a different material, I thought there was no danger that one would be mistaken for the other. But I was wrong.

Just how wrong I discovered when, after a long delay, late at night when I wanted to get to sleep, a man appeared with a large bag containing two bathrobes. Apparently their search had also turned up another guest's bathrobe that the maids had taken. It looked even less like the hotel's bathrobe than mine did.

Something as simple as turning on a light can be a puzzle at some hotels. Again, the fatal allure of the fancy seems to be the problem with people who choose things to put in hotel rooms. Moreover, it is not uncommon for different lamps in the same hotel room to have different fancy ways of being turned on.

Years ago, at a hotel where I stayed for a week, it was only on the last day that I finally figured out, or stumbled on, the way to turn one of the floor lamps off and on.

Since I was very busy on that trip, I didn't feel like adding this to the list of things to phone the front desk about, especially late at night, when I was more interested in getting to sleep than in waiting for some technician to show up and unravel the mystery.

After my misadventures in Los Angeles, I was off to San Diego, where a hotel maid had to replace a light bulb in the bedroom and a technician had to fix a lamp in the living room. Later I had to fix a toilet that kept running after being flushed. I once had a toilet like that at home, so I knew what to do. But I replaced my malfunctioning toilet at home, unlike the hotel.

No amount of fancy things makes up for hassles.

SOURCE

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The Twinkies story reviewed

Mike Shedlock returns to the fray below. His summary is good but I think he takes insufficient account of history.

The union concerned is one of those power-drunk unions that repeatedly made restrictive and uneconomic demands that deprived management of the ability to manage. Such unions can only be crushed rather than reformed -- as Ronald Reagan showed with PATCO and Margaret Thatcher showed with the Fleet St print unions.

So the bosses at Hostess must have been heartily tired of dealing with the thugs concerned and the big money the bosses paid themselves were a "golden escape" for them -- to make it easy on themselves if they had to shut down the company. (All value for the shareholders had already been lost through the earlier bankruptcy proceedings).

So Leftists rage at the money paid to management but if the union had been reasonable neither the big money to management nor the job losses would have been needed. Both the big money to management and the shutdown were revenge for years of union thuggery.

The big money to management might even have been foreseen by management as a provocation that would cause the union to dig its heels in and thus justify the shutdown. So an embittered management punched the union oppressors in the face by making them responsible for 15,000 lost jobs -- JR

At least a dozen readers sent emails in response to my previous two posts on Twinkies.

One misguided soul from the Netherlands wrote "Your article on the bankruptcy of Hostess is so extremely biased. I am NOT surprised because you're ALWAYS bashing the unions."

Many emails including the one from the Netherlands pointed to articles such as Vulture capitalism ate your Hostess Twinkies.

One person accused me of being an extreme right-winger. I also received comments about me being an extreme left-wing Obama fan.

Silliness is clearly in the eyes of the beholder as it is impossible for both of those to be true. (In fact, neither is true because I am issue-based, not political party based, and I have huge differences with both major political parties).

I sometimes wonder if people can read. Regarding Twinkies, I distinctly stated on my blog and I repeat ...

"There is plenty of blame to go around, including untenable wages and benefits, leveraged debt, untenable management salaries etc.

However, the enabling factor behind the debt is loose monetary policy by the Fed coupled with fractional reserve lending. Factor in unions and corrupt management and there is no way the company could make it without huge concessions from the union.

Still, it is difficult to have much sympathy for those who vote to have no job in these trying times.

The union will likely see pension benefits slashed by 50% or more when handed over to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC). The PBGC is of course US taxpayers who should not have to pick up any of this tab at all (but they will)."

The person who accused me of being an extreme right-winger heard me on Coast-to-Coast where I mentioned "vulture capitalists" and leveraged debt.

So yes, I am aware of leverage. I am also aware of huge raises and other poor management decisions. The facts remain as follows

* The Fed's loose monetary policy and fractional reserve lending enable leveraged buyouts

* The unions made a piss poor choice

* Past is Irrelevant

There was an offer on the table that would have saved 15,000 jobs. The union said no. Are those 15,000 people better off with no job than a job?

That is all that matters. Management salaries and leveraged debt are in effect sunken costs. If the majority of those people can go out and find a better deal, then they made the correct choice. If not, they didn't.

Given that accrued pension benefits went up in smoke in addition to all those jobs, I strongly suggest the union made a very poor choice.

I freely admit that if a majority of those workers can find better jobs with better benefits, then I am mistaken. However, that begs the question: If those workers could do better elsewhere, than why were they working for Hostess in the first place?

Like it or not, nothing else matters. Cutting off your nose (or your job) to spite management is not a smart thing to do.

SOURCE

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A vast moral difference

by Jeff Jacoby

Palestinians have a fierce new song to accompany their intensified conflict with Israel. "Strike a Blow at Tel Aviv," recorded by Shadi al-Bourini and Qassem al-Najjar, was posted last week on various Palestinian websites, including the Facebook page of the TV show Fenjan Al-Balad, which describes its mission as "trying to influence young Palestinian society for the better." The video, which features images of wounded Israelis and massed Qassam artillery rockets, opens with these lines:

Strike a blow at Tel Aviv.
Strike a blow at Tel Aviv.
Strike a blow at Tel Aviv and frighten the Zionists.
The more you build it, the more we will destroy it.
Strike a blow at Tel Aviv.

Over a driving beat, the lyrics (translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute) grow increasingly bellicose. "We don't want no truce or bargain," they proclaim. They exhort the missiles to "explode in the Knesset" and "terrorize Tel Aviv," while mocking the Israelis in bomb shelters who "cower with fear."

There have been many Israeli war songs over the years. Indeed, the endless conflict with the Arabs has engendered some of Israel's most enduring music. But most of it revolves around a longing for peace and the desire for normality. An Israeli equivalent of "Strike a Blow at Tel Aviv," ecstatic at the prospect of killing the enemy, is virtually unthinkable.

Other Palestinian videos have also been getting attention this week. Al-Aqsa TV, the official Hamas-run television channel, has been airing messages that extol suicide bombings and advise Israelis to get ready for more of them. "We've missed the suicide attacks," one video jeers. "Expect us soon at bus stations and in cafés." A second, along with video of rockets being fired into Israel, warns "the Zionists" not to go to bed: "We may get you in your sleep." In still another, Hamas reiterates the oft-repeated boast of murderous jihadists everywhere: "[We] love death more than you love life."

Media coverage of the hostilities in Gaza tends to focus on rockets and casualties and diplomatic maneuvering. Not emphasized nearly enough is the vast moral distance that separates Israel from its terrorist enemy. Israel and Hamas are not at war over territory. What divides them is an unbridgeable cultural abyss. On one side is a Jewish state that seeks peace with its neighbors and has repeatedly offered deep concessions to achieve it; on the other, a fanatic regime of jihadists who glorify death, abominate Jews – and are obsessed with eradicating that solitary Jewish state.

"Our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave," avows the hate-drenched Hamas charter. Success will not come, declares Article 7, "until Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them; until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: 'O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!'"

By now it shouldn't come as news that Hamas means what it says. By now it should be obvious even to the congenitally naïve that so long as Hamas rules Gaza – a de facto Palestinian state, no matter what anyone calls it – it will never end its quest for Israel's annihilation. To Western eyes that may seem an improbable objective, given Israel's enormous military edge. But Hamas understands the value of terror. When it can send hundreds of rockets slamming over the border, when it can force Israelis to listen constantly for the siren that means they have just 15 seconds to find shelter, Hamas inches toward its goal. And when Israel finally retaliates and only then does an international uproar ensue, Hamas inches closer still.

What can diplomacy achieve with an enemy that rejects the basic norms of international behavior? That is not only indifferent to the suffering of its own people, but welcomes it for its propaganda value? That rejoices in suicide terrorism, and runs TV spots promising more of it?

Diplomacy cannot solve the problem of terrorist regimes. Neither can unilateral concessions or UN resolutions. The only solution is to deprive the terrorists of power. So long as Gaza remains a Hamas-ruled tyranny, peace will remain but a dream.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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23 November, 2012

The Origins of Thanksgiving

by ADRIAN MORGAN

The story of Thanksgiving is one that involves many of the great things that are generally associated with America – but it has become infused with myth. The Pilgrim Fathers are sometimes portrayed as “Puritans” which they were not. In many ways the Pilgrims were free thinkers. Several who had made the journey from Plymouth had earlier been living as exiles in the Netherlands.

The original Pilgrims belonged to the “English Dissenters” a religious group who wanted to worship God in their own way, without belonging to the hierarchical state church. At that time, they had suffered persecutions for not attending official “Anglican” church services. Genuine Puritans obliged the government of King James I, and attended Church of England services. Anyone who did not attend these official Sunday services was fined. Two of the leaders of the English Dissenters had been executed for “sedition,” and these executions hastened the desire of the Pilgrims to leave England. The Netherlands had provided a safe refuge for many of their number, but America seemed more promising.

There were two boats that were scheduled to make the journey – the Mayflower and also the Speedwell. The latter boat developed problems on two initial attempts to set sail, and eventually only the Mayflower crossed the Atlantic, leaving in September of 1620. A year earlier, the Pilgrims had gained a permit to settle in North Virginia in 1619.

William Bradford (1590 – 1657), a 30-year old man at the time of the journey, would write a journal, whose contents were later published as “Of Plymouth Plantation.” He was traveling with his wife, but they had to leave their four-year old son behind. At this time, the troupe of Pilgrims heading for America were calling themselves “The Saints.” On November 11, 1620, they arrived in Cape Cod. The “Saints” were happy when they had arrived, but Bradford noted:

"But hear I cannot but stay and make a pause, and stand half amased at this poore peoples presente condition; and so I thinke will the reader too, when he well considered ye same. Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation (as may be remembred by yt which wente before), they had now no friends to wellcome them, nor inns to entertaine or refresh their weatherbeaten bodys, no houses or much less townes to repaire too, to seeke for succoure. .."

On November 15, a smaller boat (a sloop, called a “shallop” by Bradford) was sent out with an advance party, while the majority of the Pilgrims remained in the Mayflower. The first Native Americans encountered by the advance party were fearful and retreated into woods. When a band of about thirty settlers came across an abandoned village, they appear to have stolen what they could. As Bradford wrote:

"ther was allso found 2. of their houses covered with matts, and sundrie of their implements in them, but the people were rune away and could not be seen; also ther was found more of their corne, and of their beans of various collours. The corne and beans they brought away, purposing to give them full satisfaction when they should meete with any of them (as about some 6. months afterward they did, to their good contente).

And here is to be noted a speciall providente of God, and a great mercie to this poore people, that hear they gott seed to plant them corne the next year, or els they might have starved, for they had none, nor any liklyhood to get any till the season had beene past (as the sequell did manyfest). Neither is it lickly they had had this, if the first viage had not been made, for the ground was now all covered with snow, and hard frozen. But the Lord is never wanting unto his in their greatest needs; let his holy name have all the praise."

The sloop made its way further down the coast, and at one stage, near a point where a natural harbor was discovered, there was a confrontation with the “Indians”. The exploratory party retrieved their arms and cutlasses and most of the indigenous people retreated, but one man hid behind a tree and continued to fire arrows at the settlers. A musket ball fired into the trunk sent splinters flying and the archer ran off.

The natural harbour lay near an area that had fresh running streams and had been cleared for farming, with cornfields. This was the site of a former village of the Patuxet, who had been virtually exterminated by plagues (probably smallpox), brought by contact with English fishermen, between 1616 and 1619.

The site of the former Patuxet community was chosen to be the place where the Pilgrims would establish their home. When the exploring party arrived back at the Mayflower, Bradford would discover that his wife Dorothy had slipped off the side of the ship and had drowned. No mention of this event is made in his journal, and some historians have suggested that Dorothy Bradford may have committed suicide.

On December 16 the exploratory party returned to the harbor and on December 25, they began to construct the first building, a communal house. The remainder of the Pilgrims resided in what was felt to be the comparative safety of the Mayflower, but conditions were bad. As Bradford recorded:

"In these hard and difficulte beginings they found some discontents and murmurings arise amongst some, and mutinous speeches and carriags in other; but they were soone quelled and overcome by the wisdome, patience, and just and equall carrage of things by the Govr and better part, which clave faithfully togeather in the maine. But that which was most sadd and lamentable was, that in 2. or 3. moneths time halfe of their company dyed, especialy in Jan : and February, being the depth of winter, and wanting houses and other comforts; being infected with the scurvie and other diseases, which this long vioage and their inacomodate condition had brought upon them; so as ther dyed some times 2. or 3. of a day, in the foresaid time; that of 100. and odd persons, scarce 50. remained., And of these in the time of most distres, ther was but 6. or 7. sound persons, who, to their great comendations be it spoken, spared no pains, night nor day, but with abundante of toyle and hazard of their owne health, fetched them woode, made them fires, drest them meat, made their beads, washed their lothsome cloaths, cloathed and uncloathed them; in a word, did all the homly and necessarie offices for them which dainty and quesie stomacks cannot endure to hear named; and all this willingly and cherfully, without any grudging in the least, shewing herein their true love unto their freinds and bretheren. A rare example and worthy to be remembred. Tow of these 7. were Mr. William Brewster, ther reverend Elder, and Myles Standish, ther Captein and military comander, unto whom my selfe, and many others, were much beholden in our low and sicke condition."

Losing more than half of their number was a blow. Of the 102 people who had left Plymouth in England, only 44 survived. As the Mayflower settlers tried to establish the settlement which would later be known as Plymouth:

All this while the Indians carne skulking about them, and would sometimes show them selves aloofe of, but when any aproached near them, they would rune away. And once they stoale away their tools wher they had been at worke, and were gone to diner.

On March 16, one native man named Samaset introduced himself to them, and he could speak limited English. The stolen tools were returned. Samaset introduced them to another man called Squanto, who had been in England. Squanto (Tisquantum) was a Patuxet who had earlier been abducted by a slaver and was taken to Spain, but he had fled to England. From there he had joined with a merchant who had gone to Newfoundland, and from there Squanto had returned to the North Virginia (New England) coast. Squanto would act as interpreter and would be a friend to the Pilgrims until his death. A few days after their first encounter, Squanto and Samaset would introduce the Pilgrims to their “sachem” or leader, Massasoit. This man was the head of the Pokanoket and head of the Wampanoag confederacy of tribes.

Massasoit negotiated a treaty with John Carver, the leader of the Plymouth settlers, where both sides agreed to assist the other if attacked by hostile groups. The treaty maintained that there would be mutual respect and if any individual from either side had transgressed against the other group, he would be given up to the other side for punishment. Carver would die within a month, and in his place William Bradford became the governor of Plymouth.
Around the middle of July 1623, after a prolonged period of drought, the settlers prayed for deliverance. When the rains fell, as Bradford reported:

"It came, without either wind, or thunder, or any violence, and by degreese in that abundance, as that the earth was thorowly wete and soked therwith. Which did so apparently revive and quicken the decayed corne and other fruits, as was wonderfull to see, and made the Indeans astonished to behold; and afterwards the Lord sent them shuch seasonable showers, with enterchange of faire warme weather, as, through his blessing, caused a fruitfull and liberall harvest, to their no small comforte and rejoycing. For which mercie (in time conveniente) they also sett aparte a day of thanksgiveing. This being overslipt in its place, I thought meet here to inserte the same."

Here, then, is the first mention of a day being set aside for Thanksgiving, though in Bradford’s “On Plymouth Plantation,” the exact date of when this day of Thanksgiving was first celebrated is not mentioned.

A supposed “Thanksgiving proclamation” by Bradford claims that the Thanksgiving Day should be on November 29, though the words of this proclamation are almost certainly a 20th century invention. The signing of this so-called proclamation document is patently absurd – “Ye Governor of Ye Colony.” The term “ye” is a quaint pseudo-medievalism more suited to Robin Hood movies starring Erroll Flynn and set in a mythical “Merrie England” than it is to William Bradford. Certainly, a tourist in England can frequently encounter some ghastly cafe calling itself “Ye Olde Tea Shoppe,” but despite his arcane and irregular spelling, Bradford’s command of English language is sophisticated and close to modern speech. Nowhere does he substitute the word “the” with “ye.”

Hoax documents aside, the first Thanksgivings would probably have been a similar event to the Harvest Festivals traditionally practiced in England and elsewhere. These traditionally take place on the Sunday nearest the Harvest Moon (the full moon closest to the Fall Equinox – September 23).

Moving forward in time, the first authentic document of a “Thanksgiving Proclamation” is by George Washington, in which he suggested that a “Day of Publick Thanksgiving and Prayer” should be held on Thursday, November 26, 1789. The full original text of this proclamation, written in New York on October 3, 1789, is available on the Family Security Matters website today.

Washington’s attempt to institute a national Thanksgiving Day did not become accepted as an official national holiday for another seventy four years. Thanksgiving celebrations took place, but at various times in various regions. There was no unifying date or “movable feast” day that could be agreed on throughout all the states. The person who was most influential in getting a national day of Thanksgiving officially inaugurated was Sarah Josepha Hale (1788 – 1879). Hale, an editor and writer petitioned four presidents - Zachary Taylor, Millard Filmore, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan – to persuade them to institute a national day of Thanksgiving.

As editor of the Ladies Book, Hale wrote in 1851:

“Thanks- giving Day is the national pledge of Christian faith in God acknowledging him as the dispenser of blessings .... The observance of the day has been gradually extending, and for a few years past efforts have been made to have a fixed day which will be universally observed throughout the country .... The last Thursday in November was selected as the day, on a whole, most appropriate."

On September 28, 1863, then aged 74, Sarah Josepha Hale wrote to Abraham Lincoln. She requested that the “day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival... You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritive fixation, only, to become permanently, an American custom and institution.”

In 1863, America was in the midst of Civil War, but the notion of Thanksgiving was taken up by President Abraham Lincoln. His proclamation announcing the official inauguration of Thanksgiving Day. was delivered on October 3, 1863, the anniversary of George Washington’s proclamation. This was five weeks before he gave his famous Gettysburg Address.

SOURCE

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What America's founding communists can teach us

The Separatist Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock in November 1620 began their new settlement utilizing overtly communist economic principles. In addition to common ownership of the land, the Pilgrims farmed corn on a communal plot and divided their harvest evenly amongst themselves.

This is the theoretical Marxist utopia — minus indoor plumbing, NPR, MSNBC and portable electronic devices powered by Solyndra solar panels, naturally. But did this early communist experiment work? Did it succeed at putting food on the table?

Not according to William Bradford, an early Pilgrim governor of the colony best known today as the “Father of Thanksgiving.”

The communal arrangement initially employed by the Pilgrims was “found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort,” Bradford wrote in his journal, which was later compiled into Of Plymouth Plantation.

Why did this arrangement fail? Because as has been the case from time immemorial, the equitable division of inequitably produced assets did not sit well with those whose labors yielded the harvest.

“For the young men, that were most able and fit for labor and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense,” Bradford wrote.

But enmity amongst settlers wasn’t the real problem encountered at Plymouth — it was a shortage of food. In his book Mayflower: A Story of Courage Community and War historian Nathaniel Philbrick discusses how communal farming and common ownership produced a “disastrous harvest.”

Faced with the prospect of starvation, Bradford “decided that each household should be assigned its own plot to cultivate, with the understanding that each family kept whatever it grew,” according to Philbrick.

Not surprisingly this approach replaced infighting and starvation with harmony and industry — not to mention an abundance of food.

“This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content,” Bradford wrote.

In other words where top-down planning based on communist ideology failed — the enforcement of private property rights based on free market ideology succeeded.

“The change in attitude was stunning,” Philbrick writes. “Families were now willing to work much harder than they had ever worked before.”

“The Pilgrims had stumbled on the power of capitalism,” Philbrick added, noting that “although the fortunes of the colony still teetered precariously in the years ahead, the inhabitants never again starved.”

As the United States moves further away from its free market foundation this Thanksgiving, the example of Plymouth is worth considering. It is a cautionary tale — a grim reminder of where the federal government’s present trajectory is going to take our nation.

Already the “fair share” policies of Barack Obama — who is making good on his stated desire to “spread the wealth” around — have failed to produce the promised economic recovery. In fact America’s central bank is now printing money indefinitely as government’s debt and unfunded liabilities race past the threshold of sustainability.

The result of this “stimulus?” Income levels are shrinking, joblessness remains chronically high and economic growth is anemic. And lurking around the corner are massive tax hikes and the full implementation of Obama’s socialized medicine law — both of which will result in additional large-scale shifts from the “makers” to the “takers” in our society.

Incentivizing dependency has clearly failed to stimulate our economy. From 2000-10, government’s cash assistance to the poor increased by 68 percent — after adjusting for inflation. Health care assistance increased by 87 percent, housing assistance by 108 percent and food assistance by 139 percent — again, all after adjusting for inflation. Still, poverty in America climbed from 11.3 to 15.1 percent during that time period.

Government efforts to combat poverty have produced more poverty, in other words — and based on the ongoing entitlement expansion, the worst is likely yet to come.

As we gather together to celebrate Thanksgiving this year, let’s not only remember the lessons of Plymouth — let’s commit to proclaiming the virtues of self-reliance, property rights and free markets more boldly than ever. Otherwise we’ll have even less to be thankful about next year.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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22 November, 2012

Some history

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Twinkies and golden eggs

Union demands have served to decrease number of jobs

By THOMAS SOWELL

Killing the goose that lays the golden egg is one of those fairy tales with a heavy message that a lot of adults should listen to. The labor unions that have driven the makers of Twinkies into bankruptcy, potentially destroying 18,500 jobs (subject to court-ordered mediation), could learn a lot from that old fairy tale.
Many people think of labor unions as organizations to benefit workers, and think of employers who are opposed to unions as just people who don't want to pay their employees more money. But some employers have made it a point to pay their employees more than the union wages, just to keep them from joining a union.

Why would they do that, if it is just a question of not wanting to pay union wages? The Hostess Brands bankruptcy is a classic example of costs created by labor unions that are not confined to paychecks.

The work rules imposed in union contracts required Hostess, which makes Twinkies and Wonder Bread, to deliver these two products to stores in separate trucks. Moreover, truck drivers were not allowed to load either of these products into their trucks. And the people who did load Twinkies into trucks were not allowed to load Wonder Bread, and vice versa.

All of this was obviously intended to create more jobs for the unions' members. But the needless additional costs that these make-work rules created ended up driving the company into bankruptcy, which can cost 18,500 jobs. The union is killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

Not only are there reasons for employers to pay their workers enough to keep them from joining unions, there are reasons why workers in the private sector have increasingly voted against joining unions. They have seen unions driving jobs away to nonunion competitors at home or driving them overseas, whether with costly work rules or in other ways.

The legendary labor leader John L. Lewis called so many strikes in the coal mines that many people switched to using heating oil instead, because they couldn't depend on coal deliveries. A professor of labor economics at the University of Chicago called John L. Lewis "the world's greatest oil salesman."

There is no question that Lewis' United Mine Workers Union raised the pay and other benefits for coal miners. But the higher costs of producing coal not only led many consumers to switch to oil, these costs also led coal companies to substitute machinery for labor, reducing the number of miners.

By the 1960s, many coal-mining towns were almost ghost towns. But few people connected the dots back to the glory years of John L. Lewis. The United Mine Workers Union did not kill the goose that laid the golden eggs, but it created a situation where fewer of those golden eggs reached the miners.

It was much the same story in the automobile industry and the steel industry, where large pensions and costly work rules drove up the prices of finished products and drove down the number of jobs. There is a reason why there was a major decline in the proportion of private sector employees who joined unions. It was not just the number of union workers who ended up losing their jobs. Other workers saw the handwriting on the wall and refused to join unions.

There is also a reason why labor unions are flourishing among people who work for government. No matter how much these public sector unions drive up costs, government agencies do not go out of business. They simply go back to the taxpayers for more money.

Consumers in the private sector have the option of buying products and services from competing, non-union companies-- from Toyota instead of General Motors, for example, even though most Toyotas sold in America are made in America. Consumers of other products can buy things made in non-union factories overseas.

But government agencies are monopolies. You cannot get your Social Security checks from anywhere except the Social Security Administration or your driver's license from anywhere but the DMV.

Is it surprising that government employees have seen their pay go up, even during economic downturns, and their pensions rise to levels undreamed of in the private sector? None of this will kill the goose that lays the golden egg, so long as there are both current taxpayers and future taxpayers to pay off debts passed on to them.

SOURCE

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The Horrors of FEMA Disaster 'Relief'; the Glory of Private Efforts

Chuck Norris

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'" -- President Ronald Reagan

Those wise and yet haunting words spoken by one of our nation's greatest presidents couldn't ring more true -- especially today, as winter sets in on an estimated 130,000 of our fellow Americans who are still struggling without power. Many live without heat, hot water or inhabitable homes and question the government's efforts to alleviate their condition.

Amid the election frenzy, several mainstream media outlets instantly praised the Obama administration's response to the Hurricane Sandy devastation in the Northeast. But let's look beneath the congratulatory headlines to see the real and horrifying picture of what's happening.

Right now, homeless Americans are literally freezing, wrapped in blankets and trash bags as they struggle to survive in FEMA tent cities such as New Jersey's "Camp Freedom," which reportedly "resembles a prison camp."

"Sitting there last night, you could see your breath," displaced resident Brian Sotelo told the Asbury Park Press. "At (Pine Belt), the Red Cross made an announcement that they were sending us to permanent structures up here that had just been redone, that had washing machines and hot showers and steady electric, and they sent us to tent city. We got (expletive)."

Sotelo said Blackhawk helicopters patrol the skies "all day and night," and a black car with tinted windows surveys the camp while the government moves heavy equipment past the tents at night. According to the story, reporters aren't even allowed in the fenced complex, where lines of displaced residents form outside portable toilets. Security guards are posted at every door, and residents can't even use the toilet or shower without first presenting ID.

"They treat us like we're prisoners," Ashley Sabol told Reuters. "It's bad to say, but we honestly feel like we're in a concentration camp."

Snow and icy slush seep into living areas through the bottoms of the government tents.

Meanwhile, officials are said to be banning residents from taking pictures and even cutting off Wi-Fi and power access.

"After everyone started complaining, and they found out we were contacting the press, they brought people in," Sotelo said. "Every time we plugged in an iPhone or something, the cops would come and unplug them." He added: "Everybody is angry over here. It's like being in prison."

In New York, residents of Gerritsen Beach have banded together to survive. "With all due respect to the federal issue, we're used to taking care of ourselves," Doreen Garson, the acting volunteer fire chief, told The Washington Post as area residents received hot meals outside a trailer. "I don't know what FEMA is really doing for anyone."

Some citizens say FEMA has distributed checks to fix their homes, but bureaucratic hurdles mean relief amounts are determined inconsistently and may be insufficient to cover damage. In some cases, the rebuilding funds are distributed even when reconstruction doesn't make sense because the destroyed homes are located in high-risk areas.

FEMA's bureaucratic tape is such a mess that states have had to hire consulting firms just to navigate the paperwork, with consultants earning as much as $180 an hour -- all of which is billed to American taxpayers.

Meanwhile, FEMA -- which previously provided trailers to victims of Hurricane Katrina that made residents sick from toxic levels of formaldehyde -- will now bring more temporary homes to New York and New Jersey. The government assures us that this time the homes have been approved by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, FEMA failed to have bottled water and other supplies ready for storm victims -- a week after the storm hit -- and was forced to seek help from private vendors to meet residents' needs.

While generous citizens fill trucks with donations and goods for hurricane survivors, FEMA is reportedly demanding they stop -- because the federal agency has "strict rules on what can and can't be accepted."

To make matters worse, FEMA now expects Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to appear before Congress and request a taxpayer bailout for FEMA flood-insurance operations while it burns through $200 to $300 million a day.

Where did we go wrong? The moment we began looking to government to fill the role of caretaker, provider and savior.

What happened to the days when communities and churches were the places Americans turned to for help? We need to get back to basics, where Americans care for our brothers and sisters and help them in times such as these.

In one brilliant example of communities banding together, Staten Island residents organized their own citizen-led team of volunteers and started a donation drive, bringing massive trucks of aid into their community from Virginia. They've worked with local churches, VFW posts and businesses to bring in needed supplies and help with cleanup efforts.

In yet another stunning example of private efforts, veterans of both the Israeli army and U.S. military descended on New York to help with rescue operations and relief assistance when the government was said to be absent.

Churches and businesses are reaching out to people who've been displaced, packing U-Haul trucks and 18-wheelers with food, diapers, blankets, toiletries and other needed goods.

"We decided that it wasn't enough for us to simply declare the gospel; we've got to demonstrate it," pastor Jerry Young said from New Hope Baptist Church in Mississippi. "What we're trying to do now is demonstrate the gospel."

Just as these grassroots volunteers have been sacrificing so much to help displaced citizens and clean up storm-ravaged areas in the Northeast, I urge America's citizen volunteers, churches and businesses to follow their examples.

Let's stop making the mistake of expecting government to be our savior in times like these.

We are told eight times in the Bible to love our neighbor. This Thanksgiving week, America has an extraordinary opportunity to do just that. Let's band together and show our fellow citizens that we care and we won't leave them to the "mercy" of the government in their time of need.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Bakery union set to crumble: "Bankrupt Hostess Brands Inc. and its striking union agreed to enter into mediation to try to resolve their differences, putting the baking company's planned liquidation on hold for now. At a U.S. Bankruptcy Court hearing Monday in White Plains, N.Y., the 82-year-old company sought permission to start shutting down its business. Instead, Judge Robert Drain urged Hostess and the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union to consider mediation. Both sides agreed to try to work through the conflict, which could preserve more than 18,000 jobs. Those include 550 positions for workers at two bakeries and seven retail stores in Los Angeles and Orange counties, as of the start of the year."

UN: ending AIDS epidemic is "feasible": "An end to the worldwide AIDS epidemic is in sight, the United Nations says, mainly due to better access to drugs that can both treat and prevent the incurable human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes the disease. Progress over the past decade has cut the death toll and helped stabilize the number of people infected with HIV, the U.N. AIDS program said in its annual report on Tuesday. 'The global community has embarked on an historic quest to lay the foundation for the eventual end of the AIDS epidemic. This effort is more than merely visionary. It is entirely feasible,' UNAIDS said. ... Deaths from AIDS fell to 1.7 million in 2011, down from a peak of 2.3 million in 2005 and from 1.8 million in 2010." [They're going to stop homosexuals from sticking their member where the sun doesn't shine??]

We need to end the drug war!: "To save our children, we need to get drugs out of our schools. The only way to do that is to take the profit out through re-legalization. You don't see pushers selling tobacco and alcohol in the schools because there isn't the profit margin that prohibition brings. If we're serious about saving our kids, we have to stop the pushers by slashing their profits."

Let's hear it for scandal!: "I can't abide the sort of Beltway scold who looks down his nose at political scandals as distractions from 'the business of governing.' Ringside seats at the latest --'gate are among the few redeeming features of life in this miserable company town. At a minimum, scandals serve as a useful reminder that we're usually led by people of questionable competence, miserable judgment and a flexible relationship with the truth. At their best, they can even provoke much-needed reforms."

Last surviving Mumbai gunman Mohammed Kasab executed in India: "Mohammed Kasab, the sole surviving gunman from the 2008 Mumbai attacks, has been hanged in an Indian prison. Kasab was executed at 7.30am (0200 GMT) at Yerwada jail in Pune in the western Indian state of Maharashtra after India's President Pranab Mukherjee rejected his mercy plea earlier this month, local media said. The Pakistan-born Kasab was one of 10 gunmen who laid siege to the city in attacks that lasted nearly three days and killed 166 people. Kasab was sentenced to death in May 2010 after he was found guilty of a string of charges, including waging war against India, murder and terrorist acts. During the 2008 attacks, the heavily armed Islamist gunmen stormed targets in Mumbai including luxury hotels, a Jewish centre, a hospital and a bustling train station. "

California leads the way: "Under the federal government’s new measurement of poverty, California is in last place — or at the top of the state rankings with a 23.5 percent poverty rate. This state, now under a super-majority of Democratic leadership so Republicans cannot stop any new schemes, is excelling in all the wrong areas and continues to sink in areas of growth and prosperity. Unfortunately, poverty isn’t the only area where the Golden State reigns supreme. California has the third highest unemployment rate in the nation at 10.2 percent. The state faces an unfunded liability of $100 billion in its Public Employees’ Retirement System and $65 billion in its State Teachers’ Retirement System. Furthermore, the state has a roughly $16 billion budget deficit."

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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21 November, 2012

A simple economic truth that's staring Americans in the face

Stop saving

Obama has printed greenbacks by the truckload yet prices in the supermarkets have mostly not risen much. That's not supposed to happen. More money chasing the same amount of goods and services is supposed to devalue the money and send prices rocketing. So what gives? That's a puzzle many economists have addressed. Lags in the system can by now be fairly convincingly dismissed so there is only one possible explanation. People are saving (mainly by paying off debt) at roughly the same rate as Obama is printing money.

So what's going on is not only driven by Keynesian thinking but it is actually working in a Keynsian sort of a way. Public demand is replacing private demand. So as long as Americans lack confidence in the future, Obama can keep printing money and thus seize huge amounts of private output for spending by the government. And it's hard to see him doing anything to boost confidence in the next 4 years. So there is no need for him to cut government spending.

But countries need investment spending to remain prosperous and it is precisely investment spending that is not happening. People are mostly not building new homes and businesses are mostly not building new factories, to put it at its simplest. A large part of the workforce which normally provides investment goods (builders etc) is either not working or has been sucked into unproductive government employment.

But without investment spending the country will not only fail to grow but will even go backwards. Maintenance is a major form of investment spending and without maintenance assets will deteriorate and everyone will be poorer for it.

But, whatever the detail, the crash in private investment is causing a crash in jobs and more and more people are becoming welfare-dependent. America is becoming steadily poorer. And Obama's job numbers are the sort of thing that the guy had in mind who wrote the book "How to lie with statistics". Even many Mexicans are going home for lack of work. As a percentage of the population, the number of people working has not been so low since the Depression.

Is there a way out? Hopefully. Countries can continue to get poorer for many years -- as Britain has. And the solid bloc of minorities that elected Obama may continue to elect equally destructive Democrats for many years to come. But I am guessing here that Americans have got more spunk than that. If the next Democrat presidential candidate is white, even some blacks may get tired of no jobs and vote GOP.

And just the election of a GOP president would probably inspire confidence in the people who make investment decisions. And if he immediately rolled back the previous 8 years of EPA regulations, America would be on a roll. The demand for investment goods and services would roar ahead and all that newly released investment money chasing a fairly fixed supply of goods and services will bid up prices sharply. Everything will cost a lot more and a greenback will buy a lot less. Roaring inflation will have arrived.

A drastic cut in government spending at the same time could in theory prevent much of the inflation but that ain't gonna happen.

So people's savings will be virtually wiped out, which will be keenly felt by many, particularly older Americans who will see a life's hard work and savings go down the drain.

So what should Americans do right now? Roughly the opposite of what they are now mostly doing: Stop saving and stop paying off debt. Maybe even borrow money to buy another house for letting out. Money in the bank won't do you much good in the future but owning real assets will. But don't buy gold. The price of gold is inflated at the moment by uncertainty. Once confidence returns, the demand for gold will drop.

And I know what I am talking about. I have "been there and done that". In the early '70s I bought some condos using mainly borrowed money. Then along came a Leftist government, led by the economically illiterate E.G. Whilam, that went on a spending spree and inflated the currency to do it. So when my loans came up for renewal, the prices of real estate had roughly doubled and by selling one condo I could pay off my debts on all the rest. I thus owe my present economically comfortable circumstances to Leftist folly. You too can do that.

Shares in blue chip companies are another possibility but are risky unless you know what you are doing.

The destruction of savings will of course create great outrage and who will get the blame for that? Unless they have great PR, it will be the next GOP administration. They will be blamed for excesses created by Obama. The GOP administration might even try price-controls to save its skin. Nixon did. But that will just create more chaos.

So a return to Donk destruction can also be foreseen, sadly for America. The long-term future for America is not bright now that a huge slice of the electorate is as thick as a brick. Restricting voting to those who pay income taxes would help but is most unlikely to happen.

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Regime Uncertainty: Some Clarifications

by Robert Higgs

Private investment is the most important driver of economic progress. Entrepreneurs need new structures, equipment, and software to produce new products, to produce existing products at lower cost, and to make use of new technology that requires embodiment in machinery, plant layouts, and other aspects of the existing capital stock. When the rate of private investment declines, the rate of growth of real income per capita slackens, and if private investment drops quickly and substantially, a recession or depression occurs.

Such recession or depression is likely to persist until private investment makes a fairly full recovery. In US history, such recovery usually has occurred within a year or two after the trough. Only twice in the past century has a fairly prompt and full recovery of private investment failed to occur — during the Great Depression and during the past five years.

In analyzing data on investment, we must distinguish gross and net investment: the former includes all spending for new structures, equipment, software, and inventory, including the large part aimed at compensating for the wear, tear, and obsolescence of the existing capital stock; the latter includes the gross expenditure in excess of that required simply to maintain the existing stock. Therefore, net investment is the best measure of the private investment expenditure that contributes to economic growth.

As the figure shows, net private domestic fixed investment (a measure that excludes investment in inventories) reached a peak in 2006–2007, declined somewhat in 2008, then plunged in 2009 before reaching a trough in 2010. Although it recovered slightly in 2011, it remained 20 percent below the previous peak, and the pace of its recovery to date implies that another three or four years will be required merely to bring it back to where it was in 2007. With adjustments for changes in the price level, the projected recovery period would be slightly longer. (Using the price index for gross private domestic investment to obtain real values, we find that real net private domestic fixed investment is now at approximately the same level it had attained in the late 1990s.) To understand why the current overall economic recovery has been so anemic, we must understand why net private investment has not recovered more quickly.

In a 1997 article in the Independent Review ("Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed After the War") I argued that a major reason for the incomplete recovery of private investment during the latter half of the 1930s was "regime uncertainty." By this, I mean a pervasive lack of confidence among investors in their ability to foresee the extent to which future government actions will alter their private-property rights. In the original article and in many follow-up articles, I documented that between 1935 and 1940, many investors feared that the government might transform the very nature of the existing economic order, replacing the primarily market-oriented economy with fascism, socialism, or some other government-controlled arrangement in which private-property rights would be greatly curtailed, if they survived at all. Given such fears, many investors regarded new investment projects as too risky to justify their current costs.

During the past several years, I have argued that a similar, if somewhat less extreme fear now pervades the business community, which explains at least in part the sluggish pace of the current economic recovery. Other exponents of this view include such prominent economists as Gary Becker, Allan Meltzer, John Taylor, and Alan Greenspan. (Until recently, Austrian economists were more receptive than mainstream economists to the idea of regime uncertainty; see, for example, the recent Mises Daily by John P. Cochran.) In addition, economists Scott Baker and Nicholas Bloom at Stanford and Steven J. Davis at the University of Chicago have devised an empirical index of policy uncertainty that has remained at extraordinarily high levels since September 2008. However, what most other economists — and all of those in the professional mainstream — have noted is not exactly the same as what I call regime uncertainty, but rather a related, somewhat narrower phenomenon.

Over the years, some economists have urged me to forsake the term "regime uncertainty" and to use instead an expression such as policy uncertainty, rule uncertainty, or regime worsening. I have rejected these suggestions because the idea I seek to convey encompasses more than simply policies or rules. Moreover, regime uncertainly does not necessarily signify only apprehension about potential worsening as a central tendency.

Regime uncertainty pertains to more than the government's laws, regulations, and administrative decisions. For one thing, as the saying goes, "personnel is policy." Two administrations may administer or enforce identical statutes and regulations quite differently. A business-hostile administration such as Franklin D. Roosevelt's or Barack Obama's will provoke more apprehension among investors than a business-friendlier administration such as Dwight D. Eisenhower's or Ronald Reagan's, even if the underlying "rules of the game" are identical on paper. Similar differences between judiciaries create uncertainties about how the courts will rule on contested laws and government actions.

For another thing, seemingly neutral changes in policies or personnel may have major implications for specific types of investment. Even when government changes the rules in a way that seemingly strengthens private-property rights overall, the action's specific form may jeopardize particular types of investment, and apprehension about such a threat may paralyze investors in these areas. Moreover, it may also give pause to investors in other areas, who fear that what the government has done to harm others today, it may do to them tomorrow. In sum, heightened uncertainty in general — a perceived increase in the potential variance of all sorts of relevant government action — may deter investment even if the mean value of expectations shifts toward more secure private-property rights.

Regime uncertainly is a complex matter. No empirical index can capture it fully; some indexes may actually misrepresent it. Only the actors on the scene can appraise it, and their appraisals are intrinsically subjective. However, by assessing a variety of direct and indirect evidence, analysts can better appreciate its contours, direction, and impact on private investment decisions.

SOURCE

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Some alternative history

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Big Labor killed the Twinkie

By Adam Bitely — The war on profit and success waged by Big Labor has claimed their latest victim: Hostess.

The snack food king announced on Friday that they would immediately cease all production operations at their bakeries and would lay off their more than 18,000 employees and liquidate their assets. Simply put, the company that sells us Ho-Hos, Ding-Dongs and Twinkies is no more.

Hostess had been battling the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union for the better part of the past year. After filing for bankruptcy in January of 2012, Hostess had sought to restructure their labor deal to make the company competitive in the snack food industry again. The labor union, arguing that it was protecting the workers, would not make the necessary concessions to keep the company afloat. Instead, the union, knowing that the company might go under completely, decided to gamble away the employees they purportedly represented.

The union went on strike in early November, severely hampering the production capabilities of Hostess. The strike was the final straw for Hostess ownership who decided that it was better to give up and go home than deal with the two front war that they were dealing with.

Now there is a possibility that those who went on strike and lost their jobs could find themselves receiving taxpayer funded unemployment benefits. After engaging in efforts to destroy their jobs, which they were warned by Hostess was a possibility when they decided to strike, the last thing these people deserve is any sort of compensation to tide them through the hardship created by their own efforts.

The demise of Hostess is just the latest shoe to fall in the war on the producers that is being waged by Big Labor. Convincing people to join their unions because of the supposed protections afforded them by membership, these organizations have instead shown a willingness to destroy the companies of the employees they represent. It is past time that the disastrous effects of labor unions are shown front and center to people around the country.

As Bill Wilson, President of Americans for Limited Government put it, “It is common for parasites to kill their hosts, but it rarely happens in a way where so many people can see it. This union did what many others have done outside of the spotlight, they have forced a company to go out of business directly due to their irresponsible actions.”

And what is most ironic in the downfall of the cupcake king is that Dick Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO which is one of the largest labor organizations in the country, blamed the Hostess closure on Mitt Romney saying, “What’s happening with Hostess Brands is a microcosm of what’s wrong with America, as Bain-style Wall Street vultures make themselves rich by making America poor. Crony capitalism and consistently poor management drove Hostess into the ground, but its workers are paying the price.”

So according to the prinicipal spokesman of Big Labor, companies exist as jobs programs and not to earn a profit for shareholders. But what happened on Friday is that over 18,000 new people were turned over to the Department of Labor for unemployment benefits — proving Trumka’s and Big Labor’s premise for existence is nothing more than a sham to shakedown America’s producers.

Ultimately, they have shown time and again that they don’t care what happens to the employees. They only care about themselves. They are fighting for themselves and against producers to get what the producers have.

SOURCE

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Obamacare implementation craters under state objections

The national health care law jumped back into the headlines last week as a deadline for states to decide whether to establish individual state health care exchanges approached and then was extended by the Obama Administration to December 14.

The delay was requested by the Republican Governor’s Association whose members had posed questions of the Obama Administration about the law over the past few months that remained unanswered.

Over the past week, the list of states not participating in the system has grown to nineteen as the states of Wisconsin, Ohio and Nebraska chose to join sixteen others in rejecting the state health insurance exchange that is called for under the Obamacare law.

Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin announced his choice in a letter to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Friday writing, “No matter which option is chosen, Wisconsin taxpayers will not have meaningful control over the health care policies and services sold to Wisconsin residents.”

Walker’s letter continued by stating, “If the state option is chosen, however, Wisconsinites face risk from a federal mandate lacking long-term guaranteed funding.” ....

Currently, nineteen states are rejecting the state exchanges, sixteen states are enacting them, three are attempting a state/federal exchange hybrid, and twelve will decide before the new December 14 deadline.

The undecided states are: Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Idaho, Michigan, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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20 November, 2012

Socialized medicine ALWAYS fails: The Australian case

"Free" public hospitals, tax rebates for having private insurance and refunds for private health expenditures are all in place but are still insufficient for many people with expensive illnesses. Governments just can't afford to look after everyone. They should confine their help to the seriously ill only but that would now be politically impossible

FAMILIES are being forced to sell their homes or raid their superannuation to pay medical bills, with some going bankrupt as Medicare rebates [sometimes only a third of the actual cost] fail to keep pace with inflation and health funds fail to cover all medical charges.

The financial nightmare has exposed the growing inadequacy of Medicare and health fund rebates and the crippling health costs to those with multiple or serious illnesses.

Battling breast cancer, chemotherapy and a life-threatening infection, Leonie Havnen's biggest challenge was not her health but the $31,300 in medical bills not covered by Medicare.

This year the 52-year-old Sydney mother of two was forced to raid her superannuation nest egg to cover her treatment costs.

"As a taxpayer for the past 36 years who pays around $30,000.00 a year in tax, $2,500 health insurance and the Medicare levy, to have to pay out of pocket for life saving medical treatment, just screams to me the 'the system is broken'," she said.

"Why did I have to access my superannuation to pay for my life saving medical treatment? We aren't a third world country."

Since being diagnosed with breast cancer a year ago Ms Havnen has had surgery six times, first to remove both breasts and then to deal with the consequences of a golden staph infection. She spent time in hospital when one of her kidneys collapsed. A statement from her health fund for the 2011-2012 financial year shows her private hospital treatment cost $77,732 and she received rebates of just $59,400 from Medicare and her health fund leaving her $18,331 out of pocket.

On top of these hospital expenses, Ms Havnen had another $12,000 in bills for specialist appointments, scans, health fund excess payment, and medication. Her health fund reviewed her case after being contacted by The Sunday Telegraph and have since refunded her a further $6000.

While our Medicare and health fund systems are praised as among the best in the world, there is emerging evidence they are leaving hundreds of thousands of Australians in poverty.

A Menzies Centre for Health Policy study has found 250,000 Australians spend more than 20 per cent of their income on health costs. Doctors and anaesthetists who charge large out-of-pocket gap fees, poor health insurance cover, Medicare rebates that haven't kept pace with inflation and the $35.40 copayment for medicines are at fault. As well, many treatments and medicines are not covered by either subsidy schemes.

A recent Health Consumers NSW survey has found families were being forced to sell their homes or skip doctors' appointments or medicines because of the cost.

"Due to the combination of suddenly not being able to work, and the high out of pocket costs of my illness, we had to sell our family home," one respondent told the survey. "Have not attended a cardiologist since February 2011. Cannot afford to," another said.

The government's Private Health Insurance Administration Council said health fund members paid $4.3 billion in out of pocket expenses last financial year.

Research by the George Institute found 11 per cent or 28, 665 bankruptcies in 2009 cited ill health or absence of health insurance as the primary reason.

A recent survey of 3000 National Seniors members found one in five Australians aged 50 to 64 are skipping doses of their prescription medicines because of cost.

Gaps fees for plastic and reconstructive surgeons averaged $1588, for orthopaedic surgery $1485, the gap for scans averaged $88 and for specialists $56.

A spokesman for Health Minister Tanya Plibersek said gaps came about when doctors charged more than the scheduled fee.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare figures show Australians spend an average $1075 a year in out-of-pocket health expenses.

"The issue is whilst we say we have a universal system, the reality is many people are struggling," Consumers Health Forum chief Carol Bennett said. "The cumulative costs of a chronic illness mean you have multiple scripts and scans and appointments and you've got to make the difficult choice of whether you see your doctor or put food on the table."

More here

An example of an encounter with a "free" Australian public hospital here. And examples of the disastrous state of socialized medicine in Britain appear daily on EYE ON BRITAIN

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Welcome to the Lousiest Recovery of All Time

I have put up below some excerpts from a Leftist analysis. It explains a lot. I have not however put up its explanation of the Fed's continued folly in thinking that money-printing will achieve anything positive. In a typical Leftist way, the writer thinks the Fed is part of a conspiracy. It may be but that is irrelevant. Bernanke and the Fed are simply doing the little that lies within their power. The real cure for America's ailments lies with Obama and Congress. Encouraging business rather than strangling it is what is needed

Check it out: The number of people currently on food stamps in the US is at a record-high of 47.1 million. That’s more than twice as many recipients than in 2007 when the crisis began. And the percent of Americans living below the poverty line has skyrocketed, too. It’s gone from 12.3 percent in 2006 to 16.1 percent today. According to the Census Bureau, nearly 50 million people in America are now living below the poverty line. In other words, if you’re poor in America your numbers are growing and things are getting worse. Some recovery, eh?

And it’s not just the poor who are hurting either. The middle class is getting clobbered, too. Unemployment is still way too high (7.9 percent) and, according to the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances, middle income families have seen nearly 40 percent of their net worth go up in smoke since 2007. The bulk of the losses are attributable to the giant housing bust of ’07 which wiped out $8 trillion in home equity leaving the majority of baby boomers unprepared for retirement. It’s a desperate situation that no one seems to want to talk about, but the reality is that millions of people are going to have to figure out how to scrape by on next-to-nothing or work until they’re too senile to punch a clock. As far as these folks are concerned, the recovery is just a big joke.

On previous videos I predicted that the current QE [money printing] would have very little impact on both the stock market and the economy. And that is what happened. Why did I predict that? Short term interest rates are already at zero and it has been five months now since mortgage rates reached current record low levels. So yes, as a result of Operation Twist after tax income rose to a $300 billion in annualized growth this past June through September. That was up from a $200 billion growth rate over the first five months of 2012. Since October, after tax income – remember this is a before inflation number – has dropped back to a $200 billion growth rate. In other words, the Fed this year will in essence print half a trillion dollars that will not improve after tax income nor help stock prices grow……

So the US economy is currently barely growing despite huge amounts of deficit spending and money printing.”

This is Bernanke’s worst nightmare. Stocks are looking wobbly and his nutcase monetary theories are no longer working. But rather than change directions and admit his error, Bernanke has decided to double-down and throw the printing presses into high-gear...

Bernanke continues to believe that the entire economy can be effectively run by moving levers at the Central Bank. He thinks that if you plop enough money into the top of the system, (financial markets) it will eventually dribble downwards to the worker bees. Fat chance. It hasn’t happened yet, but not from want of trying.

Bernanke is right about one thing though, inflation expectations are beginning to fade which means that disinflation or outright deflation are a growing threat to the economy. Take a look at this blurb from The Economist:

“….since mid-October, there has been an unmistakable reversal in the inflation-expectations trend. Based on 5-year breakevens, all of the September spurt has been erased. And 2-year breakevens are back at July levels. Given my optimism over the Fed’s September moves and the apparent strength of underlying fundamentals in the economy, I would like to disregard this trend, but one should be very reluctant to abandon guideposts that have served one well just because they’ve moved in an inconvenient way.”

This is why Bernanke is wheeling out the heavy artillery, because QE3 hasn’t boosted spending or borrowing at all. Business investment is still in the doldrums and earnings have hit the skids in a big way. So where are all the green shoots?

Bernanke should follow the advice of Nomura’s chief economist Richard Koo. Koo has done extensive research on Japan’s 20 year running-battle with deflation and explained in excruciating detail what needs to be done to emerge from, what he calls, a balance sheet recession. Here’s a sample of his work:

“The most important lesson of the last 20 years in Japan and of the last four years in western economies is that monetary policy is ineffective when there is no private demand for funds…

“In Japan, there has been little or no private loan demand since 1995, when the BOJ brought interest rates down to near-zero levels. And neither the economy nor asset prices have recovered, even though, as BOJ Governor Masaaki Shirakawa has noted, the BOJ embarked on quantitative easing fully eight years before its counterparts in Europe and the U.S…..

When businesses and households not only stop borrowing money but start to work off their debt, the resulting absence of borrowers effectively traps central bank-supplied liquidity in the financial system, and as a consequence the funds neither stimulate the economy nor spark inflation……”

Sound familiar? And here’s more from the Financial Times via Economist’s View:

“Today, the US private sector is saving a staggering 8 per cent of gross domestic product – at zero interest rates, when households and businesses would ordinarily be borrowing and spending money. … This is the result of the bursting of debt-financed housing bubbles, which left the private sector with huge debt overhangs … giving it no choice but to pay down debt or increase savings, even at zero interest rates.

More HERE

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Maybe We Really Can’t All Just Get Along

Derek Hunter knows his history

During the Los Angeles riots of 1992, Rodney King famously asked, “Can’t we all just get along?” The answer should be an easy and unequivocal “yes,” but it seems less and less likely these days.

King was speaking in term of race, but the same could be said of political ideology. Liberals, conservatives and every other point on the political spectrum used to co-exist fairly easily (with the exception of left-wing anarchists who don’t get along with anyone). But these days détente has given way to anger and open hostility.

Some, not all, people have become less civil to those with whom they disagree politically. The modern left, birthed with the start of the eugenics-loving, racist progressive movement at the turn of the 20th century, always has embraced, to varying degrees, the concept of silencing opponents. Through the factions of communism, socialism and fascism (all takes on the same philosophy), leftists have made continuous attempts to silence and punish anyone who doesn’t toe their line.

President Woodrow Wilson, a progressive hero, made it illegal to speak German in this country and, in the Sedition Act of 1917, outlawed the use of “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” against the government, flag or military. Wilson’s rabid racism and implementation of segregationist policies in the federal government are routinely ignored by progressives today. But they are all too real and did enormous and lasting damage to our nation.

But that was (and still is) what progressives stood for. They were the elites, the smartest the nation had to offer. And, as such, it was up to them to “improve” the world through government action. They were white, so blacks were inferior. They were smart, so anyone they deemed not to be was inferior, and so on. They believed certain “undesirable” people should be sterilized and thus bred out of existence.

Those deemed worthy or necessary to be allowed to continue to exist would be ruled by them because they, the progressives, quite simply knew better what people needed than the people themselves. Constitution be damned, they were “progressing” the human race.

Although their tactics have changed over time, their motivation and ultimate desires haven’t – they want control and don’t care who or what they destroy to get it.

Fast-forward to today. Progressives are in the process of seizing control of the health care system. Regulations and laws are making more and more businesses effective wards of the state functioning in the ever-narrowing window of what’s left of the free-market.

But it’s not just economics. The sentiments behind President Wilson’s Sedition Act are alive and well. They’re no longer embedded in government; they’ve moved to the media and academia. Speech codes limit not only the words students can use but their ability to express thoughts and opinions progressives deem unworthy. Progressive media outlets frame opposition to President Obama as racist in the hopes of scaring critics into silence.

Now this disparate world view and loyalty to ideology over country/liberty/reality is metastasizing into more places it will damage beyond repair.

Union workers voluntarily have driven Hostess out of business. Seems they’d rather have no pay than less pay, no pension over a restructured one. They commit economic suicide, and pampered, over-paid union bosses such as Richard Trumka blame the Bain Capitals of the world.

Even on something as serious as the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, progressives aren’t interested in facts. Calls for truth-seeking are met with cries of racism because UN Ambassador Susan Rice, the sacrificial lamb the president sent out to lie for him, happened to be black. These progressives are not remotely interested in why Rice lied to the American people about what happened that sad night, nor do they care about being lied to themselves. They care about their agenda. Lying to the contemptible masses is acceptable and encouraged because the unwashed masses don’t know what’s best for themselves anyway.

This “progressive” attitude toward reality is now amplified by the web of social media, which empowers the spread of their fact-lacking desires to once-unheard drones who parrot it unquestioned to the world. Like a cold virus on a plane, it spreads. The truth, or even a desire to find it (as in the case of Benghazi), immediately butts up against a wall of willful ignorance built by a left-wing industrial complex of moneyed interests and true believers. No amount of contradictory evidence can convince them what actually is if they wish it not to be.

The right has its own version of this suborn, wishfully ignorant army. But it is smaller with much less funding. The reason this hive-mindset doesn’t translate to the right is we are not all of like minds. Priorities to one conservative are not priorities to another. Diversity of opinion not only exists on the political right, it is encouraged. Nothing less would be accepted from a philosophy based on the individual.

The progressive left doesn’t suffer from intellectual diversity. In spite of its penchant for bumper stickers calling for questioning of authority, celebrating diversity and “tolerance,” progressives tolerate deviation from their prescribed norm like Hamas would tolerate the suggestion they observe Rosh Hashanah. That’s why there’s so little dissent from anything its leaders propose. No group of nearly 200 clear-thinking individuals who swore an oath to the Constitution and hoped to sway a majority of Americans to their cause would ever elect a radical San Francisco leftist their leader, yet Nancy Pelosi…

When Rodney King asked his famous question, we really could have all gotten along. But the intervening years saw the rejection of a liberal, almost moderate, left and the rebirth of a philosophy spawned from hatred and division with the sole goal of control. Although a great many Americans support this goal, the wool has been pulled over the eyes of many more who’ve been fooled into thinking liberty is a chip to be bartered for a crumb of pie rather than the key to making your own.

I opt against trading my liberty to sing kumbaya with those who seek to impose upon me that which I do not want because they deem it in my best interest. Our president can bow to anyone he wants, but I will no bow to him, nor will I bow to his ideological brethren. I will not bow to anyone. We can all get along, but as long as my opponents seek to deny me any of my liberty, I choose not to.

SOURCE

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

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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19 November, 2012

Grim outlook for failing Western economies

In Europe, Britain and the USA

Many on the Left will finally have got the economy of their dreams – or, rather, the one they have always believed in. At last, we will be living with that fixed, unchanging pie which must be divided up “fairly” if social justice is to be achieved. Instead of a dynamic, growing pot of wealth and ever-increasing resources, which can enable larger and larger proportions of the population to become prosperous without taking anything away from any other group, there will indeed be an absolute limit on the amount of capital circulating within the society.

The only decisions to be made will involve how that given, unalterable sum is to be shared out – and those judgments will, of course, have to be made by the state since there will be no dynamic economic force outside of government to enter the equation. Wealth distribution will be the principal – virtually the only – significant function of political life. Is this Left-wing heaven?

Well, not quite. The total absence of economic growth would mean that the limitations on that distribution would be so severe as to require draconian legal enforcement: rationing, limits on the amount of currency that can be taken abroad, import restrictions and the kinds of penalties for economic crimes (undercutting, or “black market” selling practices) which have been unknown in the West since the end of the Second World War.

In this dystopian future there would have to be permanent austerity programmes. This would not only mean cutting government spending, which is what “austerity” means now, but the real kind: genuine falls in the standard of living of most working people, caused not just by frozen wages and the collapse in the value of savings (due to repeated bouts of money-printing), but also by the shortages of goods that will result from lack of investment and business expansion, not to mention the absence of cheaper goods from abroad due to import controls.

And it is not just day-to-day life that would be affected by the absence of growth in the economy. In the longer term, we can say good-bye to the technological innovations which have been spurred by competitive entrepreneurial activity, the medical advances funded by investment which an expanding economy can afford, and most poignantly perhaps, the social mobility that is made possible by increasing the reach of prosperity so that it includes ever-growing numbers of people. In short, almost everything we have come to understand as progress. Farewell to all that. But this is not the end of it. When the economy of a country is dead, and its political life is consumed by artificial mechanisms of forced distribution, its wealth does not remain static: it actually contracts and diminishes in value. If capital cannot grow – if there is no possibility of it growing – it becomes worthless in international exchange. This is what happened to the currencies of the Eastern bloc: they became phoney constructs with no value outside their own closed, recycled system.

When Germany was reunified, the Western half, in an act of almost superhuman political goodwill, arbitrarily declared the currency of the Eastern half to be equal in value to that of its own hugely successful one. The exercise nearly bankrupted the country, so great was the disparity between the vital, expanding Deutschemark and the risibly meaningless Ostmark which, like the Soviet ruble, had no economic legitimacy in the outside world.

At least then, there was a thriving West that could rescue the peoples of the East from the endless poverty of economies that were forbidden to grow by ideological edict. It remains to be seen what the consequences will be of the whole of the West, America included, falling into the economic black hole of permanent no-growth. Presumably, it will eventually have to move towards precisely the social and political structures that the East employed. As the fixed pot of national wealth loses ever more value, and resources shrink, the measures to enforce “fair” distribution must become more totalitarian: there will have to be confiscatory taxation on assets and property, collectivisation of the production of goods, and directed labour.

Democratic socialism with its “soft redistribution” and exponential growth of government spending will have paved the way for the hard redistribution of diminished resources under economic dictatorship. You think this sounds fanciful? It is just the logical conclusion of what will seem like enlightened social policy in a zero-growth society where hardship will need to be minimised by rigorously enforced equality. Then what? The rioting we see now in Italy and Greece – countries that had to have their democratic governments surgically removed in order to impose the uniform levels of poverty that are made necessary by dead economies – will spread throughout the West, and have to be contained by hard-fisted governments with or without democratic mandates. Political parties of all complexions talk of “balanced solutions”, which they think will sound more politically palatable than drastic cuts in public spending: tax rises on “the better-off” (the only people in a position to create real wealth) are put on the moral scale alongside “welfare cuts” on the unproductive.

This is not even a recipe for standing still: tax rises prevent growth and job creation, as well as reducing tax revenue. It is a formula for permanent decline in the private sector and endless austerity in the public one. But reduced government spending accompanied by tax cuts (particularly on employment – what the Americans call “payroll taxes”) could stimulate the growth of new wealth and begin a recovery. Most politicians on the Right understand this. They have about five minutes left to make the argument for it.

More HERE

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Will America be killed by its own internal parasites?

No one understood the dynamics of aging societies approaching decrepitude better than Mancur Olson, an economist who taught at the University of Maryland until his death in 1998. Olson’s crowning achievement was a book published in 1982 titled, “The Rise and Decline of Nations.” Olson argued that the proliferation of interest groups (collusions or distributional coalitions, in his terms) eventually spells doom for the societies they inhabit. And proliferate they have, from 6,000 in 1959 to 22,000 at the beginning of the 21st century, according to the Encyclopedia of Associations. Like it or not, every man, woman, and child in the country is represented by an interest group.

But when we say “interest group,” what exactly do we mean? America’s master political thinker, James Madison, said it best with his definition of “faction” in Federalist 10, as comprising “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community” (italics added). So much for our contemporary, naïve notions about how factions (interest groups) proclaim to represent some greater good.

It gets worse, especially considering three additional developments. First, America’s mammoth federal government constitutes an interest group itself, which means it does all the things other public and private groups do to protect itself. Second, about half of the population receives some form of aid from the federal government, according to the Heritage Foundation’s 2012 Index of Dependence on Government, and these recipients constitute perhaps the most behemoth group of them all. Third, close to one-half of the entire population does not pay federal-income taxes, a figure that climbed from 12 percent in 1969 to 34.1 percent at the beginning of the Bush administration to its current figure as President Obama starts his second term. The question is: What does all this mean for the destiny of America?

Prepare yourself for some very bad news. As societies age, they “tend to accumulate more collusions and organizations for collective action over time,” which in normal speak means that societies become infested with interest groups just like arteries become more rigid and clogged with body gunk as you get older—a phenomenon Jonathan Rauch referred to as “Demosclerosis.” Further, groups “reduce efficiency and aggregate income in the societies in which they operate and make political life more divisive.” Example: anyone read the healthcare bill lately? And the thousands of regulations in existence and forthcoming? And consider its huge increased costs?

The keystone of this argument is a passage that is terrifying in its implications and is worth quoting in full: “The typical organization for collective action [interest group] within a society will … have little or no incentive to make any significant sacrifices in the interest of the society” and “there is ... no constraint on the social cost such an organization will find it expedient to impose on the society in the course of obtaining a larger share of the social output for itself”. This means nothing less than it says: a group will kill its host, the American republic in this case, before relinquishing even a modicum of benefits for itself.

Nations die this way, empires collapse, societies atrophy, and countries implode (like the old USSR) or are conquered from without. In the United States, this phenomenon cannot be blamed exclusively on Democrats or Republicans; both parties represent coalitions of groups that all want something from the government. Indeed, if there is any difference between Republicans and Democrats in this regard it is that President Obama has accelerated this process over the last four years. But institutionalized selfishness was a going concern before he came along.

More HERE

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It’s Economic Growth, Not Redistribution, that Lifts Everyone, Including the Poor

Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon note in their underappreciated work, It’s Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years, that in the last century,1900 to 2000, real per capita GDP in America grew by nearly 7 times, meaning the American standard of living grew by that much as well. The authors explain,

“It is hard for us to imagine, for example, that in 1900 less than one in five homes had running water, flush toilets, a vacuum cleaner, or gas or electric heat. As of 1950 fewer than 20 percent of homes had air conditioning, a dishwasher, or a microwave oven. Today between 80 and 100 percent of American homes have all of these modern conveniences.

Indeed, in 1900 only 2% of homes in America enjoyed electricity. As Cox and Alm note further in their insightful Myths of Rich and Poor, “Homes aren’t just larger. They’re also much more likely to be equipped with central air conditioning, decks and patios, swimming pools, hot tubs, ceiling fans, and built in kitchen appliances. Fewer than half of the homes built in 1970 had two or more bathrooms; by 1997, 9 out of 10 did.”

Such economic growth produced dramatic improvements in personal health as well. Throughout most of human history, a typical lifespan was 25 to 30 years, as Moore and Simon report. But “from the mid-18th century to today, life spans in the advanced countries jumped from less than 30 years to about 75 years.” Average life expectancy in the U.S. has grown by more than 50% since 1900. Infant mortality declined from 1 in 10 back then to 1 in 150 today. Children under 15 are at least 10 times less likely to die, as one in four did during the 19th century, with their death rate reduced by 95%. The maternal death rate from pregnancy and childbirth was also 100 times greater back then than today.

Moore and Simon report, “Just three infectious diseases – tuberculosis, pneumonia, and diarrhea – accounted for almost half of all deaths in 1900.” Today, we have virtually eliminated or drastically reduced these and other scourges of infectious disease that have killed or crippled billions throughout human history, such as typhoid fever, cholera, typhus, plague, smallpox, diphtheria, polio, influenza, bronchitis, whooping cough, malaria, and others. Besides the advances in the development and application of modern health sciences, this has resulted from the drastic reduction in filthy and unsanitary living conditions that economic growth has made possible as well. More recently, great progress is being made against heart disease and cancer.

Also greatly contributing to the well-being of working people, the middle class, and the poor in America has been the dramatically declining cost of food resulting from economic growth and soaring productivity in agriculture. As Moore and Simon report, “Americans devoted almost 50 percent of their incomes to putting food on the table in the early 1900s compared with 10 percent in the late 1900s.” While most of human history has involved a struggle against starvation, today in America the battle is against obesity, even more so among the poor. Moore and Simon quote Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, “The average consumption of protein, minerals, and vitamins is virtually the same for poor and middle income children, and in most cases is well above recommended norms for all children. Most poor children today are in fact overnourished.” That cited data comes from the U.S. Census Bureau. As a result, poor children in America today “grow up to be about 1 inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II.”

That has resulted from a U.S. agricultural sector that required 75% of all American workers in 1800, 40% in 1900, and just 2.5% today, to “grow more than enough food for the entire nation and then enough to make the United States the world’s breadbasket.” Indeed, today, “The United States feeds three times as many people with one-third as many total farmers on one-third less farmland than in 1900,” in the process producing “almost 25 percent of the world’s food.”

Moreover, it is economic growth that has provided the resources enabling us to dramatically reduce pollution and improve the environment, without trashing our standard of living. Moore and Simon write that at the beginning of the last century,

“Industrial cities typically were enveloped in clouds of black soot and smoke. At this stage of the industrial revolution, factories belched poisons into the air—and this was proudly regarded as a sign of prosperity and progress. Streets were smelly and garbage-filled before the era of modern sewage systems and plumbing.”

Such sustained, rapid economic growth is the ultimate solution to poverty. It was economic growth in the last century that reduced U.S. poverty from roughly 50% in 1900, and 30% in 1950, to 12.1% in 1969. Among blacks, poverty was reduced in the 20th century from 3 in 4 to 1 in 4 through economic growth. Child poverty of 40% in the early 1950s was also reduced by half. It was economic growth that made the elimination of child labor possible as well.

The living standards of the poor in America today are equivalent to the living standards of the middle class 35 years ago, if not the middle class in Europe today. With sustained, vigorous economic growth, 35 years from now the lowest income Americans will live at least as well as the middle class of today.

If real compensation growth for the poor can be sustained at just 2% a year, after just 20 years their real incomes will increase by 50%, and after 40 years their incomes will more than double. If pro-growth economic policies could raise that real compensation growth to 3% a year, after just 20 years their real incomes would double, and after 40 years it would triple. That is the most effective anti-poverty program possible.

Just imagine what 2100 will look like if we can keep this economic growth going. Physicist Michio Kaku gave us an indication of that in a March, 2012 interview in the Wall Street Journal, explaining, “Every 18 months, computer power doubles, so in eight years, a microchip will cost only a penny. Instead of one chip inside a desk top, we’ll have millions of chips in all of our possessions: furniture, cars, appliances, clothes. Chips will be so ubiquitious that we won’t say the word ‘computer.’”

Kaku continued, “To comprehend the world we’re entering, consider another word that will disappear soon: ‘tumor.’ We will have DNA chips inside our toilet, which will sample some of our blood and urine and tell us if we have cancer maybe 10 years before a tumor forms.” He adds, “When you need to see a doctor, you’ll talk to a wall in your home, and an animated artificially intelligent doctor will appear. You’ll scan your body with a hand-held MRI machine, the ‘Robodoc’ will analyze the results, and you’ll receive a diagnosis that is 99% accurate.”

Kaku further projected, “In this ‘augmented reality,’…the Internet will be in your contact lens. You will blink, and you will go online. That will change everything.” Kaku concludes, “If you could meet your grandkids as elderly citizens in the year 2100, you would view them as being, basically, Greek gods.”

Just maintaining the real, long term, U.S.economic growth rate of 3.2% from 1947 to 2007 would have doubled our GDP of today 4 times, meaning a GDP 16 times as large as today, In that future, the poor of the time will have the standard of living of the American middle class in 2065. We will enjoy peace in our time, as the American military will be so advanced and dominant that no one else will even try to spend enough on their military to even threaten or challenge us. A world of free trade resulting from this Pax Americana will spread prosperity throughout the now third world. If we can gain some sense and reform and modernize our entitlement programs, and restrain unnecessary spending, America’s national debt will be a tiny fraction of our GDP.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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18 November, 2012

Oklahoma Doctors vs. Obamacare

Surgery center provides free-market medicine

Three years ago, Dr. Keith Smith, co-founder and managing partner of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, took an initiative that would only be considered radical in the health care industry: He posted online a list of prices for 112 common surgical procedures. The 51-year-old Smith, a self-described libertarian, and his business partner, Dr. Steve Lantier, founded the Surgery Center 15 years ago, after they became disillusioned with the way patients were treated at St. Anthony Hospital in Oklahoma City, where the two men worked as anesthesiologists. In 1997, Smith and Lantier bought the shell of a former surgical center with the aim of creating a for-profit facility that could deliver first-rate care at a fraction of what traditional hospitals charge.

The major cause of exploding U.S. heath care costs is the third-party payer system, a text-book concept in which A buys goods or services from B that are paid for by C. Because private insurance companies or the government generally pick up most of the tab for medical services, patients don’t have the normal incentive to seek out value.

The Surgery Center’s consumer-driven model could become increasingly common as Americans look for alternatives to the traditional health care market—an unintended consequence of Obamacare. Patients may have no choice but to look outside the traditional health care industry in the face of higher costs and reduced access to doctors and hospitals.

"It's always been interesting to me,” says Dr. Jason Sigmon, “that in any other industry, tons of attention is devoted to making systems more efficient, but in health care that's just completely lost." Sigmon, an ear, nose, and throat surgeon, regularly performs procedures at both the Surgery Center and at Oklahoma City's Integris Baptist Medical Center, which is the epitome of a traditional hospital. It's run by a not-for-profit called Integris Health, which is the largest health care provider in Oklahoma serving over 700,000 patients a year.

Sigmon says he can perform twice as many surgeries in a single day at the Surgery Center than at Integris. At the latter institution, he spends half his time waiting around while the staff struggles with the basic logistics of moving patients from preoperative care into the operating room. When the patient arrives, Sigmon will sometimes wait even longer for the equipment he needs.

Except for the clerical staff, every employee at the Surgery Center is directly involved in patient care. For example, both human resources and building maintenance are the responsibility of the head nurse. "One reason our prices are so low," says Smith, "is that we don't have administrators running around in their four or five thousand dollar suits."

In 2010, the top 18 administrative employees at Integris Health received an average of $413,000 in compensation, according to the not-for-profits' 990 tax form. There are no administrative employees at the Surgery Center.

Because bills charged by Integris are paid primarily by insurance companies or the government, the hospital gets away with gouging for its services. Reason obtained a bill for a procedure that Dr. Sigmon performed at Integris in October 2010 called a “complex bilateral sinus procedure,” which helps patients with chronic nasal infections. The bill, which is strictly for the hospital itself and doesn't include Sigmon's or the anesthesiologist's fees, totaled $33,505. When Sigmon performs the same procedure at the Surgery Center, the all-inclusive price is $5,885.

The Integris bill for the same nasal procedure went to Blue Cross of Oklahoma, so the patient had no compelling reason to question its outrageous markups. They included a $360 charge for a steroid called dexamethasone, which can be purchased wholesale for just 75 cents. Or the three charges totaling $630 for a painkiller called fentanyl citrate, which all together cost the hospital about $1.50.

While patients and their insurance companies rarely pay the full price on a hospital bill, the bigger the bill, the more the hospital gets. Uninsured patients at Integris generally get a 50 percent discount, while private insurance companies pay closer to 60 percent of the full bill, which is still greater by orders of magnitude than what the Surgery Center collects.

Integris Health declined to make a spokesperson available to be interviewed for this story. But in a statement, the company defended its outrageous bills on the grounds that it needs a way to cover losses on services offered free. Whatever the merits of that argument, Integris must also cover overhead costs and bureaucratic inefficiencies that the Surgery Center has managed to abolish.

The rising cost of health insurance has been driving companies to look for ways to cope with the third-party payer system. Health maintenance organizations, or HMOs, have been one approach. Today, a growing number of firms are dumping their health insurance providers and becoming “self-funded,” meaning they pay their employees' health care costs directly out of their revenues. This model was virtually nonexistent 30 years ago, and today an estimated 60 percent of Americans work for “self-funded” companies.

Self-funded companies, like individual patients, can negotiate directly with hospitals for lower prices. Recently a handful of self-funded Fortune 500 companies struck deals directly with major hospitals to care for their patients for a negotiated fee.

In Oklahoma City, there’s an alternative health care market taking shape in which hospitals offers competitive flat fee prices to self-funded companies. And it’s all modeled after the Surgery Center.

This was the brainchild of Jay Kempton, who is the president of The Kempton Group, which administers health care plans for self-funded companies. When Kempton met Keith Smith, he had been looking for a way to help his clients deal with their exploding health care costs. "Cutting edge procedures are justifiably expensive," Kempton concedes. "But what we also see are soaring increases in relatively garden-variety procedures, like a knee resurfacing or a carpal tunnel release. Those things should not be experiencing 10 or 15 percent inflation every year."

So Kempton and Smith came up with a cost-saving arrangement: If their employees agreed to be treated at the Surgery Center instead of a traditional hospital, they would be spared the cost of all co-pays and deductibles.

Almost immediately, Kempton was approached by other surgical centers and hospitals. There are now four health care facilities participating in his flat-fee consortium, and more are on the verge of coming onboard.

June Wietzikoski is a typical patient benefiting from this alternative health care market. She works as a loan officer for a community bank in Groesbeck, Texas, which is a client of the Kempton Group. She had carpal tunnel release procedure done at the Surgery Center for the all-inclusive price of $2,775, which was covered by her employer. Had she gone to a traditional hospital run by Integris the discounted bill would have come to about $7,452 and she would have been personally responsible for the first $5,299, since she hadn’t met her deductible.

"It makes me mad that people are bankrupted by our current health care system when many times the costs are completely unjustified," says Smith.

Is Kempton's model replicable in other places? There are obstacles. Oklahoma has an unusually entrepreneurial health care sector, which stems from a 1989 decision to roll back the state's Certificate of Need (CON) laws. CON laws, which are still on the books in 35 states, require all medical facilities to get permission from a planning board before opening, which in practice provides a way for traditional hospitals to use political influence to keep new entrants out of the market.

A new provision buried in Obamacare effectively prohibits doctors from starting their own hospitals or expanding the hospitals they already own, which has been widely interpreted as a give-away to the American Hospital Association.

The Surgery Center is exempt from this statute, since it's technically not a hospital and it doesn't accept Medicaid or Medicare. So Smith and Lantier are considering expanding to accommodate their growing clientele.

Smith believes that despite the obstacles, market-driven facilities like his will thrive and proliferate as consumers catch on to costly collusion between big government and big health care.

Says Smith: "Everyone can see what the prices are at the Surgery Center, and that affordable health care is possible. So the jig is up.”

SOURCE

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ObamaCare Mandate To Cut Worker Hours, Leaving The Poor Worse Off

In Barack Obama’s first term the U.S. labor force shrank to a 30-year low. Job growth lagged behind population growth as millions gave up their search for gainful employment. Income levels receded, productivity sputtered and deficits soared — all in the name of “recovery.”

So what does Obama have planned for an encore? How does he intend to further “stimulate” the economy during his second term?

In his victory speech, Obama pledged he would continue pursuing “the kind of bold, persistent experimentation that Franklin Roosevelt pursued during the only crisis worse than this one.”

That’s a truly frightening thought. In fact if left unchecked, Obama’s “bold, persistent experimentation” could very well wind up making this crisis every bit as bad as that one. For example, atop Obama’s second term “to do” list is the full implementation of his signature first term accomplishment: ObamaCare.

Having secured another four years in the White House, Obama can now block any effort to overturn his socialized medicine law — although states can (thankfully) still stop much of its new spending if they reject ObamaCare’s “exchanges” and refuse its Medicaid enrollment expansions. For the sake of our future deficits, let’s hope they do so en masse.

One provision of ObamaCare that can no longer be stopped, however, is its “employer mandate.” While nowhere near as infamous as the “individual mandate” compelling citizen participation in the health insurance market, ObamaCare’s requirement that companies provide coverage to all employees working more than 30 hours a week will be a job killer nonetheless.

Not only will this mandate prevent job growth among small businesses, it will also result in fewer hours and less income for workers at larger companies. These are people struggling to make ends meet on limited income — people who cannot afford to lose these hours.

Last month Darden Restaurants — which employs 185,000 people at nearly 2,000 Olive Garden, Longhorn Steakhouse and Red Lobster restaurants — revealed that it was scaling back many of its employees’ workweeks to 28 hours. Ordinarily such a move would result in high turnover and an influx of less-competent employees — but not in Obama’s economy.

This month Kroger — the grocer that employs 350,000 people — announced that existing part-time workers and new hires would be limited to working 28 hours per week.

“Kroger is doing this to avoid paying for full-time health care for employees who currently only receive part-time benefits,” one employee explains. ”And (so) they will not get hit with the $3,000 penalty.”

Darden and Kroger won’t be the only employers limiting hours in anticipation of ObamaCare’s crippling new levies. Millions across the country are likely to be affected by the mandate — and the vast majority of these will be lower middle class people who desperately need that extra income to make ends meet.

In other words ObamaCare’s “employer mandate” will wind up hurting the very people Obama claims to be fighting for — reducing their take-home pay at a time when loose monetary policy is already whittling away at the value of every dollar they earn.

The impact of all this lost income on our consumer economy — and on our soaring taxpayer tab — isn’t hard to predict. When people make less money, they spend less money — slowing economic activity. They also become more dependent on government handouts — further inflating a welfare tab that exceeded $1 trillion during the last fiscal year.

What can be done to stop these terrible outcomes? That’s what’s so depressing: Absolutely nothing — at least not over the course of the next four years. In fact, this is just the beginning of the “bold, persistent experimentation” that Americans are going to see from Obama during his second term. Just ask him.

SOURCE

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Union bosses shaft their members -- 18,000 of them

Hey Obama! What about a handout?

Hostess Brands Inc., the bankrupt maker of Wonder bread and Twinkies, said it will fire more than 18,000 workers and liquidate after a nationwide strike by bakery workers crippled operations.

“Companies in bankruptcy don’t have any margin for error,” Chief Executive Officer Gregory F. Rayburn said today in an interview with Betty Liu on “In the Loop” on Bloomberg Television. “We just didn’t have enough workers crossing the picket line.”

The 82-year-old maker of Hostess CupCakes, Ding Dongs and Ho Hos was undone by the strike after changes in American diets led to years of declining sales while ingredient costs and labor expenses climbed. The decision to liquidate capped a weeklong standoff between the company, once the largest U.S. wholesale baker, and a union that called its proposed labor contract “horrendous.”

Rayburn said Hostess will dismiss most of its 18,500 employees and focus on selling assets. Shipments of bread, snack cakes and other products will continue until supplies run out, he said. While Hostess has fielded interest in pieces of the business, its labor contracts and pension obligations have deterred any bids for the whole company, Rayburn said.

“A lot of people say it’s the management. I can’t say whose fault it is,” said Misty Williams, 40, who worked at the company for 14 years. “I wish they were able to come to an agreement,” Williams, who just bought a house in Pennsylvania, said. “They were just too stubborn, I guess; the union and the management.”

Twinkies and other Hostess brands will probably disappear from the marketplace, said Tim Ramey, a Lake Oswego, Oregon- based analyst for D.A. Davidson & Co. Any buyer would need a distribution system, he said.

“Without your own distribution, it’s pretty problematic,” Ramey said today by telephone. “Twinkies has been on a slow death spiral for a long time. Somebody might decide they want something to do with it, but it’s not likely.”

More HERE

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Obama's Hostile and Evasive Presser

Obama's first post-election press conference, if you could call it that, tells us a great deal about his attitude and the approach he intends to pursue in his second term, which is the same failed policy mix on steroids.

Obama's words and body language indicate he intends to be quite aggressive in his second term and more dictatorial. It was as if he regards his election as a coronation to kingship. His responses and deflections even to softball press questions and his hostile attitude toward elected GOP officials in the co-equal legislative branch make that abundantly clear.

In his first response, Obama repeated the mantra that this economy still suffers because of events that preceded his first term anointment. He offered the tautology that a growing economy depends on a thriving middle class. Yes, prosperity depends on people being prosperous, but the question is: How do we get there?

According to Obama, we do it through economic protectionism, rebuilding those roads and bridges he believes are responsible for creating the businesses that American entrepreneurs didn't build themselves, throwing more federal money at education, and, for good measure, reducing our deficit in a "balanced" way, which means his way (only on "the rich"). He expressed his openness to "compromise" and "new ideas" and then demonstrated in his remaining answers how insincere that bipartisan gesture was.

In Obama-speak, "balance" means weighted against the rich. It makes no economic sense to increase tax rates on the highest income producers when many small businesses responsible for most American jobs fall into that category. It will further retard economic growth and yield insufficient revenues to make a dent in our deficits or debt.

After making it emphatically clear that it would be his way or the highway, Obama said, yet again, that the American people just want the parties to work together. On the most important issue facing us, spending, especially on entitlements, he didn't even bother to pretend to have a plan.

In his first term, Obama routinely abused his authority and paid no price for his usurpations. If there were any doubt before the election that Obama intended to unilaterally impose his will and avoid accountability for it in his second term, he has now eviscerated it.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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16 November, 2012

Australia: The miserable and aggrieved end of politics (Labor Party) versus the cheerful end (conservative coalition)

Even though they are in government, the Leftist party is still the miserable party

So rancorous are relations between the government and the opposition that even the humble Christmas party invitation is being used as a political weapon. At least in Labor's case.

With the festive season approaching - and for many in this place, the temporary lull cannot come soon enough - the usual round of Yuletide knees-ups are being organised for the final sitting week, which is the last week of November.

The Coalition invitation, extended to MPs, senators and staffers, features an innocuous Christmas tree illustration. The most frightening aspect is the revelation that the Northern Territory Country Liberal Party senator, Nigel Scullion, will be plying all and sundry with his "famous mango daiquiris".

Labor's invitation is far more foreboding. It features Tony Abbott, portrayed as the evil Christmas Grinch, poised atop Parliament House, his pointy fingers holding a bright red Christmas bauble upon which is inscribed the word "no".

The portrayal of Mr Abbott as the Dr Seuss character - a bitter, grouchy, cave-dwelling creature with a heart two sizes too small - has not gone unnoticed in the Coalition.

"There's a clear choice this Christmas: enjoying Nigel's famous mango daiquiris, or a Labor Party obsessed with Tony Abbott. Which would you rather attend?" said one senior Liberal figure.

Moreover, the Coalition party is free. Depending on who you are and when you pay, Labor's shindig costs between $25 and $50 a head. Mr Abbott may be the Grinch but Labor is Scrooge.

A Labor staffer returned fire: ‘‘The Coalition’s has to be free otherwise no-one would turn up. They’ve got to bribe staffers with free booze.’

SOURCE

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A Few Observations on the Efficiency of Local Government

Recent discussions of local government and state finances have focused on high-profile employees. Efforts to control costs in Wisconsin resulted in protests and a recall election. Now Scranton, Pennsylvania, has reduced its workers’ wages to the legal minimum wage. Local budgetary crises have made it difficult for towns to pay for police, firefighters, and school teachers. Some people claim that government employment must be maintained—maybe even increased—because these workers provide vital services.

As a teacher at a private college, I can’t help but notice that the private sector can and does supply education—as well as security. Private provision of education and security are and will always be imperfect, but the track record of government services is hardly enviable. Towns like Sandy Springs, Georgia, and Maywood, California, have saved money by contracting local services, except for the police and fire departments, out to the private sector. (While bidding for a government contract is semi-competitive—there’s only one purchaser—the winning firm is a monopolist, so this arrangement is different from a competitive market.)

We should examine the relative merits of private and government education and security, but there are other issues that may deserve more attention. Many town departments get little scrutiny. The operation of our water, road, recreation, and engineering departments often escapes notice.

Twenty-seven years ago I worked as a summer employee of the Livingston, New Jersey, engineering department. At that time I intended to earn a degree in civil engineering, so this job seemed like a good idea. I was told the engineering department hired several local college students every summer so they could learn surveying, build a résumé, and “earn” some money. During this summer I observed a local government from the inside. I had plenty of time to watch what people were doing because as the chief engineer put it on my first day, “There is no work for you to do in this job.” I thought he might be exaggerating, but this was not the case.

One could say that my own observations are merely anecdotal, but Livingston’s government works like other municipal governments. A town council makes decisions, and residents pay for these decisions, mostly through property taxes and small fees.

The time I spent not working that summer enabled me to observe others not working. The engineering department of Livingston had three full-time civil engineers. There wasn’t enough actual work to keep even one busy. We surveyed land that had already been surveyed. We observed a road construction project and some housing construction. Very little of what any of us did had any practical purpose.

The water department was slightly more productive. Every morning the water department van would go out to fix broken water mains. Most of the time there were none to fix, so this crew of about a half dozen men would be “on call.” How often did water mains break? Once every month or two. How long did it take them to fix a broken main? Two or three days. Do the math and it is obvious that these men were paid to do nothing most of the time. What did they do? They would hang around the local parks, the Livingston Mall, the Donut Basket, or somewhere else.

The road department would clear fallen trees or branches a few times a year. During the summer that I worked in the town hall, some of them were busy replacing street signs they had previously misspelled.

The town recreation department was somewhat busy during the spring and summer. I am not sure how they passed the time the rest of the year.

Perhaps the oddest daily event was the 2 p.m. break in the town hall. Every day town employees would gather in the break room for about an hour for donuts and coffee. This was not a break from work so much as a break from sheer boredom. Soon after the “break” ended, town employees would leave this den of inactivity, fill up their cars at the taxpayer-funded town gas pump, and go home.

My overall impression that summer was that if the entire town hall staff had been abducted by aliens, it could have been weeks, perhaps more than a month, before any residents would have noticed.

I doubt much has changed. Several years ago Livingston had a scandal when the town council built a new and lavish town hall. The remodeling was so expensive that it sparked outrage. The point here is not just to note an example of waste, but also the difference between high- and low-profile waste. Livingston wasted $30 million on its municipal building, but paying the salaries and benefits for dozens of nearly useless town employees over decades costs even more.

As a graduate of the Livingston public school system I can say that the teachers do teach. As a former resident of Livingston I can attest that the streets are safe. High-profile government employees do provide some services. But as an economist I can see that town governments are biased toward waste. Local taxes are coercive and go into a general fund to finance all of a town’s departments. Local taxes disperse costs over all residents, obscuring the costs of financing specific departments and of hiring individual employees. Many costs of operating local government go entirely unnoticed, making cost control impossible. What takes the place of decision-making on the basis of cost? Decision-making on the basis of politics. There is no market test because the “buyers” of services are not free to say no. Thus politicized management by local governments has a proven track record of waste, to the point where many cities and states are faced with budget crises or have gone bankrupt.

In the past several years many people have realized that the overall costs of government are excessive. Public outrage over waste can have two outcomes. Government officials may occasionally respond to public pressure on high-profile issues, perhaps yielding partial or temporary improvements. Lasting solutions to government waste (local or federal) require extensive privatization. There is a fundamental problem with government in that the people who are most familiar with the worst examples of waste are precisely those people who gain from it: public employees. Taxpayers are at a permanent disadvantage when it comes to learning exactly how their tax dollars are spent or wasted. The smartest move for taxpayers is therefore to press not for more efficient government, but for much less government.

Modern government is a failed social experiment at both the local and national levels. Those who insist on maintaining traditional government services at any cost fail to see that we have options. Recent examples of outsourcing services have been successful, but these moves may not go far enough. Economist Walter Block has written extensively on road privatization. The late Elinor Ostrom, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics, examined common-pool resource management by local nongovernment organizations. Alternative institutions have proven track records. We should have moved away from government economic management before it created severe budgetary crises. Now that these crises are upon us, we should act decisively to end the era of big government.

SOURCE

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Statist Claptrap on the Gas Lines

by Jacob G. Hornberger

For an excellent example of the economic ignorance that pervades the mainstream press, take a look at these two articles: “Behind New York Gas Lines, Warnings and Crossed Fingers” by David W. Chen, Winnie Hu, and Clifford Krauss and “Around Odd-Even License Plate Rules, a History of Impatience” by James Barron.

The articles address the long lines at gasoline stations in New York in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. What makes the articles so astounding is that as one reads through them, it becomes obvious that all of the authors are totally ignorant of the true cause of the gas lines.

Here’s the lead paragraph from the first article:

The return of 1970s-era gas lines to the five boroughs of New York City was not the result of a single miscalculation, but a combination of missed opportunities, ignored warnings and a lack of decisiveness by city and state officials that produced a deepening crisis and a sense of frustration.

The article then proceeds to explain how New York officials dallied over whether to implement a rationing plan, as New Jersey had already done. In an implicit dig at the “free market,” the authors of the first article state, “These officials seemed to cross their fingers that somehow the gas supply would improve and that they would be able to avoid resurrecting unpleasant memories of the 1970s.”

The authors also alluded to “panic buying and hoarding” as contributing causes of the long lines. On the supply side, they blamed the problem on damage to a refinery and to several gas terminals.

Lest you have any doubts about the ideological perspective of the authors, consider this line from the first article: “Compounding the problem was the lack of a centralized way for officials to coordinate with counterparts in the region’s complicated fuel-distribution network….”

In other words, what was needed to solve the problem of those long gas lines was central planning, with the plan to include a rationing system. You know, just like in the old Soviet Union! You remember that system, right? You remember how well central planning worked there, right? You remember the rations there, right? You remember the perpetually long lines there, right?

Ultimately, New York officials did impose a rationing system, one that permitted people to get gas on certain days depending on the last digit of their license plates.

The second article compared the long gas lines to those in the 1970s. The author of that article blames the shortage of gas on the fact that “the storm forced tankers bound for the New York area to wait it out…” and to the fact that the storm cut off electricity to gas stations. The author then proceeds to describe the long gas lines in the 1970s, blaming them on the Arab oil embargo in 1973 and the Iranian revolution in 1979, which he says set off “panic buying and long lines at gasoline stations.”

As any libertarian or Austrian economist will tell you, all this is just sheer nonsense. But like I say, it’s classic statist. Despite all the writings that libertarians and Austrians have published on this subject over the years, the statist mindset simply cannot process it or even allude to it.

Consider these two articles:

“New York Investigates Price Gouging Post-Sandy” by James O’Toole at CNN Money.

“N.J. Sues Gas Stations, Hotel for Post-Sandy Gouging” by David Voreacos at Bloomberg.

Now, I’d be willing to bet that those four New York Times authors are familiar with these price-gouging legal actions. But what is painfully obvious is that none of the four is able to tie the two things together!

The reason for those long post-Sandy gas lines was not the “free market,” or “panic buying,” or a reduction in supply, or the failure of public officials to implement a good central plan, or their delay in imposing a rationing system.

The reason for those long gas lines was very simple: Price controls, both today and in the 1970s! Those anti-gouging laws are a form of price control. They make it illegal for the free market to operate. Remember: the term “free market” does not mean that things are given away — as in the common use of the word “free.” It means a market that is free of government control or regulation.

Thus, it’s obvious that when the state makes it illegal for owners of gasoline (or anything else) to charge whatever they want, that is not a “free market.” That is a controlled or regulated or managed market.

The worst thing that public officials can do in a hurricane or other disaster is impose price controls (or anti-gouging laws). Prices are nothing more than the free market’s intricate messaging system. When a disaster occurs, the price of gasoline soars, owing to skyrocketing demand and drastically reduced supply.

The soaring price tells consumers to conserve. It also tells suppliers to supply. So, people cut back. They’re more careful about how they use gasoline because it’s so expensive. At the same time, entrepreneurs, attracted by the extraordinarily high profits they can make, figure out ways to get gasoline to consumers. Gradually, the price starts to drop.

When public officials intervene with their price-gouging laws, they disrupt the free market’s intricate messaging system. By artificially keeping prices down, they ensure that consumers will continue using available stocks of gasoline as if nothing has happened. And they destroy the financial incentive of entrepreneurs to rush more stocks of gasoline to the affected areas.

What’s most astounding about all this is that it’s only libertarians who see the moral abomination that is involved with price controls. The gasoline doesn’t belong to the states of New York or New Jersey. It doesn’t belong to society. It doesn’t belong to consumers. It belongs to the owners of the gasoline. An owner of something has the right to sell it at any price he wants. It’s his property! By the same token, consumers have the right to walk away.

Why can’t statists see this? Why do they turn to methods that were embraced by Soviet officials rather than the free market? Because the last thing any statist is going to do is even hint that the state is responsible for the problem. We saw that during the Great Depression, which was caused by the Federal Reserve but blamed on “the failure of free enterprise.” We’re seeing it now in New York. To the statists, the government is god. To them, the state is always the solution, not the source, of the problem.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Businesses against deregulation: "Most people believe that businesses abhor regulations and would love to do away with them entirely. This belief is often wrong. Many regulations make it harder for startups to enter the market, and can hobble smaller competitors. That’s why incumbent firms in many industries regularly welcome new regulations with open arms, and will spend millions on lobbying to pass them. It’s a way to keep the competition out."

China-bashing season over, but frictions will persist: "Although bashing China, especially by the candidate trying to unseat the incumbent, has become a feature of nearly every US presidential campaign of the past 20 years, Romney's criticism was particularly intense. Moreover, the Republican Party has changed noticeably over that time, with the role of religious conservatives becoming more prominent and the role of business leaders less so. That shift made it even more likely that a Romney administration would have adopted a hard-line, if not outright confrontational, stance toward Beijing. Obama's re-election makes such a stance less likely. However, complacency about the bilateral relationship is unwarranted and could prove dangerous."

Greed, self-interest, and the extended order of voluntary transactions: "One virtue of a private-property free market is that it channels our self-interests so that we serve our self-interests best by serving the self-interests of others. I can get a beer from you, a brewer, only by giving you something that you value more than the beer in return. We both gain. Government, in contrast, unleashes greed."

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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15 November, 2012

Ronald Reagan Flashback: A Rendezvous With Destiny

Will the GOP ever again have such clarity of vision? He was usually called "amiable" -- and he was. But he could bark when barking was needed

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Voting fraud roundup

Philadelphia - Court-appointed Republican poll inspectors are being forcibly removed from voting stations in some Philadelphia wards and replaced in some cases by Democratic inspectors and even members of the Black Panthers, according to GOP officials.
Paul Bedard at washingtonexaminer.com

Philadelphia - One polling site in Philadelphia apparently had a mural of President Obama emblazoned on the wall directly behind the voting machines. The mural, at a local school being used as a polling site, contained the words "change!" and "hope," along with a quote from the president.
foxnews.com

Philadelphia Black Panthers - Jerry Jackson, who was charged in the 2008 case along with Minister King Samir Shabazz, but later saw charges dropped by the Department of Justice, was seen early Tuesday outside a North Philadelphia voting site wearing the group's trademark black beret, combat-style uniform and heavy boots. Fox News confirmed he is a designated poll watcher.
foxnews.com

Philadelphia, ACORN affiliate CVP - The Community Voters Project is a "non-partisan" lefty organization whose mission is to register people to vote, with a particular emphasis on minorities... This year, however, it seems they aren't registering everyone who wants to vote. Outside a CVP office in Philadelphia, for example, they shredded and threw away numerous registration forms.
Mike Flynn at breitbart.com

Perry County Pennsylvania - A video posted on YouTube at a Pennsylvania polling station allegedly shows an electronic voting machine changing a man's vote from President Barack Obama to Mitt Romney.
CBS DC at washington.cbslocal.com

Chicago - "This photo, taken by a voter this morning at the Ward 4, Precinct 37 polling place shows an election judge checking in voters while wearing an Obama hat," a source writes. "Chicago's 4th ward is home to President Barack Obama." The voter who took the photo says: "Woman in front of me also given an extra ballot.
Daniel Halper at weeklystandard.com

Guilford County North Carolina - I cast my vote for Mitt Romney but Obama's name got the Check Mark (touch screen machine)! I was LIVID! So I called over a volunteer to show them. I clicked on Romney again and NO Check Mark appeared. So I clicked Romney AGAIN and PRESTO CHANGE-O..Obama's name got Check Marked AGAIN right in front of the volunteers' eyes!
Voter, via Joel Pollak at breitbart.com

Charlotte North Carolina - On Tuesday morning, there was a concern raised at Winding Springs Elementary School. Two voters Eyewitness News talked with said when they pressed the button attempting to vote for Mitt Romney, the machine put the check mark next to the name of President Barack Obama.
wsoctv.com

St. Louis Missouri - Claims of faulty machines giving votes intended for Mitt Romney to President Obama are unfounded, the Missouri Secretary of State's office says.
Johnny Kampis at watchdog.org

Detroit - The Michigan Republican Party is alleging that a poll watcher in Detroit on Tuesday morning was threatened with a gun. According to the Michigan GOP the poll watcher's 911 call was rejected.
Kerry Picket at washingtontimes.com

Detroit - A woman in a Detroit polling location was aggressively campaigning for Obama. A female voter in line objected. The Obama supporter punched the woman in the face. Police came to arrest her and she smacked the cop.
@electionjournal via breitbart.com

Bay Area California - We found over 25,000 questionable names still on the state voter rolls. A closer look at the data revealed that some of the dead people were not only registered, but somehow, even voted, several years after their death.
Stock, Escamilla and Nious at nbcbayarea.com

Pueblo, Colorado - officials have received reports of touch-screen voting machines casting votes for Obama after people intended to vote for Romney.

Las Vegas - Last week, I met with two immigrant noncitizens who are not eligible to vote, but who nonetheless are active registered voters for Tuesday's election. They said they were signed up by Culinary Local 226.
Glenn Cook at lvrj.com

Medina Ohio - Flyers claiming to be from a non-existent Tea Party in Medina, Ohio were placed in mailboxes on Monday urging Ohio voters to defeat "the n***er" in the White House to "help keep our country strong and white."
Tony Lee at breitbart.com

Sturtevant, Wisconsin - Voted this morning at 9:30 am. I was confronted by two Obama supporters, wearing pro Obama shirts, taking pictures of everyone inserting their paper ballots in the voter machine asking how we were voting. I told clerk and she kicked them out but they just moved to the hallway of the entrance.
breitbart.com

Boca Raton Florida - A woman attempting to vote in West Boca Raton this morning was initially prohibited from entering the polling place because she was wearing a tee shirt with the letters MIT.
bocanewsnow.com

Tallahassee Florida - A poster featuring President Obama that read "Change the Atmosphere" was reported to be hanging on a wall at a Florida, polling station. This photo was reportedly taken by a voter.
danjoseph at mrctv.org

SOURCE

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Romney made camo wearing voters disappear

Analyzing elections when feelings are still raw is usually a bad idea. Of course that doesn’t stop those with an agenda from opining and pushing specific pet ideas.

That is what we have been witnessing in the wake of Tuesday’s massive disappointment. The media and some talking heads have been all over the idea that changing demographics are the problem and that Republicans have to become Democrats in order to appeal to Hispanics.

However, digging into the numbers reveals a little more complex story. Preliminary analysis of exit polls of people who voted suggest that many lower income white voters chose to stay at home rather than vote for the lesser of two evils.

By this analysis, this drop in white participation rather than a massive increase in ethnic participation is likely what caused Romney to lose. These dropped out voters would not have liked Obama, but didn’t trust Romney either. In fact, a good argument can be made that Romney, the candidate who establishment Republicans declared to be the most electable, was the worst possible choice to win this election.

In picking Romney, Republicans chose a candidate who personified big business, signed legislation banning semi-automatic firearms, and obviously wore the big government millstone known as Romneycare.

While those in the know continually urged social conservatives to keep quiet, because the election would be won on economic issues, the Obama campaign smartly exploited Romney’s weakness with lower income blue collar voters by playing to their natural suspicion of big business.

As a former state lobbyist for the National Rifle Association, I saw this dynamic repeated in election after election, as blue collar voters struggled between the candidate who they believed represented their economic interest against the one who represented their personal freedom interest.

The 2012 election was set up for these voters choice to be easy, as Obama’s four years in office forfeited any claim he had to being supportive of their economic interest. Obama also is a threat to their firearm rights and is against them on every social issue.

But, without an opposing candidate who they believed was on their side, they stayed home. While some might claim that this was a failure of the NRA or other lobbying groups who supported Romney, those groups can only open the door for a candidate, he or she has to walk through it.

Romney didn’t. Instead, Romney stood at the threshold hoping that others would deliver blue collar voters into his column, without him risking taking any negative media hits. But there is only so much an organization like the NRA can do when the candidate himself has both a terrible record and never addresses the overall issue in a compelling and convincing way.

SOURCE

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Reid Short on Votes for 'Filibuster Reform'

An important update to this report from last week -- it appears that Harry Reid is struggling to cobble together the requisite 51 votes to nuke long-standing minority prerogatives in the Senate:

Democrats don’t have the 51 votes they need in the Senate to change filibuster rules that could make it harder for the GOP minority to wield power in the upper chamber. Lawmakers leading the charge acknowledge they remain short, but express optimism they’ll hit their goal. “I haven’t counted 51 just yet, but we’re working,” said Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), a leading proponent of the so-called constitutional or “nuclear” option, in which Senate rules could be changed by a majority vote.

Part of the struggle here is that some tenured Democrats recall what things were like when the shoe was on the other foot:

The problem for Udall and other supporters of filibuster reform is that many veteran Democratic senators remember when the filibuster was a useful tool in their years in the minority. In the tradition-bound Senate, these veterans aren’t thrilled with changing the upper chamber’s rules, particularly with the use of the controversial constitutional option — which has never been used to change the chamber’s rules. Under the option, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) would send to the Senate desk a resolution changing the rules and ask for it to be adopted immediately. The parliamentarian would rule the request out of order and then the presiding chair — likely Vice President Biden — would affirm or ignore the parliamentarian’s ruling. The Senate could then uphold Reid’s move to change the rules with a simple majority vote. Biden could break a 50-50 tie in Reid’s favor, meaning Udall and others backing filibuster reform only need 50 votes in the Senate to win.

When Republicans were contemplating their own version of the nuclear/constitutional option during the Bush administration, it was to be limited to presidential judicial appointments only -- a response to Democrats' unprecedented campaign of obstructing majority-supported nominees. Their argument at the time was that the Constitution states that the president "shall appoint" members of the judicial branch, and that the "advice and consent" clause was never intended to entail super-majority support. (Article II, Section II of the Constitution does specify a two-thirds majority threshold for treaty approvals, but not for executive appointments). Democrats loudly objected to Republicans' proposal, eventually leading to the "Gang of 14" compromise, to which both parties have generally adhered ever since. At the time, one of the primary admonitions against the notion of changing Senate rules by a simple majority vote was that limiting the judicial filibuster would shove the Senate down a slippery slope to limiting or eliminating the "sacred" legislative filibuster -- which is precisely what Reid is seeking to do now. Though Democrats may be shy of the 51 votes they'd need at the moment, the complexion of the Senate majority coalition will change considerably in the upcoming session:

The most likely time for Reid to use this option is at the beginning of the new Congress. Supporters call it the constitutional option, but it is well-known as the “nuclear” option for the meltdown in partisan relations that it could effect. All seven Democratic senators-elect — Tammy Baldwin (Wis.), Martin Heinrich (N.M.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Mazie Hirono (Hawaii), Tim Kaine (Va.), Chris Murphy (Conn.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) — have pledged to support filibuster reform. Sen.-elect Angus King (I-Maine) made filibuster reform a central plank of his campaign.

Republican leadership is hinting it would wage partisan warfare against the majority's entire agenda if Democrats attempt to jam through their procedural "reforms" -- a warning shot across Reid's bow:

...Winning over Republican support for weakening a powerful tool for the minority party seems like wishful thinking. Senate GOP leadership aides say any effort to change the rules by a partisan party-line vote will “poison the well” for reaching bipartisan deals. “We hope Democrats will work toward allowing members of both sides to be involved in the legislative process — rather than poisoning the well on the very first day of the next Congress,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.).

Frustrated Democrats accuse the GOP minority of waging (or threatening) a record number of filibusters to thwart various initiatives and legislation over the last six years. Republicans counter that they've been forced to take these dramatic actions because Reid's unprecedented and imperious control has choked out other, less severe minority tools, such as offering amendments to bills. Facing another stalemate, and with both sides fuming, the Democrats are considering dropping a procedural bomb into the upper chamber. As I asked last week, shouldn't a non-nuclear compromise that addresses both sides' concerns at least be attempted before slinging partisan acrimony into the stratosphere?

The best solution to this problem would be for the Senate leadership to hammer out a compromise that would significantly curb the majority "filling the tree," in exchange for the minority curtailing their filibuster posturing.

...The manner in which this issue is handled could set the tone for the next two years of American governance. Will we witness reasonable solutions, or will comity erode further -- leading to increased legislative dysfunction, and plunging Congressional approval to subterranean new lows?

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ELSEWHERE

What does this tell you about the U.N.?: "The U.N. General Assembly yesterday voted overwhelmingly to condemn the U.S. commercial, economic and financial embargo against Cuba for the 21st year in a row. The final tally yesterday was 188-3, with Israel and Palau joining the United States. The Marshall Islands and Micronesia both abstained. Last year’s tally for the symbolic measure was almost identical, 186-2, with three abstentions."

Should Christians use UPS?: "United Parcel Service (UPS), one of the three largest shipping companies in the U.S., has announced that it is instituting a new policy governing its charitable giving that will restrict it from donating to organizations with discriminatory policies. According to Think Progress, Boy Scouts of America (BSA) will be one of the groups to lose funding from the UPS Foundation because of its refusal to shed its anti-LGBT policies."

Upstart Square battles payment giants: "Two years ago, employees from the start-up Square Inc descended on farmers markets in San Francisco to hand out a new type of credit-card reader that let small, independent merchants accept plastic via their smartphones or tablets. But this month, when Starbucks Inc and Square announced that 7,000 coffee shops across the country would begin accepting payment through Square's smartphone app, the small white cubes that were Square's original calling card didn't merit a mention."

Africans launch campaign against gay marriage: "A few hundred Liberians representing the Christian and Muslim faiths and civil society organizations gathered here Saturday to launch a campaign to press the government to ban same-sex marriage. The campaign is seeking 1 million signatures supporting a resolution to ban gay and lesbian activities here."

Israeli aircraft strike Gaza sites: "Israeli aircraft struck three times in Gaza in the early hours of Tuesday morning, hitting a weapons storage facility and two rocket launching sites used by militants, the military said in a statement. As a growing crisis in the Gaza Strip moved into a fifth day, the Israeli army said it had scored direct hits on the targets. No casualties were reported in the strikes which caused loud explosions."

Obama considering John Kerry for “defense” secretary: "President Obama is considering asking Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) to serve as his next defense secretary, part of an extensive rearrangement of his national security team that will include a permanent replacement for former CIA director David H. Petraeus. Although Kerry is thought to covet the job of secretary of state, senior administration officials familiar with the transition planning said that nomination will almost certainly go to Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations."

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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14 November, 2012

Obama Likely Won Re-Election Through Election Fraud

Rachel Alexander

There were many factors that hurt Mitt Romney and favored Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election. The Democrats portrayed Romney in the worst light possible; as a wealthy, out of touch millionaire who wanted to return women to the 1800's. The left wing media predictably did everything it could to perpetuate that false caricature. Obama's race was an advantage; voters of all persuasions, particularly minorities, still cannot get over the allure of the first black president. The 47% of Americans on welfare were predisposed to vote for the food stamp president over Romney, wanting the free goodies to keep on giving, despite the long-term unsustainability.

In spite of those odds, polls indicated that Romney was going to win the election. The economy is close to Great Depression era conditions, and unemployment is almost as high as when Obama entered office. Economic conditions became so dire after Obama took office it prompted the rise of an entire new movement, the Tea Party. Presidents rarely win reelection when the economy is in the tank.

So how did Romney lose a race that numerous reputable polls and pundits predicted would be an easy win, based on historical patterns? The most realistic explanation is voter fraud in a few swing states. According to the Columbus Dispatch, one out of every five registered voters in Ohio is ineligible to vote. In at least two counties in Ohio, the number of registered voters exceeded the number of eligible adults who are of voting age. In northwestern Ohio's Wood County, there are 109 registered voters for every 100 people eligible to vote. An additional 31 of Ohio's 88 counties have voter registration rates over 90%, which most voting experts regard as suspicious. Obama miraculously won 100% of the vote in 21 districts in Cleveland, and received over 99% of the vote where GOP inspectors were illegally removed.

The inflated numbers can't just reflect voters who have moved, because the average voting registration level nationwide is only 70%. The vast majority of voters over the 70% level are not voting because they want to, they are voting because someone is getting them to cast a vote, one way or another. Those 31 counties are most likely the largest counties in Ohio, representing a majority of Ohio voters. This means the number of votes cast above the 70% typical voter registration level easily tops 100,000, the margin Obama won Ohio by.

Videographer James O'Keefe, known for his undercover videos exposing left wing fraud, caught a Virginia Democratic Congressman's son on video in October explaining how to commit voter fraud. Patrick Moran, the son of Rep. Jim Moran, told O'Keefe's videographer that in order to make a vote for someone else, you'd need two pieces of identification, such as a utility bill, explaining, "they can fake a utility bill with ease, you know?" He went on to advise the videographer that he should also call the voter and pretend to be a polling company in order to make sure the voter isn't intending to vote. He said that Democrat attorneys would be located in the polling places to assist him if challenged casting one of these illegal votes.

In another video, O'Keefe's videographer tells a DNC staffer from Obama's Organizing for America that she intends to vote in both Texas and Florida. The staffer laughs and says, "It's cool." The staffer then prints out a voter registration form for the undercover videographer and advises her on what to do if she gets caught.

These are just the known instances of attempted voter fraud. How many instances occurred that were not discovered? Obama's Organizing for America looked up voters in swing states – many who would not have bothered voting otherwise – and got them to vote. How did they get them to vote? They may have given them rides to the polls, they may have offered to fill out and return their ballots for them, or they may have voted ballots for the ones who were not going to vote.

Many on the left believe there is nothing wrong with committing fraud in order to ensure Obama's reelection. It is a common tenet on the left that the ends justify the means. Saul Alinsky, the 1960's radical who inspired Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, taught community organizers like Obama that dishonesty is acceptable if it achieves your political goals. And when caught, Alinsky teaches radicals to deny the wrongdoing and change the topic to put their accusers on the defensive. One Obama supporter brazenly posted on Facebook that he was voting four times for Obama, asserting that the ends justify the means.

Aiding Obama's win was a devious suppression of the conservative vote. The conservative-leaning military vote has decreased drastically since 2010 due to the so-called Military Voter Protection Act that was enacted into law the year before. It has made it so difficult for overseas military personnel to obtain absentee ballots that in Virginia and Ohio there has been a 70% decrease in requests for ballots since 2008. In Virginia, almost 30,000 fewer overseas military voters requested ballots than in 2008. In Ohio, more than 20,000 fewer overseas military voters requested ballots. This is significant considering Obama won in both states by a little over 100,000 votes.

Voter fraud has been in the works for years. At least 52 employees of the left wing group ACORN have been convicted of voter registration fraud. ACORN itself was convicted of the crime of "compensation," paying its registration canvassers bonuses to exceed their quotas. In 2008, 36% of ACORN's voter registrations were invalidated. Left wing political pundit Chris Matthews admitted last year that pretending to call someone from a polling company, then voting their ballot for them, has been happening in big cities since the 1950's. He admitted he knows that kind of voter fraud takes place in Philadelphia.

Strong-arming people into voting who really have no desire to vote undermines our form of government. People do not choose to vote because they are uninformed about the issues and candidates, are lazy, cynical, or are content with the status quo. Voting someone else's ballot for them is cheating the system and essentially giving yourself two votes.

When people claim that Obama won because the economy was improving, or because Americans generally think he is doing a good job, it is not true. He won through dishonest methods and rhetoric. Many of the votes cast in the swing states were cajoled, some legally and perhaps even more illegally, into supporting him. If voter fraud becomes acceptable, then maybe Donald Trump is right: it's time for a revolution.

SOURCE

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GOP soul-searching and the ‘Dougherty Doctrine’

These days, everyone has their assessment of why Republicans lost and what they need to do in order to win. And you’ll notice a pattern to them.

Pro-lifers say Republicans need a real pro-life nominee. Social liberals say Republicans need to drop all social issues. Hawks say Romney needed to attack Obama on his foreign-policy weakness. Some non-interventionist conservatives say Romney could have won had he staked out a more humble foreign policy.

Conservative writer Michael Brendan Dougherty saw this happening in 2006, and summed it up:

"At the end of the day, the arguments all seem to boil down to something similar: If it were more like me, the Republican Party would be better off. It’s failing because it’s like you."

The Dougherty Doctrine is that all prescriptions for electoral success coincide neatly with the prescribers favored policies. I exemplified the Dougherty Doctrine with my column today, arguing for a free-market populism and a GOP assault on corporate welfare.

The Dougherty Doctrine gives a reason to look skeptically at any “what-my-party-needs-to-do-now” essays. But let me add a corollary: Just because one’s electoral advice coincides with one’s policy preferences that doesn’t mean the electoral advice is wrong.

SOURCE

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Obama makes mockery of the rule of law

Among the objections to Obamacare, one that has not gotten as much attention as it should is the president's power to waive the law for any company, union or other enterprise he chooses.

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution provides for "equal protection of the laws" for all Americans. To have a law that can cost an organization millions of dollars a year either apply or not apply – depending on the whim or political interest of the president of the United States – is to make a mockery of the rule of law.

How secure is any freedom when there is this kind of arbitrary power in the hands of one man?

What does your right of freedom of speech mean if saying something that irritates the Obama administration means that you or your business has to pay huge amounts of money and get hit with all sorts of red tape under Obamacare that your competitor is exempted from, because your competitor either kept quiet or praised the Obama administration or donated to its reelection campaign?

Arbitrary Obamacare waivers are bad enough by themselves. They are truly ominous as part of a more general practice of this administration to create arbitrary powers that permit them to walk roughshod over the basic rights of the American people.

The checks and balances of the Constitution have been evaded time and time again by the Obama administration, undermining the fundamental right of the people to determine the laws that govern them, through their elected representatives.

You do not have a self-governing people when huge laws are passed too fast for the public to even know what is in them.

You do not have a self-governing people when "czars" are created by executive orders, so that individuals wielding vast powers equal to, or greater than, the powers of Cabinet members do not have to be vetted and confirmed by the people's elected representatives in the Senate, as Cabinet members must be.

You do not have a self-governing people when decisions to take military action are referred to the United Nations and the Arab League, but not to the Congress of the United States, elected by the American people, whose blood and treasure are squandered.

You do not have a self-governing people when a so-called "consumer protection" agency is created to be financed by the unelected officials of the Federal Reserve System, which can create its own money out of thin air, instead of being financed by appropriations voted by elected members of Congress who have to justify their priorities and trade-offs to the taxpaying public.

You do not have a self-governing people when laws passed by the Congress, signed by previous presidents, and approved by the federal courts, can have the current president waive whatever sections he does not like, and refuse to enforce those sections, despite his oath to see that the laws are faithfully executed.

Barack Obama, for example, refused to carry out sections of the immigration laws that he does not like, unilaterally creating de facto amnesty for those illegal immigrants he has chosen to be exempt from the law. The issue is not – repeat, NOT – the wisdom or justice of this president's immigration policy, but the seizing of arbitrary powers not granted to any president by the Constitution of the United States.

You do not have a self-governing people if President Obama succeeds in having international treaties under United Nations auspices govern the way Americans live their lives, whether with gun control laws or other laws.

Obama's "citizen of the world" mindset was revealed back in 2008, when he said "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that every other country is going to say okay."

The desire to circumvent the will of the American people was revealed even more ominously when Barack Obama said to Russian President Medvedev – when he thought the microphone was off – that, after he is reelected and need never face the voters again, he can be more "flexible" with the Russians about missile defense.

There are other signs of Obama's contempt for American Constitutional democracy, but these should be more than enough. Dare we risk how far he will go when he never has to face the voters again, and can appoint Supreme Court justices who can rubber stamp his power grabs? Will this still be America in 2016?

SOURCE

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Conservatives Can Win Over Blacks and Latinos

by STAR PARKER

I wrote last April regarding an analysis done by Ron Brownstein in National Journal: "Brownstein estimates that Barack Obama could be re-elected with as little as 39 percent of the white vote. He notes that in 2008, when Obama was elected with just 43 percent of the white vote, it was the first time ever that a presidential candidate was victorious with double digit losses of white voters."

In a column I wrote a month ago, I noted: "What was once the exception to the rule in America - not being white, not being married, not have traditional views on family, sex, and abortion - is becoming the rule. And these constituencies are becoming sufficiently large to elect a president."

We can win our country back. Low and middle-income blacks and Latinos are hurt disproportionately by a sluggish economy that can only be revived by less government spending and regulation, and low taxes. They just need someone to care to focus on their communities and explain these dynamics to them.

They need to get their kids out of public schools, a cause which only conservatives champion.

And they need to understand that they have everything to gain by getting out of the entitlement programs that the left tells them they need.

The last thing low-income earners need is to pay payroll taxes when they could save this money and build wealth. And the last thing they need is government bureaucrats running their health care.

When the only message blacks and Latinos get is from left wing politicians and media telling them they need government to take care of them, what can we expect but what we just saw in this election?

Business is also about knowing that there is no short cut around hard work.

Republicans must do more than showcase a few black and brown faces at their convention every four years and call this outreach.

Conservatives must get into black and Latino communities, talk to their clergy and community leaders, and explain how conservative policies of limited government and traditional values will save their communities and our nation.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Obamacare’s doctor depression: "Thanks to Obamacare, America's corps of doctors appears to have a case of the blues. The Physicians Foundation recently asked more than 13,000 doctors about their morale, their career plans, their practices and their views of the Affordable Care Act. The results were grim. Nearly six in 10 doctors said that they are less positive about the future of healthcare in America under Obamacare. Almost two-thirds have a negative attitude toward their jobs -- nearly twice as many as before the health law was passed in 2010. ... Worse, their collective frustration is exacerbating our nation's troubling doctor shortage."

FEMA’s wasteful “disaster socialism”: "In the Washington Examiner, Shikha Dalmia of the Reason Foundation notes that FEMA has been as slow after Superstorm Sandy as it was after Hurricane Katrina -- and that when it finally provides aid to residents of affected regions, it will be providing not life-sustaining aid, but loans, handouts and welfare benefits, some of which will flow to people who don’t even legally qualify for them. People have this weird idea that FEMA helps people in the 48-hours after a natural disaster. It doesn’t."

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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13 November, 2012

Old Soviet jokes become the new American reality

By Oleg

I have seen the future and ran away.

At first the move to America from the former USSR made me feel as though I had made a jump in time, from the stagnant depraved past into a distant dynamic future.

There was an abundance of commonly available futuristic contraptions, machines, and appliances that made everyday existence easier and more enjoyable. Less obvious but just as exciting was the media's openness: I no longer needed to read between the lines to know what was happening.

Most importantly, there was honesty, dignity, and respect in relations among people.

Today I'm feeling like a time traveler again. Only this time the productive, honest and self-reliant America is vanishing in the past, as we are quickly approaching the all too familiar future.

It is the future of equal poverty, one-party rule, media mooching, government looting, bureaucratic corruption, rigged elections, underground literature, half-whispered jokes, and the useful habit of looking over your shoulder.

It was nice living in America before it changed the course and followed Obama's direction "Forward," which, according to my compass, is pointing backward.

All of a sudden I find myself playing the role of a comrade from the future, helping my new compatriots to navigate the quagmire ahead of us.

Deprived of free political speech, Soviets had developed a culture of underground political jokes. I used to remember thousands of them. Here's one of my favorites, dealing with the discrepancy between the official narrative and the everyday reality:

The six contradictions of socialism in the USSR:

* There is no unemployment - yet no one is working.

* No one is working - yet the factory quotas are fulfilled.

* The factory quotas are fulfilled - yet the stores have nothing to sell.

* The stores have nothing to sell - yet people's homes are full of stuff.

* People's homes are full of stuff - yet no one is happy.

* No one is happy - yet the voting is always unanimous.

Already in America I discovered that most of my old Soviet jokes didn't work in translation. It wasn't so much the language difference as the fact that Americans had no first-hand knowledge of a totalitarian government, ideological uniformity, and shameless propaganda. But that is changing. The more America "progresses" back to the Soviet model, the more translatable the old Soviet jokes become.

Let's see how an old Soviet joke can be rewritten into a new American joke. The six contradictions of socialism in the United States of America:

* America is capitalist and greedy - yet half of the population is subsidized.

* Half of the population is subsidized - yet they think they are victims.

* They think they are victims - yet their representatives run the government.

* Their representatives run the government - yet the poor keep getting poorer.

* The poor keep getting poorer - yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.

* They have things that people in other countries only dream about - yet they want America to be more like those other countries.

There's more where it came from - or where we're going, whichever the case may be.

SOURCE

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Hello Obama second term; bye bye Western Civilization

By James Delingpole, writing from Britain

It seems to me that the victory the Obamaphiles have won is entirely Pyrrhic. In what way, I would like to ask them, is a second term for a proven failure a good thing? On the evidence of Obama's four years in power so far, what exactly have they seen that augurs so well for the next four years of the American presidency?

Was it his resolute decision to sacrifice the lives of four brave men in Benghazi, perhaps?

Or was it his truly heartwarming eagerness to reward his friends at Solyndra by handing them $500 million of taxpayers' money for a business that was essentially worthless?

Or his inspired decision to hit the already struggling US economy with the bill for a whopping new, NHS-style disaster in the making called Obamacare?

Under the Obama administration the US economy has shown few if any signs of a genuine economic recovery. Housing remains depressed, unemployment is high, average family income has fallen and America increasingly has about it the moribund, shabby air of third world kleptocracy rather than the thrusting optimism you'd expect of the leader of the free world.

The US today is almost unrecognisable from the land of opportunity I fell in love with on my first visit nearly 30 years ago. And the reason for this is really very simple (and especially obvious in basket cases like the People's Republic of California): Big Government has continued to grow and grow; regulations have accumulated; private wealth has been confiscated and squandered, on welfare, on bail-outs for companies like GM which would have been better left to fail, on Ben Bernanke's quantitative easing spree, on stringent measures to deal with the so-far unproven threat of "climate change"….

And this hasn't just been an Obama-related problem. It's been an every-US-president-since-at-least-Calvin-Coolidge problem. Even under Ronald Reagan the size of government grew.

To be honest, I think it would probably have continued to grow under a Mitt Romney presidency too. Romney would certainly not have been my first choice of GOP candidate. (Or indeed my second, third or fourth…..) He always struck me as being part of the same corporatist problem rather than the authentic, red-meat, free market solution.

It wasn't so much that I was rooting for Romney. More that I was rooting desperately, passionately against Obama whose statist tendencies – and autocratic instincts – are just a great deal more extreme and dangerous.

One thing I noticed on Twitter today: the quantity of bile being spewed out seemed to increase from very late morning onwards. And I wondered whether, maybe, this was symptomatic of the attitudes and lifestyles and career status of that whole class of person which blindly roots for Obama. I don't mean the welfare class: though of course that rooted for Obama too. I was thinking more of the entitlement class, the bureaucratic and technocratic elite – or trainee members thereof – so brilliantly anatomised in this piece by Joel Kotkin.

Perhaps they're studying "climate science" or "sustainability" at university; maybe they work in the public sector, with its more generous attitudes to those staff members who arrive late or decide to throw the occasional sickie; maybe they're currently resting while they search for the kind of career which enables them to achieve a perfect work/life balance and helps them feel really good about themselves, perhaps doing something marvellously worthwhile in the charities sector; or maybe they're employed by somewhere unimpeachably nice and on the right side of the "progressive" argument, like maybe the BBC, or the Guardian, or the Grantham Institute; perhaps they're incredibly well-paid stand-up comedians who earn their fortunes pandering to the prejudices of that vast constituency of ex-students, future students and perpetual students I've just described…

What this entitlement class has in common, both in Britain and in the US – and indeed throughout our tottering Western civilisation – is an unshakable conviction that a) the state is a force for good and b) that it owes them a living. So fiercely do they cleave to this faith that they have never stopped to think where this benign and bounteous state actually gets its money from or what might happen when the money runs out. In fact they consider the very act of thinking such unpleasant thoughts tantamount to heresy. This is why they dismiss their opponents as being not merely wrong but morally deficient – evil, even.

Problem is, the money has run out. It happened quite a while back and all our governments and their corporatist and bankster allies have been doing these last few years is finding ever more ingenious ways of disguising the fact. Just so long as they can keep the scam going just that little bit longer, that's all they care about. Then they can pass the parcel on to which ever schmuck comes next.

This can't go on forever. Nor will it. Because no one is prepared to face up to the facts and deal with them – and both Obama's re-election and the GOP's failure to come up with a sufficiently convincing candidate are proof of this; as indeed is the history of our own Coalition – it is all going to end very nastily and very messily.

SOURCE

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The anger of damaged women helped put Obama back into power

Some comments from Australia by Steve Kates:

Abortion rights are as secure as, indeed more secure, than the right to bear arms. It might as well be in the Constitution, given how literally impossible it would be to change the circumstances for abortion in any significant way, never mind the availability of contraception.

And what’s more, everyone knows it. Anyone who votes based on some concern that the Republican Party would be capable of making this change even if it wished to is living in a world of paranoia and might as well be worried about asking the government to protect them from men from Mars. The reality, however, is more closely represented by this video which is funny in a very unfunny way. Do not play this in an office environment and make sure you turn the volume down. I also give you a bad language alert. But the point is massive.

Miss 31 voted for Obama and is representative of the women who are in massive agreement with the cries of misogyny and the lack of respect for women. There is no point going too far into this, but the most influential social philosopher of the twentieth century was Hugh Hefner and his Playboy Philosophy. You would have to be at least as old as I am to recall what a shock it was to read Hefner’s “philosophy” in the pages of Playboy back when I was about 14 in the 1960s. Here’s the gist: all those uptight girls hanging onto their virginity ought to liberate themselves and get into the sexual scrum with the boys. In an era when a goodnight kiss was a big deal this was magic. And with the likes of Germaine Greer and her buddies saying the same just as the birth control pill was becoming readily available, a new world opened for which neither the young women of the time or the young men were really prepared.

But who has come out of this genuinely hurt by the changed attitude to women. Both men and women are worse for it, but if you ask me, it is women who have been psychologically damaged far more than the men. And I suspect Miss 29 has not avoided the deep and fearsome pains of commitment-free sexual relations either.

These are the attitudes that Obama was tapping into. Watching the Middle East burn and the American economy trashed by debt and deficits are irrelevant to such women whose anger is beyond all understanding, particularly for men of my and Romney’s generation.

More HERE

NOTE: The comments above by Steve Kates led to an accusation (not online) from Melbourne Left-leaning newspaper The Age that Kates is a sexist. Kates has taken umbrage at that and is demanding an apology. The only thing that puzzles me about all that is why Kates expects Leftists to do anything other than what they do. It's actually a fairly mild accusation by Leftist standards. Try Bush=Hitler. I think I would simply laugh at their folly. The Murdoch rival of The Age has three times their circulation and The Age consequently is going broke. Confining your market to Leftists is dumb

The cry of the loud blonde in the video -- "There's nobody there" -- is very common among unmarried women in their 30s so Kates is right to draw attention to it and to attempt to explain it. Like Kates, I think the women concerned have mostly been hornswoggled by feminism -- JR

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A deluded feminism's real damage

Philippa Martyr backs up Steve Kates

The "cohort of damaged women" is real, and it is huge, and they have been damaged by real sexism, not by Steve Kates. They fell for a sales pitch that has reduced them to a pair of open legs: an airbrushed porn image that can’t answer back, has no mind, no soul, and importantly, no opinions on anything outside "reproductive rights".

Porn images also don’t get pregnant, which is why pretty much every adult woman in Australia has either had, or knows someone who’s had, an abortion. Legalised abortion and access to effective contraception were supposed to make abortion rare, but it’s actually now at plague proportions.

Most adult women in Australia also know someone who regrets having an abortion. Many of us also know the women with the mystery breast cancers, the women who now can’t have children, the women who are on substantial doses of antidepressants and have attempted suicide, the women who cry on certain hidden "anniversaries" they won’t talk about.

How can anyone think that this is a good thing? Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century feminists argued that abortion was a quintessentially male solution to a problem that didn’t exist, except in the panic-stricken male mind. They argued for and tried to envision a future where every child would be welcomed, regardless of its origin. Yet every day women continue to climb up obediently on to the abortionist’s couch in the name of maintaining the status quo. How is this freedom of choice?

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Another engine explosion on a superjumbo: "DISTRESSED passengers told how they survived a mid-air emergency last night when an Emirates A380's engine exploded at 10,000 feet and forced it to turn back for an emergency landing. About 20 minutes after leaving Sydney, Emirates flight EK413 experienced an "engine fault" en route to Dubai. "I saw a flash," John Fothergill, 49, from Auckland, said. "I thought it could have been lightening but then we saw flames come out of the engine. The whole interior of the A380 lit up. "You'd have to say there were two or three metre flames. (The) explosion shook the plane, there was a bigger judder."

Why Mitt Romney lost — and the GOP will continue to lose: "How did Mitt Romney and the Republican Party blow it all so badly? The short answer is that the GOP insisted on pushing backward-looking social issues in a country that is increasingly libertarian."

Republicans must be super-careful: "President Obama's re-election puts Republicans on notice. No matter what we do, the media will portray us as extreme, venal, stupid or anti-woman, if not as individuals, then guilty by association. The GOP nominee must bear the burden of admittedly medieval statements on pregnancy and rape. ... Mitt Romney renounced the statements -- and still they tarnished the GOP brand. On the other side, all Democrats are moderates. Party bigs need never explain why Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts senator-elect, padded her credentials as an American Indian. ... Not only do the Democrats' bad actors not stain the ticket, they win."

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

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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12 November, 2012

Was the Petraeus resignation all it seems?

Prominent Australian conservative commentator, Andrew Bolt, accepts the official story and gives his reasons below. I add my comments at the end

There’s a lot of conspiracy mongering about the resignation of CIA chief David Petraeus over his affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell - as in: was this to nobble him as he prepared to blow the whistle on the Obama Administration’s cover-up on Benghazi? But the facts, as reported, seem to speak for themselves:

[A]n FBI source says the investigation began when American intelligence mistook an email Petraeus had sent to his girlfriend as a reference to corruption. Petraeus was commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan from July 4, 2010 until July 18, 2011.

The investigation began last spring, but the FBI then pored over his emails when he was stationed in Afghanistan. …

Given his top secret clearance and the fact that Petraeus is married, the FBI continued to investigate and intercept Petraeus’ email exchanges with the woman. The emails include sexually explicit references to such items as sex under a desk.

At some point after Petraeus was sworn in as CIA director on Sept. 6, 2011, the woman broke up with him. However, Petraeus continued to pursue her, sending her thousands of emails over the last several months, raising even more questions about his judgment.

“Thousands of emails” in just the last few months sounds like a man obsessed, and an indiscreet one for a CIA boss. Then there is this:

The biographer for resigning CIA Director David Petraeus is under FBI investigation for improperly trying to access his email and possibly gaining access to classified information, law enforcement officials told NBC News on Friday.

So I’m inclined not to buy the post-election conspiracy theorising of a Lt Col Ralph Peters, among many:

The timing is just too perfect for the Obama administration. Just as the administration claimed it was purely coincidence that our Benghazi consulate was attacked on the anniversary of September 11th. Now it’s purely coincidence that this affair—extra-marital affair—surfaces right after the election, not before, but right after, but before the intelligence chiefs go to Capitol Hill to get grilled. As an old intelligence analyst, Neil, the way I read this—I could be totally wrong, this is my interpretation—is that the administration was unhappy with Petraeus not playing ball 100% on their party-line story. I think it’s getting cold feet about testifying under oath on their party-line story. And I suspect that these tough Chicago guys knew about this affair for a while, held it in their back pocket until they needed to play the card.

SOURCE

I agree with Bolt but for rather different reasons. As a social psychologist, I have studied a bit about male/female attraction and have myself been married 4 times (and still have a patient lady in my life) and to me the pictures above say all that needs to be said.

The top picture is of the girlfriend, the second picture is of Petraeus and his wife of 37 years. Petraeus would be queer if he didn't leap at the younger woman's availability. He would have to be superhuman to have resisted the temptation. But the security risks of extra-marital liasons are well-known (vide the Profumo affair in Britain) so he had to be dismissed from his very sensitive job. That the timing was held over until after the election is however beyond doubt -- JR.

Another view -- from "Former Spook":

David Petraeus's sudden fall from grace invites a rather obvious question, namely who leaked information about his affair. In our experience, someone at the general's level typically resigns over an affair when the story is about to hit the press. We're guessing that someone in the media was given the details about the CIA Director's extra-marital affair, and they called Langley asking for a statement. Realizing his indiscretion would soon become public, Petraeus took the pro-active step of submitting his resignation, which was "regretfully" accepted by President Obama.

So, who "got" David Petraeus? Beyond his own, deplorable conduct, there is the list of ususal suspects. We'll begin with veterans of the CIA clandestine service and paramilitary operations directorate. They are furious over Petraeus's conduct in the aftermath of the Benghazi debacle, when his statements on the attack were similar to those of administration officials, who suggested the attack on the consulate was the result of an "out-of-control" protest, sparked by outrage over an internet video that offensive to Muslims. Two CIA contractors were among the four Americans killed in the attack and other agency personnel were wounded. Yet, the administration did nothing to send assistance to the besieged consulate, other than a quick reaction force from the embassy in Tripoli.

As we've noted before, no one plays the "leak" game better than the spook community. As the White House clung to its "video" narrative, operatives involved in the Benghazi operation began passing details of that fateful night, raising new questions about what actually occurred. The leaks were aimed (in part) at the administration, but they were also directed at Petraeus and the Director of National Intelligence (James Clapper) who were viewed as not only abandoning operatives on the ground, but doing little to defend the reputation of intelligence professionals when various administration officials suggested the community "got it wrong" before Benghazi.

Then, more than six weeks after the attack, Petraeus did something a bit unusual. Realizing the White House's well-deserved reputation for throwing people under the bus, the CIA Director announced that no one at his agency had taken steps to prevent assistance from reaching our diplomats and intel operators on the ground in Benghazi. That assertion shifted the blame squarely on the administration and the Pentagon. Needless to say, Petraeus's comments didn't exactly win him any friends in the West Wing, or on the E-ring of the Pentagon. And, if he was trying to rally support in the spook world, it was probably too late for that as well.

So members of the intel community had plenty of motive for exposing the CIA Director's extra-curricular activities. And, it wouldn't be that hard to discover what he was up to. As a former senior commander (and more recently as head of the CIA), Petraeus has been living in a 24-hour security bubble for years, so his protection detail was probably aware of the affair, and it didn't take long for word to leak to other spooks, who had plenty of motive to get rid of Petraeus. Additionally, there are now reports the affair began during his military days--possibly dating to the general's tenure as our commander in Iraq and Afghanistan--so there were plenty of people in a position to "know."

But don't exclude the possibility of a White House "job," either. Relations between the retired General and Mr. Obama were never good; there were disagreements over U.S. policies in Afghanistan and many in the administration viewed Petraeus as "too independent" for the job. And, when the CIA Director blamed the lack of support in Benghazi on the White House, the administration had a clear reason for getting rid of General Petraeus. As President Obama reviews candidates for his second term cabinet (and other senior positions) we keep hearing the term "pliable" being tossed about. In other words, the Commander-in-Chief is looking for individuals who will take orders without question or complaint. David Petraeus clearly didn't fit that mold. So, with his affair under investigation by the FBI, it wasn't hard for Team Obama to obtain that information and use it when it became convenient.

SOURCE

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The impoverishing drift Leftward of the American electorate

Mark Steyn foresees below something of an American collapse. I agree but doubt that it will be sudden. Other countries -- such as Britain -- have been impoverished by socialism but the decline has been gradual. America faces a dismal rather than a chaotic fate. American exceptionalism will gradually fade away. The great experiment is over.

That America's debts will be "paid" by inflating the currency is certain, however. So holders of significant savings (e.g. the elderly) will be hard hit.

Hardest hit -- absolutely hugely so -- will however be the governments of China and Japan. Will China "accidentally" drop a big one on San Francisco to say thankyou? It's possible. There'd be no risk of retaliation from Obama. They'd just have to apologize and he would bow to them -- JR

In the weeks ahead, Democrats and Republicans will reach a triumphant “bipartisan” deal to avert the fiscal cliff through some artful bookkeeping mechanism that postpones Taxmageddon for another year, or six months, or three, when they can reach yet another triumphant deal to postpone it yet again. Harry Reid has already announced that he wants to raise the debt ceiling — or, more accurately, lower the debt abyss — by $2.4 trillion before the end of the year, and no doubt we can look forward to a spectacular “bipartisan” agreement on that, too. It took the government of the United States two centuries to rack up its first trillion dollars in debt. Now Washington piles on another trillion every nine months. Forward!

If you add up the total debt — state, local, the works — every man, woman, and child in this country owes 200 grand (which is rather more than the average Greek does). Every American family owes about three-quarters of a million bucks, or about the budget deficit of Liechtenstein, which has the highest GDP per capita in the world. Which means that HRH Prince Hans-Adam II can afford it rather more easily than Bud and Cindy at 27b Elm Street. In 2009, the Democrats became the first government in the history of the planet to establish annual trillion-dollar deficits as a permanent feature of life. Before the end of Obama’s second term, the federal debt alone will hit $20 trillion. That ought to have been the central fact of this election — that Americans are the brokest brokey-broke losers who ever lived, and it’s time to do something about it.

My Hillsdale College comrade Paul Rahe, while accepting much of my thesis, thought that, as an effete milquetoast pantywaist sissified foreigner, I had missed a vital distinction. As he saw it, you can take the boy out of Canada but you can’t take the Canada out of the boy. I had failed to appreciate that Americans were not Euro-Canadians, and would not go gently into the statist night.

But, as I note in my book, “a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two.” Tuesday’s results demonstrate that, as a whole, the American electorate is trending very Euro-Canadian. True, you still have butch T-shirts — “Don’t Tread On Me,” “These Colors Don’t Run” . . . In my own state, where the Democrats ran the board on election night, the “Live Free or Die” license plates look very nice when you see them all lined up in the parking lot of the Social Security office. But, in their view of the state and its largesse, there’s nothing very exceptional about Americans, except that they’re the last to get with the program. Barack Obama ran well to the left of Bill Clinton and John Kerry, and has been rewarded for it both by his party’s victory and by the reflex urgings of the usual GOP experts that the Republican party needs to “moderate” its brand.

I have no interest in the traditional straw clutching — oh, it was the weak candidate . . . hard to knock off an incumbent . . . next time we’ll have a better GOTV operation in Colorado . . . I’m always struck, if one chances to be with a GOP insider when a new poll rolls off the wire, that their first reaction is to query whether it’s of “likely” voters or merely “registered” voters. As the consultant class knows, registered voters skew more Democrat than likely voters, and polls of “all adults” skew more Democrat still. Hence the preoccupation with turnout models. In other words, if America had compulsory voting as Australia does, the Republicans would lose every time. In Oz, there’s no turnout model, because everyone turns out. The turnout-model obsession is an implicit acknowledgment of an awkward truth — that, outside the voting booth, the default setting of American society is ever more liberal and statist.

The short version of electoral cycles is as follows: The low-turnout midterms are fought in political terms, and thus Republicans do well and sometimes spectacularly well (1994, 2010); the higher-turnout presidential elections are fought in broader cultural terms, and Republicans do poorly, because they’ve ceded most of the cultural space to the other side. What’s more likely to determine the course of your nation’s destiny? A narrow focus on robocalls in selected Florida and New Hampshire counties every other fall? Or determining how all the great questions are framed from the classroom to the iPod to the movie screen in the 729 days between elections?

The good news is that reality (to use a quaint expression) doesn’t need to swing a couple of thousand soccer moms in northern Virginia. Reality doesn’t need to crack 270 in the Electoral College. Reality can get 1.3 percent of the popular vote and still trump everything else. In the course of his first term, Obama increased the federal debt by just shy of $6 trillion and in return grew the economy by $905 billion. So, as Lance Roberts at Street Talk Live pointed out, in order to generate every dollar of economic growth the United States had to borrow about five dollars and 60 cents. There’s no one out there on the planet — whether it’s “the rich” or the Chinese — who can afford to carry on bankrolling that rate of return.

According to one CBO analysis, U.S.-government spending is sustainable as long as the rest of the world is prepared to sink 19 percent of its GDP into U.S. Treasury debt. We already know the answer to that: In order to avoid the public humiliation of a failed bond auction, the U.S. Treasury sells 70 percent of the debt it issues to the Federal Reserve — which is to say the left hand of the U.S. government is borrowing money from the right hand of the U.S. government. It’s government as a Nigerian e-mail scam, with Ben Bernanke playing the role of the dictator’s widow with $4 trillion under her bed that she’s willing to wire to Timmy Geithner as soon as he sends her his bank-account details.

If that’s all a bit too technical, here’s the gist: There’s nothing holding the joint up.

So Washington cannot be saved from itself. For the moment, tend to your state, and county, town and school district, and demonstrate the virtues of responsible self-government at the local level. Americans as a whole have joined the rest of the Western world in voting themselves a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. The longer any course correction is postponed the more convulsive it will be. Alas, on Tuesday, the electorate opted to defer it for another four years. I doubt they’ll get that long.

SOURCE

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Fake picture circulates the world this morning

This is being tweeted today relentlessly as though it is a picture of what occurred last night. In reality it dates from 2008 (see it here), and even back then its authenticity was questioned.

Why are we seeing it now? Why is it being pushed across the world's social media networks tonight?

Heavy fighting has going on in southern Israel and inside Gaza since early this evening. It began when an IDF patrol was hit by an anti-tank rocket fired from within Gaza around sundown. Several Israeli servicemen are seriously injured. In a country where most people's children serve in the defence forces, an attack like this does not go un-noticed. Throughout Saturday night, Israel has channeled some of its sophisticated weapons, including helicopters and drones, at very carefully selected targets in the Gaza Strip, an area dominated by the Hamas terrorist organization and bristling with tens of thousands of rockets stashed away inside homes, mosques and hospitals.

The terrorists for their part have fired off dozens of rockets. Frightened families throughout most of southern Israel are inside safe rooms and bomb shelters, or within a few seconds' dash of one, as we write this. School classes throughout the area have been canceled (Sunday is a school day in Israel). This will not prevent foreign media channels from saying - as they will certainly do in the coming hours - that Israel is responding disproportionately.

Militarily, the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza are far less-well equipped with military equipment than the IDF is. But strategically, the Gazan side has the 'advantage' of being ready, willing and able to do anything that will un-nerve the Israeli side and bring criticism onto Israeli heads. If this means telling lies, taking steps that provoke Israeli reactions that will certainly injure their neighbours, or firing rockets indiscriminately at towns, farms, homes, buses, cars, schools - well, that's what they have been doing for years. It's how they fight.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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11 November, 2012

The slow death of white America: How will the great melting pot adapt to the millions of black and Hispanic voters who swept Obama back to power?

By Tom Leonard

For Republicans struggling to understand their defeat at the polls, the most chilling statistic in this week’s presidential election was this: Mitt Romney won the biggest share of the white vote that any Republican White House contender ever has — and he still lost.

In an election battle that was defined as much as anything by race, Mitt Romney won the support of 59 per cent of whites, but just 27 per cent of Latinos, 26 per cent of Asian-Americans and 6 per cent of African-Americans.

Thirty years ago, being unpopular with ethnic minorities would hardly have stopped a white establishment candidate like Romney from trouncing Barack Obama. But back then, whites accounted for almost 90 per cent of voters. Now they make up just 72 per cent of the electorate, and that figure is shrinking by the year.

Tuesday’s election showed a large turnout by Hispanics, who constituted some 10 per cent of voters — more than ever before. With 71 per cent of them voting for Mr Obama — notably in a handful of crucial swing states such as Florida, Colorado and Nevada, where they turned out at the polls in unusually high numbers — Hispanic voters gave the President his winning margin.

In other key states, such as Ohio, pundits said a strong showing by Hispanic and black voters together ensured an Obama victory.

The Republican party, said one pollster, ‘will be doomed if they lose black and Latino votes by these same margins in the future’.

He’s not exaggerating. As the election highlighted, white America is dying — and in a quite literal sense.

The evidence of this demographic timebomb, which is likely to alter the face and character of the U.S. far more fundamentally than any number of elections, was made plain in the summer in a new report by the U.S. Census Bureau. It revealed that for the first time in American history, ethnic minorities now account for more than half the babies born in the U.S.

Of the four million children born in the year to July 2011, 50.4 per cent were ethnic minorities — black, Asian, mixed-race and, above all, Hispanic.

It was a long-expected milestone on the road to an America in which, according to experts, within 30 years whites will no longer be the majority.

Rather, the U.S. will boast 130 million Hispanics, more than the current population of Mexico. Among under 18-year-olds, whites will become a minority as early as 2019.

For a country founded by British colonists on British traditions and, for half its history inhabited almost entirely by white Europeans (if you discount the slaves, as the nation’s leaders did), it signals a seismic cultural transformation for the world’s sole superpower.

Given that immigration has become the country’s single most divisive issue, predictably some Americans have been punching the air for joy at the decline of a white majority, while others are bereft at what they see as the leaching away of their nation’s traditional character.

Liberals wedded to a multi-ethnic future insist it will be an opportunity to reinvigorate the U.S., creating a more diversified, open-minded and 21st century country.

At the other extreme are conservatives who believe the ‘death’ of white America spells cultural, economic and political doom for their country, and an end to the values of self-sufficiency that made their country great. And in between the two extremes are most rank-and-file Americans, who understand that the U.S. needs new blood if it is to avoid Japan and Europe’s economic nightmare of an ageing population, but who are worried by the implications of what has been dubbed the ‘browning’ of the U.S.

As they sit on a bus or train listening to Mexican Americans chat away in Spanish, they may wonder if their country’s famous ability to assimilate all newcomers is going to work in the next century.

Conservative thinker Pat Buchanan, a senior adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, is an outspoken critic of recent immigration. For him, ‘white America is a dying tribe’, and the ethnic minority tribes that are jostling to fill the gap are simply not up to the task of competing against the rising power of China.

When, 14 years ago, President Bill Clinton told students in Oregon that it would be better for America when everyone was a minority, Buchanan waspishly observed that those students would one day ‘have to spend their golden years in a Third World America’.

Unlike in the past, it isn’t black Americans who are the greatest political concern for the defenders of ‘old’ America, but Hispanics from Mexico and Latin America — the legacy of four decades of economic migration by millions who have come north looking for a job and a chance to find the American Dream.

The problem, in the eyes of many conservatives, is that compared with the generations of Irish, Germans, Jews, Poles and Italians before them, pitifully few Hispanics have yet found that dream. Most Hispanics — two-thirds of whom originate from Mexico — continue to be stuck limpet-like at the bottom of society, a quiet, often overlooked army doing the most menial jobs such as picking fruit, washing cars, toiling in restaurant kitchens and cleaning offices.

Thanks to the sweeping away of immigrant quotas, the immigrant population has quadrupled since 1970, with nearly 14 million entering the country between 2000 and 2010 alone.

Mexicans are by far the biggest group — of the 12 million now living in the U.S., about half are there legally. (It is sobering to learn that the U.S. population of around 226 million in 1980 has now increased to more than 314 million.)

America’s struggling economy and toughened border controls have put a brake on immigration, but the problem for those upset by the country’s changing demographics is that whites — while still constituting 72 per cent of the population — aren’t having enough children.

The fertility rate for Hispanic women is 2.4 children, compared with 2.1 for black women, and only 1.8 for whites. Latinos don’t just have more children — already more than a quarter of all babies — but they are also much younger. While the average age of American whites is 42, for Hispanics it is just 27.

In much of America’s south-west, there is growing tension between richer but increasingly beleaguered older white people and younger, poorer Latinos.

Earlier this year, a Texas pizza chain called Pizza Patron drew a storm of protest from conservatives after launching a promotion to give free slices to anyone who could order in Spanish. (In 2007, the company’s bosses even received death threats after they started accepting Mexican pesos as another stunt.)

Pat Buchanan told me that white Middle America feels it has been abandoned. ‘They watch on cable TV as illegal aliens walk into their country and are rewarded with free healthcare and education for their kids, take jobs away from U.S. workers and carry Mexican flags while marching in American cities to demand U.S. citizenship: they sense that they are losing their country, and they are right,’ he said.

He insisted there are increasingly ‘two Americas’: white and northern Asian-Americans from China, Japan and South Korea, who have higher incomes and far better educational qualifications than the other half of the divided nation — the Hispanic and African-Americans.

In this, at least, his opponents will concede he has a point. America — like Britain — desperately needs a well-qualified workforce to compete in the world, but just 13 per cent of adult Latinos have a college degree, compared with 18 per cent of blacks and 31 one per cent of whites.

Buchanan believes Britain, with the rest of Europe, faces the same fate as the U.S. under the relentless logic of a dwindling white population and growing minorities.

‘There’s nothing the British can do because they’re not reproducing,’ he said. ‘They’re getting older, they’re going to die and someone’s going to come in and take it over. I think Europe is finished.’

Liberal demographic experts such as Bill Frey at the think-tank the Brookings Institution dismiss doom-mongering about Hispanics as the irrational fear of a generation who — owing to a dearth of immigration between the Thirties and Seventies — never had to grow up with an influx of newcomers. Americans were just as scared of Italian immigrants when they arrived in the early 20th century, he argues. He says Hispanic immigrants bring ‘enthusiasm, energy and inventiveness’ to America — qualities you can’t measure by the size of their bank account or their number of degrees.

What’s more, he says, while it always takes about three generations for immigrants to start moving up through society, surveys show Hispanic immigrants really do want to become ‘mainstream Americans’. They ‘just’ need government help — education, housing, social services, English lessons — to give them a leg-up.

With this touchstone issue set to dominate much of America’s social and political debate in the coming years, the Republican Party is left to wrestle with the issue of how it can attract voters who are not wedded to the traditional values it espouses.

The sensible response for the party will be to turn to its strong line-up of young, ethnic minority figures — particularly charismatic Cuban-American Marco Rubio, a Florida senator — who are waiting in the wings as future leaders.

If instead it chooses another candidate like Romney in 2016, it may be doomed to failure again. ‘Harsh rhetoric about Hispanics is for some Republicans rather like smoking — you know it will kill you, but you do it anyway,’ says party pollster Whit Ayres.

If those in the leadership don’t ‘break the habit’, he says grimly, the Republican party is finished.

SOURCE

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Demographics haven't killed the GOP -- yet

Another view

President Obama's re-election has triggered panic in some GOP circles. Obama was able to win not just once, when Americans were reacting against the Bush era, but a second time, with a weak economy and a vulnerable record. America, the alarmists say, has fundamentally shifted so much that Republicans can no longer win national elections. This thesis merits serious consideration. Especially relevant is the fact that Mitt Romney's dismal performance among the growing Hispanic demographic made the race essentially unwinnable.

That having been said, Republicans' demise may not be at hand just yet. In the short and medium-term, it is worth asking how much of this victory can be chalked up to Obama's personal appeal and status as a historical figure, as opposed to fundamental shifts in the American electorate. The key question is whether future Democratic candidates will be able to command the type of margins Obama enjoyed among young voters and African-Americans. Although Republicans face long-term challenges with voter demographics, Romney's problem in this election may not have been primarily structural.

Democrats have consistently dominated Republicans among black voters in the modern era. They have also had the edge with younger voters. Obama significantly outperformed his Democratic predecessors among these groups, for reasons that seem obvious. But he won't always be on the ballot.

Take the black vote. In the six presidential races between 1984 and 2004, Republicans' support among blacks never exceeded 12 percent. But in 2008, Obama won them with an astounding 95 percent to 4 percent for John McCain. This time, he got 93 percent.

Romney received only 6 percent of the black vote. If he had gotten George W. Bush's level of support among blacks in 2004 (11 percent), he would have carried Florida and Ohio by more than 100,000 votes in each state. It's quite possible that Obama has found a Democratic ceiling with black voters, and future Democratic nominees cannot take such margins for granted. So although Republicans cannot afford to continue writing off black votes as they have for far too long, they probably still have time for a serious effort to win more of them.

The story is similar with the youth vote. In past elections, the under-29 vote has gone to Democrats consistently. John Kerry won this group by 9 points in 2004. Obama's great achievement was not that he turned out under-29 voters in significantly higher numbers but that he inspired so many of them. He won them by an astounding 34 points in 2008.

Obama has an unusually strong appeal with the young, but even his advantage among them shrank by 11 points between 2008 and 2012. Will the 2016 presidential campaign of, say, Martin O'Malley or Mark Warner appeal to under-29 voters quite so strongly? And what about black voters? Even assuming 2012 turnout levels for both groups, Obama would have certainly lost Florida, Ohio and Virginia if he had won just these two groups by the same margins that John Kerry did in 2004. And under such a scenario, had Romney managed to win 28 percent among Hispanics instead of his appalling 23 percent performance in Colorado, he would be the next president.

Republicans must take seriously their very real problems with black voters, young voters and also Hispanic voters. But they would be wrong to throw up their hands at demography as if the reaper had already arrived. There is still time for them to reach out. Democrats know they cannot take Obama-levels of support among these groups for granted, but Republicans will be done for indeed if they don't start working now to win their votes.

SOURCE

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Four more years of decline

Great nations and proud empires have always collapsed from within before they were conquered from without. President Obama's re-election mirrors the self-indulgent, greedy and envious nation we are rapidly becoming.

Pollsters Michael Barone and Dick Morris got it horribly wrong. Both predicted a 300 electoral-vote win for Romney. It was President Obama who reached that mark. The central message coming out of the election seems to be that we are no longer the America of our Founders, or even the America that existed during World War II, which produced our "greatest generation."

Instead, the election validates the enormous cultural shift that has been taking place since the 1960s, when a countercultural bomb was dropped on society, producing moral fallout that continues to this day.

I am a child of the "greatest generation." My parents believed I should learn to take care of myself. They would have been too embarrassed to ask for help if they needed it. If they did, they would turn to family first, or to a friend or neighbor. There were fewer social programs then, so people mostly did without, living only on what they truly needed. It said something about your character if you refused to strive toward self-sufficiency.

In 2012, nothing appears to embarrass us. Snooki. Honey Boo Boo. Reality TV wives. Look at what is paraded before us as normal. Oppose the new normal and it is you who are the anomaly.

Young people are taught in public schools, at major universities, on television and in movies, that every life choice is acceptable and every tenet open to interpretation. In politics, some proclaim it is right to oppose the successful and envy the rich to the point where they must be denigrated and penalized for their success with higher taxes. No one has to be personally responsible. No education; no motivation; no life plan? No problem. The government will take care of you.

One thing Romney might have done better is to have featured more people who had overcome government dependence by embracing the values he was promoting. Example trumps philosophy, and success should trump victimhood. Inspiration follows perspiration. But in our "entitlement" age even that might have been impossible to overcome.

Other signs of cultural decay are accepted with little notice. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 40 percent of babies born in America are born to unmarried women. Shrug. Abortion clinics continue to operate. Yawn.

There is no longer any cultural corrective because we have abandoned the concept of objective truth. Nothing is right or wrong, because that suggests a standard by which right and wrong might be defined. Personal choice is the new "standard," which is no standard at all. One might as well develop individual weights and measures.

Politicians bid for votes, making promises they can't keep to voters who will believe anything, as long as it appeals to greed, envy and their sense of entitlement. This undermines our culture. This fuels our massive debt, weakening our economic power and America's standing in the world.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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9 November, 2012

Translating ....

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Financial crisis can’t explain the current slow recovery

Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s book, “This Time is Different,” has become the bible of the Obama administration. Their claim that recoveries after financial crises are naturally much slower than other recoveries has given President Obama a lot of cover. Their argument may be widely accepted by the media but has not been so readily accepted by economists.

Reinhart and Rogoff lashed out at academic critics a couple of weeks ago with an opinion piece in Bloomberg and again recently on CNN, attacking economists who disagree with them as blinded by support for Mitt Romney.

Our current recovery has been the weakest since at least World War II. Thirty-nine months since the recovery started in June 2009, job growth has been only 2 percent. During the average recovery since 1970, job growth over the first 39 months has averaged over 8 percent. The current recovery has failed to keep up with the growth in the working age population. Unlike past recoveries, much of the drop in the unemployment rate simply reflects people giving up looking for work. And there is no doubt there was a financial crisis.

But the financial crisis is not the explanation for the slow recovery.

The problem for Reinhart and Rogoff is that neither US historical data nor recent international comparisons support their assertion. Indeed, their claim is at odds with two well-known stylized facts:

1) Severe recessions are matched by strong recoveries, known as Zarnowitz’s law (the basis for Milton Friedman “plucking model” introduced in 1964 and supported by direct evidence in 1993).

2) Most severe recessions are accompanied by banking crises. Put these two stylized facts together, and even before looking at the data, you have to be somewhat skeptical about the Reinhart-Rogoff generalization.

When you do look at the data the results are clear. In five of the six financial crises since 1882 – the Great Depression of the 1930s was the sole exception – the strength of the recovery in real Gross National Product greatly exceeds the previous decline, by close to 6 percentage points over the eight quarters following the cyclical trough. This is similar to what we see in the two severe contractions in which there are no financial crises. The recent recession and recovery are more similar to the Great Depression than the other episodes.

Cross-country comparisons tell a similar story. Unemployment actually recovered faster in countries hit by a financial crisis than in those in a recession for other reasons. Of the nine foreign countries for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics has produced comparable unemployment data based on the same definition of unemployment, Reinhart and Rogoff identify four as suffering from a financial crisis (Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) and five as not (Australia, Canada, France, Italy and Sweden). From January 2009 to December 2011, the unemployment rates in the countries with financial crises actually increased less than in those that avoided such a crisis (0.66 percentage points versus 0.86 percentage points).

Countries identified as suffering a financial crisis by Reinhart and Rogoff also did not experience slower Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth during their recoveries. From the third quarter of 2009, when the U.S. recovery started, the difference in GDP growth between the two sets of nations averaged just one-tenth of 1 percent.

The combination of Obama’s stimulus, multiple jobs bills and massive new regulations on everything from financial markets, housing, health care, credit cards and energy is a possible explanation for the difficulties in the U.S. labor market. Resources spent by the government must come out of someone’s pocket. Spending almost $1 trillion on various stimulus projects means moving around a lot of resources and jobs. People don’t instantly move between jobs, temporarily increasing unemployment. All the new regulations are similarly detrimental. And more regulations may be coming, creating substantial uncertainty about the future.

Canada provides a simple comparison. Our unemployment rates increased in lock step from August 2008 until six months later, in February 2009, when the stimulus was passed in the United States. The increased gap when the stimulus was passed is consistent with the stimulus, not something unique about the financial crisis, being the initial development that made things worse. Since the stimulus largely ended by the middle of 2011, the gap has decreased.

Americans have suffered two very slow recoveries – during the Great Depression and now. The most obvious common factor in both has been the Keynesian policies and massive regulations used to “cure” those downturns. Clearly, “financial crisis” can’t explain the current slow recovery.

SOURCE

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Solzhenitsyn on what America has lost

However, in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims.

Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer.

In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth century’s moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the Nineteenth Century.

More HERE

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One of civilization's wonders

Jeff Jacoby looks on the bright side

Note: This short column was written on Election Day for the Boston Globe's early edition, which was printed and distributed before the election results were known

AS THE NATION'S ELECTORAL BRAWL drew to a close, I thought about a question posed by ABC's Martha Raddatz to vice-presidential candidates Joe Biden and Paul Ryan during their debate in Kentucky last month. She quoted "a highly decorated soldier" who was "dismayed" at the tone of the campaign. "The ads are so negative," the soldier had lamented, "and they're all tearing down each other rather than building up the country."

Raddatz challenged the candidates: "What would you say to that American hero about this campaign? And at the end of the day, are you ever embarrassed by the tone?"

Biden and Ryan sidestepped the question, resorting instead to their rehearsed arguments and talking points. Which was too bad, for that soldier's grievance deserved a response.

I wish the candidates had reminded him that the vitriol of US presidential competitions didn't begin with Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. In 1884, British historian James Bryce described the battle for the White House between James Blaine and Grover Cleveland as a "tempest of invective and calumny," and the nastiness of presidential campaigns was an old story even then.

Yet those campaigns end in what can only be described as a miracle. For months we fight over the most emotional, consequential issues in American life. The stakes always seem enormous. The hopes and fears of millions of voters are invested in the outcome. In much of the world and for most of history, only bloodshed could resolve disputes so momentous. But everyone knows how this election will end. The losing candidate will deliver a graceful concession speech; the victor will peacefully take the oath of office in January.

Yes, the meanness of these campaigns is regrettable. Politics isn't pretty anywhere. But here it ends with amazing dignity, in polling stations across the country, as a mighty nation calmly effects the transfer of power and authority. If that isn't one of civilization's wonders, what is?

SOURCE

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Future Storms Like Superstorm Sandy Could Bankrupt States

Some state governments are so far into the insurance business that they could be bankrupted by storm claims

Superstorm Sandy killed over 70 people in the U.S., knocked out power for millions up and down the East Coast, flooded the New York Subway, and damaged thousands of homes. The final price tag for the storm's damage could exceed $40 billion, which would make it the most expensive storm to hit the U.S. since Hurricane Katrina.

Coming as it did, only a year after Hurricane Irene and eight years after Hurricane Ivan, some are asking whether it is part of a trend towards more damaging storms. The answer is yes—we humans are to blame for more damaging storms, but not for the reasons you might think. One of the main culprits is government intervention in insurance markets, which creates perverse incentives to build in danger zones, thereby increasing the threat posed by storms both to property owners and to taxpayers. If Sandy had hit Florida the way it hit New York and New Jersey, it might have bankrupted the state. To reduce the scale of future damage from storms like Sandy, and the threat of fiscal implosion, federal and state governments should get out of the insurance business.

There have been superstorms similar to Sandy in the past, including the blizzard of 1978, the Perfect Storm of 1991, and the Eastcoaster of 1996. But there doesn’t seem to be a trend in the number or intensity of either hurricanes or Sandy-like superstorms. Martin Hoerling, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says there is no trend in the number of hurricanes or extratropical cyclones. Nor is there any evidence of a relationship between the numbers of either type of cyclone and climate change. However, there has been a significant increase in the amount of damage caused by hurricanes and similar extreme weather events over the past 50 years. There are two main reasons for this. First, we have become much wealthier: inflation adjusted average per capita income in the U.S. rose threefold, from $13,250 in 1960 to $39,800 in 2008. Second, the number of people living along the coast has increased dramatically: from 1960 to 2008 coastal population rose by 84 percent, whereas the non-coastal population rose by 64 percent. As a result, there is simply more valuable property in coastal areas that is likely to be affected when a big storm hits.

One reason coastal population rose more than non-coastal population is that government disaster insurance programs have actively encouraged people to locate close to the coast. In addition to the National Flood Insurance Program, the federal government’s second largest fiscal liability next to Social Security, many states run property insurance plans out of the residual market intended to provide a lower cost of insurance for owners of homes and businesses in more risky areas, which would normally be difficult or impossible to obtain in the private market. Such state-run insurance plans are offered through Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) plans, Beach and Windstorm plans, or in Florida and Louisiana, state-run insurers of “last resort.”

FAIR was established by the federal government as part of an urban redevelopment program following the riots of 1968, with the express intention of encouraging people to buy property in depressed areas. The plans do that, but by reducing the cost of insuring against risks such as flooding and storm damage, they also encourage people to build properties in storm and flood-prone areas. That increases the damage done when a storm hits.

These insurance plans also suffer from risk concentration—in direct violation of one of the basic principles of insurance: risk diversification. When a state provides disaster insurance coverage to a group of people within its borders all of whom face similar risks, it is concentrating risk. When disaster strikes and a significant proportion of those insured suffer major losses, the state’s insurance fund may suffer a catastrophic shortfall—with dire consequences for the state’s fiscal position. According to the Insurance Research Council, U.S. residual market exposure has grown an average of 18 percent per year since 1990 in large part because of the artificially low cost of such state-backed insurance. In other words, the FAIR Plans developed in the 1960s have exacerbated the problem of risk concentration by encouraging development and population growth on the coast.

This has been especially problematic in Florida, where the state-run Citizens Property Insurance Company (CPIC) has grown to cover at least 25 percent of homeowners in the state, mostly in extremely high-risk areas prone to hurricane damage. Because they are covered by CPIC, policyholders pay rates that are not actuarially sound, underfunding the potential claims payouts. To make matters worse, the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund (FHCF)—a state-run reinsurance fund which provides reinsurance to both private insurers in Florida and CPIC—has been estimated to underfund its $17 billion in obligations by at least $3.2 billion. If CPIC and FHCF fail to make ends meet to pay out claims in the event of a large storm or series of storms, Florida taxpayers will be on the hook for the bills.

Rather than sending a market signal warning of the cost of coastal living, subsidized insurance has compounded the problem, with demand for FAIR and Beach Plans more than tripling. In the wake of major storms such as Andrew and Katrina, the total number of FAIR and Beach Plan policies has increased from 931,550 in 1990 to 3.3 million in 2011. Over the same period, the total exposure to loss covered under the nation’s FAIR and Beach Plans increased 1,517 percent, from $54.7 billion in 1990 to $884.7 billion in 2011. The combination of more policies and greater coverage has pushed state-run plans to record deficits, after facing high volumes of claims from bad storm seasons. According to the Insurance Information Institute, of the 31 FAIR plans for which data are available, 28 have incurred at least one operating deficit since 1999. Of the six Beach and Windstorm Plans, all have sustained at least one underwriting loss since 1999.

While much of the increase in the number of state-backed policies has been driven by Louisiana, Florida, and other Southern states, Northeastern states have also seen increases in the amount of coverage provided by their FAIR plans. In particular, Massachusetts has seen a 336 percent increase in the number of its FAIR plan policies, representing an increase in coverage by $72.6 billion.

Government subsidies to insurance may have been well intentioned but by incentivizing people to build homes in danger zones, they have created enormous fiscal risk. If states want to avoid this looming fiscal trouble, they would do well to address all the causes. In the case of insurance, they can begin right away by ceasing to issue new policies and retiring policies when the renewals come due. That would force property owners to seek insurance on the private market, or move.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Alaska gold rush for laborer’s union: "The Alaska Policy Forum recently exposed that the state’s legislature in 2011 and 2012 appropriated millions of tax dollars to finance a Laborer’s International Union of North America local’s facilities. As is the case with numerous state government spending initiatives today, it violates the state’s Gift Clause — a constitutional protection in 47 of 50 states that forbids government from allocating tax dollars to private entities for non-public purposes."

The conflation trap: "It is not only mainstream libertarians (and of course, to a far greater extent, conservatives) that tend to conflate the results of crony corporatism with those of free markets; such conflationism is all too common on the traditional left as well. The difference is that the evaluations are reversed; where the right-wing version of conflationism treats the virtues of free markets as reason to defend the fruits of corporatism, the left-wing version of conflationism treats the objectionable fruits of corporatism as reason to condemn free markets."

Is the state anarchistic?: "We’re playing pretend when we think that the Constitution protects us, and we’re playing pretend again if we think that elections can regulate the politicians. Here’s the truth ... The State is an ANARCHISTIC institution. It’s ruled by no one, and it obeys no laws."

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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8 November, 2012

You ain't seen nothing yet

With the House still in Republican control, there is not much damage Obama and his Democrats can do via legislation but Obama's regulatory powers are immense. Just the EPA could destroy American business singlehandedly and they are going to try. They will undoubtedly be held up in the courts but, with Obama appointments to SCOTUS, the EPA will prevail in the end.

The re-election of Obama after 4 years of great economic failure is immensely disturbing. It suggests that no conservative can now be elected President. With the media, most minorites and the 47% behind them, are the Democrats now unbeatable? It seems likely. It seems that America's decline is now well underway and is probably irreversible. I am glad I am not an American who wants a job -- JR

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The Wilderness

At a low point in the fortunes of the Tory party, Disraeli said, “The pendulum swings.” It does indeed, but it is not going to swing back to limited-government republicanism any time soon; in fact such republicanism has for some time been effectively dead in California, New York, and the other arrantly blue states. Nor, to judge from yesterday’s election, is such republicanism especially vibrant in middle-of-the-road states like Florida, Virginia, Ohio, and Colorado. Put it another way: only once since the 1980s has a Republican candidate won a greater number of votes in a presidential election than the Democratic candidate (Bush in 2004).

Defeat offers clarity. If we had any doubts as to our position, yesterday’s election put an end to them. Those of us who continue to oppose the fiscal and constitutional overreach of the modern social state now find ourselves in the wilderness.

Insofar as politics are concerned, the best the center-right in America can do, in the foreseeable future, is to act as a check on folly in the political arena, and in doing so hope to prove Macaulay wrong when he said that the American Republic would fail because the poor would plunder the rich and increase the country’s distress by devouring the “seed-corn” of future growth.

SOURCE

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Some examples of anti-business regulation at work

According to conventional progressive wisdom, regulation is the means by which a compassionate government protects the weak and innocent from the strong and malevolent.

Try telling that to Brad Jones. Jones is one of the owners of Buckingham Slate, a Virginia business a little over an hour's drive west of Richmond. The company is distinguished by the quality of the highly valued Arvonia slate it produces. And by the fact that its roots trace back almost to the Civil War. And by the fact that federal regulators smacked it with a $4,000 fine.

Over a trash can. The offending can — or "waste receptacle," in the words of the Mine Safety and Health Administration's official citation — was "not covered." What's more, "the receptacle was full." It "could be smelled." There were — brace yourself — "flies fl[y]ing in and around the receptacle." And to crown all, "management engaged in aggravated conduct constituting more than ordinary negligence" by allowing this "condition to exist." The horror.

Buckingham Slate has racked up other fines, too — such as a $70,000 fine imposed because one of its trucks had an inoperable horn. Perhaps regulators were following the approach advocated by Al Armendariz, the former EPA official who said enforcers should "crucify" offenders to "make an example" of them, which would then make others "easy to manage."

According to President Obama's campaign rhetoric, Republicans have nothing to offer but "the same prescription they've had for the last 30 years. . .: 'Feel a cold coming on? Take two tax cuts, roll back some regulations, and call us in the morning!' "

Funny stuff. But Martha Boneta isn't laughing.

Boneta, a Fauquier County farmer, hosted a birthday party for eight 10-year-old girls — an occasion for which she lacked the proper "events permit." For this, the county slammed her with a $5,000 fine. She also got in hot water for selling items, such as yarn and birdhouses, that she had not made herself.

Outraged over how the county was treating her, local farmers showed up at a zoning-board meeting a couple of months ago with pitchforks in hand. But the demonstration was only so useful. She ended up closing her shop anyway.

Americans should place more trust in "the guiding hand of government," according to the president and his supporters.

But try telling that to Nathan Hammock and his family. The Hammocks own a dairy farm in Museville. Because of drought, they wanted to put an irrigation pond on their property. They eventually managed to — after three years trying to get permission from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers. "I think we've spent close to $30,000" in the process, Hammock says.

Hammock made the comment in a video you can find on the website of Rep. Robert Hurt (go to http://hurt.house.gov/ and click on "Videos"). Hurt, who represents Virginia's Fifth District, has introduced legislation to let farmers farm without having to navigate a "tremendous bureaucratic maze." It is moving through Congress — slowly.

The plural of anecdote, of course, is not data. So here are some data: In its first three years the Obama administration imposed more than 100 economically significant regulations — those costing $100 million or more. That's roughly four times as many as the Bush administration did during a similar period, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Liberal outfits insist Heritage is wrong. But even by their Obama-friendly accounting, the current president has been issuing major rules at a rate 24 percent faster than Bush. Despite the lip service he often pays to the free market, the president has overseen massive regulatory expansions. See, e.g., the banking industry; vehicle mileage standards; Obamacare's seemingly endless new rules; carbon emission limits on coal-fired power plants; energy-efficiency standards for home appliances; and dozens more.

According to a report by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, "The published regulatory burden for 2012 [alone] could exceed $105 billion. . . . Since January 1, the federal government has imposed $56.6 billion in compliance costs and more than 114 million annual paperwork burden hours."

Ask Jones about paperwork. Buckingham Slate is overseen by an alphabet soup of federal and state agencies, and "each one of them wants something from us all the time that is costing us money" — spill-prevention plans that require hiring an engineer; pre-shift inspections; dust monitoring; and more. Jones estimates that five of his 45 employees spend 20 percent of their time simply filling out paperwork.

Of course we need regulation. It helps keep our food safe to eat and our air safe to breathe. Companies shouldn't be able to shift the costs of production onto the public by dumping pollutants into the environment. Everybody agrees with that. The real question is: At what point does regulation go too far?

"If you're a small operator, they're just putting you out of business," says Jones. "It doesn't matter that we can compete globally. . . . Sooner or later, that kind of regulation is going to shut you down."

SOURCE

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Obama Supreme Court would attack free speech and right to equal protection

Hans Bader

The Obama Administration has avidly attacked certain constitutional rights. In one Supreme Court case, it argued that the government had the power to ban a non-profit corporation from publishing a book critical of a political candidate (the Supreme Court rejected this argument in a 5-to-4 vote, over a dissent by the liberal justices). In another, it took a position rejected by a unanimous Supreme Court, arguing that it could dictate who churches can hire as ministers or select to speak for them on matters of religious doctrine — a position so extreme that would have violated the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.

It has sought to not only preserve racial preferences where they already exist (like in admissions to colleges and universities, and in government hiring and federal contracts), but also to extend them to new areas, like health care, and racial quotas in school discipline, which violates a federal appeals court ruling enforcing constitutional equal-protection guarantees). And it wants to ban speech that it views as constituting, or inciting, discrimination, which would reach a vast range of speech ranging from the politically-incorrect to the blandly economic.

Former Education Department lawyer Curt Levey discusses the implications of Obama replacing two Supreme Court justices who will reach the age of 80 in a few years. Here is his “Top Ten” list of potential Supreme Court rulings that might result from Justice Scalia or Justice Kennedy being replaced as they reach an advanced age and retire:

#10 – A ban on voter ID laws, making it impossible to stop voter fraud.

#9 – Carte blanche for hate-speech laws that ban videos and other expression deemed offensive to Muslims and other minorities.

#8 – Abolition of the death penalty.

#7 – A prohibition on tuition vouchers being used for religious schools, crippling the school choice movement.

#6 – Elimination of all legal limits on racial preferences for minorities.

#5 – A requirement for taxpayer-funding of abortions through the third trimester of pregnancy.

#4 – Invention of a constitutional right to gay marriage that would trump all state laws and religious objections.

#3 – Striking down, as unconstitutional discrimination, any serious attempt to curtail the flow of illegal immigrants into the country or to deny them government benefits.

#2 – Elimination of an individual right to possess firearms.

#1 – Enshrinement of welfare and government-provided healthcare as constitutional rights, thus fulfilling Barack Obama’s dream of a Supreme Court willing to bring about “redistribution of wealth” by “break[ing] free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.” (quoting 2001 PBS interview with Obama).

Some of his predictions will likely come true under an Obama Supreme Court, in whole or in part (I don't view all of the things he predicts as being bad, although most of them are).

Levy argues that an Obama-picked Supreme Court will give the government “carte blanche for hate-speech laws.” This is both an overstatement and an understatement, but it contains more than a kernel of truth. I think that an Obama Supreme Court would interpret the Fourteenth Amendment as forcing colleges and universities — and conceivably cities and counties as well — to restrict hateful (and not-so-hateful) speech that creates a “hostile environment” (i.e., a "hostile educational environment" or “hostile municipal environment.”)

A liberal federal appeals court has already ruled this year in DiStiso v. Cook that school officials are liable under the Fourteenth Amendment for racially-hostile “educational environments” created by racial name-calling and racist speech among kindergartners, effectively requiring teachers to ban such speech under fear of personal liability, even though students are not state actors or agents of their schools (just as private citizens are not state actors, or agents of their city or county). This radical ruling, which ignores the state-action doctrine accepted by the current Supreme Court, was unnecessary to prevent true harassment, since Title VI of the Civil Rights Act already reaches racial harassment by peers that is “severe and pervasive” enough to interfere with an education.

(The plaintiff in the DiStiso case argued that the “harassment” was actionable under the Fourteenth Amendment even if it was not severe enough to violate Title VI or Title IX, effectively circumventing statutory limits on liability.) Another federal appeals court has held that the government is liable for harassment by state actors in society generally, outside the workplace and schools. See Johnson v. Martin, 195 F.3d 1208 (10th Cir. 1999). If you put these two rulings together, as a logical chain, you could argue that local governments are obligated to suppress racist or sexual speech in the larger society as well, to prevent a racially or sexually hostile “municipal environment.”

(All sorts of speech is forbidden in the workplace to prevent a “hostile work environment,” like when a liberal federal appeals court allowed a secretary to sue for sexual harassment over a professor’s looking at porn on his office computer. A federal appeals court relied on the First Amendment to dismiss a racial harassment lawsuit over a professor’s anti-immigration emails, but it didn’t deny that they fell within the broad concept of “hostile work environment,” and liberal lawyers argued the speech should be suppressed as equality-depriving “verbal conduct”).

On the other hand, if they wish to restrict hate speech, local governments will not have “carte blanche” even under an Obama Court, since they will have to frame any hate-speech ban as a ban on “verbal conduct” that creates a “hostile environment,” using “verbal conduct” as a euphemism for speech (an argument that worked in the California Supreme Court in the Aguilar v. Avis case), rather than coming right out and declaring their intention to ban all hate speech, irrespective of whether it contributes to a hostile municipal environment. Liberal judges like banning certain speech, but only when they can call it something other than speech. By contrast, four conservative and moderate Supreme Court justices once worried that banning speech that creates a “hostile educational environment” could lead to violations of academic freedom in the college setting, in their dissent in a K-12 harassment case where no First Amendment defense was raised or ruled on.

But for the reasons I have given elsewhere, I think #4 on Levy's list, dealing with gay marriage, is partly erroneous. I don’t think churches will ever be forced to perform gay marriages if they don’t want to. Conversely, given strong support for gay marriage in the legal profession, which is much more socially liberal than the general population, I believe that the days of gay marriage being banned are numbered, regardless of who is president. (A bipartisan panel of a federal appeals court struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act, based on reasoning that could also take down state gay marriage bans).

I do agree with him that Obama Supreme Court nominees are more likely to override the religious objections of non-churches, such as religious schools and hospitals, to various coercive government mandates favored by gay-rights lobbying groups, than are Justices appointed by more conservative presidents. Even Republican or libertarian lawyers who support gay marriage often believe that religious businesses and professionals should have a First Amendment right not to be forced to participate in publicizing or photographing gay unions, as this amicus brief in a New Mexico case illustrates. (Note that New Mexico does not even recognize gay marriage, so banning gay marriage doesn't make religious liberties problems go away.) This distinguishes conservative lawyers and judges from their liberal counterparts, who tend to like such government mandates, and believe that it is legitimate to use government power to try to extinguish religiously-motivated prejudices and change people’s thinking.)

Levey also argues that an Obama Court would lead to a “requirement for taxpayer-funding of abortions.” This is right, to at least a certain extent. The Supreme Court’s decision that state Medicaid programs don’t have to pay for abortion was decided by a 5-to-4 vote (see Harris v. McRae). Liberal law professors have denounced that ruling ever since. Moreover, if you accept Justice Ginsburg’s argument that abortion restrictions are automatically a form of sex-discrimination (a very controversial argument, to be sure), then the decision was wrongly decided.

So I think that even a single Obama appointee to the Supreme Court over the next few years could result in that ruling being overruled. Some abortion rulings seem unlikely to be overruled regardless of who is president. Ever since Nixon, who railed against “acid, amnesty, and abortion,” Republican presidents have denounced abortion, but the only effect this seems to have had on abortion is on the area of funding, not the legality of abortion (taxpayer funding for abortion, both at home and overseas, has been more limited under conservative Congresses and Administrations than under liberal ones, but even when the Supreme Court included seven GOP appointees and only two Democratic appointees in 1992, it reaffirmed Roe v. Wade in its Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision.) Another Obama appointment to the Court could also lead to an overruling of the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 ruling upholding a restriction on a particular procedure used in so-called “partial birth abortion,” since that ruling was decided over a dissent by all of the Supreme Court’s liberal justices.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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7 November, 2012

Hurricanes and Socialism

by Jacob G. Hornberger

Two articles in the New York Times last week exemplify perfectly why our nation is in such bad shape. Both articles concerned the devastation from Hurricane Sandy. The first was a Times editorial, entitled “A Big Storm Requires Big Government.” The other article was in the form of an op-ed entitled “Grover Cleveland’s Hurricane” by Matthew Algeo.

The thrust of both pieces was that Hurricane Sandy proved that the nation really needs big government in general and FEMA in particular. Without FEMA and big government, the argument goes, there is no way that people in a free society could cope with emergencies and crises.

Actually, however, in the process of praising FEMA, Algeo did Americans a great service. He criticized President Grover Cleveland for having denied federal disaster relief to hurricane victims in the latter part of the 19th century. He also pointed out that Cleveland vetoed a welfare bill for Texas farmers who were suffering a severe drought.

Why is that a service to Americans? Because it bursts the myth that is inculcated into every American schoolchild — that America’s system has always been the same. Americans are made to believe that myth because the last thing statists want them to do is to start wondering why our American ancestors chose a different system than the one that modern-day Americans chose. In fact, in their haste to publish an article criticizing Grover Cleveland and his selfishness, I can’t help but wonder if the Times failed to realize that the article it was publishing, at the same time, was bursting one of the government’s most prized myths.

As Algeo implicitly points out, Americans have lived under two different economic systems and social orders. Our American ancestors chose a way of life in which everyone kept everything he earned. There was no income tax. That wasn’t an accident. Our ancestors believed that a free society necessarily entailed the right of people to keep the fruits of their earnings.

There was also no requirement that people do the “right” thing with their money. They were free to do whatever they wanted with it. They could save, donate, invest, or spend it. The choice was theirs. Our ancestors believed that that’s part of what living in a free society is all about.

Cleveland’s position simply reflected what America was once all about — what a free society was once all about. As Algeo points out, Cleveland stated, “Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character.” That’s not only what Cleveland believed. It was the philosophy that undergirded American society through the 1800s.

Not so today. Having born and raised under a welfare state, many Americans believe they are entitled to be taken care of by the government, When things go wrong, the first response is, “I have a right to federal money,” which is really nothing more than saying, “I have a right to your money, thanks to the taxing power of the IRS and the welfare function of the federal bureaucracies.”

What happened before Americans adopted the income-tax, welfare-state way of life? When government was prohibited from taking care of people, people responded by figuring out ways to help others. But unlike the welfare state, which is founded on force, Americans relied on the voluntary actions of people. They believed that that was what genuine charity was all about.

In fact, Algeo himself alludes to this phenomenon. When Cleveland refused to provide federal money for the hurricane victims, Algeo tells us what happened: “Into the void stepped Clara Barton, the 72-year-old nurse who had founded the American Red Cross 12 years earlier. Almost single-handedly, Ms. Barton organized relief efforts — distributing food and clothing and supervising the construction of new homes (first for widows and the infirm). Her heroic work, especially in the South, saved countless thousands from disease and starvation.”

Imagine that! One person accomplishing so much! And think about this: If Americans had embraced statism from the start of the nation, there never would have been a Red Cross. After all, why would Clara Barton have started the Red Cross if the government was already serving a paternalistic role in American life?

So what happened? What caused the system to change?

American statists hated the principles of economic liberty on which America had been founded. They hated the idea that people should be free to keep the fruits of their earnings and decide what to do with them. They wanted a system in which the government confiscated people’s income and wealth and redistributed it to others. Although today they hate the label, back then many statists didn’t mind being called socialists. They knew that that’s what they were.

Over time, the statists prevailed. They were able to engraft their cancerous philosophy onto America’s constitutional order. They got their income tax amendment in 1913. They got their Federal Reserve Act in the same year. And then Franklin Roosevelt, seizing upon an economic crisis, one that had been caused by the Fed, ushered in the socialist, fascist, interventionist system under which we now live, all under the false pretense that he was “saving free enterprise.”

And then there is the out-of-control federal spending, which increasingly saddles the American people with ever-growing federal debt. But of course, every time someone suggests that federal spending be curtailed even by a tiny percentage, the statists rise up and scream in horror, “Oh, no, the nation couldn’t survive if that particular dole is reduced!”

It’s no different with FEMA. Algeo and the Times suggest that FEMA is one of those vitally important agencies whose budget could never be reduced, much less ended. But wouldn’t they say the same about Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, education grants, auto bailouts, the FDIC, and every other socialistic program? Would they say that even a minute reduction in the budgets of the CIA, the military, and the rest of the warfare state would grievously threaten “national security”?

Except for libertarians, the welfare state has severely damaged the principles of self-reliance, can-do, and independence within the American people. Algeo and the Times’ editorial board provide irrefutable proof that Cleveland was right: Federal aid has encouraged the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and has certainly weakened the sturdiness of our national character.”

SOURCE

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Obama and the politics of contempt

Caroline Glick

"Your first time shouldn't be with just anybody. You want to do it with a great guy."

So begins the now famous official Barack Obama for President campaign ad that was released last week. The ad depicts a young woman named Lena Dunham, who is apparently a celebrity among Americans in their teens and 20s.

After that opening line, Ms. Dunham continues on for another minute and a half discussing how having sex for the first time and voting for Barack Obama for president are really the same thing, and how young women don't want to be accused of either being virgins or of having passed up on their chance to cast their votes for Obama next Tuesday.

I've never been particularly interested in so-called "women's issues." It never seemed to me that any party or politician was particularly good or bad for me due to the way they thought of women. That all changed with the Dunham ad for Obama.

With this ad, Obama convinced me he is a misogynist.

The Obama campaign's use of a double entendre to compare sex - the most personal, intimate act we engage in as human beings, with voting - the most public act we engage in as human beings - is a scandal.

It is demeaning and contemptuous of women. It reduces us to sexual objects. When called on to vote, as far as Obama is concerned, as slaves to our passions, we make our decisions not based on our capacity for rational choice. Rather we choose our leaders solely on the basis of our sexual desires.

Beyond the ad's bald attempt to impersonalize, generalize and cheapen the most personal act human beings engage in, the ad is repulsive because it takes for granted that what happens in our private lives is the government's business.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is a totalitarian position.

THE WHOLE point of liberal democracy is to put a barrier between a person's personal life and his or her government. A liberal democracy is founded on the notion of limited government. It assumes there are a lot of places where government has no role to play. And first and foremost among those places is the bedroom.

The theory behind limited government is that if the government is permitted in our private space then we are no longer free. When - as in the case of the Dunham ad - a political campaign conveys the message that there is something personally wrong with not actively supporting its candidate, it communicates the message that it sees no distinction between personal and public life, and therefore rejects the basic notion of freedom from government. And this is repugnant, not just for women, but for everyone who values freedom.

One of the oddest aspects of the Obama sex ad is that to believe that this sort of message can be effective, the campaign had to ignore mountains of data about the demographic group the ad targets - young college-educated women.

According to just about every piece of survey data collected over the past 20 years, young women in America today are more accomplished, more professionally driven, and more intellectually successful than their male counterparts. That the Obama campaign believes the votes of this successful, smart group of women can be won by appealing to their basest urges rather than their capacity to reason is demeaning and perverse and, one would think, counterproductive.

But it isn't surprising.

The fact is that the Obama campaign - and indeed, the Obama presidency - has treated the American people with unprecedented arrogance and contempt. On issue after issue, Obama and his minions have eschewed intellectual argumentation.

On issue after issue they have preferred instead to attack Obama's detractors as stupid, backwards, bigoted, bellicose and evil.

For instance, however one feels about current events in the Middle East, there is a legitimate - indeed critical - argument to be had about the nature of the Islamist forces the Obama administration is supporting from Cairo, Egypt, to Alexandria, Virginia.

The Muslim Brotherhood is the most popular movement in the Islamic world. It is also a totalitarian, misogynist, anti-Jewish, anti-Christian and anti-American movement. It seeks Islamic global supremacy, the genocide of Jewry, the subjugation of Christianity and the destruction of the United States.

There is an intellectual case to be made for appeasing these popular, popularly elected forces.

There is a (stronger) intellectual case to be made for opposing them. But rather than make any of the hard arguments for appeasing the Muslim Brotherhood, the Obama administration has deflected the issue by castigating everyone who opposes its appeasement policies as racist, McCarthyite warmongers.

If women who don't support Obama are prudish geeks, Americans who oppose his appeasement policies are bloodthirsty bigots.

Then there was the attack in Benghazi on September 11 and the general Islamic assaults on US embassies throughout the Muslim world that day.

The acts of aggression that Muslims carried out against several US embassies on September 11 and since have all been acts of war against America.

The rioters who stormed the US embassies in Egypt, Tunis and Yemen and replaced the American flag with the flag of al-Qaida all violated sovereign US territory and carried out acts of war. The US had the right, under international law, to repel and respond with military force against the rioters as well as against their governments. Instead the White House blamed the acts of war on a US citizen who posted a video on YouTube.

Then there was Benghazi. In Benghazi, jihadists took this collective aggression a step further. They attacked the US Consulate and a US government safe house with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. Their goal was to murder all the US citizens inside the compounds. In the event, they successfully murdered four Americans, including the US ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.

In the six weeks that have passed since the attack in Benghazi, despite administration attempts to stonewall, and despite the US's media's inexcusable lack of interest in the story, information has continuously dribbled out indicating that Obama and his senior advisers knew in real time what was happening on the ground. It has also come out that they rejected multiple requests from multiple sources to employ military power readily available to save the lives of the Americans on the ground.

There may be good reasons that Obama and his top aides denied those repeated requests for assistance and allowed the American citizens pinned down in Benghazi to die. But Obama and his aides have not provided any.

Rather than defend their actions, Obama and his advisers first sought to cover up what happened by blaming the acts of war on that YouTube video.

When that line of argument collapsed of its own absurdity, Obama shifted to blaming the messenger.

His campaign accused everyone asking for facts and truthful explanations about what happened in Benghazi of trying to politicize the attack.

Obama himself has twice struck the Captain Renault pose and declared himself "Shocked, shocked!" that anyone would dare to insinuate that he did not do everything in his power to save the lives of the Americans whose lives he failed to save.

More HERE

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Canada in trouble too. Overall unemployment level of 7.4% hides a lot

The Financial Post has an interesting story on the state of the Canadian jobs market. It seem over 100% of job growth is from government jobs.

Canada may have added 1,800 jobs in October, but that number hides the fact that almost all the gains came from government and that the private sector lost more than 20,000 jobs.

The 1,800 jobs added was already a disappointment compared with the 10,000 economists had forecast. According to Statistics Canada, that left the unemployment rate unchanged at 7.4%.

The six-month average for jobs gains is now 29,400, according to Reuters. But it’s a very different story when you look at the private sector and public sector separately.

More HERE

Note: Australia's current unemployment rate is 5.4%, which is about average for the last 10 years. It shows what is possible

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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6 November, 2012

A special class of people

The men and women who volunteer to lay down their lives for the security of their fellow citizens cannot afford to make big decisions lightly. I think their views should therefore be especially respected on the present momentous occasion -- JR

In the United States, at least through the next election, we have the freedom to vote for the candidates of our choice. When considering presidential candidates, I give great consideration to the opinions of those who have sworn allegiance to "support and defend" our Constitution. No, I don't mean the beltway politicos who violate their oaths daily, but those in the ranks of our Armed Services, who have sworn to defend our Constitution with their lives, those who keep the Flame of Liberty burning bright.

You already know that a majority of active duty officers and enlisted personnel support conservative candidates, but as the father of an active duty Airman, I thought it might be instructive to list the senior retired military personnel who have endorsed the presidential candidates. (These are the official lists from each campaign.)

Senior officers endorsing Barack Hussein Obama:

Gen. Wesley Clark, USA, Gen. Colin Powell, USA, Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, USA, Adm. Donald Gutter, USN, Adm. John Nathman, USN.

Senior officers and decorated personnel endorsing Mitt Romney:

Adm. James B. Busey, USN, Gen. James T. Conway, USMC, Gen. Terrence R. Dake, USMC, Adm. James O. Ellis, USN, Adm. Mark Fitzgerald, USM, Gen. Ronald R. Fogleman, USAF, Gen. Tommy Franks, USA, Gen. Alfred Hansen, USAF, Adm. Ronald Jackson Hays, USN, Adm. Thomas Bibb Hayward, USN, Gen. Chuck Albert Horner, USAF, Adm. Jerome LaMarr Johnson, USN, Adm. Timothy J. Keating, USN, Gen. Paul X. Kelley, USMC, Gen. William Kernan, USA, Adm. George E.R. Kinnear II, USN, Gen. William L. Kirk, USAF, Gen. James J. Lindsay, USA, Gen. William R. Looney III, USAF, Adm. Hank Mauz, USN, Gen. Robert Magnus, USMC, Adm. Paul David Miller, USN, Gen. Henry Hugh Shelton, USA, Gen. Lance Smith, USAF, Adm. Leighton Smith, Jr., USN, Gen. Ronald W. Yates, USAF, Adm. Ronald J. Zlatoper, USN, Lt. Gen. James Abrahamson, USAF, Lt. Gen. Edgar Anderson, Jr., USAF, Lt. Gen. Marcus A. Anderson, USAF, Lt. Gen. Buck Bedard, USMC, Vice Adm. A. Bruce Beran, USCG, Vice Adm. Lyle Bien, USN, Lt. Gen. Harold Blot, USMC, Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, USA, Vice Adm. Mike Bowman III, USN, Vice Adm. Mike Bucchi, USN, Lt. Gen. Walter E. Buchanan III, USAF, Lt. Gen. Richard A. Burpee, USAF, Lt. Gen. William Campbell, USAF, Lt. Gen. James E. Chambers, USAF, Vice Adm. Edward W. Clexton, Jr., USN, Lt. Gen. John B. Conaway, USAF, Lt. Gen. Marvin Covault, USA, Vice Adm. Terry M. Cross, USCG, Vice Adm. William Adam Dougherty, USN, Lt. Gen. Brett Dula, USAF, Lt. Gen. Gordon E. Fornell, USAF, Vice Adm. David Frost, USN, Vice Adm. Henry C. Giffin III, USN, Vice Adm. Peter M. Hekman, USN, Vice Adm. Richard D. Herr, USCG, Lt. Gen. Thomas J Hickey, USAF, Lt. Gen. Walter S. Hogle, Jr., USAF, Lt. Gen. Ronald W. Iverson, USAF, Lt. Gen. Donald W. Jones, USA, Vice Adm. Douglas J. Katz, USN, Lt. Gen. Jay W. Kelley, USAF, Vice Adm. Tom Kilcline, USN, Lt. Gen. Timothy A. Kinnan, USAF, Vice Adm. Harold Koenig, M.D., USN, Vice Adm. Albert H. Konetzni, USN, Lt. Gen. Buford Derald Lary, USAF, Lt. Gen. Frank Libutti, USMC, Vice Adm. Stephen Loftus, USN, Vice Adm. Michael Malone, USN, Vice Adm. Edward H. Martin, USN, Vice Adm. John J. Mazach, USN, Vice Adm. Justin D. McCarthy, USN, Vice Adm. William McCauley, USN, Lt. Gen. Fred McCorkle, USMC, Lt. Gen. Thomas G. McInerney, USAF, Vice Adm. Joseph S. Mobley, USN, Lt. Gen. Carol Mutter, USMC, Lt. Gen. Dave R. Palmer, USA, Vice Adm. John Theodore "Ted" Parker, USN, Lt. Gen. Garry L. Parks, USMC, Lt. Gen. Charles Henry "Chuck" Pitman, USMC, Lt. Gen. Steven R. Polk, USAF, Vice Adm. William E. Ramsey, USN, Lt. Gen. Joseph J. Redden, USAF, Lt. Gen. Clifford H. "Ted" Rees, Jr., USAF, Lt. Gen. Edward Rowny, USA Vice Adm. Dutch Schultz, USN, Lt. Gen. Charles J. Searock, Jr., USAF, Lt. Gen. E. G. "Buck" Shuler, USAF, Lt. Gen. Alexander M. "Rusty" Sloan, USAF, Vice Adm. Edward M. Straw, USN, Lt. Gen. David J. Teal, USAF, Lt. Gen. Billy M. Thomas, USA, Vice Adm. Donald C. "Deese" Thompson, USCG, Vice Adm. Alan S. Thompson, USN, Lt. Gen. Herman O. "Tommy" Thomson, USAF, Vice Adm. Howard B. Thorsen, USCG, Lt. Gen. William Thurman, USAF, Lt. Gen. Robert Allen "R.A." Tiebout, USMC, Vice Adm. John B. Totushek, USNR, Lt. Gen. George J. Trautman, USMC, Lt. Gen. Garry R. Trexler, USAF, Vice Adm. Jerry O. Tuttle, USN, Lt. Gen. Claudius "Bud" Watts, USAF, Lt. Gen. William "Bill" Welser, USAF, Lt. Gen. Thad A. Wolfe, USAF, Lt. Gen. C. Norman Wood, USAF, Lt. Gen. Michael W. Wooley, USAF, Lt. Gen. Richard "Rick" Zilmer, USMC, Major Gen. Chris Adams, USAF, Rear Adm. Henry Amos, USN Major Gen. Nora Alice Astafan, USAF, Major Gen. Almon Bowen Ballard, USAF, Major Gen. James F. Barnette, USAF, Major Gen. Robert W. Barrow, USAF, Rear Adm. John R. Batlzer, USN, Rear Adm. Jon W. Bayless, USN, Major Gen. John E. Bianchi, USA, Major Gen. David F. Bice, USMC, Rear Adm. Linda J. Bird, USN, Rear Adm. James H. Black, USN, Rear Adm. Peter A. Bondi, USN, Major Gen. John L. Borling, USMC, Major Gen. Tom Braaten, USA, Major Gen. Robert J. Brandt, USA, Rear Adm. Jerry C. Breast, USN, Rear Adm. Bruce B. Bremner, USN, Rear Adm. Thomas F. Brown III, USN, Major Gen. David P. Burford, USA, Rear Adm. John F. Calvert, USN, Rear Adm. Jay A. Campbell, USN, Major Gen. Henry Canterbury, USAF, Rear Adm. James J. Carey, USN, Rear Adm. Nevin Carr, USN, Rear Adm. Stephen K. Chadwick, USN, Rear Adm. W. Lewis Chatham, USN, Major Gen. Jeffrey G. Cliver, USAF, Rear Adm. Casey Coane, USN, Rear Adm. Isaiah C. Cole, USN, Major Gen. Stephen Condon, USAF, Major Gen. Richard C. Cosgrave, USANG, Rear Adm. Robert Cowley, USN, Major Gen. J.T. Coyne, USMC, Rear Adm. Robert C. Crates, USN, Major Gen. Tommy F. Crawford, USAF, Rear Adm. James P. Davidson, USN, Rear Adm. Kevin F. Delaney, USN, Major Gen. James D. Delk, USA, Major Gen. Robert E. Dempsey, USAF, Rear Adm. Jay Ronald Denney, USNR, Major Gen. Robert S. Dickman, USAF, Rear Adm. James C. Doebler, USN, Major Gen. Douglas O. Dollar, USA, Major Gen. Hunt Downer, USA, Major Gen. Thomas A. Dyches, USAF, Major Gen. Jay T. Edwards, USAF, Major Gen. John R. Farrington, USAF, Rear Adm. Francis L. Filipiak, USN, Rear Adm. James H. Flatley III, USN, Major Gen. Charles Fletcher, USA, Major Gen. Bobby O. Floyd, USAF, Rear Adm. Veronica Froman, USN, Rear Adm. Vance H. Fry, USN, Rear Adm. R. Byron Fuller, USN, Rear Adm. George M. Furlong, USN, Rear Adm. Frank Gallo, USN, Rear Adm. Ben F. Gaumer, USN, Rear Adm. Harry E. Gerhard Jr., USN, Major Gen. Daniel J. Gibson, USAF, Rear Adm. Andrew A. Giordano, USN, Major Gen. Richard N. Goddard, USAF, Rear Adm. Fred Golove, USCGR, Rear Adm. Harold Eric Grant, USN, Major Gen. Jeff Grime, USAF, Major Gen. Robert Kent Guest, USA, Major Gen. Tim Haake, USAR, Major Gen. Otto K. Habedank, USAF, Rear Adm. Thomas F. Hall, USN, Rear Adm. Donald P. Harvey, USN, Major Gen. Leonard W. Hegland, USAF, Rear Adm. John Hekman, USN, Major Gen. John A. Hemphill, USA, Rear Adm. Larry Hereth, USCG, Major Gen. Wilfred Hessert, USAF, Rear Adm. Don Hickman, USN, Major Gen. Geoffrey Higginbotham, USMC, Major Gen. Jerry D. Holmes, USAF, Major Gen. Weldon F. Honeycutt, USA, Rear Adm. Steve Israel, USN, Major Gen. James T. Jackson, USA, Rear Adm. John S. Jenkins, USN, Rear Adm. Tim Jenkins, USN, Rear Adm. Ron Jesberg, USN, Rear Adm. Pierce J. Johnson, USN, Rear Adm. Steven B. Kantrowitz, USN, Rear Adm. John T. Kavanaugh, USN, Major Gen. Dennis M. Kenneally, USA, Major Gen. Michael Kerby, USAF, Rear Adm. David Kunkel, USCG, Major Gen. Geoffrey C. Lambert, USA, Rear Adm. Arthur Langston, USN, Rear Adm. Thomas G. Lilly, USN, Major Gen. James E. Livingston, USAF, Major Gen. Al Logan, USAF, Major Gen. John D. Logeman Jr., USAF, Rear Adm. Noah H. Long Jr, USNR, Rear Adm. Don Loren, USN, Major Gen. Andy Love, USAF, Rear Adm. Thomas C. Lynch, USN, Rear Adm. Steven Wells Maas, USN, Major Gen. Robert M. Marquette, USAF, Rear Adm. Larry Marsh, USN, Major Gen. Clark W. Martin, USAF, Major Gen. William M. Matz, USN, Rear Adm. Gerard Mauer, USN, Rear Adm. William J. McDaniel, MD, USN, Rear Adm. E.S. McGinley II, USN, Rear Adm. Henry C. McKinney, USN, Major Gen. Robert Messerli, USAF, Major Gen. Douglas S. Metcalf, USAF, Rear Adm. John W. Miller, USN, Rear Adm. Patrick David Moneymaker, USN, Major Gen. Mario Montero, USA, Rear Adm. Douglas M. Moore, USN, Major Gen. Walter Bruce Moore, USA, Major Gen. William Moore, USA, Major Gen. Burton R. Moore, USAF, Rear Adm. James A. Morgart, USN, Major Gen. Stanton R. Musser, USAF, Rear Adm. John T. Natter, USN, Major Gen. Robert George Nester, USAF, Major Gen. George W. Norwood, USAF, Rear Adm. Robert C. Olsen, USN, Major Gen. Raymund E. O'Mara, USAF, Rear Adm. Robert S. Owens, USN, Rear Adm. John F. Paddock, USN, Major Gen. Robert W. Paret, USAF, Rear Adm. Robert O. Passmore, USN, Major Gen. Earl G. Peck, USAF, Major Gen. Richard E. Perraut Jr., USAF, Major Gen. Gerald F. Perryman, USAF, Rear Adm. W.W. Pickavance, USN, Rear Adm. John J. Prendergast, USN, Rear Adm. Fenton F. Priest, USN, Major Gen. David C. Ralston, USA, Major Gen. Bentley B. Rayburn, USAF, Rear Adm. Harold Rich, USN, Rear Adm. Roland Rieve, USN, Rear Adm. Tommy F. Rinard, USN, Major Gen. Richard H. Roellig, USAF, Rear Adm. Michael S. Roesner, USN, Rear Adm. William J. Ryan, USN, Major Gen. Loran C. Schnaidt, USAF, Major Gen. Carl Schneider, USAF, Major Gen. John P. Schoeppner, Jr., USAF, Major Gen. Edison E. Scholes, USAF, Rear Adm. Robert H. Shumaker, USN, Rear Adm. William S. Schwob, USCG, Major Gen. David J. Scott, USAF, Rear Adm. Hugh P. Scott, USN, Major Gen. Richard Secord, USAF, Rear Adm. William H. Shawcross, USN, Major Gen. Joseph K. Simeone, USAF and ANG, Major Gen. Darwin Simpson, ANG, Rear Adm. Greg Slavonic, USN, Rear Adm. David Oliver "D.O." Smart, USNR, Major Gen. Richard D. Smith, USAF, Major Gen. Donald Bruce Smith, USAF, Rear Adm. Paul O. Soderberg, USN, Rear Adm. Robert H. "Bob" Spiro, USN, Major Gen. Henry B. Stelling, Jr., USAF, Rear Adm. Daniel H. Stone, USN, Major Gen. William A. Studer, USAF, Rear Adm. Hamlin Tallent, USN, Major Gen. Hugh Banks Tant III, USA, Major Gen. Larry S. Taylor, USMC, Major Gen. J.B. Taylor, USA, Major Gen. Thomas R. Tempel, USA, Major Gen. Richard L. Testa, USAF, Rear Adm. Jere Thompson, USN, Rear Adm. Byron E. Tobin, USN, Major Gen. Larry Twitchell, USAF, Major Gen. Russell L. Violett, USAF, Major Gen. David E.B. "DEB" Ward, USAF, Major Gen. Charles J. Wax, USAF, Rear Adm. Donald Weatherson, USN, Major Gen. John Welde, USAF, Major Gen. Gary Whipple, USA, Rear Adm. James B. Whittaker, USN, Rear Adm. Charles Williams, USN, Rear Adm. H. Denny Wisely, USN, Rear Adm. Theodore J. Wojnar, USCG, Rear Adm. George R. Worthington, USN, Brig. Gen. Arthur Abercrombie, USA, Brig. Gen. John R. Allen, USAF, Brig. Gen. Loring R. Astorino, USAF, Brig. Gen. Richard Averitt, USA, Brig. Gen. Garry S. Bahling, USANG, Brig. Gen. Donald E. Barnhart, USAF, Brig. Gen. Charles L. Bishop, USAF, Brig. Gen. Clayton Bridges, USAF, Brig. Gen. Jeremiah J. Brophy, USA, Brig. Gen. R. Thomas Browning, USAF, Brig. Gen. David A. Brubaker, USAF, Brig. Gen. Chalmers R. Carr, USAF, Brig. Gen. Fred F. Caste, USAFR, Brig. Gen. Robert V. Clements, USAF, Brig. Gen. Christopher T Cline, USA, Brig. Gen. George Peyton Cole, Jr., USAF, Brig. Gen. Richard A. Coleman, USAF, Brig. Gen. Mike Cushman, USAF, Brig. Gen. Peter Dawkins, USA, Brig. Gen. Sam. G. DeGeneres, USAF, Brig. Gen. George Demers, USAF, Brig. Gen. Howard G. DeWolf, USAF, Brig. Gen. Arthur F. Diehl, USAF, Brig. Gen. David Bob Edmonds, USAF, Brig. Gen. Anthony Farrington, USAF, Brig. Gen. Norm Gaddis, USAF, Brig. Gen. Robert H. Harkins, USAF, Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Honeywill, USAF, Brig. Gen. Stanley V. Hood, USAF, Brig. Gen. James J. Hourin, USAF, Brig. Gen. Jack C. Ihle, USAF, Brig. Gen. Thomas G. Jeter, USAF, Brig. Gen. William Herbert Johnson, USAF, Brig. Gen. Kenneth F. Keller, USAF, Brig. Gen. Wayne W. Lambert, USAF, Brig. Gen. Jerry L. Laws, USA, Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Lennon, USAF, Brig. Gen. John M. Lotz, USAF, Brig. Gen. Robert S. Mangum, USA, Brig. Gen. Frank Martin, USAF, Brig. Gen. Joe Mensching, USAF, Brig. Gen. Richard L. Meyer, USAF, Brig. Gen. Lawrence A. Mitchell, USAF, Brig. Gen. Michael P. Mulqueen, USMC, Brig. Gen. Ben Nelson, Jr., USAF, Brig. Gen. Jack W. Nicholson, USA, Brig. Gen. Maria C. Owens, USAF, Brig. Gen. Dave Papak, USMC, Brig. Gen. Gary A. Pappas, USANG, Brig. Gen. Robert V. Paschon, USAF, Brig. Gen. Allen K. Rachel, USAF, Brig. Gen. Jon Reynolds, USAF, Brig. Gen. Edward F. Rodriguez, Jr., USAFR, Brig. Gen. Roger Scearce, USA, Brig. Gen. Dennis Schulstad, USAFR, Brig. Gen. John Serur, USAF, Brig. Gen. Joseph L. Shaefer, USAF, Brig. Gen. Graham Shirley, USAF, Brig. Gen. Raymond Shulstad, USAF, Brig. Gen. Stan Smith, USAF, Brig. Gen. Ralph S. Smith, USAF, Brig. Gen. Donald Smith, USA, Brig. Gen. David M. Snyder, USAF, Brig. Gen. Michael Joseph Tashjian, USAF, Brig. Gen. Richard Louis Ursone, USA, Brig. Gen. Earl Van Inwegen, USAF, Brig. Gen. Terrence P. Woods, USAF, Brig. Gen. Mitchell Zais, USA, Brig. Gen. Allan Ralph Zenowitz, USA

I pray that for my son and millions of young people serving our nation in uniform the Office of President and Commander in Chief will soon be occupied by a man who will restore the honor and integrity due that office -- Mitt Romney.

SOURCE

Today is the day: A race that the whole nation will watch

And I will certainly be watching it on TV. No. Not the American Presidential election but the Melbourne Cup, Australia's richest horse race. It is known as "The race that stops a nation", as so many follow it, at work or at home. Both events are always held on the first Tuesday of November but I have no idea if that is anything more than a coincidence.

Australia is in a time zone that is nearly a day ahead of America, though, so it will be Wednesday in Australia before we hear anything of the election -- so I will be able to follow both races with ease.

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Ignoring the Unseen Consequences of the Dole

by Jacob G. Hornberger

Mocking Mitt Romney’s shifting positions on the auto bailout, the New York Times editorializes that the bailout turned out to be a huge success because “nearly 1.5 million people are working as a direct result of the bailout. G.M.’s American sales continue to increase, and Chrysler said this week that its third-quarter net income rose 80 percent.”

We begin with the proposition that thievery can sometimes be tremendously successful for the thief. Let’s assume that a penniless robber robs a bank of $10 million dollars and isn’t caught. Obviously he’s now able to do things he couldn’t do before. He buys two new cars, thereby increasing employment in the car industry. He does the same in the home-construction business by purchasing a new mansion. He opens a successful business, hiring dozens of people. He donates money to the poor.

Defenders of the theft can point to the robber and say, “Look at all the good that has come out of that robbery. Praise theft!”

Do you see anything wrong with this picture?

One thing involves moral principles. Theft is wrong in a moral sense, even if the thief benefits from the money and does nothing but good things with it. The money belongs to the owner. He’s entitled to it regardless of how he uses it. The thief has no moral right to take the money from the owner, even if the thief plans to do wonderful things with the money.

That’s a moral blind spot that afflicts statists, at least when government enters the picture. For them, if it’s the government doing the stealing and redistributing, then it’s not immoral at all. Instead, for the statists, it is the epitome of goodness.

Consider the auto bailout. Where did the money come from? Contrary to popular opinion, the federal government is not a fountain of wealth. It doesn’t produce anything. Instead, it is parasitic in nature. It gets its money by confiscating (taxing) wealth from the private sector.

Thus, in order to give money to the auto companies, the government must first take it from people who are working in the private sector. In doing so, it is taking money from people to whom it belongs in order to give it to big corporations to whom it does not belong.

For statists, that’s no problem. For them, the taking and redistribution reflect how good the politicians and bureaucrats are. If anyone objects, he’s labeled a bad, selfish, no-good type of person.

Moral principles are one of the major dividing lines between libertarians and statists. Libertarians adhere consistently to moral principles, not just with respect to private conduct but also governmental conduct. For statists, moral principles go out the window when government is doing the stealing (or murdering, kidnapping, torturing, assassinating, etc.).

But that’s not the only blind spot that statists have. They are also unable to recognize the unseen economic consequences of a government dole. Their mindsets are focused on what is seen rather than on what is unseen.

The Times’ position on the auto bailout is a classic example of this phenomenon. The Times’ editorial board points to the auto companies and exclaims: Look at how well they’re doing with the money that the government has given to them; this shows that taking money from people to whom it belongs and giving it to people who need it more really does work.

But what about the people from whom the bailout money was taken? What happened to them as a consequence of having that money taken from them? How many marginal firms went out of business because that much-needed money was taken from them? How many people were put out of work owing to the fact that people in the private sector weren’t allowed to spend and invest their money they way they wanted.

Let’s assume, for example, that thousands of people planned to buy new television sets. Before they made the purchases, the government took their money from them and gave it to the auto companies. What happened to the television industry? It didn’t make the sales. It didn’t expand production. It didn’t hire new people.

Since those things never happened, we don’t see them. Even the new people who were never hired in the television industry don’t know how the bailout affected their lives. But through reason, thought, and analysis, we can see that a government dole has unseen economic consequences by virtue of taking money from one group of people and transferring it to another group of people.

There is another factor to consider. Think of the hundreds of millions of dollars that the auto companies have paid in income taxes for the last several decades to fund the welfare-warfare state. If all that money had not been extracted from the auto companies, they would have a nest egg of billions of dollars to draw upon. With all that money, they wouldn’t have needed a government bailout. The fact that the government has taken all that money from them to fund its welfare-warfare operations for the past several decades has left the auto companies (and everyone else in the private sector) significantly poorer than they would be had there been no welfare-warfare state and income tax to fund it.

Finally, we mustn’t forget the mindset of dependency that the statists have inculcated in the American people with the welfare-state way of life. As soon as things go wrong, as they inevitably do from time to time, the first thing many Americans now do is call on the government to take someone else’s money and give it to them. Thus the welfare state not only violates moral principles, it also damages the traits of self-reliance and independence as well as spirit of benevolence that comes in a libertarian society.

The Times concludes, “What Mr. Romney cannot admit is that all this is a direct result of the government investment he would have rejected.”

Maybe that’s true. But what the New York Times cannot acknowledge are the horrible consequences that the welfare-state way of life has had on the American people, morally, economically, and spiritually.

SOURCE

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True the Vote: Keeping American Elections Free and Clean

The 2012 election will be the first in 30 years where the country will see a large organized presence dedicated to the integrity of votes cast, all thanks to voter integrity group True the Vote.

During the 2008 election cycle, Catherine Engelbrecht volunteered at the polls in Harris County, the second largest voting block in Texas. She noticed that although she was there with a small group of people to observe, Harris County had a poll watcher shortage of at least 50 percent. There weren’t enough people observing the election process to prevent fraud. Shortly after her experiences at the polls, Harris County authorities found 23,000 invalid voter registration forms that had been submitted by an ACORN operative. It was then that Engelbrecht founded True the Vote, where she now serves as president. The mission of True the Vote is simple: prevent voter fraud and uphold the law.

“We recognized there was a problem,” Engelbrecht tells Townhall. “There are raging debates about Cap and Trade and healthcare and you name it, but if the election process isn’t trustworthy, if it’s not reliable, then you know what does any of it really matter? It’s a scary thought to think about how tenuous, how fragile the process really is but it was so clear that something was not right and the quickest fix was to remind citizens that voting was not enough.”

Engelbrecht and True the Vote volunteers quickly started to identify how citizens could get further involved with the election process by looking at the process as a whole. Poll watching was an easy way to get a large amount of people involved in the election process.

“What got my attention is the simple fact that this where it all starts. If we cannot freely and fairly elect our representatives, nothing from there goes the way the citizens of the country want it to go, that’s the beginning,” True the Vote volunteer Joni Carlisle, who uses vacation time to help the organization 14 hours a day, tells Townhall. “We’re making a huge difference.”

By Election Day 2010, True the Vote had trained 1,000 poll watchers who could be used by election officials to observe polling stations in Harris County. Training of everyday citizens was then expanded across the country to further prevent voter fraud.

“We didn’t look for it to be a national thing, we just thought, ‘We see a problem and we need to fix it,’” Engelbrecht says. “We really decided we would become the boutique provider of in depth, real life training opportunities and it seemed to resonate across the country in ways that we could have never imagined.”

Bill Ouren started volunteering with True the Vote in January 2010 and is now the National Elections Director. His job is to connect citizens with their desire to ensure the freedom and fairness of elections.

“I was looking for something positive, something I thought would make a difference. There is nothing more fundamental to our democracy than our vote and the freedom and the integrity that surrounds that vote and it just appealed to me individually,” Ouren tells Townhall.

But what is a poll watcher or election observer? And is it effective? The fact is, poll watching is a time honored tradition dating back to the women’s suffrage movement and served as an important part of the Civil Rights movement. The NAACP used to support election observation because it keeps the process honest and ensures all voters are treated fairly. Poll watchers watch the election process to protect the rights of the voters. They do not watch the voters, they watch the process.

“They [poll watchers] are they eyes and ears of the Republic. They are not to talk to voters, they are to observe and report and they do that on behalf of the stakeholders they represent which is typically a party or a candidate or an issue on the ballot or in some cases like in Wisconsin, poll watchers can be self appointed citizens,” Engelbrecht says. “Observation changes things. Frankly, people want to do the right thing but it’s human nature to cut corners and you cut and you cut and you cut and before long you get to where we are and in many places across this country where the process isn’t even recognizable.”

Today, the NAACP, ACLU, SEIU, AFL-CIO, major media outlets and other far Left groups launch regular attacks on True the Vote and its volunteers, despite the organization's efforts to prevent voter fraud being non-partisan.

“They must be looking to protect some system of subversion that they’ve protected under the dark of night and they don’t want it to be exposed,” Engelbrecht says. “It’s stunning to hear these groups just deny vote fraud even exists. There’s every evidence to the contrary. It’s a known fact that it exists but yet they refuse to speak the truth.”

The catalyst for expanding from being a local group in Texas to a national organization according to Engelbrecht, was attacks by the Left because they gave True the Vote a new platform.

“Because of that platform, people from across the country began to contact us and say, ‘Hey that’s what you guys are seeing? That’s what we’re seeing too. Can we work together?’” Engelbrecht says. “Although there are many groups that want to continue to paint us into a corner, the fact is our message is one for all Americans."

Heading into Election Day 2012, True the Vote has trained thousands of people in 50 states to legally poll watch. Christian Adams, a former Department of Justice Attorney, New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case whistleblower and author says this is exactly why the Left is going “berserk.”

“I know this, there will be less crime in the election this year than there was in 2008,” Adams said. “There will be less crime nationwide than there was in 2008 because True the Vote is on the ground and that is something they deserve a great deal of thanks for.”

The True the Vote program is set up so that on Election Day in addition to volunteers conducting observations at the polls, they submit incident reports. This gives True the Vote evidence that can later be looked at, studied and used to reform broken parts in the election system to prevent fraud in future elections.

“This is not a press to go through the 2012 election,” Ouren says. “We have come a long way in two years, we will go probably that much further in another two years. We’re going to continue what we’ve been doing.”

There’s no doubt True the Vote has had an impact.

“I think we’ve changed the national debate. I think we’ve brought focus to an issue that’s been a dirty little secret of both parties for an awfully long time that everybody worries about after the election for few days and then everybody gets on with their business and it never fixes itself. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished,” Engelbrecht says. “We are doing the right thing.”

Sunday night, hundreds of volunteers gathered one last time at True the Vote headquarters before heading into Tuesday’s election. After four years of attacks and smears, they’re ready to use their training to keep our elections clean.

“We are responding as best as we know how as good stewards for our country. It’s been an amazing privilege to be part of a movement born of nothing, born of an inspiration that didn’t exist prior in this way and be part of what I think is historic,” Engelbrecht says.

SOURCE

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Racial Divide Worse Under Obama

The headline of a recent article by the Washington Post’s Peter Wallsten capsulizes, inadvertently, the supreme paradox of the Obama presidency.

“Obama struggles to balance African America’s hopes with country’s as a whole,” it says.

The story documents Obama’s struggles over the last four years, which continue today, to avoid overplaying his hand as the first black president, yet to also not ignore this fact.

But nowhere does Wallsten note the irony that four years ago many understood the meaning of Obama’s election as the beginning of the end of the perception of black America as a world apart from the rest of America.

There was exhilaration that the nightmare was over – finally. That wrongs have been righted, that we can get on with America’s business without the ongoing issue of race looming, and that we can stop looking at blacks politically as a special class of Americans.

Yet here we are now at the end of four years of the presidency of this first black president and attitudes about race seem to have hardly changed at all. There is still the sense that black America and the rest of America are not on the same page and that blacks and the country “as a whole” have different needs and different agendas.

Wasn’t Obama’s election supposed to have changed all of this?

More HERE

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

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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5 November, 2012

Conservatives have the gift of contentment

How happy you are seems to be mostly inborn -- and the surveys repeatedly show that conservatives are happier than those on the Left. It seems clear that this is no coincidence. Leftism is ABOUT whining. They are always dissatisfied with something and want to change or even "smash" something.

So it is no surprise that the evidence shows political polarity to be largely inborn too. See the sidebar here. You are largely born either conservative or Leftist, though aging has a conservatizing effect too. Conservatives are just not upset by every little thing the way Leftists are. And that's a considerable gift.

So I thought that I might reproduce an excerpt from an email I have just received from a vocal Australian conservative. He is not rich and life has not always been easy for him. He sent me the following when I wrote to him and noted that I had not heard from him for a while:

One day, when I can, I'll tell you the crappy story of my life for the last five months which will explain why I so rudely disappeared from your view. With all that has happened though, I do consider myself a blessed and fortunate soul and I wouldn't be anywhere or anyone else.

I think that's rather wonderful. He is a true conservative with a great gift for contentment. I have it too. With a severe iatrogenic illness that sees me under the surgeon's knife several times a year, I could conceivably be a moaner but I am content with my life too. Always have been.

And I know another treasure of a man who is as poor as a churchmouse and always "skint" but he is very conservative, very active in politics and laughs his way though life. He has a ball.

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Obama campaign struggles to explain ‘revenge’ remark

The hate is clear

A seemingly offhand utterance from President Obama has turned into a major point of contention between the two campaigns, as Team Obama tries to explain what the president meant when he told a crowd of supporters that “Voting is the best revenge.”

It happened in Springfield, Ohio Friday as Obama was discussing the economic policies of the 1990s. When Obama referred to “a Senate candidate by the name of Mitt Romney,” the crowd booed his opponent’s name — certainly not unusual reaction at political rallies of both parties. Then Obama said, “No, no, no — don’t boo, vote. Vote. Voting is the best revenge.”

It was an ugly and small-minded moment, especially for the end of a campaign when candidates usually try to stress larger, optimistic themes. Romney incorporated the “revenge” line in his speech in Ohio Friday night, saying that while Obama advises revenge, he, Romney, wants people to vote “for love of country.”

As Obama traveled to northern Ohio Saturday morning, campaign official Jen Psaki was asked about the “revenge” remark. According to a White House pool report, Psaki said Obama had been speaking in the context of Romney’s “scare tactics” in Ohio. The Republican is “frightening workers in Ohio into thinking, falsely, that they’re not going to have a job,” Psaki said, according to the pool report. “And the message [Obama] was sending is if you don’t like the policies, if you don’t like the plan that Gov. Romney is putting forward, if you think that’s a bad deal for the middle class, then you can go to the voting booth and cast your ballot. It’s nothing more complicated than that.”

The problem is, the president was actually not speaking in the context of Romney’s highly-controversial ads about bailed-out Chrysler adding production of Jeeps in China. In fact, Obama had not said a word about the Jeep controversy when he said “revenge.” His speech had touched on Hurricane Sandy, on the progress the American economy has made in the last few years, on his national security accomplishments, on the choice Americans will make on November 6, on Bill Clinton’s record — on a lot of things, but not on Jeep.

And even after the “revenge” remark, it took Obama six paragraphs to get to his discussion of Jeep. The bottom line is, while it is impossible to know what was in the president’s mind, he simply was not talking about Jeep when he told voters that “Voting is the best revenge.”

SOURCE

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A Tale of Two Countries

Ben Shapiro

It has become an accepted truism in American politics that both Democrats and Republicans want the same things: a prosperous America, a strong America, an America true to principles of freedom and liberty.

Perhaps 50 years ago that was true. Today, it no longer is.

The fact is that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are no longer arguing over means; we are arguing over ends. Democrats know that economic prosperity for the broad swath of the United States cannot be bought with higher taxes; even Bill Clinton recognized as much in the 1990s, which is why he lowered capital gains taxes dramatically after raising personal income taxes just as dramatically. Instead, Democrats argue, as President Obama did in 2008, that taxes must be raised "for purposes of fairness."

Democrats also know that American influence in the world can't be attained purely with negotiations, timetables and unilateral pullouts. Kind words don't win hearts, and they don't defend our friends from aggression. Democrats simply hope to be left alone. After all, as President Obama has said, America has demonstrated "arrogance" and sought to "dictate our terms" to other countries. And that just isn't fair.

Fairness lies at the root of the Democratic agenda. It's a leveling agenda, not a growth agenda. What's more, it's a philosophy of constant revolution since ultimate fairness can never be achieved in a world where we are all blessed with different gifts. The philosophy that prizes fairness above all else -- at least in material and cultural terms -- can never achieve human happiness, since such fairness can never be attained. And even if it (SET ITAL) could (END ITAL) be attained, it would require unbelievable levels of suppression. The human spirit is not built to serve the god of fairness.

Prosperity and strength lie at the root of the Republican agenda. Conservatives don't support lower taxes because we hate the poor.

Conservatives support lower taxes because lower taxes create prosperity for everyone. Individuals always know more about their lives than any bureaucrat does. They know more about their needs and wants. They know which products they require, and they know how to find the best deal. No government can better distribute resources than individuals making individual decisions can. Competitive markets have done more to create wonderful products and raise the quality of living across the globe than any other institution. Central planning does not create wealth. It merely redistributes poverty.

When it comes to America's role in the world, conservatism does not rely on America to be one among many. We must be proud of our role as a global leader. Our values (SET ITAL) are (END ITAL) superior to those of other countries. Our system, prizing limited government and preserving individual liberties, is the greatest system of government ever devised. Why would we run from the honor of leading? Why would we shirk that responsibility? Most importantly, if we wish to see the world a happier place, why would we deny to others the opportunity to share in our lot, especially if it preserves our interests to do so?

Mitt Romney knows all this. Barack Obama does not. That's why Obama suggests on Jay Leno that banks have to be regulated because they're "in it to make money." And that's why Mitt Romney knows that businesses must be encouraged to profit-seek, rather than punished for doing so. That's why Obama leaves American ambassadors to die overseas rather than giving an intervention order. That's why Romney knows that backing down in the face of foreign fire is a recipe for disaster, not peace.

The Democratic road leads to an end: Europe. The Republican road leads to an end: a resurgent, dominant America on the world scene.

We can choose to fade into oblivion, suffering from high taxes and broken promises, telling ourselves that the government will take care of us even as we go broke. Or we can choose to rise again, believing in the values that made us great. In less than a week, that choice is in our hands.

SOURCE

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The Unintended Consequences of Cracking Down on Payday Lenders

Four years ago, Virginia lawmakers cracked down on payday lending. They limited borrowers to one payday loan at a time, and doubled the length of time they had to pay the money back. It worked. Payday loans plunged more than 80 percent. A few lenders left the state completely.

But it also didn’t work. The reforms created a vacuum being filled by a new form of short-term lending: car-title loans.

In a payday loan, the borrower writes a post-dated check to cover the loan amount, plus fees. In a car-title loan, the borrower puts up a vehicle as collateral. Since 2010 the number of car-title lending companies in Virginia has more than doubled. Last year, they made more than 128,000 loans, worth an aggregate $125 million. They also repossessed nearly 8,400 vehicles.

Legislation to cap interest rates on payday and car-title loans died last year. It likely will come up again. But some localities don’t want to wait. Officials in Chesterfield want to ban such lenders from the county entirely. This is probably a fool’s errand; shutting down lenders won’t make demand disappear. Borrowers in need of quick cash may just cross jurisdictions – or turn to even more risky sources, such as the Internet.

It’s easy to understand Chesterfield’s position when you hear stories like that of Manassas resident Brenda Ann Covington. A while back she borrowed $1,500, and put up her 2005 Chevy Silverado as collateral. Somehow she ended up owing $4,100 – and could have lost a vehicle worth much more. On the other hand, there is no shortage of horror stories about commercial banks, either – as anyone burned in the recent housing bubble can attest.

What’s more, defaulting on a mortgage can destroy your credit rating. Defaulting on a payday or car-title loan won’t touch it. That’s one reason borrowers like storefront lenders: They “keep my payday borrowing separate from my other banking.”

There are other reasons: According to the financial-services journal American Banker, “borrowers may prefer to pay higher rates for small, short-term loans than to participate in credit union programs that have strings attached, such as a savings component. . . . Borrowers also dislike that credit unions generally have shorter operating hours.” As a recent article in Regulation magazine – a publication of the libertarian Cato Institute – puts it: Storefront loans have “non-price benefits” that make up for the higher interest rates.

Yet those higher interest rates lead many to believe such “predatory” lenders are little better than leg-breaking loan sharks. Is that charge sustainable? Again, comparison is instructive. The banking industry’s profit margin is 5.2 percent. Payday lenders’ profits are only 2.4 percentage points higher. Both traditional banking and storefront lending are less profitable than pharmaceuticals, railroads, mining – or even regulated gas and electric utilities.

But wait: If, as critics allege, storefront lenders charge ridiculously high rates, then why aren’t they raking in money hand over fist? For one thing, they endure much higher rates of default than banks do. Just as hospitals must charge paying customers more to cover charity care, payday lenders must charge more to cover the welshers. (Banks avoid this problem by simply refusing to lend to bad credit risks. How does that help poor people?

Still, critics insist the interest rates charged by storefront lenders are so high they’re immoral. But it’s the critics, not the lenders, who are being dishonest. Here’s why:

Suppose Milton borrows $250 from a storefront lender and pays it back two weeks later. The lender charges a standard $15 fee to pay his employees, his utility bill, and so on. That is 6 percent of the loan amount. Yet critics want to express that as an annual rate – which, in this case, would be 156 percent. This sounds outrageous. What it really tells us is not that the lender’s greed is huge – but that the loan amount is small. A $15 charge on a two-week, $10,000 loan has an APR of only 3.9 percent, even though the transaction charge is exactly the same.

Banks and credit unions don’t usually offer the sort of financial services storefront lenders offer. When they do, they end up charging similar sums. StretchPay, an Ohio-based credit-union alliance, charges an annual fee of $35 for loans up to $250. That’s an APR of 364 percent on a two-week loan.

Then there is microcredit – a Third-World financing revolution that began with the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. The idea is to lend very small amounts to poor people so they can start businesses. Microlenders have been criticized because, given the small loan amounts, the effective interest rates they charge also turn out to be pretty high – anywhere from 70 to 125 percent. But they don’t ask for collateral, either. That makes them look a lot like payday lenders.

There’s one big difference, though: While payday and similar lenders are reviled for preying on the poor, Grameen Bank and its founder Muhammad Yunus were awarded the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize.

SOURCE

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Sacramento Pastor Opposes Obama, gets threats

Can we expect black people will vote for a black president? In 2008, President Obama won more than 90% of the black vote.

But a Sacramento pastor and leader of the largest multi-racial congregation in the state says while he’s proud of Mr. Obama, the president won’t get his vote.

Dr. Phillip Goudeaux leads Calvary Christian Center’s 20,000 worshippers. “I accepted Christ in my life. My relationship with Him means more to me the Democratic party, Independent, Republican, black or white,” Goudeaux told FOX40.

Goudeaux has pastored here for three decades but it’s his more recent political stance that’s upset some in the black community.

His vote Tuesday won’t go America’s first black president. “I’m going to support people who support life, marriage between man and woman, smaller government, who supports Israel,” he said.

Goudeaux feels so strongly, he’s traveled the nation to promote traditional marriage.

His outspoken views have not only drawn criticism but even death threats.

“Why don’t i have a right to speak my values without being hated on?” says Goudeaux.

Others in the black community like longtime friend and Pastor Sherwood Carthen have come to his defense. “We’re diverse”, said Carthen. “We have thoughts of our own. And we don’t have the idea that you can put us in one box. One size does not fit all.”

Goudeaux’s views aren’t unique. National polls show support for gay marriage among black people remains under 50 percent, indicating the community isn’t as homogenous as many think.

“They’re getting it all mixed up. I’m voting for values, my commitment to the kingdom of God,” said Goudeaux.

Experts say they expect similar voter turnout numbers from the black community this year.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Heh! Britain's major Leftist paper going broke: "The publisher of the Guardian and Observer newspapers is close to axing the print editions of the newspapers, despite the hopes of its editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger to keep them running for several years. The Guardian and Observer publisher has spent the last few years battling to stem losses of £44m a year. However, it has been slow to make savings and any money that it has clawed back has been spent on expanding its US and online operations. However, trustees of the Scott Trust, GNM’s ultimate owner, fear it does not have enough cash on its books to sustain the newspaper"

Price gouging saves lives in a hurricane: "In the evening before Hurricane Charley hit central Florida, news anchors Bob Opsahl and Martie Salt of Orlando's Channel 9 complained that we 'sure don't need' vendors to take advantage of the coming storm by raising their prices for urgently needed emergency supplies"

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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4 November, 2012

What does "Amen" mean?

A word that at least a billion people have used but who knows what it means?

It's Hebrew and at the end of a prayer it means roughly "So be it" or "I agree"! But that is not the end of it. It has a broader meaning than that. When Jesus said: "Verily, verily, I say unto you ...." (e.g. in John 5:24), what word do you think he was using according to the original Greek text that was translated as "verily"? That's right. He was actually saying: "Amen, amen, I say unto you". So it's basically just a way of emphasizing the correctness of something.

I must admit that I was rather staggered myself when I wondered what the obsolete English word "verily" stood for in the original text and found myself staring at "Amen" when I looked up my authoritative Westcott & Hort text. I couldn't believe my eyes for a minute. I even checked it in the Griesbach recension as well.

On further checking in my Abbott-Smith lexicon I see that the word was also used in the Septuagint: The translation into Greek of the OLD Testament that Christ and the Apostles usually quoted from. So we see how a Hebrew word got into Greek. It has no exact translation into Greek so the learned Jewish translators of the OT in olden times simply reproduced it. Abbott-Smith offers "be firm" as the meaning of the Hebrew original.

Even my Liddell & Scott lexicon of CLASSICAL Greek gives the word a brief mention, maybe because of its Septuagint usage. We learn every day.

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When an atheist argues passionately for the protection of Christians

The inimitable Pat Condell again

I'm guessing that it's only his atheism that protects Condell from Britain's vicious hate-speech laws. The British establishment is basically atheist. Condell started out as a comedian but he has found Islam less and less amusing over the years. His home page is here. I rather like the opening greeting

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Rumors of General Ham Being Relieved Could be True

by GREGORY D. LEE

Rumors have been swirling about General Carter Ham, commander of Africa Command located in Stuttgart, Germany, ever since Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced that President Obama has nominated General David Rodriguez to replace him. Those rumors have been adamantly denied by the Pentagon.

While on active duty as an army reservist during 2011 at the Special Operations Command Europe, also headquartered in Stuttgart, I met newly arrived General Ham at the annual Army Ball. He had just arrived in country and took over Africom the day NATO initiated military air operations in Libya. Most command tours of duty are at least three years unless the commander elects to retire. I haven't read anything about Gen. Ham intending to do so. He has only been the commander of Africa Command less than 18 months.

I was forwarded an email from someone associated with the U.S. military in Stuttgart. The email claims that when Gen. Ham was notified of the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, he took immediate action to send operational forces there, only to be told by the Pentagon to "stand down." As commander of Africom, he would have been receiving the same information the CIA, Pentagon, White House and National Security Council did from the U.S. embassy in Tripoli. One of Africom's missions is to conduct NEO's (non-combatant evacuation operations) in its area of responsibility. He rightfully voiced his objections to the stand down and gave orders to deploy U.S. forces there anyway. When he did, his deputy commander "apprehended" him and then relieved him of his command. When I read the email description of this, I thought this was a scene from a bad war movie.

Apprehending someone in the military is the equivalent of a civilian arrest. Disobeying a lawful order is punishable by two-years of confinement and reduction of rank, according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It would be highly, highly, extraordinary for anyone to relieve a four-star general, let alone "apprehend" him.

A week ago, Rear Admiral Charles M. Gaouette, Commander of an aircraft carrier strike group positioned in the Middle East, was sent home to Washington State pending the outcome of an undisclosed investigation. Coincidence? I hardly think so. The admiral was most probably reading the same message traffic and voiced his objections to "standing down." Why else send him home for a tune up by his superiors?

If the rumors are true, either Secretary Panetta gave the order to "stand down" or he was told by the president to have General Ham do so. Whoever it was obviously was above a four-star general's pay grade.

Regardless, what happened in Benghazi is exactly why the army has various military commands around the world. If this administration won't use the assets it has to protect U.S. personnel and one of its own ambassadors from harm's way, then why even have them?

If my sources of information are correct about the chain of events leading to Gen. Ham's departure, it further illustrates why liberals should never be allowed to be in charge of national security. They simply do not have the stomach for it.

The President and Secretary of State Clinton wanted to put a nice face on the country's relationship with the newly established fledgling Libyan government. They portrayed the attack on the consulate as a spontaneous outburst by protestors that got out of hand stemming from an obscure video defaming the Prophet Mohammad. In reality, it was a preplanned terrorist attack on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001.

The word "terrorism" has essentially been erased from the vocabulary of this administration, especially after the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Having an attack by al-Qaeda factions on a consulate in a country the administration took credit for liberating does not fit the template of a foreign policy success. A cover up was launched, putting a lid on information until after next week's election.

Don't count on the media asking hard questions about why Gen. Ham left his command early and Rear Admiral Gaouette was sent home on "temporary duty." The answer to those questions would only amplify this administration's limp-wristed reaction to terrorist events and foreign policy failures. It would also further demonstrate that President Obama has managed to severely deteriorate relations in the Middle East.

SOURCE

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American Exceptionalism and Its Discontents

In May 2011, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, a columnist I admire, wrote an opinion piece titled “The Myth of American Exceptionalism.” In it, he opined that the “problem of the 21st century is the problem of culture,” in particular the “culture of smugness,” the emblem of which “is the term ‘American exceptionalism.’ It has been adopted by the right to mean that America, alone among the nations, is beloved of God.”

I wrote a rebuttal, contending that exceptionalism means nothing of the sort, and that no one on the right that I was aware of – and no one, evidently, that Cohen was aware of since he quoted no one to substantiate his thesis – would define exceptionalism as he had.

So I was particularly interested to see a recent “news analysis” by The New York Times’ Scott Shane, a reporter I admire, titled “The Opiate of Exceptionalism.” In it, Shane defines exceptionalism differently than Cohen had -- but equally incorrectly. He opines – excuse me, analyses -- that American voters “demand constant reassurance that their country, their achievements and their values are extraordinary.” He goes on to assert that Americans want their presidents to be “cheerleaders,” and that this is a “national characteristic, often labeled American exceptionalism.”

No, no, and no. American exceptionalism does not imply that -- nor is it an assertion of “American greatness,” as Shane also claims. It is something simpler and humbler: recognition that America is, as James Madison said, the “hope of liberty throughout the world,” and that America is different from other nations in ways that are consequential for the world. Let me briefly mention three.

Most nations are founded on blood. America, by contrast, was founded on ideas. This is why anyone from anywhere can move to America and become American. This is among the reasons so many people want to become American – and do. Couldn’t one just as easily move to Japan and become Japanese? Seriously? Nor can one simply become Ukrainian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Portuguese or Egyptian.

For those who do become Americans -- and especially for their children -- anything is possible. Consider such all-Americans as Colin Powell, Jeremy Lin, Bobby Jindal, Tiger Woods, and of course the most obvious example: An African student marries an American girl, and their son goes on to become the President of the United States. When I was a student in Russia years ago, I had friends from Africa and some married Russian girls. Does anyone believe that the children of these couples can hope to succeed Vladimir Putin?

A second way America is exceptional: The ideas on which this nation is based were revolutionary in the 18th century – and still are today. All men are created equal? Governments derive their powers only from the consent of the governed? We are endowed by our Creator with rights and freedoms that no one can take away? China is nowhere close to embracing such principles. Nor is most of the Middle East, the “Arab Spring” notwithstanding. Latin America and Africa have a long way to go. And in Europe, I fear, the commitment to individual liberty has been weakening.

Finally, there is leadership. If America does not accept this responsibility – and that’s how it should be seen, not as a privilege or entitlement; not as a reason to shout “We’re No. 1!” – which nation will? Iran’s theocrats would be eager – but that means they impose their version of sharia, Islamic law, well beyond their borders. Putin will grab whatever power is within his reach but he would rule, not lead. There are those who see the UN as a transnational government. They don’t get why it would be disastrous to give additional authority to a Security Council on which Russia and China have vetoes, or a General Assembly dominated by a so-called Non-Aligned Movement constituted largely of despotic regimes that recently elevated Iran as their president.

Among the evidence Shane gathers in an attempt to prove that America is unexceptional: America’s high rates of incarceration and obesity, the fact that Americans own a lot of guns, consume a lot of energy, and have too few 4-year-olds in pre-school. He maintains that one consequence of American exceptionalism is that there is little discussion, not least during election campaigns, of America’s “serious problems” and “difficult challenges” all because, he says, “we, the people, would rather avert our eyes.”

His case in point is Jimmy Carter who “failed to project the optimism that Americans demand of their president,” and therefore “lost his re-election bid to sunny Ronald Reagan, who promised ‘morning in America’ and left an indelible lesson for candidates of both parties: that voters can be vindictive toward anyone who dares criticize the country and, implicitly, the people.”

Shane does not consider an alternative analysis: that Carter’s policies contributed to the enfeebling economic phenomenon known as stagflation, and that he presided over a string of foreign policy failures, among them America’s humiliation at the hands of Iran’s jihadist revolutionaries. He ignores this too: Reagan went on to restore the nation’s economic health and to pursue policies that led to the collapse of the Soviet empire. Shane has every right to believe that America would have fared better under Carter than Reagan, but there is no historical or evidentiary basis to suggest he’s right and a majority of American voters were wrong.

Shane writes that exceptionalism “has recently been championed by conservatives, who accuse President Obama of paying the notion insufficient respect.” The issue is not respect but comprehension. Curiously, Shane omits Obama’s most famous statement on exceptionalism. At a NATO summit in France in 2009, the President said:

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

This is really a way of saying that no nation is exceptional, that are all, as Garrison Keillor might put it, “above average.” But it was America that began the modern democratic experiment. And if America does not fight for the survival of that experiment, what other nation will?

A half century ago, Reagan -- not Carter -- said: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” Today, freedom is under sustained assault by totalitarians, terrorists and tyrants. It is America’s exceptional burden to defend those who live in liberty, and support those who aspire to be free. This should be obvious. But, as Shane wrote in another context, too many of us “would rather avert our eyes.”

SOURCE

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The Uncool President

Victor Davis Hanson

In 2008, Barack "No Drama" Obama was the coolest presidential candidate America had ever seen -- young, hip, Ivy League, mellifluous and black, with a melodic and exotic name. Rock stars vied to perform at his massive rallies, where Obama often began his hope-and-change sermons by reminding the teary-eyed audience what to do in case of mass fainting.

The giddy media declared Obama a "sort of god," and "the smartest man with the highest IQ" ever to assume the presidency. Somehow, even legs got into the hero worship, as pundits praised the sight of Obama's "perfectly creased pant," and one commentator felt "this thrill going up my leg" when Obama spoke.

Four years of governance later, the huge crowds have mostly melted away. Those still left do not faint. The columns are in storage. The Latinate "Vero Possumus" is not even voiced in English.

Instead of "no red states or blue states" healing rhetoric, Obama has sown all sorts of needless divisions in hopes of cobbling together a thin us-versus-them coalition, as independents flee. The 99 percent claim oppression by the 1 percent. Young single female professionals are supposedly at war with Republican Neanderthals. Beleaguered gays apparently must fight the bigotry of the homophobic right wing. Greens should go on the offensive against conservative polluters who are OK with dirty air and water. Latinos must "punish our enemies" at the polls, and Attorney General Eric Holder's "my people" are to be set against "a nation of cowards." With all the advantages of incumbency and an obsequious media, why is Barack Obama reduced to stooping to save his campaign?

A dismal economy, of course, explains voter discontent. So do the contradictory and illogical explanations about the recent killing of a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Libya. Mitt Romney is also proving a far better campaigner than were prior so-so Obama opponents like Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Obama's first debate was a disaster.

A more worldly Obama no longer talks of cooling the planet or lowering the rising seas. Barely even with challenger Mitt Romney in the polls, he now alternates between the crude and the trivial in a campaign that in its shrillness on the stump evokes the last desperate days of failed incumbents like Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush.

Obama blasts Romney as a "bullsh--ter," and releases an ad in which a starlet compares voting for him to her first sexual experience. When Obama is not crude, he is adolescent -- as he references Big Bird, plays word games like "Romnesia" and ridicules Romney for his "binders" debate remark.

The greatest problem facing Obama, however, is not just his mediocre record of governance, but the growing public perception that he is as uncool in 2012 as he was cool in 2008. Voters no longer feel they're square for voting against Obama. Instead, it's becoming the "in" thing to shrug that enough is enough.

A common theme of classic American tales such as "The Rainmaker," "Elmer Gantry," "The Music Man" and "The Wizard of Oz" is popular anger unleashed at Pied Piper-like messiahs who once hypnotized the masses with promises of grandeur.

The bamboozled people rarely fault their own gullibility for swooning over hope-and-change banalities, but rather, once sober, turn with fury on the itinerant messiahs who made them look so foolish.

In other words, it is not just the economy, foreign policy, poor debating skills or a so-so campaign that now plagues Obama, but the growing public perception that voters were had in 2008, and that it now is OK -- even cool -- to no longer believe in him.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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2 November, 2012

High IQ as just one part of biological good functioning

I have for some years been putting forward evidence in favor of the view that high IQ is just one aspect of general biological good functioning. I never thought to get the NYT on my side but you can read it below

FEW of us are as smart as we'd like to be. You're sharper than Jim (maybe) but dull next to Jane. Human intelligence varies - and this matters because smarter people generally earn more money, enjoy better health, raise smarter children, feel happier and, just to rub it in, live longer as well.

But where does intelligence come from? How is it built? Researchers have tried hard to find the answer in our genes. With the rise of inexpensive genome sequencing, they've analysed the genomes of thousands of people, looking for gene variants that clearly affect intelligence, and have found a grand total of two.

One determines the risk of Alzheimer's disease and affects IQ only late in life; the other seems to build a bigger brain, but on average it raises IQ by all of 1.29 points.

Other genetic factors may be at work. A report last year concluded that several hundred gene variants taken together seemed to account for 40 per cent to 50 per cent of the differences in intelligence among the 3500 subjects in the study.

But the authors couldn't tell which of these genes created any significant effect. When they tried to use the genes to predict differences in intelligence, they could account for only 1 per cent of the differences in IQ.

"If it's this hard to find an effect of just 1 per cent," Robert Plomin, a professor of behavioural genetics at King's College London, told New Scientist, "what you're really showing is that the cup is 99 per cent empty."

But is the genetic cup really empty, or are we just looking for the wrong stuff?

A developmental neurogeneticist Kevin Mitchell at Trinity College Dublin, thinks the latter. In an essay he published in July on his blog, Wiring the Brain, Mitchell proposed that instead of thinking about the genetics of intelligence, we should be trying to parse "the genetics of stupidity," as his title put it. We should look not for genetic dynamics that build intelligence, but for those that erode it.

The premise for this argument is that once natural selection generated the set of genes that build our big, smart human brains, those genes became "fixed" in the human population; virtually everyone receives the same set and precious few variants affect intelligence. This could account for the researchers' failure to find many variants of measurable effect.

But in some other genetic realms we do differ widely, for example, mutational load - the number of mutations we carry. This tends to run in families, which means some of us generate and retain more mutations than others do. Among our 23,000 genes, you may carry 500 mutations while I carry 1000.

Most mutations have no effect. But those that do are more likely to bring harm than good, Mitchell says , because "there are simply many more ways of screwing something up than of improving it".

Open the hood of a smooth-running car and randomly turn a few screws, and you'll almost certainly make the engine run worse than before. Likewise, mutations that change the brain's normal development or operation will probably slow it down. Smart Jane may be less a custom-built, high-performance model than a standard version pulling a smaller mutational load.

We also inherit - through genes yet to be identified, of course - a trait known as developmental stability. This is essentially the accuracy with which the genetic blueprint is built.

Developmental stability keeps the project on track. It reveals itself most obviously in physical symmetry. The two sides of our bodies and brains are constructed separately but from the same blueprint of 23,000 genes. If you have high developmental stability, you'll turn out highly symmetrical. Your feet will be the same shoe size, and the two sides of your face will be identical.

If you're less developmentally stable, you'll have feet up to a half size different and a face that's like two faces fused together. Doubt me? Take a digital image of your face and split it down the middle. Then make a mirror image copy of each half and attach it to its original. In the two faces you've just made - one your mirrored left side, the other your right - you'll behold your own developmental stability, or lack thereof.

Both those faces might be better looking than you are, for we generally find symmetrical faces more attractive. It also happens that symmetry and intelligence tend to run together, because both run with developmental stability. We may find symmetrical faces attractive because they imply the steadiness of genetic development, which creates valuable assets for choosing a mate, like better general fitness and, of course, intelligence - or as Mitchell might put it, a relative lack of stupidity.

These ideas don't strike geneticists as radical or contrary. A geneticist at Princeton University Leonid Kruglyak, who studies yeast and flatworms, noted that geneticists had long recognised that mutations could "throw sand in the gears of the brain" and that complex traits arose in complicated ways.

"Talking about 'a gene for a trait' is a shorthand at best," he wrote, "and a well-known fallacy at worst."

Mitchell agreed. "This isn't a brand new idea," he says. "But it's not one that has been generally adhered to in intelligence studies."

Not brand new, perhaps, but it's this kind of "inversion of thought" that can spark new approaches to intractable problems.

Dr Jay Giedd, who studies brain development at the US National Institutes of Health, has done research suggesting that the brain blooms through many small arcs of development that make it responsive to experience - and vulnerable to error. At first, he says, he was sceptical of Mitchell's idea. Then he discussed it with colleagues at a neuroscience meeting.

"My initial thought was that it would be easy to sink the argument," Giedd says. But the more they discussed it, the more sense it made. "Everybody I ran it by seemed to feel the logic is sound."

SOURCE

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A pretty good summary

This is said to be a yard sign on the front yard of a home in Glenview, Illinois

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It’s Obama’s record, not his race

By WALTER E. WILLIAMS

The Washington Post, in giving President Barack Obama an endorsement for another four years, wrote Oct. 25, "Much of the 2012 presidential campaign has dwelt on the past, but the key questions are who could better lead the country during the next four years – and, most urgently, who is likelier to put the government on a more sound financial footing."

The suggestion appears to be that a president is not to be held accountable to his promises and past record and that his past record is no indication of his future behavior. Possibly, the Washington Post people believe that a black president shouldn't be held accountable to his record and campaign promises. Let's look at it.

What about Obama's pledge to cut the deficit in half during his first term in office? Instead, we saw the first trillion-dollar deficit ever, under any president of the United States. Plus, it has been followed by trillion-dollar deficits in every year of his administration. What about Obama's pledge of transparency, in which his legislative proposals would be placed on the Internet days before Congress voted on them so that Americans could inspect them? Obama's major legislative proposal, Obamacare, was enacted in such secrecy and with such speed that even members of Congress did not have time to read it.

Remember that it was Rep. Nancy Pelosi who told us, "But we have to pass the (health care) bill so that you can find out what is in it." What about Obama's stimulus packages and promises to get unemployment under control? The Current Employment Statistics program shows that in 2008, the total number of U.S. jobs was more than 138 million, compared with 133.5 million today. As Stanford University economics professor Edward Lazear summed it up, "there hasn't been one day during the entire Obama presidency when as many Americans were working as on the day President Bush left office."

While Obama's national job approval rating is a little less than 50 percent, among blacks his job approval is a whopping 88 percent. I'd like to ask people who approve of Obama's performance, "What has President Obama done during the past four years that you'd like to see more of in the next four years?"

Black support of politicians who have done little or nothing for their ordinary constituents is by no means unusual. Blacks are chief executives of major cities, such as Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington, Memphis, Atlanta, Baltimore, New Orleans, Oakland, Newark, Cleveland and Cincinnati.

In most of these cities, the chief of police, the superintendent of schools and other high executives are black. But in these cities, black people, like no other sector of our population, suffer from the highest rates of homicides, assaults, robberies and shootings. Black high-school dropout rates in these cities are the highest in the nation. Even if a black youngster manages to graduate from high school, his reading, writing and computational proficiency is likely to be equivalent to that of a white seventh- or eighth-grader. That's even with school budgets per student being among the highest in the nation.

Last year, in reference to President Obama's failed employment policies and high unemployment among blacks, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., who is chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said, "If Bill Clinton had been in the White House and had failed to address this problem, we probably would be marching on the White House." That's a vision that seems to explain black tolerance for failed politicians – namely, if it's a black politician whose policies are ineffectual and possibly harmful to the masses of the black community, it's tolerable, but it's entirely unacceptable if the politician is white.

Black people would not accept excuses upon excuses and vote to re-elect decade after decade any white politician, especially a Republican politician, to office who had the failed records of our big-city mayors. What that suggests about black people is not very flattering.

SOURCE

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The News Squashers

NBC's David Gregory isn't always a news reporter. As we're seeing with increasing frequency on that network, he's squashing stories. Call him an unreporter. On Sunday's "Meet the Press," he showed the extent to which he'll vaporize any suggestion that Team Obama failed to offer adequate protection from terrorists at our consulate in Benghazi.

Businesswoman Carly Fiorina slammed Obama's Libya response: "That attack went on for seven hours...[with the] Secretary of Defense saying he denied requests for help over that seven hours." Gregory cut her off: "We'll get to Libya a little bit later." Surprise: It never came up again.

It sounded a lot like 1999, when Gregory squashed RNC spokesman Cliff May on MSNBC as he tried to mention Juanita Broaddrick's rape charges against Bill Clinton. Or the obsequious 2008 moment when then-CNN anchor John Roberts promised Obama in an interview he would create a "Reverend Wright-Free Zone."

Too many in the "news" media think of themselves as a deputized PR Secret Service for Obama, just as they did for Clinton. They reject the concept of nonpartisanship. In their view, one side is credible, the other not. Why balance social service with greed? Tolerance with hate? Justice with oppression? There is right, and there is wrong, and there ought not to be a middle ground in enlightened journalism. There is only the light of truth.

It follows that they use their influence to protect the White House, to preserve the president's "political viability within the system," as they say. If, God forbid, Republicans win the presidency, these same "journalists" are justified in brawling and mauling to derail the GOP agenda. In fact, they're called to do so. It is, after all, the public's Right to Know.

Look across the Sunday shows that aired on the networks with nine days to go in the campaign. On most, there was a total avoidance of any scrutiny for Obama.

On ABC's "This Week," Newt Gingrich noted Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's refusal to send assistance to Benghazi and ripped into Obama: "He's canceling trips over the hurricane. He did not cancel his trips over Benghazi." George Stephanopoulos moved on to another campaign question.

On CBS's "Face the Nation," Bob Schieffer asked John McCain about the hurricane, and which party might get hurt by it. McCain squeezed in Libya in his answer: "This tragedy turned into a debacle, and massive cover-up or massive incompetence in Libya is having an effect on the voter because of their view of the commander-in-chief. And it is now the worst cover-up or incompetence that I have ever observed in my life." Schieffer moved on.

Perhaps the worst performance in this sorry flock of sheep came from CNN's Candy Crowley. She'd enabled Obama's Libya lies by supporting him with a mangled "fact check" in the second debate, and learned nothing from the ensuing criticism -- or just refused to alter her position. She failed to ask Obama spinner David Axelrod anything about Libya. She punted. Then when RNC Chairman Reince Priebus arrived, she focused on GOP "gaffes," like Richard Mourdock sticking up for the humanity of a baby conceived in rape.

Crowley couldn't ask about Libya damage for Democrats, but she pounded Priebus about damage to those anti-woman Republicans: "Does it hurt the party image to have these issues out there in a way that makes the party or that is portrayed as making the party look unbending and, you know, anti-woman, as is described in the Obama ad?"

Notice how the media bashing of Mourdock and Todd Akin so perfectly matches the messaging of Obama's advertising?

Priebus stated the obvious -- no party has a monopoly on gaffes -- but the network news squashers specialize in ignoring the obvious. Obama and Biden can say the most foolish or obnoxious things, and the networks skip them. None of them, even Crowley, found it "anti-woman" when Arizona's Democratic Senate candidate Richard Carmona joked during a debate that his male moderator was "prettier" than Crowley.

Shameless Crowley just moved on to another alleged Republican "outrage." John Sununu implied that Colin Powell endorsed Obama in demonstration of racial solidarity.

On "Fox News Sunday," Brit Hume denounced the Libya squashers. "One of the problems we're having here is that it has fallen to this news organization, Fox News, and a couple of others to do all the heavy lifting on this story. The mainstream organs of the media that would be after this like a pack of hounds if this were a Republican president have been remarkably reticent."

In squashing Obama's failures for partisan reasons, these journalists share in the disgrace that Obama earned by coming clean instead of covering up. They share the cover-up. If their man is defeated as a result of his horrific record, these media guardians should share in that defeat as well.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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1 November, 2012

Why Liberals Think What They Do

Victor Davis Hanson touches on some of the emoting behind liberalism below and gets it pretty right. In a way, though, he puts the cart before the horse. The real question is what Leftism/liberalism IS.

My proposal is that liberalism is the interconnected emotions of rage/anger/hate. People who are in the grip of such motives ARE Leftists/liberals. Why they feel that way can vary but it is rage at the world about them that unites them and makes them Leftists. What they think all comes from that primitive emotion, not from any rationality. Hence the strange thinking that Hanson outlines. Their thinking is what is needed to justify their hates, nothing else. They just close their mind to any logic or reality that conflicts with that need

For a good current example of the hate and rage that motivates the Left, see here. -- JR

Exemption from guilt

Liberals believe that abstract caring allows them seclusion and cocooning in the real, material world. Private schools, tony upscale suburbs, nice Volvos and Lexus SUVs, jet travel to Tuscany, a fine Napa $100 wine, Harvard or Stanford for junior — all that reeks of privilege and exclusivity, and can prompt remorse. In some sense, Costa del Sol and Martha’s Vineyard, like John Kerry’s yacht or John Edwards’ home, are antithetical to the entire liberal value system. But if one is loudly for “pay-your-fair-share” higher taxes, or for affirmative action, or for more deficit spending, then one feels absolved from guilt over his isolated privilege — and can enjoy it without lamentation. And if one makes enough money not to worry about a few more taxes or fees, then a mind at peace is a pretty good deal. Lots of those who now reside in Portola Valley and the Berkeley hills helped to promote policies whose deleterious results fell on distant others, out of mind, out of sight, far away in Porterville and Stockton. Liberalism is an elite person’s psychological investment in enjoying a guilt-free affluence.

Naiveté

Large percentages of the population now work for government — federal, state, or local. Millions more are divorced from the tragic world of mining or drilling where nature is unforgiving. That distance has allowed Americans in droves to disengage from both the private sector, where one either makes a profit or goes broke, and the grimy processes by which we live one more day. A San Francisco professor, a Monterey lawyer, and a Sacramento bureaucrat do not know how hard it is to raise beef, grow peaches, find and pump oil and gas, and haul logs out of the forest and into Home Depot as smooth lumber, or what it takes to build a small Ace Hardware business. The skills needed to keep a 7-Eleven viable in a rough neighborhood, I confess, dwarf those of the classics professor.

In the elite liberal mind, there is instead a sort of progressive Big Rock Candy Mountain. Gasoline comes right out of the ground through the nozzle into the car. Redwood 2x4s sprout from the ground like trees. Apples fall like hail from the sky; stainless steel refrigerator doors are mined inches from the surface. Tap water comes from some enormous cistern that traps rain water. Finished granite counter tops materialize on the show room floor. Why, then, would we need Neanderthal things like federal gas and oil leases, icky dams and canals, yucky power plants, and gross chain saws — and especially those who would dare make and use them?

Anger, envy, and the primordial emotions

For some, especially those who are well-educated and well-spoken, a sort of irrational furor at “the system” governs their political make-up. Why don’t degrees and vocabulary always translate into big money? Why does sophisticated pontification at Starbucks earn less than mindlessly doing accounting behind a desk? We saw this tension with Michelle Obama who, prior to 2009, did not quite have enough capital to get to Aspen or Costa del Sol, and thereby, despite the huge power-couple salaries, Chicago mansion, and career titles, felt that others had far too much more than the Obamas. “Never been proud,” “downright mean country,” “raise the bar,” etc., followed, as expressions of yuppie angst. The more one gets, the more one believes he should get even more, and the angrier he gets that another — less charismatic, less well-read, less well-spoken — always seems to get more.

So do not discount the envy of the sophisticated elite. The unread coal plant manager, the crass car dealer, or the clueless mind who farms 1000 acres of almonds should not make more than the sociology professor, the kindergarten teacher, the writer, the artist, or the foundation officer. What sort of system would allow the dense and easily fooled to become better compensated (and all for what — for superfluous jet skis and snowmobiles?) than the anguished musician or tortured-soul artist, who gives so much to us and receives so much less in return? What a sick country — when someone who brings chain saws into the Sierra would make more than a UC Berkeley professor who would stop them.

Nihilism

Finally, we come to a small subset that simply does not like America’s wealth and capitalism, supremacy overseas, and ubiquitous global culture — or at least believes that anything not his own must be far better (an oikophobia or hatred of one’s own household). He bores us with lectures on the wonderful EU, the superior La familia romance of Latin America, the “it takes a village” values of Africa, or the Cairo speech mythologies of the Middle East. Because America is so affluent, it allows so many the luxury to dream of how our wealth is so ill-gotten — as long as quiet others in the shadows ensure that life remains pretty good in San Francisco and Madison. Contrarianism is an innate characteristic, but one indulged without risk, only when the larger tribe is safe and secure.

In short, twenty-first century elite liberalism has become a psychological condition, not a serious blueprint on how to solve real problems. The president knows that — and so without ideas has been reduced to name-calling and sermons on Big Bird.

More HERE

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Americans in Benghazi could have been saved -- except that Obama said No

The news is breaking today but there is a small bit that is being overlooked. According to the statements from Fox News:

"The security officer had a laser on the target that was firing and repeatedly requested back-up support from a Specter gunship, which is commonly used by U.S. Special Operations forces to provide support to Special Operations teams on the ground involved in intense firefights. The fighting at the CIA annex went on for more than four hours — enough time for any planes based in Sigonella Air base, just 480 miles away, to arrive. Fox News has also learned that two separate Tier One Special operations forces were told to wait, among them Delta Force operators."

Everyone is reporting this but they are missing a key point. From the retired Delta operator:

"Having spent a good bit of time nursing a GLD (ground Laser Designator) in several garden spots around the world, something from the report jumped out at me.

One of the former SEALs was actively painting the target. That means that Specter WAS ON STATION! Probably an AC130U. A ground laser designator is not a briefing pointer laser. You do not "paint" a target until the weapons system/designator is synched; which means that the AC130 was on station."

Only two places could have called off the attack at that point; the WH situation command (based on POTUS direction) or AFRICOM commander based on information directly from the target area.

If the AC130 never left Sigonella (as Penetta says) that means that the Predator that was filming the whole thing was armed.

If that SEAL was actively "painting" a target; something was on station to engage! And the decision to stand down goes directly to POTUS! This is far bigger than Watergate.

The second worst feeling in the world has to be the platform crew being desperately asked for help, given a clear target and then having to stand down and watch your fellow Americans die.

The worst has to be the team on the ground knowing that the President just left you to die.

Update: Even with two Predators on station, one unarmed and filming and one armed, the call to stand down comes from the same sources. Earlier today, Bob Owens at PJ Media posts about the responsibility of the order to call off the mission as well as some good info about the AC130s on station.

More HERE

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Defence Dept. Won’t Label Fort Hood Shootings as Terrorist Attack

Already facing intense scrutiny for its shifting narrative about the assault on the U.S. Consulate in Libya, the Pentagon now says it will not reclassify the Fort Hood shootings as a terrorist attack over concern about biasing the case against the gunman -- an argument that is getting a mixed review from legal specialists.

Late Friday, after 160 victims of the Fort Hood, Texas, shooting called on the Pentagon to label the attack terrorism instead of workplace violence as it has for the past three years, the Department of Defense said it would not reclassify the attack.

In rejecting the victims outcry, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta's spokesman cited concern that having the government weigh in could bias the case against Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, 42, who is awaiting trial and faces the death penalty if convicted.

When asked how Mr. Panetta plans to respond to the victims, his spokesman took a day and a half to respond, eventually emailing a statement Friday night.

"The Department of Defense is committed to the integrity of the ongoing court martial proceedings of Major Nadal Hassan and for that reason will not further characterize, at this time, the incident that occurred at Fort Hood on November 5, 2009," Pentagon spokesman George Little said in the statement. "Major Hassan has been charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder, and 32 counts of attempted murder. As with all pending UCMJ matters, the accused is innocent until proven guilty."

But Mark Zaid, a national security law expert who sued Libya for the 1988 terrorism bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, said he doubted the government's hesitancy to designate the Fort Hood assault terrorism was really motivated by concern about prejudicing his trial.

"I find that a little difficult to believe," he said. "If that was the case, than how in the world would the Pentagon prosecute any terrorism case? There is a process in any case -- whether military or civilian -- to deal with any potential bias of a juror. It's a fundamental part of the judicial system to ensure that juries are impartial."

When presenting its case against Maj. Hasan, prosecutors will undoubtedly point to email chains between the defendant and al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki, Mr. Zaid noted.

"There's clearly going to be terrorist angles in the process," he said. "And calling it terror is not going to change the nature of the incident or the [jurors'] knowledge about it."

Jeffrey F. Addicott, the director for Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, accused the Pentagon of "playing word games" just days before Monday night's final debate between President Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney in which foreign policy was the main focus.

Acknowledging Maj. Hasan's alleged shooting spree as a major terrorism attack on the homeland "destroys the administration's narrative that al Qaeda is winding down" and there is a diminishing threat of a terrorist attack occurring on U.S. soil, Mr. Addicott said.

"This war against al Qaeda is not localized to Afghanistan and Pakistan -- the problem here is that we have many people who are not members of al Qaeda but they are infected with the virus of radical Islam," he said. "To say that Hasan was not motivated by radical Islamic extremism is absurd."

But David Glazier, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a former fellow at the Center for National Security Law, strongly disagreed.

Labeling the shootings workplace violence instead of terrorism, he said, "makes perfect sense" because it's a simple cut-and-dried murder case without getting into the complexities of the military's law of war and whether it's appropriate to consider Maj. Hasan an unlawful combatant.

"The Department of Defense is being cautious but correct in proceeding with its case that this is an ordinary service member who is being prosecuted for a very serious crime," he said. "A military individual pulls out a gun and shoots. It's not necessary to get into motivation to prove that basic offense."

Reclassifying the shootings as a terrorist attack, could very well reset the whole case as the defense tries to obstruct and delay as much as possible, he added.

Last week a coalition of 160 victims and family members in the deadly rampage at the military post in Killeen, Texas, nearly three years ago called on the administration to reclassify the attack as terrorism, citing the suspect’s ties to al Qaeda and his radical Islamist beliefs.

The assault at Fort Hood left 13 dead and more than 30 wounded by gunshots, and officially designating the attack as terrorism would make service-member victims eligible for Purple Heart medals, and, the victims say, grant them access to medical care and benefits similar to what soldiers wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan would receive.

In the past month, many of the Fort Hood victims watched the Obama administration’s changing statements about the attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi and apparent reticence to label the attack in Libya terrorism until weeks later and drew parallels to the government’s reaction to the assault in Texas.

Nearly three years after the shootings, several government and separate independent investigations uncovered evidence that the FBI knew Maj. Hasan was emailing with al-Awlaki before the shootings and did nothing to intervene.

According to authorities, Maj. Hasan also followed al-Awlaki’s advice to scream "Allah akbar" ("God is great") to invoke fear before starting to shoot. Al-Awlaki was killed in 2011 by a drone airstrike in Yemen.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Hurricanes are nature’s Keynesianism: "It was inevitable that with the arrival of Hurricane Sandy, various economic pundits would speculate on its effects on 'the economy.' Needless to say, some were saying that the hurricane would boost spending—both at the retail and then reconstruction level -- and in that sense might actually provide a lift to GDP. The whole episode is yet another reminder that old fallacies die hard in economics."

Another counterproductive ban: " It's perplexing for both police and lawmakers throughout the U.S.: They want to do something about the danger of texting while driving, a major road hazard, but banning the practice seems to make it even more dangerous. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says that 3 of every 4 states that have enacted a ban on texting while driving have seen crashes actually go up rather than down. It's hard to pin down exactly why this is the case, but experts believe it is a result of people trying to avoid getting caught in states with stiff penalties. Folks trying to keep their phones out of view will often hold the phone much lower, below the wheel perhaps, in order to keep it out of view. That means the driver's eyes are looking down and away from the road."

Another excuse for government bites the dust: "One morning last week the recycling truck came hurtling down the street. Only one family in our neighborhood, so far as I can tell, dutifully sorts their glass, plastic and other stuff into the red, white and blue bins. The trash men throw the contents of all three into the gaping maw at the back of their truck."

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party.

MESSAGE to Leftists: Even if you killed all conservatives tomorrow, you would just end up in another Soviet Union. Conservatives are all that stand between you and that dismal fate. And you may not even survive at all. Stalin killed off all the old Bolsheviks.

IN BRIEF:

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

Leftists think that utopia can be coerced into existence -- so no dishonesty or brutality is beyond them in pursuit of that "noble" goal

It's the shared hatred of the rest of us that unites Islamists and the Left.

American liberals don't love America. They despise it. All they love is their own fantasy of what America could become. They are false patriots.

The Democratic Party: Con-men elected by the ignorant and the arrogant

The Democratic Party is a strange amalgam of elites, would-be elites and minorities. No wonder their policies are so confused and irrational

The Republicans are the gracious side of American politics. It is the Democrats who are the nasty party, the haters

The characteristic emotion of the Leftist is not envy. It's rage

Leftists are committed to grievance, not truth

The world's dumbest investor? Without doubt it is Uncle Sam. Nobody anywhere could rival the scale of the losses on "investments" made under the Obama administration

"Behind the honeyed but patently absurd pleas for equality is a ruthless drive for placing themselves (the elites) at the top of a new hierarchy of power" -- Murray Rothbard - Egalitarianism and the Elites (1995)

"World socialism as a whole, and all the figures associated with it, are shrouded in legend; its contradictions are forgotten or concealed; it does not respond to arguments but continually ignores them--all this stems from the mist of irrationality that surrounds socialism and from its instinctive aversion to scientific analysis... The doctrines of socialism seethe with contradictions, its theories are at constant odds with its practice, yet due to a powerful instinct these contradictions do not in the least hinder the unending propaganda of socialism. Indeed, no precise, distinct socialism even exists; instead there is only a vague, rosy notion of something noble and good, of equality, communal ownership, and justice: the advent of these things will bring instant euphoria and a social order beyond reproach." -- Solzhenitsyn

"The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left." -- Ecclesiastes 10:2 (NIV)

“My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.” -- Thomas Jefferson

"Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power" -- Bertrand Russell

Evan Sayet: The Left sides "...invariably with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success." (t=5:35+ on video)

Some useful definitions:

If a conservative doesn't like guns, he doesn't buy one. If a liberal doesn't like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.
If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn't eat meat. If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone.
If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation. A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.
If a conservative doesn't like a talk show host, he switches channels. Liberals demand that those they don't like be shut down.
If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn't go to church. A liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced. (Unless it's a foreign religion, of course!)
If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it. A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.

There is better evidence for creation than there is for the Leftist claim that “gender” is a “social construct”. Most Leftist claims seem to be faith-based rather than founded on the facts

Leftists are classic weak characters. They dish out abuse by the bucketload but cannot take it when they get it back. Witness the Loughner hysteria.

Death taxes: You would expect a conscientious person, of whatever degree of intelligence, to reflect on the strange contradiction involved in denying people the right to unearned wealth, while supporting programs that give people unearned wealth.

America is no longer the land of the free. It is now the land of the regulated -- though it is not alone in that, of course

The Leftist motto: "I love humanity. It's just people I can't stand"

Why are Leftists always talking about hate? Because it fills their own hearts

Envy is a strong and widespread human emotion so there has alway been widespread support for policies of economic "levelling". Both the USA and the modern-day State of Israel were founded by communists but reality taught both societies that respect for the individual gave much better outcomes than levelling ideas. Sadly, there are many people in both societies in whom hatred for others is so strong that they are incapable of respect for the individual. The destructiveness of what they support causes them to call themselves many names in different times and places but they are the backbone of the political Left

Gore Vidal: "Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little". Vidal was of course a Leftist

The large number of rich Leftists suggests that, for them, envy is secondary. They are directly driven by hatred and scorn for many of the other people that they see about them. Hatred of others can be rooted in many things, not only in envy. But the haters come together as the Left.

Leftists hate the world around them and want to change it: the people in it most particularly. Conservatives just want to be left alone to make their own decisions and follow their own values.

The failure of the Soviet experiment has definitely made the American Left more vicious and hate-filled than they were. The plain failure of what passed for ideas among them has enraged rather than humbled them.

Ronald Reagan famously observed that the status quo is Latin for “the mess we’re in.” So much for the vacant Leftist claim that conservatives are simply defenders of the status quo. They think that conservatives are as lacking in principles as they are.

Was Confucius a conservative? The following saying would seem to reflect good conservative caution: "The superior man, when resting in safety, does not forget that danger may come. When in a state of security he does not forget the possibility of ruin. When all is orderly, he does not forget that disorder may come. Thus his person is not endangered, and his States and all their clans are preserved."

The shallow thinkers of the Left sometimes claim that conservatives want to impose their own will on others in the matter of abortion. To make that claim is however to confuse religion with politics. Conservatives are in fact divided about their response to abortion. The REAL opposition to abortion is religious rather than political. And the church which has historically tended to support the LEFT -- the Roman Catholic church -- is the most fervent in the anti-abortion cause. Conservatives are indeed the one side of politics to have moral qualms on the issue but they tend to seek a middle road in dealing with it. Taking the issue to the point of legal prohibitions is a religious doctrine rather than a conservative one -- and the religion concerned may or may not be characteristically conservative. More on that here

Some Leftist hatred arises from the fact that they blame "society" for their own personal problems and inadequacies

The Leftist hunger for change to the society that they hate leads to a hunger for control over other people. And they will do and say anything to get that control: "Power at any price". Leftist politicians are mostly self-aggrandizing crooks who gain power by deceiving the uninformed with snake-oil promises -- power which they invariably use to destroy. Destruction is all that they are good at. Destruction is what haters do.

Leftists are consistent only in their hate. They don't have principles. How can they when "there is no such thing as right and wrong"? All they have is postures, pretend-principles that can be changed as easily as one changes one's shirt

A Leftist assumption: Making money doesn't entitle you to it, but wanting money does.

"Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money -- only for wanting to keep your own money." --columnist Joe Sobran (1946-2010)

Leftist policies are candy-coated rat poison that may appear appealing at first, but inevitably do a lot of damage to everyone impacted by them.

A tribute and thanks to Mary Jo Kopechne. Her death was reprehensible but she probably did more by her death that she ever would have in life: She spared the world a President Ted Kennedy. That the heap of corruption that was Ted Kennedy died peacefully in his bed is one of the clearest demonstrations that we do not live in a just world. Even Joe Stalin seems to have been smothered to death by Nikita Khrushchev

I often wonder why Leftists refer to conservatives as "wingnuts". A wingnut is a very useful device that adds versatility wherever it is used. Clearly, Leftists are not even good at abuse. Once they have accused their opponents of racism and Nazism, their cupboard is bare. Similarly, Leftists seem to think it is a devastating critique to refer to "Worldnet Daily" as "Worldnut Daily". The poverty of their argumentation is truly pitiful

The Leftist assertion that there is no such thing as right and wrong has a distinguished history. It was Pontius Pilate who said "What is truth?" (John 18:38). From a Christian viewpoint, the assertion is undoubtedly the Devil's gospel

Even in the Old Testament they knew about "Postmodernism": "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" - Isaiah 5:20 (KJV)

Was Solomon the first conservative? "The hearts of men are full of evil and madness is in their hearts" -- Ecclesiastes: 9:3 (RSV). He could almost have been talking about Global Warming.

"If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action." - Ludwig von Mises

The naive scholar who searches for a consistent Leftist program will not find it. What there is consists only in the negation of the present.

Because of their need to be different from the mainstream, Leftists are very good at pretending that sow's ears are silk purses

Among intelligent people, Leftism is a character defect. Leftists HATE success in others -- which is why notably successful societies such as the USA and Israel are hated and failures such as the Palestinians can do no wrong.

A Leftist's beliefs are all designed to pander to his ego. So when you have an argument with a Leftist, you are not really discussing the facts. You are threatening his self esteem. Which is why the normal Leftist response to challenge is mere abuse.

Because of the fragility of a Leftist's ego, anything that threatens it is intolerable and provokes rage. So most Leftist blogs can be summarized in one sentence: "How DARE anybody question what I believe!". Rage and abuse substitute for an appeal to facts and reason.

Because their beliefs serve their ego rather than reality, Leftists just KNOW what is good for us. Conservatives need evidence.

“Absolute certainty is the privilege of uneducated men and fanatics.” -- C.J. Keyser

“Hell is paved with good intentions" -- Boswell’s Life of Johnson of 1775

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

THE FALSIFICATION OF HISTORY HAS DONE MORE TO IMPEDE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT THAN ANY ONE THING KNOWN TO MANKIND -- ROUSSEAU

"Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him" (Proverbs 26: 12). I think that sums up Leftists pretty well.

Eminent British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington is often quoted as saying: "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." It was probably in fact said by his contemporary, J.B.S. Haldane. But regardless of authorship, it could well be a conservative credo not only about the cosmos but also about human beings and human society. Mankind is too complex to be summed up by simple rules and even complex rules are only approximations with many exceptions.

Politics is the only thing Leftists know about. They know nothing of economics, history or business. Their only expertise is in promoting feelings of grievance

Socialism makes the individual the slave of the state – capitalism frees them.

Many readers here will have noticed that what I say about Leftists sometimes sounds reminiscent of what Leftists say about conservatives. There is an excellent reason for that. Leftists are great "projectors" (people who see their own faults in others). So a good first step in finding out what is true of Leftists is to look at what they say about conservatives! They even accuse conservatives of projection (of course).

The research shows clearly that one's Left/Right stance is strongly genetically inherited but nobody knows just what specifically is inherited. What is inherited that makes people Leftist or Rightist? There is any amount of evidence that personality traits are strongly genetically inherited so my proposal is that hard-core Leftists are people who tend to let their emotions (including hatred and envy) run away with them and who are much more in need of seeing themselves as better than others -- two attributes that are probably related to one another. Such Leftists may be an evolutionary leftover from a more primitive past.

Leftists seem to believe that if someone like Al Gore says it, it must be right. They obviously have a strong need for an authority figure. The fact that the two most authoritarian regimes of the 20th century (Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) were socialist is thus no surprise. Leftists often accuse conservatives of being "authoritarian" but that is just part of their usual "projective" strategy -- seeing in others what is really true of themselves.

"With their infernal racial set-asides, racial quotas, and race norming, liberals share many of the Klan's premises. The Klan sees the world in terms of race and ethnicity. So do liberals! Indeed, liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race. Conservatives champion a color-blind society" -- Ann Coulter

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 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

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. See also here

The "steamroller" above who got steamrollered by his own hubris. Spitzer is a warning of how self-destructive a vast ego can be -- and also of how destructive of others it can be.

Heritage is what survives death: Very rare and hence very valuable

Big business is not your friend. As Adam Smith said: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary

“How can I accept the Communist doctrine, which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete textbook which I know not only to be scientifically erroneous but without interest or application to the modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, who with all their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human achievement? Even if we need a religion, how can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the red bookshop? It is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of Western Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has first suffered some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all his values.” ― John Maynard Keynes

Some wisdom from "Bron" Waugh: "The purpose of politics is to help them [politicians] overcome these feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power"

"There are countless horrible things happening all over the country, and horrible people prospering, but we must never allow them to disturb our equanimity or deflect us from our sacred duty to sabotage and annoy them whenever possible"

The urge to pass new laws must be seen as an illness, not much different from the urge to bite old women. Anyone suspected of suffering from it should either be treated with the appropriate pills or, if it is too late for that, elected to Parliament [or Congress, as the case may be] and paid a huge salary with endless holidays, to do nothing whatever"

"It is my settled opinion, after some years as a political correspondent, that no one is attracted to a political career in the first place unless he is socially or emotionally crippled"

Two lines below of a famous hymn that would be incomprehensible to Leftists today ("honor"? "right"? "freedom?" Freedom to agree with them is the only freedom they believe in)

First to fight for right and freedom,
And to keep our honor clean

It is of course the hymn of the USMC -- still today the relentless warriors that they always were. Freedom needs a soldier

If any of the short observations above about Leftism seem wrong, note that they do not stand alone. The evidence for them is set out at great length in my MONOGRAPH on Leftism.

JEWS AND ISRAEL

"And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed" -- Genesis 12:3

If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy -- Psalm 137 (NIV)

My (Gentile) opinion of antisemitism: The Jews are the best we've got so killing them is killing us.

I have always liked the story of Gideon (See Judges chapters 6 to 8) and it is surely no surprise that in the present age Israel is the Gideon of nations: Few in numbers but big in power and impact.

If I were not an atheist, I would believe that God had a sense of humour. He gave his chosen people (the Jews) enormous advantages -- high intelligence and high drive -- but to keep it fair he deprived them of something hugely important too: Political sense. So Jews to this day tend very strongly to be Leftist -- even though the chief source of antisemitism for roughly the last 200 years has been the political Left!

And the other side of the coin is that Jews tend to despise conservatives and Christians. Yet American fundamentalist Christians are the bedrock of the vital American support for Israel, the ultimate bolthole for all Jews. So Jewish political irrationality seems to be a rather good example of the saying that "The LORD giveth and the LORD taketh away". There are many other examples of such perversity (or "balance"). The sometimes severe side-effects of most pharmaceutical drugs is an obvious one but there is another ethnic example too, a rather amusing one. Chinese people are in general smart and patient people but their rate of traffic accidents in China is about 10 times higher than what prevails in Western societies. They are brilliant mathematicians and fearless business entrepreneurs but at the same time bad drivers!

Conservatives, on the other hand, could be antisemitic on entirely rational grounds: Namely, the overwhelming Leftism of the Diaspora Jewish population as a whole. Because they judge the individual, however, only a tiny minority of conservative-oriented people make such general judgments. The longer Jews continue on their "stiff-necked" course, however, the more that is in danger of changing. The children of Israel have been a stiff necked people since the days of Moses, however, so they will no doubt continue to vote with their emotions rather than their reason.

I despair of the ADL. Jews have enough problems already and yet in the ADL one has a prominent Jewish organization that does its best to make itself offensive to Christians. Their Leftism is more important to them than the welfare of Jewry -- which is the exact opposite of what they ostensibly stand for! Jewish cleverness seems to vanish when politics are involved. Fortunately, Christians are true to their saviour and have loving hearts. Jewish dissatisfaction with the myopia of the ADL is outlined here. Note that Foxy was too grand to reply to it.

Fortunately for America, though, liberal Jews there are rapidly dying out through intermarriage and failure to reproduce. And the quite poisonous liberal Jews of Israel are not much better off. Judaism is slowly returning to Orthodoxy and the Orthodox tend to be conservative.

The above is good testimony to the accuracy of the basic conservative insight that almost anything in human life is too complex to be reduced to any simple rule and too complex to be reduced to any rule at all without allowance for important exceptions to the rule concerned

"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here. For roughly two centuries now, antisemitism has, throughout the Western world, been principally associated with Leftism (including the socialist Hitler) -- as it is to this day. See here.

Leftists call their hatred of Israel "Anti-Zionism" but Zionists are only a small minority in Israel

Some of the Leftist hatred of Israel is motivated by old-fashioned antisemitism (beliefs in Jewish "control" etc.) but most of it is just the regular Leftist hatred of success in others. And because the societies they inhabit do not give them the vast amount of recognition that their large but weak egos need, some of the most virulent haters of Israel and America live in those countries. So the hatred is the product of pathologically high self-esteem.

Their threatened egos sometimes drive Leftists into quite desperate flights from reality. For instance, they often call Israel an "Apartheid state" -- when it is in fact the Arab states that practice Apartheid -- witness the severe restrictions on Christians in Saudi Arabia. There are no such restrictions in Israel.

If the Palestinians put down their weapons, there'd be peace. If the Israelis put down their weapons, there'd be genocide.

Eugenio Pacelli, a righteous Gentile, a true man of God and a brilliant Pope

ABOUT

Many people hunger and thirst after righteousness. Some find it in the hatreds of the Left. Others find it in the love of Christ. I don't hunger and thirst after righteousness at all. I hunger and thirst after truth. How old-fashioned can you get?

The kneejerk response of the Green/Left to people who challenge them is to say that the challenger is in the pay of "Big Oil", "Big Business", "Big Pharma", "Exxon-Mobil", "The Pioneer Fund" or some other entity that they see, in their childish way, as a boogeyman. So I think it might be useful for me to point out that I have NEVER received one cent from anybody by way of support for what I write. As a retired person, I live entirely on my own investments. I do not work for anybody and I am not beholden to anybody. And I have NO investments in oil companies, mining companies or "Big Pharma"

UPDATE: Despite my (statistical) aversion to mining stocks, I have recently bought a few shares in BHP -- the world's biggest miner, I gather. I run the grave risk of becoming a speaker of famous last words for saying this but I suspect that BHP is now so big as to be largely immune from the risks that plague most mining companies. I also know of no issue affecting BHP where my writings would have any relevance. The Left seem to have a visceral hatred of miners. I have never quite figured out why.

I imagine that few of my readers will understand it, but I am an unabashed monarchist. And, as someone who was born and bred in a monarchy and who still lives there (i.e. Australia), that gives me no conflicts at all. In theory, one's respect for the monarchy does not depend on who wears the crown but the impeccable behaviour of the present Queen does of course help perpetuate that respect. Aside from my huge respect for the Queen, however, my favourite member of the Royal family is the redheaded Prince Harry. The Royal family is of course a military family and Prince Harry is a great example of that. As one of the world's most privileged people, he could well be an idle layabout but instead he loves his life in the army. When his girlfriend Chelsy ditched him because he was so often away, Prince Harry said: "I love Chelsy but the army comes first". A perfect military man! I doubt that many women would understand or approve of his attitude but perhaps my own small army background powers my approval of that attitude.

I imagine that most Americans might find this rather mad -- but I believe that a constitutional Monarchy is the best form of government presently available. Can a libertarian be a Monarchist? I think so -- and prominent British libertarian Sean Gabb seems to think so too! Long live the Queen! (And note that Australia ranks well above the USA on the Index of Economic freedom. Heh!)

Throughout Europe there is an association between monarchism and conservatism. It is a little sad that American conservatives do not have access to that satisfaction. So even though Australia is much more distant from Europe (geographically) than the USA is, Australia is in some ways more of an outpost of Europe than America is! Mind you: Australia is not very atypical of its region. Australia lies just South of Asia -- and both Japan and Thailand have greatly respected monarchies. And the demise of the Cambodian monarchy was disastrous for Cambodia

Throughout the world today, possession of a U.S. or U.K. passport is greatly valued. I once shared that view. Developments in recent years have however made me profoundly grateful that I am a 5th generation Australian. My Australian passport is a door into a much less oppressive and much less messed-up place than either the USA or Britain

Following the Sotomayor precedent, I would hope that a wise older white man such as myself with the richness of that experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than someone who hasn’t lived that life.

IQ and ideology: Most academics are Left-leaning. Why? Because very bright people who have balls go into business, while very bright people with no balls go into academe. I did both with considerable success, which makes me a considerable rarity. Although I am a born academic, I have always been good with money too. My share portfolio even survived the GFC in good shape. The academics hate it that bright people with balls make more money than them.

I have no hesitation in saying that the single book which has influenced me most is the New Testament. And my Scripture blog will show that I know whereof I speak. Some might conclude that I must therefore be a very confused sort of atheist but I can assure everyone that I do not feel the least bit confused. The New Testament is a lighthouse that has illumined the thinking of all sorts of men and women and I am deeply grateful that it has shone on me.

I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age. Conservatism is in touch with reality. Leftism is not.

I imagine that the RD are still sending mailouts to my 1950s address

Most teenagers have sporting and movie posters on their bedroom walls. At age 14 I had a map of Taiwan on my wall.

"Remind me never to get this guy mad at me" -- Instapundit

It seems to be a common view that you cannot talk informatively about a country unless you have been there. I completely reject that view but it is nonetheless likely that some Leftist dimbulb will at some stage aver that any comments I make about politics and events in the USA should not be heeded because I am an Australian who has lived almost all his life in Australia. I am reluctant to pander to such ignorance in the era of the "global village" but for the sake of the argument I might mention that I have visited the USA 3 times -- spending enough time in Los Angeles and NYC to get to know a fair bit about those places at least. I did however get outside those places enough to realize that they are NOT America.

"Intellectual" = Leftist dreamer. I have more publications in the academic journals than almost all "public intellectuals" but I am never called an intellectual and nor would I want to be. Call me a scholar or an academic, however, and I will accept either as a just and earned appellation

My academic background

My full name is Dr. John Joseph RAY. I am a former university teacher aged 65 at the time of writing in 2009. I was born of Australian pioneer stock in 1943 at Innisfail in the State of Queensland in Australia. I trace my ancestry wholly to the British Isles. After an early education at Innisfail State Rural School and Cairns State High School, I taught myself for matriculation. I took my B.A. in Psychology from the University of Queensland in Brisbane. I then moved to Sydney (in New South Wales, Australia) and took my M.A. in psychology from the University of Sydney in 1969 and my Ph.D. from the School of Behavioural Sciences at Macquarie University in 1974. I first tutored in psychology at Macquarie University and then taught sociology at the University of NSW. My doctorate is in psychology but I taught mainly sociology in my 14 years as a university teacher. In High Schools I taught economics. I have taught in both traditional and "progressive" (low discipline) High Schools. Fuller biographical notes here

I completed the work for my Ph.D. at the end of 1970 but the degree was not awarded until 1974 -- due to some academic nastiness from Seymour Martin Lipset and Fred Emery. A conservative or libertarian who makes it through the academic maze has to be at least twice as good as the average conformist Leftist. Fortunately, I am a born academic.

Despite my great sympathy and respect for Christianity, I am the most complete atheist you could find. I don't even believe that the word "God" is meaningful. I am not at all original in that view, of course. Such views are particularly associated with the noted German philosopher Rudolf Carnap. Unlike Carnap, however, none of my wives have committed suicide

Very occasionally in my writings I make reference to the greats of analytical philosophy such as Carnap and Wittgenstein. As philosophy is a heavily Leftist discipline however, I have long awaited an attack from some philosopher accusing me of making coat-trailing references not backed by any real philosophical erudition. I suppose it is encouraging that no such attacks have eventuated but I thought that I should perhaps forestall them anyway -- by pointing out that in my younger days I did complete three full-year courses in analytical philosophy (at 3 different universities!) and that I have had papers on mainstream analytical philosophy topics published in academic journals

As well as being an academic, I am an army man and I am pleased and proud to say that I have worn my country's uniform. Although my service in the Australian army was chiefly noted for its un-notability, I DID join voluntarily in the Vietnam era, I DID reach the rank of Sergeant, and I DID volunteer for a posting in Vietnam. So I think I may be forgiven for saying something that most army men think but which most don't say because they think it is too obvious: The profession of arms is the noblest profession of all because it is the only profession where you offer to lay down your life in performing your duties. Our men fought so that people could say and think what they like but I myself always treat military men with great respect -- respect which in my view is simply their due.

A real army story here

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day and there is JUST ONE saying of Hitler's that I rather like. It may not even be original to him but it is found in chapter 2 of Mein Kampf (published in 1925): "Widerstaende sind nicht da, dass man vor ihnen kapituliert, sondern dass man sie bricht". The equivalent English saying is "Difficulties exist to be overcome" and that traces back at least to the 1920s -- with attributions to Montessori and others. Hitler's metaphor is however one of smashing barriers rather than of politely hopping over them and I am myself certainly more outspoken than polite. Hitler's colloquial Southern German is notoriously difficult to translate but I think I can manage a reasonable translation of that saying: "Resistance is there not for us to capitulate to but for us to break". I am quite sure that I don't have anything like that degree of determination in my own life but it seems to me to be a good attitude in general anyway

I have used many sites to post my writings over the years and many have gone bad on me for various reasons. So if you click on a link here to my other writings you may get a "page not found" response if the link was put up some time before the present. All is not lost, however. All my writings have been reposted elsewhere. If you do strike a failed link, just take the filename (the last part of the link) and add it to the address of any of my current home pages and -- Voila! -- you should find the article concerned.

COMMENTS: I have gradually added comments facilities to all my blogs. The comments I get are interesting. They are mostly from Leftists and most consist either of abuse or mere assertions. Reasoned arguments backed up by references to supporting evidence are almost unheard of from Leftists. Needless to say, I just delete such useless comments.

You can email me here (Hotmail address). In emailing me, you can address me as "John", "Jon", "Dr. Ray" or "JR" and that will be fine -- but my preference is for "JR"

Index page for this site

DETAILS OF REGULARLY UPDATED BLOGS BY JOHN RAY:

"Tongue Tied"
"Dissecting Leftism" (Backup here)
"Australian Politics"
"Education Watch International"
"Political Correctness Watch"
"Greenie Watch"
"Food & Health Skeptic"
"Eye on Britain"
"Immigration Watch International" blog.

BLOGS OCCASIONALLY UPDATED:

"Marx & Engels in their own words"
"A scripture blog"
"Recipes"
"Some memoirs"
"Paralipomena"
To be continued ....
Queensland Police -- A barrel with lots of bad apples
Australian Police News
Of Interest

BLOGS NO LONGER BEING UPDATED

"Leftists as Elitists"
Socialized Medicine
Western Heart
OF INTEREST (2)
QANTAS -- A dying octopus
BRIAN LEITER (Ladderman)
Obama Watch
Obama Watch (2)
Dissecting Leftism -- Large font site
Michael Darby
The Kogarah Madhouse (St George Bank)
AGL -- A bumbling monster
Telstra/Bigpond follies
Optus bungling
Vodafrauds (vodafone)
Bank of Queensland blues

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

Main academic menu
Menu of recent writings
basic home page
Pictorial Home Page (Backup here).
Selected pictures from blogs (Backup here)
Another picture page (Best with broadband. Rarely updated)

Note: If the link to one of my articles is not working, the article concerned can generally be viewed by prefixing to the filename the following:
http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/42197/20121106-1520/jonjayray.comuv.com/